This Thaxton was a queer-looking duck. He wasn't more than five foot two, or maybe three. He wore a shock of bristling, carroty hair over a forehead that bulged like a sponge in a Swedish bath. His eyes stuck out so far that he could have hung pictures on them, and his legs looked like a brace of parentheses hunting for a descriptive phrase.
We clenched mitts and glims at the same time. The handshake was what I had expected from the looks of him: wet towels in the sunset. But when his eyes met mine, I got the funniest darn sensation. It was something like an electric shock, only not quite.
It was something like having your cerebellum run through a wringer, only not quite. It was a little like having tiny fingers play tag in the area of your gray-matter. Only that wasn't it, either.
I gulped and said, "In the aft—What's that?"
Because the little man had said absolutely nothing! Now, smiling faintly, he did say,
"I'm glad to meet you, Sparks. Very glad to meet you!"
Lancelot Biggs was there, too, and Dick Todd, our second mate. Mr. Biggs was staring at me curiously. Now he said,
"Sparks—perhaps you'd like to show Mr. Thaxton your equipment?"
"Why not?" I said. I showed him the ship's inter-communicating system, the contact controls with which we get Lunar III, the asteroid stations, and the lightships off the various planets. I showed him the dwarf Ampie used to keep down excess voltage on the storage plates. I showed him all the things that make visitors "oh!" and "ah!" He "ohed!" and "ahed!" at the right time, then he asked,