The Love Song of Lancelot Biggs
By NELSON S. BOND
All Lt. Biggs wanted was a shipboard bouquet for
his wife, but the seeds grew a little too well!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories September 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Well, it's just like I told you. The last time you friends, dopes, and country hicks lent me your ears I said the Saturn was scheduled for an ordinary, routine, commonplace cargo shuttle to Uranus. But I also hunched it that inasmuch as my screwball pal, Lt. Lancelot Biggs, was treading the bridge almost anything was rather more than likely to happen.
And I was right. Only even in my wildest nightmares I didn't have any idea what was going to be chucked at us when we laid our lumbering old space-freighter down in the cradle at Sun City spaceport.
You see, the Saturn shuttles back and forth between the planets of the solar system, carrying everything and anything. When you carry cargoes like that, you often find yourself loaded up with plenty of trouble, and I don't mean maybe! And with Lancelot Biggs, those cargoes can do things!
What happened was that Johnston—he's the Interplanetary Corporation's port clearance official on Mars—came loping over to our jalopy like a hound in a hamburg orchard and closeted himself with Cap Hanson. For about a half hour they held privy council, as clubby as moths in an all-wool suit, and when they appeared again, the hush-hush was so loud it almost deafened you.
A few minutes later, stevedores started hauling into the Saturn's cargo bins an accumulation of air-tight, leaden containers. These workmen, too, were furtive as clergymen at a crap game, and all I could get out of them by way of explanation was the one word sentence, "Idunnonothinaboutit!"