He sat perfectly still, the little opening in his head—mouth, they call it—showing every moment a wider and wider orifice.
Feeling flattered and encouraged by his evident interest, I continued into my most valuable piece of information. How valuable it was, I did not then suspect:
“It is written in the Book of Sevens:
“When Plookh meets Plookh, they discuss sex. A convention is held, a coordinator selected, and amid cheers and rejoicing, they enter the wholesome state of matrimony. The square of seven is forty-nine.”
Silence. Hogan Shlestertrap conjugated rapidly with his bottle.
“Pensioned off,” he muttered after a while. “The great Hogan Shlestertrap, the producer and director of ‘Lunar Love Song,’ ‘Fissions of 2109,’ ‘We Took to the Asteroids,’ pensioned off in a nutty fruitcake of a world! Doomed to spend his remaining years among gabby mathematical spiders and hungry whatchamacallits.”
He rose and began pacing, an act accomplished with the lower tentacles. “I gave them saga after saga, the greatest stereos that Hollywood ever saw or felt, and just because my remake of ‘Quest to Mars’ came out merely as an epic, they say I’m through. Did they have the decency—those people I picked out of the gutter and made into household names—did they have the decency to get me a job with the distribution end on a place like Titan or Ganymede? No! If they had to send me to Venus, did they even try to salve their consciences by sending me to the Polar Continent where a guy can find a bar or two and have a little human conversation? Oho, they wouldn’t dare—I might make a comeback if I had half a chance. That Sonny Galenhooper—my friend, he called himself!—gets me a crummy job with the Interplanetary Cultural Mission and I find myself plopped down in the steaming Macro Continent with a mess of equipment to make stereos for an animal that half the biologists of the system claim is impossible. Big deal! But Shlestertrap Productions will be back yet, bigger and better than ever!”
These were his memorable words: I report them faithfully. Possibly in times to come, when civilization among us shall have advanced to a higher level—always assuming that the present problem will be solved—these words will be fully understood and appreciated by a generation of as yet unborn but much more intellectualized Plookhh. To them, therefore, I dedicate this speech of the Great Civilizer.
“Now,” he said, turning to me. “You know what stereos are?”
“No, not quite. You see only one of us has ever conversed with humans before this, and we know little of their glorious ways. Our Book of Twos is almost bare of useful information, being devoted chiefly to a description of your first six explorers, their ship and robots, by the nzred fanobrel. I deduce, however, that stereos are an essential concomitant of an industrial civilization.”