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Title: The cosmic jackpot

Author: George O. Smith

Illustrator: Vincent Napoli

Release date: January 7, 2023 [eBook #69731]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1948

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COSMIC JACKPOT ***





                          The Cosmic Jackpot

                          By GEORGE O. SMITH

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Thrilling Wonder Stories October 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Zintal, the Martian physicist, turned from his Martian companions and
crossed the room toward a large, ornate machine. From his pocket Zintal
took a couple of shiny Martian coins and dropped them in the slot and
pressed a number of buttons in sequence.

He waited. The machine clicked faintly and made a noise similar to a
Compur shutter set to one second. Then a small door became illuminated
below the keyboard.

Zintal opened the door in a semi-absent-minded way and reached in
for his purchase. His absent-mindedness disappeared. It would have
remained, of course, had he received what he paid for. But instead of
the desired purchase, he held in his large greenish hand a small red
cylinder.

Zintal grunted angrily and said: "_Ve komacil weezro!_"[1]

[Footnote 1: This expression is high grade Martian and the
expostulation of a Martian physicist, therefore its translation into
good English is near-impossible. However, a very rough transliteration
of the phrase is--

Ve--Personal pronoun--I

Komacil--Verb past-indicative--was

Weezro--Verb Transitive--Gypped!

No doubt such phrases will become more and more familiar to all Terrans
now that contact with Martians has been made. (G.O.S.)]

Whereupon Zintal hurled the small cylinder back into the delivery
receptacle and slammed the door. He had no idea of what "Lovepruf
Lipstick" could have been, and as for its cosmetic value, even the
most wanton of Martian wantons had not fallen to the bizarre idea of
using red makeup on their normally healthy green complexions. The
fact is, Zintal had punched the "Reject" button before he realized
that the lettering on the cylinder was profoundly dissimilar to any
type of lettering he had ever seen. This included a horde of Martian
mathematical symbols and ideographs representing physical identities
and, naturally, the cursive and printed forms of Martian cryptology.

He reached for the little door but he was too late. Back out of the
return-chute there came two silvery coins that Zintal picked up idly.

Again his indolent air died a-borning, and again he swore: "_Ve
komacil weezro!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

For all Zintal could tell at this moment, they might have been a good
grade of platinum or pure iridium, or any other silvery metal. But as a
medium of exchange on Mars they were worth exactly nothing.

Zintal could not even tell that the letters on the obverse side
referred to: (1) a condition of freedom, (2) faith in a familiar deity,
and (3) the date of coinage. On the reverse side the lettering was
equally desolate of meaning to the Martian. There was: (1) the country
of coinage, (2) a statement of value, and (3) a phrase in--Well,
that itself would have stopped Zintal right in his tracks. Zintal,
the Martian physicist, could no more conceive of a planet where more
than one language existed than he could, at the time of reading, have
deciphered the statement, "E pluribus unum."

Zintal aimed a kick at the offending machine, then beat upon its side
with a massive green fist. He probed into the delivery receptacle
angrily until the communications grille came to life and a cold
official voice demanded that he cease trying to make the slot machine
deliver without the proper deposit. Zintal snarled and, muttering
Martian imprecations, returned to his friends.

Even on Mars it is sheer futility to argue with a slot machine.

       *       *       *       *       *

Johnny Edwards was addressing a large, attentive group, but one small
portion of his mind was contemplating Norma Harris, his secretary. In
the terms of the day, Johnny Edwards "went for" Miss Harris in a rather
large and affectionate way, but since the human race still lacked the
faculty of mental telepathy, he was unaware of her opinion of him.

Her real opinion, that is. There was, is, and probably always will be a
deep, underlying difference between the enjoyment of holding hands in a
moving picture house or cooperating in a goodnight kiss and the idea of
first-degree matrimony.

Johnny Edwards was inclined to conjecture thus whenever he was doing
something routine, or something for which he had prepared.

This was one of those occasions. The Edwards Merchandiser was his baby.
He knew its tricks backward, forward, and in advance. Now that he was
starting production--not engineering, mind, but real production--of the
Edwards Merchandiser, he was running off the rehearsed speech with half
his brain on the job, the other half being bent toward the puzzle of
Miss Harris' affections.

She wrinkled her nose at him, which caused him to stutter over a word,
which caused him hastily to bend his entire contemplation on his talk.
He discovered, with no surprise at all, that he was in the self-apology
section.

"--ah--er--I was saying, humorously, that this idea may be likened to
electricity or nuclear physics as a field. Both were and are expected
to remake the world. The physicists and the imaginative writers of the
day contemplate and describe great works and great ideas.

"But are we any closer to interplanetary travel now than we were before
the war? Some say yes, some say no. Is any house being heated with the
power from the fission of uranium? The fact is, gentlemen, that while
some men contemplate massive feats, other men are working in smaller
ways to benefit the world. No doubt the early workers in electricity
did not foresee the complete over-hauling the world would get when the
electric light came along.

"So it is with the Edwards Merchandiser. It will be called a slot
machine and it will be popular. Its relationship to science will be
scoffed at by those brains and aesthetes who cannot correlate the
principle of the spinthariscope with the dollar watch.

"Suffice this description. In the Edwards Merchandiser there is a
matter transmitter. By-passing all the confounded legal red-tape now
ensuing among government, public and private carriers of packages and
letters, union labor, and others, the Edwards Merchandiser is a new
idea and therefore is permitted to operate without trouble.

"In the slot, you place a coin. Upon the keyboard you tap out the name
or description of the item you desire. The window flashes the proper
cost if you have not deposited properly. Upon receipt of the proper
amount, the operator then sends you the item you have purchased. It is
as simple as that. Anything that will fit the delivery cubicle here,
behind this door, can be bought and delivered! Admittedly, some items
may be difficult to obtain on an instant's notice. Yet the organization
of the Edwards Merchandiser is such that it can and will deliver if it
is humanly possible."

       *       *       *       *       *

He paused amid a round of applause. A hand went up at the rear of the
office, and Edwards nodded at the questioner.

"I'd like to see a demonstration, please."

Edwards nodded again. "Yes," he said. "But I must ask that you don't
try to stump me. I am not running a you-can't-stump-me game."

"I don't want to stump you," the man disclaimed with a smile. "Anything
will do. Just show us."

Edwards smiled genially. "Miss Harris," he said affably, "will you
please step over and use the merchandiser for the gentlemen present?"

Norma Harris smiled. She always smiled when Johnny Edwards asked her to
do something. She hoped that eventually she could convey the idea that
she would smile as happily when asked to sew buttons on or darn a sock.
She'd deal with cleaning out the furnace when she came to it, but for
the time being Norma was being affectionately helpful.

There was, of course, every opportunity to be taken for hinting. This
was nothing new; it was just one possibility out of a long line of
hints. Quietly smiling, Norma Harris extracted two dimes from her purse
and dropped them in the slot. Then on the keyboard, she tapped out the
name of a product familiar to her and waited.

Strangely named product, if you went for semantics. "Lovepruf"
apparently means something to prevent the tender emotion when what it
really meant was that it was un--

Norma opened the little door at the click of the machine and reached
in. Her hand came out quickly and she said, "Oh!" in sharp surprise.

"Oh--what?" asked Johnny Edwards.

Frowning with puzzlement, she handed him a small package.

Johnny Edwards looked at it. It was ornate and compact, covered with a
glassine substance that might have been cellophane. It meant nothing
to him. Had Johnny Edwards been a Martian, he would have known what it
was, and he could have used and enjoyed it. But since neither Johnny
Edwards nor your present correspondent was able at that time to read
Martian, and Zintal's memory failed him in the ensuing period, the true
identity of the package is one of the minor mysteries of the Solar
System.

"What is it?" asked Johnny.

"I don't know," she returned.

"Isn't it what you asked for?"

"No," she said.

Edwards swore under his breath. This was a fine demonstration to
inaugurate the sale of a new machine. It was as bad as the automobile
show where the Bland sedan had stalled on the stage and had to be
pushed off instead of roaring away like the others did. It was like the
child prodigy who forgot the seventh line of "Horatio at the Bridge."
Yet like the Lohengrin who sang the last aria too long and remarked in
a second-balcony whisper, "What time does the next swan leave?" he,
Johnny Edwards, was capable of turning disaster into at least a minor
victory.

"This is deplorable," he said in solemn tones. "Obviously something
went cock-eyed at the merchandising center. Well--" he laughed--"people
have been beating on the sides of slot machines for a couple of
hundred years, but with the Edwards Merchandiser, no man need abandon
his money to the maw of an insensate machine. Observe what we do with
an error, after which Miss Harris will try again and will without
question succeed.

"Frankly," he said as Miss Harris deposited the package into the
receptacle once more, "I'd have preferred that the error-demonstration
take place after the success. I would have planned it that way if I'd
planned a failure. But--Okay, Miss Harris?"

She nodded brightly, jingling the coins in her hand. Abruptly she
dropped them and, in her attempt to catch them, inadvertently kicked
them under the desk.

"I can sure mess things," she said apologetically. She took two more
dimes from her purse and dropped them in the slot, tapped out the name,
and opened the door. With a slight blush, Norma Harris handed Johnny
Edwards a small cylinder of red plastic.

"Woman eternal," he said dramatically. "Will you gentlemen watch Miss
Harris install a new face right here and now, or will you take my word
for it that this is a Lovepruf Lipstick?"

It was quite obvious that regardless of the previous failure, the
Edwards Merchandiser was a howling success.

       *       *       *       *       *

Several hours later, after the party broke up, Johnny Edwards returned
to his office to see Norma probing under the desk with a yardstick.

"What gives?" he asked.

Norma held up two coins.

"Where did you get those?" he asked.

"Out of the machine," she told him.

"Yeah, but--" He picked them from her palm and looked them over
carefully. "I'm no numis--munis--"

"Numismatist," she offered helpfully.

"I'm not one of them, either," he snapped. "I don't know rare coins,
Norma, but I'd say that I have a pair here that might be truly rare."

Norma looked at him. "Johnny," she said in an awed voice, "I have a
brother who is an archeologist."

"I know. Has Tony shown you anything like these?"

"No," she said. "But he has trained me to notice letters, characters,
and ideographs. The printing or engraving on these coins is very
similar to the lettering on that package!"

"Yeah, but--"

Norma giggled in semi-hysteria. "Would it be economically just to pay
for uncertain merchandise with uncertain coinage?"

"But you--"

Norma sobered. "Somewhere, someone got--temporarily, of course--a
Lovepruf Lipstick for his two dinero, here, and hurled the thing back
into the machine just as we did that package of mahooleylickum we got.
Then in return, we get two dinero and someone, somewhere, is wondering
what the legend 'One Dime' means."

"Ow!" groaned Johnny Edwards. "My aching imagination!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Indubitably,"[2] said Zintal, "these coins are an alloy of silver, but
not a particularly valuable one, I'd estimate."

[Footnote 2: Naturally, Zintal did not say 'Indubitably' or anything
that resembles it phonetically. So until the general public becomes
better acquainted with the newly-written English-Martian cross-referred
dictionary, we will give as free a transliteration of the Martian
into its nearest English connotation. This is not only permissible
but highly recommended, since (to quote a less remote parallel) when
a Frenchman watching a baseball game leaps to his feet and screams
"Murte d'arbite," he really means "Kill the umpire." Conversely, when
the American is watching a baseball game in Paris and yells "Commit
violence upon the official scorekeeper," he really means "Murte
d'arbite!" (G.O.S.)]

"You could smelt down any of our coins," replied Vorhan, the
metallurgist, "and you'd be able to sell the metal for less than half
of its coinage worth."

"True," admitted Zintal. "But--"

"Well," grinned Vorhan, "is it the money or the principle of the thing?"

Zintal grunted amicably. "Normally, I'd be inclined to eschew principle
for a bit of hard cash. But this is one of those inexplicable things
that prompts me to cry 'principle by all means.' Y'know, Vorhan, I'd
gladly forfeit both of those coins to know where they came from."

"Probably worth it," smiled Vorhan. "Obviously, Zintal, those coins
came from some civilization extra-Martian."

"But where?" demanded Zintal. "I--"

"You do not doubt their un-Martian origin?" Vorhan interrupted.

"Not at all," said Zintal unhappily. "They are too concrete as evidence
to deny. But where?"

"I am not too familiar with the other planets of the system--" Vorhan
began.

Zintal snorted ungraciously. "_This_ system?" he laughed.
"Vorhan, go take yourself an elementary course in astronomy. The outer
planets are completely unfitted for any kind of life. The inner planets
are equally vicious. The surface of the nearest is fully four fifths
water, and the next one in is completely wreathed in clouds. What kind
of life could evolve with all that water?"

"There is the innermost," said Vorhan hopefully.

"Airless," replied Zintal. "Besides which, there is but a narrow zone
where the temperature might lie at a reasonable level. Only a couple
of the satellites of the outer planets might be acceptable, but it is
generally accepted that the atmospheres of these satellites is either
non-existent or high in pre-foliage methane. The closest one, I think,
is the more likely, but it is well known that its atmosphere is normal
at about sixty per cent relative humidity. You can have it, Vorhan."

"Give it to your mother-in-law," snorted Vorhan. "I don't want it."
Then he speared Zintal with a very sharp glance. "So you're the
physicist," he said. "Instead of telling me the places where they
ain't, try to think of some place where they could be."

Zintal looked out of the window at the black sky, and waved an
all-embracing arm. "Out there there must be a myriad of nice dry
planets," he said. "I--"

"What," demanded Vorhan, "is the velocity of propagation of the Mesonic
energy level?"

Zintal grunted unhappily. "What is the velocity of propagation of
gravity?" he asked. "Until we can get far enough away from this planet
to have it make a difference, we're stuck. It used to be, 'wait until
we can modulate it,' but we've done that. Now--" Zintal shrugged.

"So what are we going to do about it?" demanded Vorhan. "Sit here and
stew ourselves into a psychoneurose?"

Zintal smiled boyishly. "I've just licensed a machine. I'm going to buy
stuff with it until it makes with the same kind of mistake."

       *       *       *       *       *

Vorhan looked at the machine with mingled admiration and sorrow. "We've
used them for fifty years," he said. "This is the first time there
ever has been anything like this. You'll be like the man who spent
his entire life winning the bet that a shuffled deck of cards would
eventually come up in the original sequence."

Zintal nodded. "You provide me with a better answer," he challenged.

Vorhan shook his head. "I can't, confound it!" he growled.

Zintal smiled. "Well, this is the machine that produced the strange
coins. I'm buying everything I can through it just in the hope. Someday
it will repeat."

Vorhan laughed. "In the meantime," he said half-humorously, "I am going
out to hunt a needle in a haystack."

Zintal turned to his workbench and handed Vorhan a large cylinder of a
crystalline metal. "This will help you," he said.

Vorhan laughed. The bar of metal was a powerful permanent magnet.

He tossed the magnet to Zintal and turned to the physicist's machine.
From his pocket he took a couple of coins and dropped them in the slot
and pecked out the name of a product on the keyboard. There was the
usual _whirrrrr_, and then from the communicating grille there
came that same haughty, ultra-virtuous voice, saying:

"Please refrain from the use of spurious coins!"

Zintal hurled the little door open and cursed a round Martian oath,
commending the machine to a first-class Martian hell that consisted of
being immersed in water up to the scalp. For on Zintal's soft green
Martian hand had spilled a boiling-hot mixture. Not only did it burn,
but it was a foul mixture of something dissolved in water!

"Now what in the name of sin is this?" he demanded, setting the
container gingerly on the workbench and covering it quickly with a
glass bell-jar to keep in the obviously poisonous vapors.

       *       *       *       *       *

Johnny Edwards yawned with a jaw-breaking stretch. Norma Harris yawned
sympathetically and told him to stop.

"It isn't the company," he assured her. "It's the hour."

She nodded sleepily. "We've spent most of the night at this," she said.
"And so far we've collected very little of interest. But we sure have a
fine collection of products. More darned toothpaste, cigarettes, candy
bars, lipstick, tobacco, gin, mosquito dope, soap, pencils, camera
film, postage stamps, ink--"

"Looks like a drug store," he grinned.

"--but nothing of unearthly coinage," she finished sleepily.

"Good thing I own the company," he said.

"Otherwise I'd be stuck for more stuff than any family of thirteen
could use in seven million years. I'll return it in the morning and
retrieve my coins."

"You should be nearly out by now," observed Norma.

"Just a few more," Johnny admitted. "Then we give up for the evening.
Well, how about coffee, Norma?"

"Black," she requested, "and bitter!"

Johnny pecked at the keyboard and within a few seconds, the machine
announced that it had delivered of itself and that the door should be
opened and the merchandise removed.

Johnny gulped. "This isn't coffee," he said, holding up a small metal
cylinder.

"What is it?" asked Norma sleepily.

"I don't know."

Norma came fully awake. "That isn't the same as before," she said.

Johnny nodded and dropped more coins in the machine. It clicked
furiously, delivered his three-hundredth package of cigarettes,
whereupon he pressed the return button and sent them back. From the
return-coin slot there dropped--two of the strange coins.

"Well," said Edwards. "This is it!"

"Send 'em a note?" suggested Norma.

"In whose language?" demanded Johnny.

"Send 'em a diagram of the Solar System," she said.

"_Which_ Solar System?" he demanded.

"Send 'em ours."

"And who'd recognize it?" he said, pouring more coins into the machine.

       *       *       *       *       *

His luck waxed and waned. For the first half hour, it was pretty much a
hit or miss proposition, in which he made connection three times. His
"take" consisted of one soft-wood cylinder "wrapped" around a strip
of graphite and a good grade of pencil it was, a box of brittle-dry
not-quite-cubes that had neither spots like dice nor did they bound
merrily (although they fractured thoroughly), and a light-weight metal
cylinder with a tiny wing-nut contraption on one end. Johnny turned it
experimentally and shortly afterwards, both Norma and Johnny left the
office to get coffee across the street--while the office aired out.
They got more coins, too, as an afterthought.

Then as the night wore on towards morning, Johnny Edwards began to
drop his coins at regular intervals. During the first hour of this,
they received a package of rectangular pasteboards that indicated that
someone else played an unearthly game of poker, pinochle, or bridge; a
folder of needles which were quite earthly save for the lettering on
the cover; and a bottle of some gooey-thick mess that Johnny dropped
on the floor. The glass broke, and the mess spilled out on the rug.
Subsequently, Johnny Edwards had to hire a taxidermist to remove the
rug from the floor--some one made a mighty good grade of mucilage.

Then as the timing became more regular, they received a book of common
paper printed in the same complex characters and the cover of which was
luridly painted.

"Great howling rockets," growled Edwards, "is that what we're
communicating with?"

Norma laughed and picked up a copy of Johnny's favorite magazine. "Is
this how we look?" she asked humorously.

The book was followed by a set of picture cards depicting a few
scenes of unearthly origin but with no printed characters--buildings
and a small bridge over a narrow span of water; trees that looked
normal enough in a forest scene. They got a ball of plastic twine, a
hard-cover volume containing nothing but listings of ideographs; a
package of evil-smelling, ultra-dry things like desiccated prunes; a
wide strip of some sort of cloth; and a jar of cream that might have
been a cosmetic--for something--but might have worked better as a
soldering flux, since it skinned the outer surface of Johnny's pocket
knife in a trice.

The pile of items grew as their coincidence increased--and then ceased
entirely.

Morning dawned bright and clear but unhappily, for the contact had
ceased abruptly and no more strange items came through.

"Me--I give up," said Johnny. "I'll run you home, Norma."

"The devil you will," she said with a very tired yawn. "Little Norma is
going to hit the studio couch in the Ladies' Room."

"But what will your parents think?" he objected.

"I'll tell 'em the truth," she said.

"The truth?" he gasped, viewing the collection of unidentifiable and
utterly useless items on the desk. "They'll never believe _that_!"

"I know," she said happily.

She left the office and it was some time before Johnny Edwards realized
that Norma didn't mind the idea of the all-white shotgun.

       *       *       *       *       *

Zintal held up a package of cigarettes with puzzlement. "Do you eat
'em, feed 'em to the wilgil, or burn 'em in a dish?" he asked.

"They might be poison."

"Undoubtedly." Zintal placed the cigarettes under another bell jar.

The deck of cards he riffled through with knowing deftness. The
dictionary he filed carefully away, and the bottle of ink went under
another bell jar. It was, he admitted, the most palatable smelling item
of the bunch. The box of candy he threw into the fireplace with a deep,
distasteful wrinkle of his wide, flat nose.

He accepted the little cylinder from Vorhan, twisted the wing-nut
and inhaled deeply. The distaste on Zintal's face diminished and was
replaced with a sigh of satisfaction. He marked some Martian characters
on the end of a rough-surfaced board with some of VerLong's finest
Lovepruf Lipstick and put the handy, soft crayon away for future use.

       *       *       *       *       *

The set of picture postcards he ran through but shook his head
because they were not indicative of anything but a slightly strange
city of rather large size. The scene of hundreds of thousands of
ultra-minute creatures basking in what was obviously a vast body of
water he shuddered at first and swore at second because the figures
were indistinct through a magnifier. The Atlantic City postcard was
consigned to the fireplace. The magazine cover depicting one of
America's shapeliest was viewed with intelligent gratification though
without the usual wolf-whistles.

[Illustration: Zintal looked at the various items.]

This went on for some time, and finally Zintal hit the coincidental
timing perfectly, and they began to catalogue the items.

Now, be it remembered that Zintal was a physicist of Martian repute,
and therefore he had an advantage over Johnny Edwards in making a wild
guess as to the origin of the contact. His only misleading evidence
was the obvious belief that no sentient life could evolve on an
overly-wet world such as Terra. It was, however, equally obvious that
the strangers did not object to water as strenuously as did Martians.
Martians could take it or leave it alone, absorbing enough for their
daily needs from contact and losing only by evaporation.

Despite the training of ages of Martians to the contrary, Zintal was
beginning to revise his opinion.

Then, because this sending of just plain "things" was beginning to
pall--especially in view of the fact that everything Zintal received
was alien and useless and the reverse must be equally true on
Terra--Zintal began to think in terms of what might be useful in making
contact with an utterly alien and unknown race.

He sat down at his drawing board and started to sketch the
constellation, Orion. If the other race were in this section of the
Galaxy, they would recognize Orion. He grumbled because he had no
star-map to ship along, and the merchandising agency claimed there was
none at hand. But a hand sketch--

Orion, if recognized, would be followed by the very characteristic
stellar layouts of Sirius and Centaurus in the hope that these systems
might harbor the aliens. He would, as a hazard, include Sol and the
planetary system; perhaps if the aliens were not of Solar origin they
might be sufficiently advanced in astronomy to recognize Sol. He--

The door opened abruptly, and several Martian police entered.

"Zintal, Physicist, we arrest you for the crime of attempting to obtain
merchandise without payment. Do you deny inserting spurious coins in
the machine?"

"I--we--"

"Come along," said the foremost policeman angrily. To his side-kick, he
said: "What some people will go through to try to beat a slot machine."

Zintal shook himself free of the official handclasp and reached for one
of the bell jars. From it he took an atomizer which he turned upon the
policemen. They retched, and while they were in the fiendish grip of
completely overturned stomachs, Zintal grabbed his machine and left.

He dropped the atomizer, and the odor of _Nuit de Noël_ filled the
air with the most foul stench ever carried on the thin air of Mars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Norma Harris entered the room brightly and found Johnny Edwards hard at
work. He looked haggard, and Norma knew that he hadn't been asleep at
all.

"What--" She stopped and pointed at the job he had been tinkering with.

He nodded, seeing that she comprehended.

"No, Johnny!"

"But somebody's gotta go," he said desperately.

"Not you," she said, running forward and wrapping her arms about him.
"Not you."

"Why not?" he asked. "Who else?"

"But--I--"

"I'll take no chances," he said. "First goes a bottle of air. Then
other items that will insure safety in that other place. Then me. And
once I'm there we can work on their gadget and get it set up so that
this haphazard business can be made into something certain."

       *       *       *       *       *

Norma nodded unhappily. "Any luck since--"

"No. But we'll get together again. You watch!"

The machine behind them buzzed and Johnny turned. "I set up a gadget to
feed nickels into it at regular intervals," he explained. "We're going
to get a fine collection of Terran pencils until they hit us again.
Looks as how _They_ just got one."

From the receptacle, Edwards took a folded tape measure and a sizable
bottle of--nothing.

"Air," he said, looking at it.

"And size," said Norma. "He--she--or it wants to come here!"

He nodded. "You analyze that air, will you? I'm going to finish this
other gimmick!"

"How do you analyze air?" she asked plaintively.

He tossed a ten-dollar bill at her. "Go buy yourself a canary," he said
with a grin. "And not one on a hat!"

There came, at regular intervals, a four-handed chronometer with
certain intervals marked vividly. Next came a small six-legged animal
that sniffed the air uncertainly but showed no discomfort.

That settled Johnny Edwards. His curiosity would probably kill him, but
it might have killed him anyway. So--He pushed a lever....

He stepped out of the cabinet and sneezed in the ultra-dry air. Zintal
blinked in astonishment and looked concerned.

"But I wanted to go your way," he said.

"Where the devil is this?" demanded Edwards.

"They're after me for trying to use slugs," Zintal complained. "What
are these things worth on your world?"

"The sun is rather small, here," Johnny observed. "Is this Mars, or is
that another sun entirely?"

"Perhaps it is your wet skin that makes you smell so," said Zintal,
sniffing. "I think that the police may understand once you are
seen--and smelled. Phew!"

"You're a double-dyed monstrosity," said Johnny amiably. "Somewhere
along about here we should start learning one another's talky-talky. Me
Johnny. Me good!"

The machine clicked again and Norma stepped out. "Me Norma," she said,
mocking him. "You explain Daddy!"

"Me clipped," he grinned at her. "What's that?"

"Newspaper," she grinned. "Thought you'd like to see it. It claims that
the White Sands Laboratory does not expect any successful attempt to
reach any other celestial body within the next fifteen years."

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, that's how it started. From a glorified coin merchandising
machine to interplanetary travel in a few roundabout jumps--or jerks.
It was easier to take off by rocket for Luna from Mars than from Terra,
and the original Mars-Luna rocket carried only a super-glorified slot
machine. Then it became a simple matter to take off from established
bases on Luna and head for Venus. Then, in a comparatively short time
it became feasible to plant the slot machines on every imaginable
planet and satellite, and the art of constructing rockets returned to
the fireworks department.

Oh--just to tie in a loose end--the Martian police were duly convinced
once they came, saw, and stood back with great green hands pinching
wide, flat noses. And the same police official who was originally there
to bring back the errant physicist was helpful.

He combined the Terran couple in Vanthlaz.[3]

[Footnote 3: The definition of this word is not quite clear. Even
Martian opinion differs pertaining to its definition; the Martian
female believing it to be a desirable state while the Martian male
insists that it is entirely one-sided and too restrictive pertaining to
his freedom. (G.O.S.)]



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