The Stars Are Calling, Mr. Keats

Robert F. Young

• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781649740717
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Hubbard had seen queegy birds before, but this was the first time he had ever seen a lame one. Robert F. Young was a Hugo nominated author known for his lyrical and sentimental prose. His work appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Startling Stories, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Galaxy Magazine, and Analog Science Fact & Fiction.

Hubbard had seen queegy birds before, but this was the first time he had ever seen a lame one. However, if you discounted its crooked left leg, it didn’t differ particularly from the other birds on display. It had the same bright yellow topknot and the same necklace of blue polka dots; it had the same royal blue beads of eyes and the same pale-green breast; it had the same bizarre curvature of beak and the same outlandish facial expression. It was about six inches long, and it weighed in the neighborhood of one and a quarter ounces

Hubbard realized that he had paused. The clerk, a high-breasted girl wearing one of the latest translucent dresses, was looking at him questioningly from the other side of the bird counter. He cleared his throat. “What happened to its leg?” he asked.

The girl shrugged. “Got broke during shipment. We marked him down but nobody’ll buy him anyway. They want it in tip-top shape.”

“I see,” Hubbard said. Mentally he reviewed the little he knew about queegy birds: they were native to Queeg, a primitive province of the Venerian Tri-State Republic; they could remember practically anything if it was repeated to them once or twice; they responded to association words; they were highly adaptable, but they refused to breed anywhere except in their native habitat, so the only way to commercialize them was by shipping them from Venus to Earth; fortunately they were sturdy enough to endure the acceleration and deceleration that shipment involved—Shipment ...

“It’s been in space then!” Hubbard spoke the words before he thought.

The girl made a malicious moue, nodded. “I always said space was for the birds.” Hubbard knew he was supposed to laugh. He even tried to. After all, the girl had no way of knowing that he was an ex-spaceman. On the surface he looked just like any other middle-aged man wandering through a five and ten dollar store on a February afternoon. But he couldn’t laugh. No matter, how hard he tried.

The girl didn’t seem to notice. She went on in the same vein: “I wonder why it is that eggheads are the only people who ever travel to the stars.”

Because they’re the only ones who can stand the loneliness and even they can stand it just so long, Hubbard almost said. Instead, he said, “What do you do with them when nobody wants them?”

“...Oh, you mean the birds. Well, first you take a paper bag and pump some natural gas into it, you don’t need very much, then you—”

“How much is it?”

“You mean the lame one?” “Yes.”

“You are a tesseract, aren’t you!...6.95—plus 17.50 for the cage.” “I’ll take it,” Hubbard said.

The cage was awkward to carry and the cover kept sliding off and every time it did the queegy bird gave a loud cheep! and the people on the airbus, and afterwards on the suburban street, turned and stared, and Hubbard couldn’t help feeling like a fool.

He’d had hopes of getting his purchase into the house and up the stairs to his room without his sister getting her eyes on it. He should have known better. Alice got her eyes on everything. “Now what have you gone and thrown yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Stars Are Calling, Mr. Keats