Families -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction
Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking
remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled
until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.
"And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.'
It sounds disrespectful."
Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a
red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That
Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever
noticed about the boy.
"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred
is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'"
"That's different," Reba said.
Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The
pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender
openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing
made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again."
"Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother
and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but
somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure
he did the best he could."
"Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting,
"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,
Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the
curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred
years ago."
"Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work
to do."
* * * * *
Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last
button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to
do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?"
"It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth
share."
"That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money
bought it?"
"You bought it, Grampa," Fred said.
"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space
flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?"
"You, Grampa," Fred said.
"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the
rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?"
"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and
longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to
go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly
galaxy? You, Grampa!"
"Well, now," Grampa protested, "I got a little put away yet. You'll be
sorry when I'm dead and gone."
"You're never going to die, Grampa," Joyce said harshly. "Just
before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that
Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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