The Mad Moon

"Idiots!" howled Grant Calthorpe. "Fools--nitwits--imbeciles!" He sought
wildly for some more expressive terms, failed and vented his
exasperation in a vicious kick at the pile of rubbish on the ground.

Too vicious a kick, in fact; he had again forgotten the one-third normal
gravitation of Io, and his whole body followed his kick in a long,
twelve-foot arc.

As he struck the ground the four loonies giggled. Their great, idiotic
heads, looking like nothing so much as the comic faces painted on Sunday
balloons for children, swayed in unison on their five-foot necks, as
thin as Grant's wrist.

"Get out!" he blazed, scrambling erect. "Beat it, skiddoo, scram! No
chocolate. No candy. Not until you learn that I want ferva leaves, and
not any junk you happen to grab. Clear out!"

The loonies--_Lunae Jovis Magnicapites_, or literally, Bigheads of
Jupiter's Moon--backed away, giggling plaintively. Beyond doubt, they
considered Grant fully as idiotic as he considered them, and were quite
unable to understand the reasons for his anger. But they certainly
realized that no candy was to be forthcoming, and their giggles took on
a note of keen disappointment.

So keen, indeed, that the leader, after twisting his ridiculous blue
face in an imbecilic grin at Grant, voiced a last wild giggle and dashed
his head against a glittering stone-bark tree. His companions casually
picked up his body and moved off, with his head dragging behind them on
its neck like a prisoner's ball on a chain.

Grant brushed his hand across his forehead and turned wearily toward his
stone-bark log shack. A pair of tiny, glittering red eyes caught his
attention, and a slinker--_Mus Sapiens_--skipped his six-inch form
across the threshold, bearing under his tiny, skinny arm what looked
very much like Grant's clinical thermometer.

Grant yelled angrily at the creature, seized a stone, and flung it
vainly. At the edge of the brush, the slinker turned its ratlike,
semihuman face toward him, squeaked its thin gibberish, shook a
microscopic fist in manlike wrath, and vanished, its batlike cowl of
skin fluttering like a cloak. It looked, indeed, very much like a black
rat wearing a cape.

It had been a mistake, Grant knew, to throw the stone at it. Now the
tiny fiends would never permit him any peace, and their diminutive size
and pseudo-human intelligence made them infernally troublesome as
enemies. Yet, neither that reflection nor the loony's suicide troubled
him particularly; he had witnessed instances like the latter too often,
and besides, his head felt as if he were in for another siege of white
fever.

He entered the shack, closed the door, and stared down at his pet
parcat. "Oliver," he growled, "you're a fine one. Why the devil don't
you watch out for slinkers? What are you here for?"

The parcat rose on its single, powerful hind leg, clawing at his knees
with its two forelegs. "The red jack on the black queen," it observed
placidly. "Ten loonies make one half-wit."

Grant placed both statements easily. The first was, of course, an echo
of his preceding evening's solitaire game, and the second of yesterday's
session with the loonies. He grunted abstractedly and rubbed his aching
head. White fever again, beyond doubt.

He swallowed two ferverin tablets, and sank listlessly to the edge of
his bunk, wondering whether this attack of _blancha_ would culminate in
delirium.