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The polyps watching from the reef swam out and frolicked after Junior, watching his contrivance go and chattering eager questions, while their parents bawled at them to keep away from that.
The three maiden aunts shrieked faintly and swooned in one another’s tentacles. The colony was shaken as it had not been since the tidal wave.
“COME BACK!” thundered Pater. “You CAN’T do that!”
“Come back!” shrilled Mater. “You can’t do that!”
“Come back!” gabbled the neighbors. “You can’t do that!”
But Junior was past listening to reason. Junior was on wheels.
Death Wish, by Ned Lang
THE space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment—the kind that fails bit by bit, and the kind that fails all at once.
Watkins was short and red-faced, magnificently mustached, and always a little out of breath. With a cigar in his hand, over a glass of beer, he talked most cynically about his ship, in the immemorial fashion of engineers. But in reality, Watkins was foolishly infatuated with Dierdre, idealized her, humanized her, and couldn’t conceive of anything serious ever happening.