Grannie Annie, who wrote science fiction
under the nom de plume of Annabella C. Flowers,
had stumbled onto a murderous plot more
hair-raising than any she had ever concocted.
And the danger from the villain of the piece
didn't worry her—I was the guy he was shooting at.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I was killing an hour in the billiard room of the Spacemen's Clubin Swamp City when the Venusian bellboy came and tapped me on theshoulder.
"Beg pardon, thir," he said with his racial lisp, "thereth thome one tothee you in the main lounge." His eyes rolled as he added, "A lady!"
A woman here...! The Spacemen's was a sanctuary, a rest club wherein-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for anothervoyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictlyenforced.
I followed the bellhop down the long corridor that led to the mainlounge. At the threshold I jerked to a halt and stared incredulously.
Grannie Annie!
There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaningon her faded green umbrella. A little wisp of a woman clad in avoluminous black dress with one of those doily-like caps on her head,tied by a ribbon under her chin. Her high-topped button shoes wereplanted firmly on the varpla carpet and her wrinkled face was set incalm defiance.
I barged across the lounge and seized her hand. "Grannie Annie! Ihaven't seen you in two years."
"Hi, Billy-boy," she greeted calmly. "Will you please tell thisfish-face to shut up."
The desk clerk went white. "Mithter Trenwith, if thith lady ith afriend of yourth, you'll have to take her away. It'th abtholutelyagainth the ruleth...."
"Okay, okay," I grinned. "Look, we'll go into the grille. There's noone there at this hour."
In the grille an equally astonished waiter served us—me a lime rickeyand Grannie Annie her usual whisky sour—I waited until she had tossedthe drink off at a gulp before I set off a chain of questions:
"What the devil are you doing on Venus? Don't you know women aren'tallowed in the Spacemen's? What happened to the book you werewriting?"
"Hold it, Billy-boy." Laughingly she threw up both hands. "Sure, I knewthis place had some antiquated laws. Pure fiddle-faddle, that's whatthey are. Anyway, I've been thrown out of better places."
She hadn't changed. To her publishers and her readers she might beAnnabella C. Flowers, author of a long list of science fiction novels.But to me she was still Grannie Annie, as old-fashioned as last year'shat, as modern as an atomic motor. She had probably written more drivelin the name of science fiction than anyone alive.
But the public loved it. They ate up her stories, and they clamored formore. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publisherssat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount.
One thing you had to admit about her books. They may have been dimenovels, but they weren't synthetic. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote anovel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bagand hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between twoexpeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto.
She was the most completely delightful crackpot I had ever known.
"What happened to Guns for Ganymede?" I asked. "That was the title ofyour last, wasn't it?"
Grannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftlyrolled herself a cigarette.
"It wasn't Guns, it was ...