Project Gutenberg's The Indulgence of Negu Mah, by Robert Andrew Arthur

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Title: The Indulgence of Negu Mah

Author: Robert Andrew Arthur

Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23688]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet, July, 1941.
Extensive research did not reveal any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.

[Illustration: _In silence Negu Mah and Sliss stood silent gazing
at the moon drenched field._]

The Indulgence of Negu Mah

by ROBERT ARTHUR

In his garden, Negu Mah, the Callisto uranium merchant, sat sipping a
platinum mug of molkai with his guest, Sliss the Venusian.

Nanlo, his wife, pushing before her the small serving cart with its
platinum molkai decanter, paused for an instant as she entered the
shell of pure vitrite which covered the garden, giving it the illusion
of out-of-doorness.

Negu Mah sat at his ease, his broad, merry, half-Oriental face
good-humored, his features given a ruddy tinge by the light of rising
Jupiter, the edge of whose sphere was beginning to dominate the
horizon. Sliss, the intelligent amphibian, squatted across from him in
the portable tub of water which he carried with him whenever absent
from the swamps of his native Venus.

The amphibian's popping eyes turned toward her, the wide frog-face
split in a smile of appreciation as Nanlo approached. She refilled
their mugs deftly and withdrew. But before she reentered the house she
could not resist hesitating to glance toward rising Jupiter and the
slim shaft of the rocketship silhouetted now against its surface.

The ship was the cargo rocket Vulcan, newest and swiftest of Negu Mah's
freighter fleet. Fully fueled and provisioned, storage space jammed
with refrigerated foods that in space the cold of the encompassing void
would keep perfectly for generations were it necessary, she would take
off in the morning from the close-by landing port for Jupiter's other
satellites, then go