Read Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 for Free Online Page A

house, rummaging behind the cushions and lifting the sofa to check under it. One of the antique silver lipsticks her mother left her is missing, and I, apparently, am somehow to blame. As we sat I offered her a smile, but she only glared at me for perhaps the fiftieth time that evening. I was going to risk saying something romantic when I suddenly realised I needed to check on the alien before bed. I closed my book, put down my pipe and rose.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” she roared.
    “I think I may have left the shed unlocked. I’m just going to check.”
    “That’s the third time you’ve checked it this evening. Are you losing your mind?”
    I didn’t respond. There is no correct response when she’s like this. The easiest way out would be to simply gouge out my own eye with a fork. But not even I am prepared to do that. I crossed the room to leave. She bared her teeth and growled.
    When I returned from checking on the still comatose alien, she’d gone and closed the bedroom door behind her. I made myself comfortable on the sofa and tried to sleep.
    And that brings us to the present.
    My warring days are over now, there’s little excitement for me anymore. The closest I have to a thrill these days is when my loving wife returns after several hours from teaching self-defence at the local boys’ grammar school and releases me from where I’ve accidentally locked myself in the utility room. Ahhh, the bittersweet joy of seeing her face as the door is finally unlocked and swings open.
    I realise my service to Her Majesty is all but done and there is little I can offer of myself in these twilight years, but I can do this one final thing. I can inform you of this imminent alien attack, and offer you the creature I have captured.
    Now it’s up to you to use this knowledge to protect our once great empire.
     
    Yours sincerely,
    Brigadier Arthur Charles Holbrook (Ret.)
DSO, OBE, MC
     
    p.s.— As I write this, the village Constable has just been speaking to my wife at the front door. Apparently a couple of houses in the street were burgled yesterday. I presume it’s the work of those ‘hoodies’ chaps. I therefore urge that you send someone straight away. It would be dreadful if one of those thieving lads were to break into my shed, discover the creature, and accidentally release it.
     
    Original (First) Publication
    Copyright © 2014 by Steve Cameron
     
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Robert Sheckley broke into print in 1952, was immediately acknowledged as the genre’s best humor writer, and began showing new ways for science fiction to use humor in his classic novels Mindswap and Dimension of Miracles. He was named Guest of Honor at the 2005 Worldcon. He considered “Cordle to Onion to Carrot” his funniest story.
     
CORDLE TO ONION TO CARROT
by Robert Sheckley
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    Surely, you remember that bully who kicked sand on the 97-pound weakling? Well, that puny man’s problem has never been solved, despite Charles Atlas’s claims to the contrary. A genuine bully likes to kick sand on people; for him, simply, there is gut-deep satisfaction in a put-down. It wouldn’t matter if you weighed 240 pounds—all of it rock-hard muscle and steely sinew—and were as wise as Solomon or as witty as Voltaire; you’d still end up with the sand of an insult in your eyes, and probably you wouldn’t do anything about it.
    That was how Howard Cordle viewed the situation. He was a pleasant man who was forever being pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, headwaiters, and other imposing figures of authority. Cordle hated it. He suffered in silence the countless numbers of manic-aggressives who shoved their way to the heads of lines, took taxis he had hailed first and sneeringly steered away girls to whom he was talking at parties.
    What made it worse was that these people seemed to welcome provocation, to go looking for it, all for the sake of causing discomfort to