AP Success - AP English Literature: The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa

The space rocket Clarissa was nine days out from Venus. The

members of the crew were also out for nine days. They were

hunters, fearless expeditionists who bagged game in Venusian

jungles. At the start of our story they are busy bagging

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their pants, not to forget their eyes. A sort of lull has

fallen over the ship (Note: a lull is a time warp that

frequently attacks rockets and seduces its members into a

siesta). It was during this lull that Anthony Quelch sat

sprawled at his typewriter looking as baggy as a bag of

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unripe grapefruit. ANTHONY QUELCH, the Cosmic Clamor Boy,

with a face like turned linoleum on the third term, busy

writing a book: “Fascism is Communism with a shave” for

which he would receive 367 rubles, 10 pazinkas and

incarceration in a cinema showing Gone With The Wind.    The

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boys upstairs were throwing a party in the control room.

They had been throwing the same party so long the party

looked like a worn out first edition of a trapeze artist.

There is doubt in our mind as to whether they were trying to

break the party up or just do the morning mopping and break

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the lease simultaneously. Arms, legs and heads littered the

deck. The boys, it seems, threw a party at the drop of a

chin. Sort of a space cataclysm with rules and little

regulation—kind of an atomic convulsion in the front parlor.

The neighbors never complained. The neighbors were 450

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million miles away. And the boys were tighter than a catsup

bottle at lunch-time. The last time the captain had looked

up the hatch and called to his kiddies in a gentle voice,

“HELL!” the kiddies had thrown snowballs at him. The captain

had vanished. Clever way they make these space bombs

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nowadays. A few minutes previous the boys had been tearing

up old Amazings and throwing them at one another, but now

they contented themselves with tearing up just the editors.

Palmer was torn in half and he sat in a corner arguing with

himself about rejecting a story for an hour before someone

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put him through an orange juice machine killing him. (Orange

juice sorry, now?)    And then they landed on Venus. How in

heck they got back there so quick is a wonder of science,

but there they were. “Come on, girls!” cried Quelch, “put on

your shin guards, get out there and dig ditches for good old

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W.P.A. and the Rover Boys Academy, earth branch 27!”    Out

into the staggering rain they dashed. Five minutes later

they came back in, gasping, reeling. They had forgotten

their corsets! The Venusians closed in like a million land-

lords. “Charge, men!” cried Quelch, running the other way.

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And then—BATTLE! “What a fight; folks,” cried Quelch.

“Twenty thousand earth men against two Venusians! We're

outnumbered, but we'll fight!" BLOOSH! "Correction—ten

thousand men fighting!” KERBLOM! “One hundred men from earth

left!” BOOM! “This is the last man speaking, folks! What a

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fight. I ain't had so much fun since—Help, someone just

clipped my corset strings!” BWOM! “Someone just clipped me!”

The field was silent. The ship lay gleaming in the pink

light of dawn that was just blooming over the mountains like

a pale flower. The two Venusians stood weeping over the

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bodies of the Earthlings like onion peelers or two women in

a bargain basement. One Venusian looked at the other

Venusian, and in a high-pitched, hoarse, sad voice said:

“Aye, aye, aye—THIS—HIT SHOODEN HEPPEN TO A DOG—NOT A DOIDY

LEEDLE DOG!” And dawn came peacefully, like beer barrels,

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rolling.