BREAK A LEG
By JIM HARMON
Illustrated by GAUGHAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction November 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The man worth while couldn't be allowed
to smile ... if he ever laughed at himself,
the entire ship and crew were as good as dead!
If there is anything I am afraid of, and there probably is, it ishaving a rookie Accident Prone, half-starved from the unemploymentlines, aboard my spaceship. They are always so anxious to please. Theyremember what it is like to live in a rathole behind an apartmenthouse furnace eating day-old bread and wilted vegetables, which doesn'tcompare favorably to the Admiralty-style staterooms and steak andcaviar they draw down in the Exploration Service.
You may wonder why anybody should make things so pleasant for a grownupwho can't walk a city block without tripping over his own feet and whohas a very low life expectancy on Earth due to the automobiles they areconstantly stepping in front of and the live wires they are fond ofpicking up so the street won't be littered.
The Admiralty, however, is a very thorough group of men. Before theyopen a planet to colonization or even fraternization, they insist onknowing just what they are up against.
Accident Prones can find out what is wrong with a planet as easilyas falling off a log, which they will if there is one lonely tree onthe whole world. A single pit of quicksand on a veritable Eden of aplanet and a Prone will be knee-deep in it within an hour of blastdown.If an alien race will smile patronizingly on your heroic attempts atgenocide, but be offended into a murderous religious frenzy if you blowyour nose, you can take the long end of the odds that the Prone willalmost immediately catch a cold.
All of this is properly recorded for the next expedition in theAdmiralty files, and if it's any consolation, high officials and screenstars often visit you in the hospital.
Charlie Baxter was like all of the other Prones, only worse. Moran IIIwas sort of an unofficial test for him and he wanted to make good. Wehad blasted down in the black of night and were waiting for daylight tobegin our re-survey of the planet. It was Charlie's first assignment,so we had an easy one—just seeing if anything new had developed in thelast fifty years.
Baxter's guard was doubled as soon as we set down, of course, andthat made him fidgety. He had heard all the stories about how highthe casualty rate was with Prones aboard spaceships and now he wasbeginning to get nervous.
Actually Charlie was safer in space than he would be back on Earthwith all those cars and people. We could have told him how the Servicepractically never lost a Prone—they were too valuable and rare tolose—but we did not want him to stop worrying. The precautions wetook to safeguard him, the armed men who went with him everywhere, theAccident Prone First Aid Kit with spare parts for him, blood, eyes,bone, nerves, arms, legs, and so forth, only emphasized to him thedanger, not the rigidly secured safety.
We like it that way.
No one knows what causes an accident prone. The big insurancecompanies on Earth discovered them when they found out in the last partof the nineteenth century that ninety per cent of the accidents werehappening to a few per cent of the people. They soon found out thatthese people were not malingering or trying to defraud anyb