The next day’s entry did not mention Lummox, being concerned with a more serious matter:
“We hit the jackpot this time . . . Civilization. The officers are, so excited they are almost off their heads. I’ve seen one of the dominant race at a distance. The same multi-legged pattern, but otherwise making you wonder what would have happened to Earth if the dinosaurs had made good.”
Still further on. . .
“I’ve been wondering what to feed Cuddle pup. I needn’t have worried. He likes everything I’ve sneaked out of the mess for him. . . but he will eat anything that is not riveted down. Today he ate my Everlasting stylus and it has me worried. I don’t suppose the ink cartridge will poison him but how about the metal and plastic? He’s just like a baby; everything he can reach goes in his mouth.
“Cuddlepuppy gets cuter every day. The little tyke seems to be trying to talk; he whines at me and I whine back at him. Then he crawls into my lap and tells me that he loves me, plain as anything. I’ll be switched if I’ll let Biology have him, even if they catch me. Those birds would likely as not cut him up just to see what makes him tick. He trusts me and i’m not going to let him down.”
The diary skipped a couple of days; the Trail Blazer had made an emergency raise-ship and Assistant Power man J. T. Stuart had been too busy to write. John Thomas knew why . . . the negotiations opened so hopefully with the dominant race had failed. . . no one knew why.
The captain fled to save his ship and his crew. They had blasted away and had again broken through the Einstein barrier without obtaining from the sentient race the astronomical data they had hoped to get.
There were only a few more entries concerning Lummox-Cuddlepup; John Thomas put the diary aside, finding that reading about Lummox was more than he could stand. He started to put everything back into his hideaway; his hand fell on a small, privately-printed book titled A FEW NOTES ABOUT MY FAMILY. It had been written by his grandfather. John Thomas Stuart IX, and Johnnie’s father had brought it up to date before he had gone on his last patrol. It belonged in the family library, beside the massive official biography of John Thomas Stuart VI, but Johnnie had sneaked it upstairs and his mother had never missed it. He knew it as well as he knew the diary, but he started thumbing through it to get his mind off Lummox.
The record started in 1880, with John Thomas Stuart. Who his people had been nobody knew, as he had come from a little Illinois town that kept no birth records in that remote day. He himself had confused the record beyond recovery by running away to sea at fourteen. He had sailed the China trade, lived through beatings and bad food, and eventually had ‘swallowed the anchor,’ a retired sea captain of the dying age of sail. He had built the old house John Thomas was in.
John Thomas, Junior, had not gone to sea. Instead he had killed himself flying a boxkite affair termed an “aeroplane.” That had been before the first of the World Wars; for several years thereafter the house had. received “paying guests.”
J. T. Stuart III had died to greater purpose; the submarine of which he was gunnery officer had penetrated Tsushima Straits to the Sea of Japan, but had failed to return.
John Thomas Stuart IV was killed on the first trip to the Moon.
John Thomas V had emigrated to Mars; his son, the famous name in the family, Johnnie skipped over quickly; he had long since grown tired of being reminded that he bore the same name as General Stuart, first governor of the Martian Commonwealth after the revolution. Johnnie wondered what would have happehed to his great great great grandfather if the revolution had failed? Would they have hanged him?. . . instead of putting up statues of him?
Much of the book was devoted to an attempt by Johnnie’s grandfather to clear the name of his own grandfather-for the son of General Stuart was no public hero; instead he had sweated out his last fifteen years of life in the Triton penal colony. His wife had returned to her family on Earth and taken back her maiden name, for herself and her son.