Project Gutenberg's Black Eyes and the Daily Grind, by Milton Lesser

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Title: Black Eyes and the Daily Grind

Author: Milton Lesser

Release Date: October 25, 2009 [EBook #30329]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: _When Black Eyes needed a nap--everybody slept!_]

BLACK EYES _and the_
DAILY GRIND

By MILTON LESSER

_The little house pet from Venus didn't
like New York, so New York had to change._

He liked the flat cracking sound of the gun. He liked the way it slapped
back against his shoulder when he fired. Somehow it did not seem a part
of the dank, steaming Venusian jungle. Probably, he realized with a
smile, it was the only old-fashioned recoil rifle on the entire planet.
As if anyone else would want to use one of those old bone-cracking
relics today! But they all failed to realize it made sport much more
interesting.

"I haven't seen anything for a while," his wife said. She had a young,
pretty face and a strong young body. If you have money these days, you
could really keep a thirty-five-year-old woman looking trim.

Not on Venus, of course. Venus was an outpost, a frontier, a hot, wet,
evil-smelling place that beckoned only the big-game hunter. He said,
"That's true. Yesterday we could bag them one after the other, as fast
as I could fire this contraption. Today, if there's anything bigger than
a mouse, it's hiding in a hole somewhere. You know what I think, Lindy?"

"What?"

"I think there's a reason for it. A lot of the early Venusian hunters
said there were days like this. An area filled with big lizards and cats
and everything else the day before suddenly seems to clear out, for no
reason. It doesn't make sense."

"Why not? Why couldn't they all just decide to make tracks for someplace
else on the same day?"

He slapped at an insect that was buzzing around his right ear, then
mopped his sweating brow with a handkerchief. His name was Judd Whitney,
and people said he had a