Project Gutenberg's The Love of Frank Nineteen, by David Carpenter Knight

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Title: The Love of Frank Nineteen

Author: David Carpenter Knight

Release Date: January 28, 2009 [EBook #27921]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_What will happen to love in that far off Day after Tomorrow? David
C. Knight, editor with a New York trade publisher, agrees with the
many impressed by "the range of possible subjects and situations" in
science fiction. The result is a unique love story from that same
Tomorrow._

the
love
of
frank
nineteen

_by DAVID C. KNIGHT_

Minor Planets was the one solid account they had.
At first they naturally wanted to hold on to it.

I didn't worry much about the robot's leg at the time. In those days I
didn't worry much about anything except the receipts of the spotel Min
and I were operating out in the spacelanes.

Actually, the spotel business isn't much different from running a plain,
ordinary motel back on Highway 101 in California. Competition gets
stiffer every year and you got to make your improvements. Take the Io
for instance, that's our place. We can handle any type rocket up to and
including the new Marvin 990s. Every cabin in the wheel's got TV and
hot-and-cold running water _plus_ guaranteed Terran _g_. One look at our
refuel prices would give even a Martian a sense of humor. And meals?
Listen, when a man's been spacing it for a few days on those synthetic
foods he really laces into Min's Earth cooking.

Min and I were just getting settled in the spotel game when the leg
turned up. That was back in the days when the Orbit Commission would
hand out a license to anybody crazy enough to sink his savings into
construction and pay the tows and assembly fees out into space.

A good orbit can make you or break you in the spotel business. That's
where we were lucky. The one we applied for was a nice low-eccentric
ellipse with the perihelion and aphelion figured just right to inter