Explore "Captain Peabody" by Rog Phillips on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
_He carried the monkey of fear on his back for all to see; and until he could shake the beast he knew he would be a captain in name only._
The gavel rapped sharply, and the murmur of conversation throughout the banquet room drifted into hushed silence. The occasion was the seventy-fifth meeting of RETSCAP, the organization of Retired Space Captains; the place, a banquet room in the Empire Club on the hundred and sixty-fourth floor of the New Empire State Building in Manhattan; the time, approximately nine thirty in the evening, August 9, 2231 A. D.; those present, the four hundred and eighteen members of RETSCAP -- or rather, four hundred and nineteen, including the new member, Captain Arthur Peabody, who had reached his ninety-fifth birthday just two weeks before, and by doing so had been automatically retired from active service and thereby become eligible for membership while still in the prime of life.