The Gall on Ice

Synopsis

Space travel is unlucky. Anyone on the cargo ship Gall knows this. Now the jobless Norton Tremor Pomelo manages to land the Gall on a world of ceramicists where he picks up more trouble in the form of a double-dealing Trammelhead (a scientist-inventor belonging to the banned Technocratic Aristocracy) and his mischievous Vorortian assistant (who happens to be two selves in one). Nort flies the malfunctioning Gall to two neighboring worlds: a society under water and the other trapped in ice. Water breathers don't take kindly to the oily and leaky spacecraft and say so loudly. Bad things, good things, and other things happen until the Trammelhead uses highly illegal technology to heal the ice world leader's sick skink. (A skink is a lizard you haven't met yet.) Then the trip gets weird. It's one humor-filled misadventure after another in The Gall On Ice, second in the series by Bill Abot, an author distinguished only by a gap in his smile and a limp in his step inspired by an escape from a bee.