“Did it fly?” said the first, scratching its osseous crest with a wingtip finger. “Or did it merely fall?”
“Big, isn’t it?” commented the second. “Much bigger than whatchamacallit, men, are supposed to be. And heavier. I wonder, is it edible?”
“Ah-ha, not is it edible,” interjected one of the dietary priests of Nerf, “but is it hazzil! That’s the question.”
“It looks hazzil.”
“The eyes are blue, that means it can’t be hazzil!”
A Proctor descended on the scene and extracted its demerit book from its wingtip-pouch with the fingertip of its other wing. “Okay, who owns this myth?”
“What’s a Teeny Slut?’ asked the dietary priest of Ned. But no one seemed to know.
And no one seemed to very much care…
THE END
Ending by Keith Laumer
The Vice-President in charge of Enforcement for the meat cutters confronted Jake, Ajax Wreckers’ ace field man, as the latter tugged at a twenty-foot length of amputated pterodactyl skin.
“Hey,” he barked over the stutter of the chain saws chopping through the lobster-like flesh. “You guys are doing our work!”
Jake dropped the leg, causing a gush of blood like drained oil to moisten the shoe-tops of the union man. He took a step toward the challenger, pushed his large, broken-veined, fist-scarred, unevenly shaved face forward.
“Oh, yeah?” he riposted.
As they stood nose to nose, their followers gathered behind them. A chain saw barked and sputtered, lugging down on bone. More large men appeared. The lines formed up across the slope of the pteranodon’s keel. An advance scout from the Black Panthers sidled up to a dark-skinned butcher who stood glowering at a similarly pigmented wrecker.
“Hey, baby,” he protested. “Let’s not waste no horsepower on internecine strife. Let’s get Honky!”