Quoth the Raven Copyright Mary Qualls 2003 Once upon a planet dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a dull and carping lecture heard so oft before... Doreen Allan smiled wryly at her parody of the ancient poem. She stood in front of the den's huge picture window, trying to get a glimpse of the nearby foothills through the snow that was being blown into mad, horizontal swirls by the storm's high winds. Worst blizzard we've had on Eapoe III in the ten years we've been on this misbegotten planet, she thought. Whatever possessed me to marry such a jerk? And then to believe that becoming part of the colonization group headed for this armpit of the universe would be a wonderful, exciting, romantic thing to do... Smart, Doreen, really smart! Her husband sat behind her at his holo-puter, going through her monthly expenditures in his usual persnickety fashion. She had been trying for the past ten or fifteen minutes to tune out his eternal complaints, but with little success. Why does he have to keep carrying on like this? she thought bitterly. He's acting like it's a matter of life or death. I exceeded my budget by less than what a single pound of squamata costs, and he bought twenty pounds of that awful stuff just before the storm hit. She sighed when his droning voice became a roar, shook herself, and turned to face him. "Doreen! Are you going to answer me? Or are you going to whine that it makes you nervous when we discuss your carelessness about money?" "No, dear." She made an effort and managed not to show her resentment. "I'm not whining. And if you'll repeat the question I'll try to answer it." "That's the kind of carelessness I'm talking about. So nervous because I caught you wasting my hard-earned money that you can't even remember what question I asked you less than two minutes ago." "I am not nervous, Edgar!" She turned her head to the side, hoping he hadn't noticed her anger. "After fifteen years of marriage, I have sterves of neel." "Aha! See? You said 'sterves of neel' instead of 'nerves of steel'. You got your tongue twisted again. You do it all the time." He frowned at her and shook his head. "If it's not because you're nervous, then it has to be sheer carelessness. And that brings us back to what I was talking about in the first..." The buzz of a timer began its loud rasping from their cellar emergency-shelter and interrupted him in mid-diatribe. "Why is that thing going off? Did you forget and leave it on or what?" "I've been canning all that baby squamata you bought, Edgar. I can't imagine why you bought so much of the stuff. I don't see how you can stand to eat the nasty things, either. Just thinking about what they are is enough to make me sick." "I bought them because they were such a bargain. The Colony's hunters glutted the market since the mountains were overrun with young squamata this season. What's more, Doreen, I like them because -- and you'd know this if you'd make an effort to get over your silly squeamishness -- they taste just like chicken, reptiles or not." She felt her stomach turn over, shuddered as she tasted bile, then swallowed and cleared her throat. "Anyway, I set the alarm to go off when it was time to take the first batch out of the cooker and start the next one." She smiled with studied innocence. "Considering how much of our grocery money is tied up in all that snake-meat, I sure don't want to let any of it go to waste, do I?" "Hmph," Edgar snorted and turned back to the holo-puter. "About time you thought of wastefulness. Better late than never, I suppose. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know." Doreen winced at the tired clich