- Allamagoosa
Infobox short story
name = Allamagoosa
author =Eric Frank Russell
language = English
genre =Science fiction
published_in =Astounding Science Fiction
publication_type =magazine
publisher =
media_type =
pub_date = May 1955"Allamagoosa" is an award-winning
science fiction short story byEric Frank Russell .The story is set on board a military
starship , the "Bustler", but the tale is comic rather than heroic. The ship's officers and crew are facing an official inspection, and worry about having stores they should not have, or "not" having something that they should have. Checking, they discover that they are supposed to have an "offog", but no one has any idea what this is, so they create a bogus electronic gadget and call it an offog to fool the inspectingadmiral , pretending that it is a special device to measure the intensity of gravity fields.As soon as they restart from the starport, they realize that it will be difficult to cheat a more experienced inspector in the future, so that the offog must disappear from the inventory. The great idea is to report that it was broken and destroy it. The captain send an official report to the central command, explaining that the offog was squashed by the tension of the combined gravity fields of a nearby double star. Almost immediately, a message of maximum priority from the central command arrives: all starships must return to the nearest spaceport, "Bustler" included, for an immediate inspection.
Too late, the captain and crew learn that "offog" is a misprint for "off. dog," the ship's official dog, Peaslake, which has spent the whole course of the inventory making a conspicuous nuisance of itself. The animal's collar, drinking bowl, sleeping basket and (the unchewed half of its) cushion were correctly ticked off the inventory list without alerting the crew to their oversight.Obviously the central command is worried about how a dog could be squashed as described.The story ends with the captain and the crew in a bigger trouble than before.
The tale is very much a parody of officialdom, in the military or elsewhere. It won a
Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955.Awards
External links
*isfdb title|id=55829|title=Allamagoosa
* [http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russell/russell1.html "Allamagoosa" at scifi.com]
* [http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2008/03/08/allamagoosa-by-eric-frank-russell/ "Allamagoosa" at BestScienceFictionStories.com] - short story reviews and resources.
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