"Because Mars is lousy with fish," the little man said. "And because
when fish die, they stink."
Larry did a brisk business for a few minutes while we sized the little
guy up again. He definitely wasn't drunk, but the task of deciding
whether he was being dead-pan-comic or just nasty was a sort of
challenge that called for thought.
"But you'd need extensive oceans to support so many fish," Willard
Saxton argued, still taking it seriously. "And if Mars had oceans we'd
have seen them long ago. They reflect light."
"Mars is too level for oceans," the little man said. "The water spreads
out thin to make one big marsh, and you can't see it because the weeds
that grow up from the bottom camouflage it."
Somebody down the bar said, "This gets curiouser and curiouser," and
everybody laughed again but Willard and Larry and the little comic.
Somebody else asked if he was a professional and what show was he on,
but he didn't answer. He just pushed his shot glass forward instead.
"Another bourbon," he said.
The announcer came on screen again when the lizard cartoon went off
and said that the Mars party's signal was beginning to come through
and that as soon as it cleared up they would put it on the cable. Then
he told us about a new kind of pretzel prepared with a special salt
guaranteed not to give us hardening of the arteries, and after that we
had another film cartoon. This one was about two crows at a circus, but
nobody could follow it because Larry turned down the sound again.
Between his third and fourth stingers Willard Saxton--who had a
reputation to uphold, being science editor of the _Advertiser_--had
made up his mind by now to put the little man in his place. It burned
him brown to see this character drinking bourbon and sneering at
himself in the mirror and not caring a damn what we thought, and it put
Willard under a sort of obligation to show him up.
"Reliable tests have conclusively proved," Willard said, "that the
atmosphere of Mars contains only minute traces of water vapor, and that
its oxygen content is less than one-hundredth the density necessary to
sustain human life. Spectroanalysis findings--"
"A spectroanalysis of Earth from Mars," the little man said, "shows
nothing beyond our Heaviside layer, and proves that we can't live here
because nothing can breathe pure ozone."
* * * * *
He finished his bourbon and made chains of wet rings on the bartop with
his glass. The mixed look on his face was so strong that for a moment I
almost thought of the name for it.
Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger--a double, this
time--and Abe Marker took over.
"How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar
make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can
you?"
"Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of
gnats."
"_Gnats?_" we all said at once, and somebody down the bar,
quicker-witted than the rest of us, added: "Gnats to you too, Charlie!"
"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in
swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell."
We sat and watched the two voiceless crows flap through the television
cartoon for a while. Nobody spoke until the film was over and the
screen went blank, when the little man caught Larry's eye and held up
one finger.
"Bourbon," he said.
We heard a confused muttering of voices in the background and waited
expectantly for Colonel Sanderson to speak to us from Mars, but
apparently the network people were still having trouble with their
transmission beam. The screen stayed blank.
"You left out the interesting part, Charlie," somebody called from down
the bar. "The Martian natives. How about them?"
"There aren't any--as you'd know them," the little man said. He seemed
to grow thoughtful for a moment. "But they are intelligent. They do
things you couldn't do."
"Such as what?" somebody asked.