_How could any race look so
ferocious and yet be peaceful--and
devise so nasty a weapon?_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
I couldn't help listening to the big spaceman sitting alone at the
corner table. He wasn't speaking to me--that was certain--nor was his
flat, curiously uninflected voice directed at anyone else. With some
surprise I realized that he was talking to himself. People don't do
that nowadays. They're adjusted.
He noted my raised eye-brows and grinned, his square teeth white
against the dark planes of his face. "I'm not psycho," he said. "It's
just a bad habit I picked up on Lyrane."
"Lyrane?" I asked.
"It hasn't been entered on the charts yet. Just discovered." His voice
was inflected now. And then it changed abruptly. "If you must know,
this is ethanol--C_{2}H_{5}OH--and I drink it." He looked at me with
an embarrassed expression in his blue eyes. "It's just that I'm not
used to it yet," he explained without explaining. "It's easier when I
vocalize."
"You sure you're all right?" I asked. "Want me to call a
psychologician?"
"No. I've just been certified by Decontamination. I have a paper to
prove it."
"But--"
"Draw up a chair," he invited. "I hate to drink alone. And I'd like to
talk to somebody."
I smiled. My talent was working as usual. I can't walk into a bar
without someone telling me his life history. Nice old ladies buttonhole
me at parties and tell me all about their childhoods. Boys tell me
about girls. Girls tell me about boys. Politicians spill party secrets
and pass me tips.
Something about me makes folks want to talk. It's a talent and in my
business it's an asset. You see, I'm a freelance writer. Nothing fancy
or significant, just news, popular stuff, adventure stories, problem
yarns, romances, and mysteries. I'll never go down in history as a
literary great, but it's a living--and besides I meet the damnedest
characters.
So I sat down.
"I guess you're not contagious if you've been through Decontamination,"
I said.
* * * * *
He looked at me across the rim of an oversized brandy sniffer--a
Napoleon, I think it's called--and waggled a long forefinger at my
nose. "The trouble with you groundhogs is that you're always thinking
we spacers are walking hotbeds of contagion all primed to wreck Earth.
You should know better. Anything dangerous has about as much chance of
getting through Decontamination as an ice cube has of getting through a
nuclear furnace."
"There was Martian Fever," I reminded him.
"Three centuries ago and you still remember it," he said. "But has
there been anything else since Decontamination was set up?"
"No," I admitted, "but that was enough, wasn't it? We still haven't
reached the pre-Mars population level."
"Who wants to?" He sipped at the brownish fluid in the glass and a
shudder rippled the heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders. He
grinned nastily and took a bigger drink. "There, that ought to hold
you," he muttered. He looked at me, that odd embarrassed look glinting
in his eyes. "I think that did it. No tolerance for alcohol."