Chapter 4
745 Words
7
OUT ON THE EDGE
spill a drop) is genuine wood, polished oak, brought all the way from London, England, on Earth, at no doubt a degree of expense even more fantastic than that which has propelled me on my travels and which is no doubt the only piece of actual organic wood many spacemen (such as walk in here, with their phantom companions) will ever see in their lives.
It does give the place a redeeming touch of authenticity.
So, picture if you will, yours truly, sidled up to that bar. You are expecting maybe a rumpled-looking man of fifty something, but still reasonably fit, but with an expression beneath his wrinkled brow that suggests he knows his career is not going where perhaps he once dreamed it would, in a rumpled suit with an antique camera around his neck and a tape recorder hanging on a strap over his shoulder – but my editor or the rewrite man will certainly delete that sort of cliché and of course I have the camera and recorder and everything else implanted in the back of my left hand. As for the suit, and my general ap-pearance, none of your damn business.
So there I was, and the bartender asked the obvious, “Would you like a drink, sir?” and I ordered, and drank, which I did purely in the line of duty, because it is part of my assignment to sample the offerings of every such watering-hole from Mercury to the Oort Cloud – not that there could be, I sincerely hoped, any such places in the Oort Cloud, because by this point I was really looking forward to going home. This was the last stop on my itinerary, and I was determined to have some relief, if only the kind you get from ceasing to hit yourself on the head with a brick after you’ve been doing it for so long you can’t remember when you started.
Besides which, I think I puked up my stomach and my intestines and left them on the floor of a sleazy dive on Ceres, sometime last year.
Maybe that was why the booze actually did settle well into me, with a warming, calming effect, because I didn’t have any
internal workings left to a***e. I sat there absorbing the atmosphere for a while, which was dark and swirly and a little stale.
The bartender did not seem particularly talkative. But I needed to get the story.
I asked him his name. He replied with something that sounded like “Tade estin hos eston.” Being the trained professional I was, I got him to spell it.
“That’s a very odd name. Is it a name?” I said.
“It’s Greek.”
(It might be a proverb, or a curse. I’d look it up later. It will be convenient hereafter to refer to the bartender as Mr. X.)
Now I was not drunk, nor was I stupid enough to say something like “It certainly seems Greek to me,” which would insult my informant before any interview could get started, so I replied with a simple, “My name’s Frank. Frank Weston. Which is not an odd name.”
“No, it is not,” he said.
I looked around, noting the emptiness of the place.
“Do you get much traffic in here?”
“Most people on the base are involved with the expedition – excuse me.”
Just my luck. Three engineering types burst noisily in. I think they’d been celebrat-ing somewhere else before they even got here, and between their drink orders and their ghastly and vulgar attempts at humor and equally ghastly laughter, they kept Mr. X busy for quite some time. So much for at-mosphere. So much for anything and every-thing, so the best I could do was point to my glass for a refill, then sip that slowly. Things proceeded until one of them did have a nasty accident with the darts and the moose made a “Whoo-hoo!” sound which was either an alarm or just cheering them on. But the other two assured the third guy that they’d chip in and pay for his new eye, so when they finally left, they were still in a jolly mood, if a little the worse for wear.
But I had not wasted my time during that hour. I took my drink to the other end of the
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