Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found out what happened.
Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid’s face— Bauer, I think it was, after he came back to the table.
“Compression and decompression,” the kid said. “You’re all the time climbing into your suit and out of your suit. Inboard air’s thin to start with. You get a few redlines—that’s these ruptured blood vessels —and you say the hell with the money; all you’ll make is just one more trip. But, God, it’s a lot of money for anybody my age! You keep saying that until you can’t be anything but a spacer. The eyes are hard-radiation scars.”
“You like dot all ofer?” asked Oswiak’s wife politely.
“All over, ma’am,” the kid told her in a miserable voice. “But I’m going to quit before I get a Bowman Head.”
I took a savage gulp at the raw Scotch.
“I don’t care,” said Maggie Rorty. “I think he’s cute.”
“Compared with—” Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table.
We sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for a while, and I noticed that the kid and Maggie had wandered into the back room—the one with the latch on the door.
Oswiak’s wife asked me, very puzzled: “Doc, w’y dey do dot flyink by planyets?”
“It’s the damn govermint,” Sam Fireman said.
“Why not?” I said. “They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn’t they use it? Serves ’em right.” I had a double Scotch and added: “Twenty years of it and they found out a few things they didn’t know. Redlines are only one of them. Twenty years more, maybe they’ll find out a few more things they didn’t know. Maybe by the time there’s a bathtub in every American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town, they’ll find out a whole lot of things they didn’t know. And every American boy will be a pop-eyed, blood-raddled wreck, like our friend here, from riding the Bowman Drive.”
“It’s the damn govermint,” Sam Fireman repeated.
“And what the hell did you mean by that remark about alcoholism?” Paddy said, real sore. “Personally, I can take it or leave it alone.”
So we got to talking about that and everybody there turned out to be people who could take it or leave it alone.
It was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, looking kind of dazed. I was drunker than I ought to be by midnight, so I said I was going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a bench at Screwball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. As I said, it was a nice night. After a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn’t give a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid into going to see some etchings. The kid didn’t get it and I led him over to hear the soap-boxers before there was trouble.
One of the orators was a mush-mouthed evangelist. “And oh, my friends,” he said, “when I looked through the porthole of the spaceship and beheld the wonder of the Firmament—”
“You’re a stinkin’ Yankee liar!” the kid yelled at him. “You say one damn more word about can-shootin’ and I’ll ram your spaceship down your lyin’ throat! Wheah’s your redlines if you’re such a hot spacer?”
The crowd didn’t know what he was talking about, but “wheah’s your redlines” sounded good to them, so they heckled mushmouth off his box with it.
I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden. He simmered down after a while and asked: “Doc, should I’ve given Miz Rorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she’d admire to have something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem’ to be real pleased with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed her by asking her right out. Like I tol’ you, back in Covington, Kentucky, we don’t have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn’t know about them. But what do you think I should’ve done about Miz Rorty?”