The hotel’s small cocktail lounge was known as the Hear Ye Room.
In the Hear Ye Room were three people — a bartender and two customers. The two customers were a thin woman and a fat man — both seemingly old. Nobody in the Wilburhampton had ever seen them before, but it already seemed as though they had been sitting in the Hear Ye Room for years. Their protective coloration was perfect, for they looked half-timbered and broken-backed and thatched and little-windowed, too.
They claimed to be pensioned-off teachers from the same high school in the Middle West. The fat man introduced himself as George M. Helmholtz, a former bandmaster. The thin woman introduced herself as Roberta Wiley, a former teacher of algebra.
They had obviously discovered the consolations of alcohol and cynicism late in life. They never ordered the same drink twice, were avid to know what was in this bottle and what was in that one — to know what a golden dawn punch was, and a Helen Twelvetrees, and a plui d’or, and a merry widow fizz.
The bartender knew they weren’t alcoholics. He was familiar with the type, and loved the type: they were simply two Saturday Evening Post characters at the end of the road.
When they weren’t asking questions about the different things to drink, they were indistinguishable from millions of other American barflies on the first day of the New Age of Space. They sat solidly on their barstools, staring straight ahead at the ranks of bottles. Their lips moved constantly — experimenting dismayingly with irrelevant grins and grimaces and sneers.
Evangelist Bobby Denton’s image of Earth as God’s space ship was an apt one — particularly with reference to barflies. Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were behaving like pilot and co-pilot of an enormously pointless voyage through space that was expected to take forever. It was easy to believe that they had begun the voyage nattily, flushed with youth and technical training, and that the bottles before them were the instruments they had been watching for years and years and years.
It was easy to believe that each day had found the space boy and the space girl microscopically more slovenly than the day before, until now, when they were the shame of the Pan-Galactic Space Service.
Two buttons on Helmholtz’s fly were open. There was shaving cream in his left ear. His socks did not match.
Miss Wiley was a crazy-looking little old lady with a lantern jaw. She wore a frizzy black wig that looked as though it had been nailed to a farmer’s barn door for years.
“I see where the President has ordered a whole brand-new Age of Space to begin, to see if that won’t help the unemployment picture some,” said the bartender.
“Uh, huh,” said Helmholtz and Miss Wiley simultaneously.
Only an observant and suspicious person would have noticed a false note in the behavior of the two: Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were too interested in time. For people who had nothing much to do and nowhere much to go, they were extraordinarily interested in their watches — Miss Wiley in her mannish wrist watch, Mr. Helmholtz in his gold pocket watch,
The truth of the matter was that Helmholtz and Miss Wiley weren’t retired school teachers at all. They were both males, both masters of disguise. They were crack agents for the Army of Mars, the eyes and ears for a Martian press gang that hovered in a flying saucer two hundred miles overhead,
Malachi Constant didn’t know it, but they were waiting for him.
Helmholtz and Wiley did not accost Malachi Constant when he crossed the Street to the Wilburhampton. They gave no sign that he mattered to them. They let him cross the lobby and board the elevator without giving him a glance.
They did, however, glance at their watches again — and an observant and suspicious person would have noticed that Miss Wiley pressed a button on her watch, starting a stopwatch hand on its twitching rounds.
Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were not about to use violence on Malachi Constant. They had never used violence on anyone, and had still recruited fourteen thousand persons for Mars.