t a couple
of minutes before I could get another bottle. The bar filled up from the
end near the stage because all the customers wanted a good, close look
at the strippers for their fifty-cent bottles of beer. But I noticed
that nobody sat down next to the kid, or, if anybody did, he didn't stay
long--you go out for some fun and the bartender pushes you around and
nobody wants to sit next to you. I picked up my bottle and glass and
went down on the stool to his left.

He turned to me right away and said: "What kind of a place is this,
anyway?" The broken veins were all over his face, little ones, but so
many, so close, that they made his face look something like marbled
rubber. The funny look in his eyes was it--the trick contact lenses. But
I tried not to stare and not to look away.

"It's okay," I said. "It's a good show if you don't mind a lot of noise
from--"

He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. "I'm a
spacer," he said, interrupting.

I took one of his cigarettes and said: "Oh."

He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: "Venus."

* * * * *

I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind of
yellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp.

"Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give you
lighters for a souvenir. But it's a good lighter. On Mars last week,
they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets."

"You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of ale
and he finished his scotch and water.

"Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot'."

One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going to
slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but
she looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me and
asked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to the
next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at
him, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinned
without thinking and said, "G'night, boys," to us.

The kid stopped in the street and said to me: "You don't have to follow
me around, Pappy." He sounded like one wrong word and I would get socked
in the teeth.

"Take it easy. I know a place where they won't spit in your eye."

He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. "This I have to see,"
he said. "Near here?"

"A few blocks."

We started walking. It was a nice night.

"I don