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."

I gave him my puzzled and expectant look.

He countered with a gesture at the nearly empty brandy glass. I got the idea. I signaled autoservice—a conditioned reflex developed over years of pumping material out of spacemen—and slipped my ID into the check slot of the robot as it rolled up beside us and waited, humming expectantly.

"Rum," the spaceman said. "Demerara, four ounces."

"You are cautioned, sir," the autoservice said in a flat mechanical voice. "Demerara rum is one hundred fifty proof and is not meant to be ingested by terrestrial life-forms without prior dilution."

"Shut up and serve," I said.

The robot clicked disapprovingly, gurgled briefly inside its cubical interior and extruded a pony glass of brownish liquid. "Sir, you will undoubtedly end up in a drunkard's grave, dead of hepatic cirrhosis," it informed me virtuously as it returned my ID card. I glared as I pushed the glass across the table.

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