for a second.
Then he turned and hooked one heel in the brass rail, leaned back on the mahogany with his elbows, and surveyed the joint like a man with time and money to spare, looking for what could be found. The glass in his hand dangled a bit, and his posture was relaxed.
It was called 'The Spaceman's Bar,' like sixteen hundred other 'Spaceman's Bar' rimming spaceports from Pluto to Mercury. The customers were about the same, too. There were four spacemen playing blackjack for dimes near the back of the room. Two women were nursing beers, hoping for someone to come and offer them something more substantial. Two young fellows were agreeing vigorously with one another about the political situation which neither of them liked. One character should have gone home eighteen drinks earlier, and was earning a ride home on a shutter with a broken nose by needling a man with a lot of patience, which was running out. A woman sat in a booth along the wall, dressed in a copy of some exclusive model that had neither the cloth nor the workmanship to stand up for more than the initial wearing, and looked already as if she had worn it often. The woman herself had the same tired, overworked look. She was too young to have that look, and Farradyne looked away, disinterested; he favored the vivacious brunette that sat gayly across the table from a young spaceman and enticed him with her eyes. Farradyne shrugged; the girl had eyes for no one else and she probably couldn't have been pried away from her young spaceman by any means. It occurred to Farradyne that, judging by the way she was acting, if some other guy slipped her a love lotus, the girl would take a deep breath, get bedroom eyed, and then leave the guy to go looking for her spaceman. Farradyne grinned at the idea.As far as Farradyne could tell, there was not a love lotus in the place, which hardly surprised him because he did not really expect to find one in a place such as this. He turned back to the bar for a refill. When he got it, he turned to face the room again and saw that a man had come in and was standing just inside the door, blinking at the lights. He was eyeing the customers with a searching look.

Eventually he addressed the entire room: "Who owns the Lancaster Eighty-One that just came in?"

"I do," said Farradyne.

"Are you free?"

"Until the third of August."

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