Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

THE MAN IN THE Antares bar-lounge didn’t quite bang his head on the curved star-ceiling on this, his fourth attempt. Or maybe it was his fifth. This failure came as a disappointment to a number of the luxurious lounge’s more vocal occupants.

When standing erect—a rare happenstance, of late—the fellow stood just under two meters tall. A haberdasher worth his salt would have estimated his mass at about two hundred kilos. This not counting the booze he’d been putting away at a prodigious rate. That he’d even managed to come close to the roof of the lounge and its simulacrum Terran sky was due in part to his considerable stature.

Starting from the far end of the lounge he’d make a mad elephant sprint toward the bar, leap onto the polished maplewood counter, and soar ceilingward from that deep-grained launch pad. A reach, stretch, grab, and down he’d come in a spectacular displacement of plastic bottles, glasses, and swizzle sticks. Whereupon he’d fight off the angry flailings of the robot bartender, now on the verge of electron psychosis, stagger between the tables, and try again.

Now he struggled to his feet, downed another slug of whatever it was he was currently drinking, and stumbled toward his launch point. His elegantly clad, youngish cheering section spurred him along. Among this group, the sporting blood was up. Bets continued to be exchanged. Would he finally kill himself by falling on his swozzled skull this fifth (or sixth) time? Or would he simply knock himself out by successfully cracking it against the roof?

Three-dimensional cumulus clouds, fat and fleecy, drifted across the dome. For all their apparent reality they were only clever projections on treated duralloy. Still, while this kangaroo-brother’s head was clearly solid bone, in any conjunction of the two the gentle clouds would surely win out.

There was a stir at the back of the room. Bobbing like emerald corks among the laughing, applauding gamblers and the outraged but intrigued patrons were the first mate and two sub-engineers of the Antares. For the last fifteen minutes their prime objective in life had been to bring down this galloping, great, aged simian with as little damage to self and company property as possible. So far their efforts had come to zilch. And they were beginning to draw a few laughs themselves.

Now the first mate, who was an educated man and spent most of his work time planning overdrive maneuvers and juggling the grav field of a small artificial sun-mass, didn’t think it was even a tiny bit funny. Matter of fact, he was just about fed up.

There was no point in re-checking the book, though. Company regs specifically forbade shooting a paying passenger, no matter how obnoxious. Other methods had so far met with abject failure. One of the sub-engineers had already taken a steel-like straight-arming from the hurtling acrobat. He wiped his lower lip and considered braining the anthropoid sot with a chair. He could always plead temporary insanity. Pension or no pension.

“Spread out, boys, here he comes again.”

Waving a half-filled bottle of Uriah’s Heep and howling at the top of his astonishing lungs, the incipient Icarus started at the bar again, picking up speed with each step. With agility amazing for one so old and so soused, the man soared high and gained the top of the bar in a single bound.

Up he went, up, up, an arm outstretched for the ceiling. Barely he missed one of the floating pseudo-clouds. There followed a satisfying and by now familiar crash from the other side of the bar. Plasticine jugs and unbreakable glass joined in a rainbow-colored fountain and bounced to the floor. Money changed hands in the crowd.

After a lingering pause, the first mate decided on a new course. He would try reason. Besides, the fellow hadn’t gotten up yet. Perhaps he’d gone and croaked himself. That would save everyone a lot of trouble.

Gesturing to the sub-engineers, he tiptoed up to the badly scuffed maplewood and peered cautiously over the top.

No such luck.

True, the fellow was momentarily incapacitated, having entangled himself in the now completely inoperable mechbar. But he was snorting and mumbling with dismaying energy.

“Sir, I appeal to your moral sense. Public drunkenness is bad enough. Eliminating our evening bar business, not to mention the bar, is worse. But your refusal to heed the admonitions of a ship’s crew in free space is insulting. What have we done to offend you?”

After a short search in the region of the floor, the man seemed to find his feet. Staggering more or less upright, he put two huge fists on the bar and leaned forward.

“Offend me? OFFEND ME!”

The mate shrank from that spiritual effluvia and tactfully turned his head to one side. It was pure self-defense. Surely they could put the man away! He was obviously flammable and constituted a real danger to the ship.

The eyes waggled until they came to rest on the bottle gripped tightly in one paw. He drained half the remainder.

“Offend me!” he blurted again. “Listen, you unmentionable hazard to navigation, that piddle-pot swine over there,” and he jabbed a great knobby finger in the direction of an especially smug-looking young gambler, “that piece of plith-seed laid claim to a greater knowledge of posigravity than I. Than me. ME! Can you fancy that?”

“I’m not sure,” the mate replied. He was experiencing some difficulty in following the other’s train of thought. Maybe the local change in the atmosphere had something to do with it. The two sub-engineers were edging around to one side of the bar. If he could keep this creature talking…

“Sexactusly,” the man said, then belched. “So we are engaged in a scientific experiment to settle the matter once and fer all. You ain’t one of them anti-empiricists, is you, bub?”

“Good lord, no,” the mate admitted truthfully enough.

“Yeh. Well, we calculated a bit of the ship’s field, see? An’ according to my calculations, I ought to be able to touch the roof, there.”

“That one over our heads?”

“Yeh, that’s the one. You ain’t so stupid as you look, matey. Now you unnerstand what I’m doing, eh?”

“Of course.” The sub-engineers were not quite in position yet. “Still, while I’m sure you know your computations, that young chap you pointed out is the son of a well-known yachtsman and something of an interplanetary sprinter himself. He just might know what he’s talking about.”

He stared across at the exploding shock of white hair, a virgin corona; at the great hooked beak of a nose, chin like a hatchet-head, oil-black eyes under break-wave brows, and the gold ring in the right ear. The hair on the man’s bare arms, though, was blond. And there were fewer wrinkles in that tanned face than you would suppose at first glance. The ones that were there, though, were really canyon wrinkles, genuine gully-gapers. No question but that the nose had come first, like Bergerac’s, and the face had been constructed around it, bits and scraps sewn on here and there. The wrinkles fell neatly in place, like seams in leather.

“I’m not sure, however,” continued the mate, “who you are.” And the court will want to know, too, he thought

For a moment he thought the other might be having an attack. Still clenching the bottle in one hand, the man shook his fist at the first mate and at the whole lounge in general.

“By the Heavenly Hosts and the whole Horse’s Head, I’m Skua September, be who! In the manner of men and all other beings I can out-drink, out-fight, out-fly, out-sleep, out-eat, out-whore, out-run, out-talk, out-shout and out-love any man in this end of the Spiral Arm!”