Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“It’s a good thing I decided to sign on when I did instead of waiting till I finished my degree in gerbis farming like everybody wanted me to,” Nert said. “If I hadn’t met you I might be spending my first evening in port at a co-op.”

“Lucky for me, you mean. I’d have been somebody’s dinner.”

They watched their waiter lead the flomox into the back room, probably to check his legal papers, while another floater came toward them dangling their order beneath him in a tangle of grassy tentacles. It left the drinking equipment and a bottle full of cool blue liquid. Nert poured a little of the liquid into their glasses. He picked up his long tubelike glass of glovo and stuck his tongue in it, while Herbie dangled a delicate finger of protoplasm into his own glass,a shallow trough. When they’d finished the first round, Herbie said, “You know, the Terrans have a ritual when friends drink together. They call it a ‘taste.’“

“What’s that?” Nert’s voice did not sound right to him. He looked into his glass to see if he could find the reason.

“A ‘taste’ is when the friends all taste together what they’re drinking, and say a few words over it.”

“What kind of words?”

“Oh, something like ‘hot jets’ or ‘happy landings.’ Something like that.”

Nert started to refill the glasses. He said, “Reminds me of the time a human visited my brindle’s farm when I was just a klara.

Forever trying to grab everybody’s claws and pump them up and down whenever he met them.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. We just let him do it.”

“Eccentric, that’s what they are. You wonder how they were smart enough to get off their own planet.”

They looked at their drinks for a moment. Then Herbie said, “What should we say over our drinks?”

“‘Happy landings’ sounds nice.”

“No. It’s got to be something original.” He thought for a few minutes. Nert could tell he was giving it all his concentration because his food vacuoles were moving quickly from place to place like the flits on his brindle’s farm. “Something like, ‘Soak it up.’”

Nert wanted to get back to his drinking, so he said, “Not bad.” He lifted his glass to his tongue and said, “Soak it up.”

“Soak it up.”

Herbie could drink and talk at the same time, and he kept up a running commentary on the beings around him. He talked about odd creatures and stranger habits, digressing often into lectures on galactography and his opinions on everything. “Soak it up,” he said. Nert became more placid as he drank. After a while Herbie’s voice was a soft buzz overlying the other noise in the bar—

And suddenly Nert was wide awake. The olfactory nerves on his shoulders bristled as he tried to find what had disturbed him. It was an odor he’d smelled before, and it was coming from the flomox who’d just returned from the back room. But a flomox shouldn’t smell that way. And the floater who had been with him shouldn’t either. Nert had almost decided it was the influence of the glovo when he suddenly identified it. Mittlebran—stuff, snort, Antrop white.

“Smell that?” Nert said.

“What?” Herbie had stopped lecturing and was content to let a flaccid pseudopod lie in his trough soaking up his glovo.

“Mittlebran. Don’t you smell it?”

Small bumps raised themselves all over Herbie’s body. They soon subsided, and he said, “You’re crazy. Stuffs illegal.”

“Since when did being illegal stop people from doing something?” Nert pushed his glass away. He’d tried mittlebran once and he didn’t like it He couldn’t sleep. And now it turned out it made him cold sober. “Herbie, can we leave?”

“Leave?” Herbie said, as if it were a new word.

Nert gently lifted the pseudopod out of the trough. “Come on. We have to find somewhere to spend the night anyway. We can celebrate some more later.”

“Don’t want to leave.”

Nert tried to push Herbie out of the depression in his chair, but the protoplasm just flowed around his claws until he was engulfed up to his joints. “Come on, Herbie. Cooperate.”

“Celebrate some more later.”

Nert found that the best way to deal with Herbie was to plunge both claws into him and carry him to the floor draped over his arms like taffy. One of the blue globes approached them and said, “Trouble, sir?”

“Just trying to get my friend home.” Nert didn’t like mittlebran, but he didn’t want to cause any trouble. If people wanted to sprinkle the stuff, that was their business, but Nert didn’t like to be around when they did it. Because of his race’s finely developed sense of smell, he knew when someone across the room had done it hours ago, and he was uncomfortable even then. When someone in such a small, stuffy place had done it only moments before, it was almost intolerable.

“Would you like a shot of denebriant?”

“That would be helpful, but I don’t know what kind.” Nert put Herbie carefully on the floor, where he tried to divide himself in two against a table leg.

“Do you know where he’s from?”

“Let me think.” Nert snapped his claws like castanets. “I think he said he was from Tramitode—uh, Arkis IV.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll be right back.”

While the waiter was gone, Nert tried to ignore the smell of the mittlebran. It made his olfactory nerves raw, as if they had been immersed in hydrochloric acid all day. As time went on he began to notice a kaleidoscope of smells coming from the creatures around him. He could close his bulging eyes and still get a picture of the room. The flomox was stinking in the corner and the floaters came and went like wisps of peppermint A musky ornt had just come in the door. The odors swirled around making him almost as giddy as the glovo had.

The floater returned with a small vial of dark amber fluid. He said, “According to my tables, this should work for all beings from Arkis IV.” He wrapped his tentacles around a small part of Herbie and squeezed until he’d madea small armlike projection. He then plunged the appendage into the vial and waited until all the liquid had been absorbed. “There. That should do it. In a few moments he should be as sober as ever.”

“Thanks very much. How much extra do I owe you?”

“Nothing. Just for the drinks. We find small special services pay off in the long run.” He took Nert’s money, about twice what he’d expected to pay for even third-level glovo, and floated back to the bar, where the ornt was complaining about the shape of the glass in which his drink had been served.

Herbie congealed little by little, and in a few minutes he said, “What’s the problem?”

Nert said, “I can’t stand the mittlebran. We’ve got to leave.”

“What mittlebran?”

Nert was on the verge of screaming. He was already an aquamarine very nearly the shade of the floaters. Carefully, with great control, he said, “I’ll explain outside. Come on. Please!”

“Sure, Nert. Sure. Let’s go.” He began to move toward the door, the lower part of his body undulating in peristaltic waves. Nert caught up and beat him to the door.

The hotel was one Nert would never have had the nerve to choose. It was called the Hotel Galactica, and it was equipped to accommodate visiting dignitaries from a thousand worlds who came to Spangle for a good time. It rose more than a hundred stories, and was built around a central court where a realistic artificial park lay under a sunny sky, no matter what the weather was like outside.

The porter dropped their bags in the room and stood waiting at the door. “Yes?” Herbie said.

“I hope you enjoy your stay at the Galactica,” the machine said. Its voice was programmed to drip with a sincerity that might have convinced the superrich who were used to flattery, but which Nert found artificial.