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into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn’t feel like paying the prices that people who space for fun can afford. The Facilities Directory listed under “Food and Drink” four establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine’s, and Slim Joan’s Bar & Grill.
    I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better at arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar’s door was right at the drop-lift exit would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage don’t generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.
    It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rather than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite. Well, I hadn’t come for the scenery.
    The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being !tang, since this was Morocho III. I’ve got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tangish, I preferred to mix my drinking with some human tongue.
    â€œSpeak English?” I asked Slim Joan.
    â€œSome,” he/she/it growled. “You would drink something?” I’d never heard a Russian-Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty booth.
    One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the lingo you can count your change.
    I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the !tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn’t stay useless, of course.
    Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as “Armpit,” and not many people take the local hop out to III (Armpit’s the stopover on the Earth-Sammler run). Starlodge, Limited, was hoping to change that situation.
    I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I’m not a snoop; it’s a side effect of the hypnotic-induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, and the other was full of useful advice. “He”—they have seven singular pronoun classes, depending on the individual’s age and estrous condition—was telling “her” never to make any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have told her not to breathe on anyone. One of the by-products of their metabolism is butyl nitrite, which smells like well-aged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.
    I’ve worked with !tangs a few times before, and they’re some of my favorite people. Very serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant’s trunk protruding. They have two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it’s impolite to take them out in public unless one is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologist with a magnifying glass to tell when.
    He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Their metabolism parts company with ours over proteins and fats, but they love our carbohydrates and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.
    A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank back into the booth. Too late.
    He strode over and stuck out his hand. “Dick Navarro!”
    â€œHello,