Tales From the Spaceport Bar

by George H. Scithers

  I frowned. "Do you mean the owl?”

  All three put their forefingers to their lips and went"Sshhh!”

  The owl suddenly flapped its wings and swooped down from the antlers to land on the table in our midst. The owl extended its talons and put a small yellow object on the table, then flew back toward the fireplace.

  I pointed at the yellow object. "What is it?”

  Droopy moustache frowned. "It’s a jellybean.”

  I reached for it, but the red-haired woman slapped my hand. "Don’t! Don’t ever take one of those things! If you do, you’ll never get rid of it! Never!!”

  I sat back in astonishment. Then memory danced by: one of the many disguises of...of...I couldn’t remember! Droopy moustache eyed the jellybean, then looked to Egyptian hairdo for guidance. "What’ll we do with it?”

  The bearded man pursed his lips, then blew on the jellybean, making it roll off the edge of the table. I heard a crunch, munch, wrrrp sound and looked for the source. On the floor, a short, round-headed creature wearing a slick shiny uniform was licking its lips. I pointed at it, asked, "What’s that?”

  The bearded man shrugged. "An omnivore. It’ll eat anything.”

  Drooping moustache flagged a waiter and ordered a Railroad Martini. The beard ordered a Schlitz Beer. I was still working on my Borehole Number Three, and the redhead shook her head. After a few moments, the waiter—a green, muscular humanoid—placed a glass in front of droopy moustache. Several dark pieces of wood floated in the clear drink.

  The blond fellow picked out the pieces of wood and flicked them into the omnivore.

  "Why did you do that?” I frowned.

  He sipped the drink. "It’s a tie composition. But you can’t let them get—ah—some too saturate. Cool.” He took another sip, as if that explained everything.

  The waiter put a plate of dark', curly hair in front of the other man at our table. The stout man called the waiter back, saying, "You’ve gotten my order wrong. I want Schlitz Beer. This is Schmidt’s beard.”

  The waiter apologized and removed the offending pelt. My mind—I felt I was closed in on something ... but then the old man in brown took a swipe at a black-warted creature with a glowing sword he’d gotten from somewhere or other, and the creature’s severed limb landed on our table.

  Drooping moustache grabbed the thing and tossed it back, yelling, "Hey, Darkness; you’ll need this.” The warted creature caught it. Moustache explained, "It’s his left hand.”

  The waiter brought the Schlitz. The bearded man touched his glass to the thin man’s Railroad Martini. They both said, "Dune the hatch,” and finished off their drinks.

  The brawl between the guys in the red shirts and the pointy-eared Mongols was getting louder—and closer. They kept yelling about the USS Enterprise, but they didn’t look Navy to me. Enterprise? Maybe I was in San Fran after all. I nodded to the two men, blew a small kiss to the red-haired woman, and ducked into the next booth. If only I could remember. ..

  Inside was a thin little man in a black cloak and beret. He had eyes like loaded dice, hands that looked like they’d only be at home in somebody else’s pockets. With him was the girl, Magda. Her outfit was all leather, now; but they wouldn’t have had to hurt the cow very bad to get that much hide off it.

  "Lance, it’s not what it seems like,” she said, in a voice like maple syrup and cinnamon. "It’s all part of the plot—”

  "Hush, Lauralyn,” said the sneak. "Buy yourself a drink or something.”

  "All right, Hexer,” Mag—uh, Lauralyn said, and went. If I was lucky she’d keep going out all day long.

  "How do you feel, Admiral?” Hexer said. "Is the drug wearing off? Are there many traces of the pirate illusion left?”

  I didn’t lose my cool. All I said was, "Huh?”

  "Yes, Admiral Kildare. L’Avectoi wanted to use your incomparable piloting skills. But to do that he had to erase your true personality and overlay that of a pirate and mercenary scoundrel. He knew that Grand Admiral Lance Kildare of the Galactic Navy would never serve him free-willed.”

  And I remembered:

  Standing on the bridge of my flagship, the Frank R. Paul’s Revenge, in command of the vastest armada of maneuverable metal the cosmos had ever known. Across the purple void we thundered, a hundred thousand strong, dodging meteors as thick as soup and watching the starry expanse pass at half of lightspeed.

  "Admiral,” my First Mate was saying in his Irish tenor laced with Scotch, "it’s Professor Robert, sir. He has some complaints.”

  A smile creased my face. "What is it this time?”

  "Several things, sir. He says that there isn’t any air in space so the Fleet shouldn’t thunder and the void shouldn’t be purple. And that meteors don’t travel around and rain on ships. And that the stars outside ought to be violet-shifted in front and red-shifted in back.”

  "Tell Dr. Robert not to be so forward,” I chuckled. Robert was a good enough man when it came to building a primary matter deinertializer or a subspace probability inverter, but his "pure” theories were wild and impractical. The Fleet not thunder indeed!

  "Now,” I said to Hexer, fixing him with an unblinking gaze, "what about this plot?”

  Hexer wavered, as though a different collaborator had seized the pen. "Yeah, it is pretty thick, isn’t it?” Then he snapped back. "I can’t tell you that,” the weasel weaseled. "I’d be killed before I got two words out!”

  'Tell me,” I repeated, in a voice like Helium II.

  "Well, it’s—”

  One of the pointy-eared Mongols crashed through the side of the booth and flattened Hexer to the floor. I left my spilled drink happily eating a hole in the table and got out before one of the red shirts could come in and get pointy-ears airborne again.

  After dodging another flying body and stepping over a couple more on the floor—the omnivore was getting behind in its work—I reached the bar again. Lauralyn was there, snuggled up next to a big guy in a grey jumpsuit with the biggest digital wristwatch I ever did see. I was beginning to wonder if that girl had some kind of skin allergy to clothing; everything she had on now was made of brass, and there wasn’t enough of it to make a good lamp.

  Near the bar a character with twice the usual quota of fingers was pounding on something that looked like a saxophone, three pianos, and a bassoon.

  It’s still the same old story,

  The plot resolved in glory,

  The editors still buy;

  And much the same word rates apply,

  As time warps by.

  There was a sign above the saxpinoon.

  REQUESTS .................... Cr 5

  "ROGER YOUNG" ........ Cr 10

  SILENCE ........................ Cr 25

  I found a space between th big guy and a chap in baggy tweeds, and told the robot Beer-can-opener tending bar to open one for me. memory was coming back, bet just a bir here, a flicker over there.... I sipped Beer and tried to remember. That just made my headache worse, so I turned and mumbled something to baggy tweeds about the fog outside.

  "That reminds me of a story,” he said. "So heavy was the gloom one afternoon in the Billiards Club that I wondered why the waiters did not turn on the lights. The darkness clung to cornices and seemed to beat down from the ceiling, and it was only low near the floor that we had any light at all.

  "Luckily it is this very kind of day that so often encourages Jorkens to tell us of some adventure, and after I had ordered him a large Whiskey, this is what he told us:

  ”'Perhaps you would like a tale that is not entirely shrouded in darkness, and what comes to mind at this moment is what happened to me once in America, when I was visiting a well-recommended public house called Gavagan’s, and a young chap was demonstrating a photographic device.

  '"Mr. Jeffers aimed his camera at the stuffed owl over the bar,’ Jorkens continued. There was a bright, noiseless flash, which caused the owl’s eyes to light up yellowly for an instant. The shutter clicked, and there was a
faint whirr as the film automatically wound to the next frame. "No double exposure,” said Jeffers.

  "'Mr. Gross looked up from his Boilermaker. "I got a cousin by marriage that got run in for that once,” he said.

  "'"What, making pictures of stuffed owls?” asked Mr. Keating from the library.

  """No, taking his clothes off in the theater. He done it twicet, and the second time—”

  """Mr. Witherwax interrupted firmly, turning to another Englishman who was visiting Gavagan’s that day and asking, "Weren’t you about to tell us a story?”

  '""Why, yes,” said the Englishman. "Have you ever noticed that, when there are twenty or thirty people talking together in a room, there are occasional moments when everyone becomes suddenly silent, so that for a second there’s a sudden, vibrating emptiness that seems to swallow up all sound? It’s almost as if everyone is listening for something —they don’t know what.

  """It was like that one evening when the White Hart wasn’t quite as crowded as usual. The Silence came, as unexpectedly as it always does, and Harry Purvis’s voice came clear across the room:

  "'""The stories that get told in bars,’ Harry

  Purvis said, looking thoughtfully at his Beer, have a great deal more truth to them than one would think. There was one in particular that I remember, from—I’d better not say just where. Anyway:

  "'"'The spacer slammed his drink on the bar,’ Harry said, 'and looked the robot bartender right in the electronic eye. "I’ve been from one side of this universe to the other and if I haven’t learned anything else, I’ve learned that you can’t believe everything you hear.”

  """The robot swallowed the empty glass, produced a full one. He sighed deep in his gearworks, afraid that this was going to be another burned-out spacer with a tale to tell. It was.

  """"Callahan’s Place was pretty lively that night,” the spacer said. "Talk fought Budweiser for mouth space all over the joint, and the Beer-nuts supply was getting critical. But this guy managed to keep himself in a corner without being noticed for nearly an hour. I only spotted him myself a few minutes before someone got him started on his story, and I make a point of studying everybody whenever I’m at Callahan’s Place.

  """"This guy,” the spacer went on, "owned a place himself, name of Draco Tavern, and he was talking about his place:

  '""""We get astronauts in the Draco Tavern,’ the guy said. 'We get workers from Mount Forel Spaceport, and some administrators, and some newsmen. We get chirpsithtra; I keep special chairs to fit their tall, spindly frames. Once in a while we get other aliens. But we don’t get many Englishmen.

  """"'This one,’ the guy explained, 'baggy tweeds and all, had a story. Business was slow in the Draco Tavern, just then, so I sat with him and listened.

  """""'Summer had gone,” the Englishman said, "and the brighter part of the autumn, and it was dark again in the Billiards Club by the time lunch was over, as though the fog had come down our little street before anyone had noticed he was about;

  and had peered in at our window. But not as an autumn fog it seemed, but a spring fog.

  '""'"'"'Whanne that Aprille with his shoures soote—

  [It was the flying Chaucer that broke the spell ]

  """""STOP!" I shouted. I remembered! Inside breast pocket: leather case, sharp edges; my badge. And inside... Jorkens and baggy tweeds looked at me in shocked silence. Then Jorkens—Jorkens? I whipped out the case, flashed the badge, flipped it open to show my Author’s Guild card. The dinky-toy pistol was in my other hand. "You almost trapped me in this diabolical nest of stories within stories, frames within frames, but now—”””””””

  —and like farmhouses after a Kansas Twister,

  the close quotes came raining down, breaking the spell. The Billiards Club flickered out; so did the Draco Tavern, Callahan’s Place, the White Hart, Gavagan’s. The Billiards Club flared and went out again, then the Spaceport Bar, the Silver Eel, Slab’s Tavern, the Aquilonian Arms...

  The Aquilonian Arms?

  I looked around wildly. The fight over in the corner was still in full swing, but now the red shirts were wearing helmets with horns and chain-mail vests, and the big guy in grey had stripped down to fur shorts and a sword and enough muscles to stock a meat market— everything flickered again, only backward one flick— heads appeared, dissolved —backward again we went — and the big guy was two guys: one a big, blond barbarian and the other a quick little guy who flicked the badge right out of my hand. I clicked off the safety and fired; the gun spat flame. One inch long, barely enough to light a cigar. It was a lighter. And then I was falling— falling into a black hole, with the green, log-log grid lines spiraling up and down the sides, up and down and down and—

  * * *

  The man seated in the center of the panel of seven nodded at the doctor, and the fellow in the wheelchair was rolled from the room. The door closed, leaving the room silent. The man in the center sadly nodded his head. "He was one of our best.”

  "Too had,” said another, wiping away a tear.

  The man in the center pressed a button set into the surface of the long table. A door opened and in walked a tall, rugged man smoking a pipe and wearing a jacket, elbows covered with shooting patches. The man in the center looked at the one in shooting patches. "You heard everything?”

  The man removed the pipe from his mouth and nodded. "I heard. Pitiful.”

  "How do you explain the gun?”

  ”Illustrators fault. The lighter was the only model he had to draw from.”

  The man in the center shook his head, then looked up at the one with the pipe. It looks impossible, but do you think you can do it? Can you close down the Spaceport Bar?”

  The man in tweed stood erect, slightly offended. ”Have I ever failed the Author's Guild Literary Cliche Squad?”

  "No.” The man in the center shook his head. "You’ve never failed us. But...you saw what happened to—”

  "Yes, yes.” The man in tweed waved a hand impatiently. "He made a mistake. They got to him first with one of their plots. That won’t happen to me.” The man in the center nodded. "Will you want one of the first-run copies of this deposition?”

  The man in tweed replaced the pipe in his mouth. "No. I’ll wait for it to come out in paperback.” He turned and left the room.

  One of the board members muttered, "As soon as he does his job, then he gets the blue pencil. Wait for it to come out in paperback, indeed!”

  The hearing was adjourned.

  This spaceport bar tale began with Barry Longyear, who submitted it to your editors. The first version, we thought, depended on too few targets—Mr. Longyear, at the time, was new to science fiction; we sent it on to John Ford, who has somewhat more familiarity with older SF literature and who has an entirely different sense of humor (except, of course, that both have a deplorable weakness for really horrid puns). Ford rewrote Longyear's version; then Longyear rewrote Ford’s. After a few rounds, we realized that this story was not (as the mathematicians put it) converging to a solution, so one of your editors—George Scithers—took the two most recent versions, patched them together, added a horrid pun or two of his own, and then purchased the result for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  The framing device is pure Longyear; the trench coat, the cable cars, and the Normandie butter are all Ford’s. From there, it’s hard to say. Ford, Scithers, and Longyear appear in the story, as does Shawna McCarthy, who was then managing editor of Asimov’s. The only part that Scithers remembers as being entirely his is the sequence of stories within stories, frames within frames, from baggy tweeds to the collapse of the close quotes. Finally, Chris Miller, our editor at Avon Books, should share some of the blame for the story’s appearance here: she is the one who insisted that we include it.

  Barry Longyear has remarked, I have never been asked to autograph a copy of this story. I still don’t understand it—the story, I mean; not why I haven’t been asked to autograph a copy.’’ He also still rankle
s ”at the removal of the anal log,” a comment which we refuse to expand upon.

  Barry Longyear began his amazingly successful career in 1978; by 1980 he had won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell awards. His story, "Enemy Mine,” became the movie of the same name. At last report, Longyear was at work on some additional events in his Circus World series and on a parody of The Red Badge of Courage.

  Before he started writing novels, John M. Ford was the most prolific contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, including one of the longest puns on record: .. how was the content of our

  winter's disc made a spurious summary by this scum of cork?” In 1984, he won the World Fantasy Award for his novel, The Dragon Waiting.

  George H. Scithers was the founding editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and was the thirteenth or fifteenth (depending on who’s counting) editor of Amazing Stories. He has won four Science Fiction Achievement Awards—Hugo Awards—for editing. He is now a literary agent, specializing in SF and fantasy.

  GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

  THE NICK OF TIME

  On February 17th, 1996, Frank Mihalik became the first person to time-travel.

  Intelligent, unflappable, a good friend and credit risk, virile but moral, he behaved just like a hero should.

  Which was just as well, as it turned out there were still some bugs in the system. Like getting stuck in a time loop for a start. Like encountering a multitude of parallel universes where Shirley Temple, not Judy Garland, starred in The Wizard of Oz - or Deanna Durbin or Gertrude Stein's daughter...

  Then there's the time when he is turned into a large green lizard with a pink tongue and a developing taste for flies. The realisation that when his girlfriend Cheryl time-travels to his rescue, she's actually a parallel Cheryl and he's nearly been unfaithful to the real Cheryl.