"C M Kornbluth - The Altar At Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

bottle and glass and went down on the stool to his left.



He turned to me right away and said: "What kind of a place is this, anyway?" The broken veins were all
over his face, little ones, but so many, so close, that they made his face look something like marbled
rubber. The funny look in his eyes was it—the trick contact lenses. But I tried not to stare and not to
look away.



"It's okay," I said. "It's a good show if you don't mind a lot of noise from—"



He stuck a cigarette into his mouth and poked the pack at me. "I'm a spacer," he said, interrupting.
I took one of his cigarettes and said: "Oh."



He snapped a lighter for the cigarettes and said: "Venus."



I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind of yellow sticker instead of the blue
tax stamp.



"Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give you lighters for a souvenir. But it's a
go"od lighter. On Mars last week, they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets."



"You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of ale and he finished his Scotch and
water.



"Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot.'"



One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going



to slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but she looked at him first and
decided not to. She curled around me and asked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on
to the next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at him, he stood up. I followed