We sat down at a table.
At Oswiak's you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the regulars do.
Paddy jigged over and said:
"Welcome home, Doc."
He's a Liverpool Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound like Brooklyn to me.
"Hello, Paddy.
I brought somebody uglier than you.
Now what do you say?"
Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped.
He took a big drink from the seidel and said:
"Can he do this?" Paddy stretched his face into an awful grin that showed his teeth.
He has three of them.
The kid laughed and asked me:
"What the hell did you drag me into here for?"
"Paddy says he'll buy drinks for the house the day anybody uglier than he is comes in."
Oswiak's wife waddled over for the order and the kid asked us what we'd have.
I figured I could start drinking, so it was three double Scotches.
After the second round, Paddy started blowing about how they took his arm off without any anesthetics except a bottle of gin because the red-ball freight he was tangled up in couldn't wait.
That brought some of the other old gimps over to the table with their stories. Blackie Bauer had been sitting in a boxcar with his legs sticking through the door when the train started with a jerk. Wham, the door closed.
Everybody laughed at Blackie for being that dumb in the first place, and he got mad.
Sam Fireman has palsy.
This week he was claiming he used to be a watchmaker before he began to shake.
The week before, he'd said he was a brain surgeon.
A woman I didn't know, a real old Boxcar Bertha, dragged herself over and began some kind of story about how her sister married a Greek, but she passed out before we found out what happened.
Somebody wanted to know what was wrong with the kid's face— Bauer, I think it was, after he came back to the table.
"Compression and decompression," the kid said.
"You're all the time climbing into your suit and out of your suit.
Inboard air's thin to start with.
You get a few redlines—that's these ruptured blood vessels —and you say the hell with the money; all you'll make is just one more trip.
But, God, it's a lot of money for anybody my age!
You keep saying that until you can't be anything but a spacer.
The eyes are hard-radiation scars."
"You like dot all ofer?" asked Oswiak's wife politely.
"All over, ma'am," the kid told her in a miserable voice.
"But I'm going to quit before I get a Bowman Head."
I took a savage gulp at the raw Scotch.
"I don't care," said Maggie Rorty.
"I think he's cute."
"Compared with—" Paddy began, but I kicked him under the table.
We sang for a while, and then we told gags and recited limericks for a while, and I noticed that the kid and Maggie had wandered into the back room—the one with the latch on the door.
Oswiak's wife asked me, very puzzled:
"Doc, w'y dey do dot flyink by planyets?"
"It's the damn govermint," Sam Fireman said.
"Why not?" I said.
"They got the Bowman Drive, why the hell shouldn't they use it?
Serves 'em right."
I had a double Scotch and added: "Twenty years of it and they found out a few things they didn't know. Redlines are only one of them.
Twenty years more, maybe they'll find out a few more things they didn't know.
Maybe by the time there's a bathtub in every American home and an alcoholism clinic in every American town, they'll find out a whole lot of things they didn't know.
And every American boy will be a pop-eyed, blood-raddled wreck, like our friend here, from riding the Bowman Drive."