The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [19]
The Rosyfin was leaving too, rolling its spherical fishbowl toward the door. I realized that its own voice hadn’t penetrated the murky fluid around it. No chittering, no bone-shivering bass. I had the wrong table.
I looked around, and there were still no other candidates. Yet somebody here had casually condemned mankind—me!—to age and die.
Now what? I might have been hearing several voices. They all sound alike coming from a new species; and some aliens never interrupt each other.
The little yellow bugs? But they were with humans.
Shells? My voices had mentioned shells ... but too many aliens have exoskeletons. Okay, a Chirpsithra would have spoken by now; they’re garrulous. Scratch any table that includes a Chirp. Or a Rosyfin. Or those Srivinthish: I’d have heard the skreek of their breathing. Or the huge gray being who seemed to be singing. That left ... half a dozen tables, and I couldn’t interrupt that many.
Could they have left while I was distracted?
I hot-footed it back to the bar, and listened, and heard nothing. And my spinning brain could find only limits.
TABLE MANNERS*
A lot of what comes out of Xenobiology these days is classified, and it doesn’t come out. The Graduate Studies Complex is in the Mojave Desert. It makes security easier.
Sireen Burke’s smile and honest blue retina prints and the microcircuitry in her badge got her past the gate. I was ordered out of the car. A soldier offered me coffee and a bench in the shade of the guard post. Another searched my luggage.
He found a canteen, a sizable hunting knife in a locking sheath, and a microwave beamer. He became coldly polite. He didn’t thaw much when I said that he could hold them for a while.
I waited.
Presently Sireen came back for me. “I got you an interview with Dr. McPhee,” she told me on the way up the drive. “Now it’s your baby. He’ll listen as long as you can keep his interest.”
Graduate Studies looked like soap bubbles: foamcrete sprayed over inflation frames. There was little of military flavor inside. More like a museum. The reception room was gigantic, with a variety of chairs and couches and swings and resting pits for aliens and humans: designs borrowed from the Draco Tavern without my permission.
The corridors were roomy too. Three Chirpsithra passed us, eleven feet tall and walking comfortably upright. One may have known me, because she nodded. A dark glass sphere rolled through, nearly filling the corridor, and we had to step into what looked like a classroom to let it pass.
McPhee’s office was closet-sized. He certainly didn’t interview aliens here, at least not large aliens. Yet he was a mountainous man, six feet four and barrel-shaped and covered with black hair: shaggy brows, full beard, a black mat showing through the V of his blouse. He extended a huge hand across the small desk and said, “Rick Schumann? You’re a long way from Siberia.”
“I came for advice,” I said, and then I recognized him. “B-beam McPhee?”
“Walter, but yes.”
the Beta Beam satellite had never been used in war; but when I was seven years old, the Pentagon had arranged a demonstration. They’d turned it loose on a Perseid meteor shower. Lines of light had filled the sky one summer night, a glorious display, the first time I’d ever been allowed up past midnight. The Beta Beam had shot down over a thousand rocks.
Newscasters had named Walter McPhee for the Beta Beam when he played offensive guard for Washburn University.
B-beam was twenty-two years older, and bigger than life, since I’d last seen him on a television set. There were scars around his right eye, and scarring distorted the lay of his beard. “I was at Washburn on an athletic scholarship,” he told me. “I switched to Xeno when the first Chirpsithra ships landed. Got my doctorate six years ago. And I’ve never been in the Draco Tavern because it would have felt too much like goofing off, but I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t a mistake. You get everything in there,