Cultural Exchange — Reading Notes

_How could any race look so ferocious and yet be peaceful--and devise so nasty a weapon?_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I couldn't help listening to the big spaceman sitting alone at the corner table. He wasn't speaking to me--that was certain--nor was his flat, curiously uninflected voice directed at anyone else. With some surprise I realized that he was talking to himself. People don't do that nowadays. They're adjusted.

He noted my raised eye-brows and grinned, his square teeth white against the dark planes of his face. "I'm not psycho," he said. "It's just a bad habit I picked up on Lyrane."

"It hasn't been entered on the charts yet. Just discovered." His voice was inflected now. And then it changed abruptly. "If you must know, this is ethanol--C_{2}H_{5}OH--and I drink it." He looked at me with an embarrassed expression in his blue eyes. "It's just that I'm not used to it yet," he explained without explaining. "It's easier when I vocalize."

"You sure you're all right?" I asked. "Want me to call a psychologician?"

"No. I've just been certified by Decontamination. I have a paper to prove it."

"Draw up a chair," he invited. "I hate to drink alone. And I'd like to talk to somebody."

I smiled. My talent was working as usual. I can't walk into a bar without someone telling me his life history. Nice old ladies buttonhole me at parties and tell me all about their childhoods. Boys tell me about girls. Girls tell me about boys. Politicians spill party secrets and pass me tips.

Something about me makes folks want to talk. It's a talent and in my business it's an asset. You see, I'm a freelance writer. Nothing fancy or significant, just news, popular stuff, adventure stories, problem yarns, romances, and mysteries. I'll never go down in history as a literary great, but it's a living--and besides I meet the damnedest characters.

"I guess you're not contagious if you've been through Decontamination," I said.

He looked at me across the rim of an oversized brandy sniffer--a Napoleon, I think it's called--and waggled a long forefinger at my nose. "The trouble with you groundhogs is that you're always thinking we spacers are walking hotbeds of contagion all primed to wreck Earth. You should know better. Anything dangerous has about as much chance of getting through Decontamination as an ice cube has of getting through a nuclear furnace."

"There was Martian Fever," I reminded him.

"Three centuries ago and you still remember it," he said. "But has there been anything else since Decontamination was set up?"

"No," I admitted, "but that was enough, wasn't it? We still haven't reached the pre-Mars population level."

"Who wants to?" He sipped at the brownish fluid in the glass and a shudder rippled the heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders. He grinned nastily and took a bigger drink. "There, that ought to hold you," he muttered. He looked at me, that odd embarrassed look glinting in his eyes. "I think that did it. No tolerance for alcohol."

I gave him my puzzled and expectant look.

He countered with a gesture at the nearly empty brandy glass. I got the idea. I signaled autoservice--a conditioned reflex developed over years of pumping material out of spacemen--and slipped my ID into the check slot of the robot as it rolled up beside us and waited, humming expectantly.

"Rum," the spaceman said. "Demerara, four ounces."

"You are cautioned, sir," the autoservice said in a flat mechanical voice. "Demerara rum is one hundred fifty proof and is not meant to be ingested by terrestrial life-forms without prior dilution."

"Shut up and serve," I said.

The robot clicked disapprovingly, gurgled briefly inside its cubical interior and extruded a pony glass of brownish liquid. "Sir, you will undoubtedly end up in a drunkard's grave, dead of hepatic cirrhosis," it informed me virtuously as it returned my ID card. I glared as I pushed the glass across the table.

"Robots," I said contemptuously. It was lost on that metallic monstrosity. It was already rolling away toward another table.

The spaceman poured the pony glass into his Napoleon, sniffed appreciatively, sipped delicately and extended a meaty hand. "My name's Halsey," he said. "Captain Roger Halsey. I skipper the _Two Two Four_."

"The Bureau ship that landed this morning?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I'm one of the Bureau's brave boys." There was a faint sneer in his voice. "The good old Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration. The busy BEE." He failed to pronounce the individual letters. "You're a reporter, aren't you?" he asked suddenly.