There was a silence, then a low roar. With all senses alert I expected someone to take up where he left off, but the roar became a cry for more beer and almajara and hands were slapping me on the back.
“Had it coming to him! Goddamn, boot, you sure toss a mean stomper!”
“Drinks on me, Diego. I never liked that sander anyway.”
“Wheaten, huh? Well, the Guild won’t ask much blood money for the likes of him.”
“Hey, Johann, your bunkie here’s not bad!”
“Where the hell did Nikolai get his degree, anyway? Caveman U?”
“Naw, some dinky sheepskin factory in the Urals. Sverdiosk, I think.”
“Isn’t that where Menshikov came from?”
“Now there was a Russian what am a Russian! Do you remember the time he—”
And they were off in Memory Lane. I rubbed my leg. It hurt like hell, and I was having a hard time slowing my heart down. I took two mugs of almajara and soon was feeling no pain.
That’s the way Nova found me, sprawled in a chair with a bare-breasted wench of uncertain name on my lap and a tableful of equally drunk men around me. The pile of credits I had put on the table had dwindled considerably in the last hour.
I looked up and there she was. I focused on her, then refocused, and kept trying. “Nova!” I said. The others echoed me and Banning, my big scarred buddy Banning, swept her into his lap, but she struggled free.
“Wheaten dead, Antonio with a smashed knee, and now Nikolai with a broken jaw!”
I waved my hand. Somehow it ended up on What’s-her-name’s breast. “Yup. That’s about it. Kuh, oops, ku- clean sweep, honey. Yessir. Best damn fight I ever had.” We all laughed at that, except Nova.
“And I thought you were . . .
“Boy loses girl,” I said. “But don’t you worry,” I said into What’s-her-name’s breasts, “everything will come out all right.”
About the only thing that came out that night was my dinner and parts of lunch.
When I woke up the next day I found out why they called it top-pop. I hurt, I limped, and I was sore all over. And I must have done
Johann found me leaning against the front of the Inn, wondering if I should die there or in the street. He laughed and took me back inside to stuff me full of vitamins, and something they jokingly called “Cork.”
“This’ll keep your brain inside your skull,” he said.
About an hour later I decided to go on living and rejoin the human race, providing it wanted me. By lunchtime I was well enough to rent a small sandcat and unpack my warmsuit and breather. I intended to see the Ruins.
I took no one with me. This was something I wanted to see alone. A beeper would guide me back, and it wasn’t all that far anyway. I headed west, feeling quite good, considering. I passed the cannibalized wreck of a sandcat, but that was the only sign humans had ever been there, except for the tracks.
Fifty kilometers out I came up over a rise and there it was. I saw that the rise was the softened edge of a vast crater, but out in the center was the Grand Hall. It looked like a tumbled mass of half-buried rocks, but it was the accepted center of the ancient Martian race. The Ruins were bigger and more complex than any yet found, but even so they did not cover much more than a few city blocks. Either there had not been so many Martians or the rest of their structures were considerably less durable.
I put the cat in gear and went down the slope, my eyes on the ancient rubble, three kilometers away. There were a few sandcat tracks, but they were all old and windblown. Mars did not have much of a tourist trade as yet, and for that I was grateful. I wanted to be alone. Like much of Mars and all of Luna the feeling of deja vu comes often to the visitor. In “God of Mars” there had been the eerie
