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 good 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'."