Mac, listening too intently, gulped a bit more of his drink than even his spaceman's gullet could take. When the red-hot lava stopped strangling him and he could see once more through the streaming fountains that had been his eyes, he managed to choke out: "What do they want it for? Do they eat it?"
The bartender laughed. "Nah. They don't really eat anything. They drink some kind of stuff they find in the rocks—like they used to find petroleum, on Earth. Radioactive, this stuff is. That's all they need to live on. They don't breathe at all. You can see that; they don't even have a mouth or a real nose, just a sort of trunk that they drink through.... Wait a minute. Be back."
The bartender rolled away. A couple of new customers had come into his side of the bar and were demanding attention.
Mac sighed and glanced at his watch. But the bartender was back and ready for more talk before Mac had made up his mind to leave. The bartender wanted to talk because this was a dull night in the cafe attached to Pallas' largest gambling-room; for the same reason, MacCauley wanted to leave. He was here on business.
However, he might need to know something about the natives of Pallas for his business. And he really was shockingly uninformed about the creatures who inhabited the free-port asteroid. Other than that they were called Kiddies, looked like seven-year-old Earthly children, and didn't breathe, he really knew nothing.
"Then what do they do with this metal if they don't eat it?" he asked.
The bartender shrugged. "They probably know, but they're too dopey to be able to tell you. I asked one of them once—he wrote out an answer, the way they always do when they want to tell you something. Seems they generate electricity in their bodies. A Palladian's idea of a real good time is to take a hunk of pure copper and hold it in his hands. The current runs from one hand to the other. They are like that. This one claimed that each metal gave them a different kind of thrill."
"All right if you like," MacCauley said absently. "Me, I'll take my jolts out of a bottle."
"Was that an order for another drink?" The bottle was already in the fat man's hands.