He was an odd-looking little guy with a head like an oversize cue-ball and a narrow fringe of fuzzy graying hair that looked like a misguided halo. He wore green-tinted contact lenses that made his eyes seem unusually large and bright.
"No, I'm not Fleming Ames," I told him. "I'm Bill Dineen, Mr. Ames' confidential secretary. What can I do for you?"
"Uh—Mr. Ames is president of Universal Liquors, Incorporated, isn't he?"
I nodded.
"I have something I'd like to show him, Mr. Dineen. It's something new. I found it on Planetoid Y-145."
I stared at him almost incredulously. He didn't look like a spaceman.
"You mean a kind of drink? But I didn't think any of the planetoids were inhabited. How did you—"
"It isn't a drink exactly, Mr. Dineen. And Planetoid Y-145 isn't inhabited—in fact, there isn't any Planetoid Y-145 any more. A meteor hit it last week, I read in the astrogation reports. Busted it to smithereens."
He reached in his pocket and held up a little transpariplast vial, which held about half an ounce of a murky blue fluid.
"So this is all there is anywhere, as far as I know," he revealed. "It's the juice of a kind of lichen that grew on the planetoid. I stopped there last month looking for minerals, and I took some of the lichen along just to see what it was. I didn't know then. I distilled this on the way back and threw out the lichen, so this is all—"