His Master's Voice

by Randall Garrett

I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. "Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will."

He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.

Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.

Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.

I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.

He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.

"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble."

"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst," I said, keeping my voice level.

"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed." His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.