Parks didn’t notice. “You guys have to take those pills, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I had to take them once. Got stranded on Luna. The cat I was in broke down eighty some miles from Aristarchus Base and I had to walk back—with my oxy low. Well, I figured—”
Clayton listened to Parks’ story with a great show of attention, but he had heard it before. This “lost on the moon” stuff and its variations had been going the rounds for forty years. Every once in a while, it actually did happen to someone; just often enough to keep the story going.
This guy did have a couple of new twists, but not enough to make the story worthwhile.
“Boy,” Clayton said when Parks had finished, “you were lucky to come out of that alive!”
Parks nodded, well pleased with himself, and bought another round of drinks.
“Something like that happened to me a couple of years ago,” Clayton began. “I’m supervisor on the third shift in the mines at Xanthe, but at the time, I was only a foreman. One day, a couple of guys went to a branch tunnel to—”
It was a very good story. Clayton had made it up himself, so he knew that Parks had never heard it before. It was gory in just the right places, with a nice effect at the end.