We dipped into an apartment house section and Cheryl set the helicar down in a night-quiet street. "Apartment Six-A," she said. And then, unexpectedly: "Take care of yourself, Bill, please. Don't do anything rash!"
I patted her shoulder reassuringly. "You may have to rescue me before the night is over," I told her. "Stand by your phonovision and be ready to bring Cora in a hurry if I call you. I can't risk taking her into the Argonaut because of Joey, but I may need her if I run afoul of Shanig. Got it?"
She nodded and gave me her phonovision code. I got out of there and headed down the street while she took the helicar up to her apartment house roof landing.
It wasn't far. Fifteen minutes of fast walking through the back streets brought me up a dark alley to the Argonaut's side entrance. The service door was locked, of course, and as a consequence none of Shanig's uglies were guarding it.
I kicked it in and went through a dusty corridor into the smoky, skohl-pungent bar-room.
The instant I was inside I knew that Cheryl had been right. Joey was there, and he was radiating for all he was worth. There was the spellbound crowd for proof of that.
The Argonaut Club was known the breadth of the System as the toughest dive that ever sold a drunken rockethand a pitcher of drugged skohl. I wound up there every time I touched Mars, and I knew the dump down to the latest ray-burn on its dingy plastoid walls. You hit some pretty rowdy shot-slots in the other spaceports, but the Argonaut topped them all. The Argonaut was rough.
Ordinarily. Tonight it looked like a missionary's picnic.
At the bar, Earthies sporting two-week passage beards and Quantrell blasters bucked over grimy rocketroom coveralls, rubbed elbows with cat-whiskered yellow city Martians and their vicious little baboon-faced cousins from the deserts. Woolly blue tree men from Titan drank with squishy Venusians and tentacled Ionians. I saw a couple of Callistans in a corner, braced saw-horse-fashion on their jointless legs and sticklike tails, grinning happily while they fraternized with a pair of ponderous Europans. The Europans, coy as two honeymooning hippos under Joey's spell, blubbered amiably back and rolled in small polite circles on their little three-wheeled carts.
Even the bouncer was happy.