He finished his bourbon and made chains of wet rings on the bartop with his glass. The mixed look on his face was so strong that for a moment I almost thought of the name for it.
Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger—a double, this time—and Abe Marker took over.
"How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can you?"
"Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of gnats."
"Gnats?" we all said at once, and somebody down the bar, quicker-witted than the rest of us, added: "Gnats to you too, Charlie!"
"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell."
We sat and watched the two voiceless crows flap through the television cartoon for a while. Nobody spoke until the film was over and the screen went blank, when the little man caught Larry's eye and held up one finger.
"Bourbon," he said.
We heard a confused muttering of voices in the background and waited expectantly for Colonel Sanderson to speak to us from Mars, but apparently the network people were still having trouble with their transmission beam. The screen stayed blank.