Braun was never a man to talk much about himself. It was always the places he had been and seen, or wanted to go. Like all old-time spacemen, he was a bird of passage. Between trips, he came in a few times, got to be a fixture. But he was always coming or going somewhere never lighting or staying put.
You don't learn too much about a man in a bar, casually. Little things add up and hint at the bigger ones. You can call him by his first name casually, and hash over mutual acquaintances, that's all.
Maybe you talk about the things men talk about. Life and death. Men and spaceships. Life on distant worlds. Braun had knocked around the galaxy like a lot of people since the DuMont space-time drive came into general use. He had seen more than the ordinary man even dreams about, but there was always a restless and curious wondering about more distant stars and their planets. On one classic occasion, you even helped him wonder about other galaxies, and if the new drive would ever take men out into the far, dark spaces where ships never ventured.
When Braun's big break came, you heard about it from someone else, since Braun was far away, at a planet-base circling a star that was just a number in a catalog. There were no formal goodbyes out there, just technical admonitions. Then a speck diminished into nowhere, with no instruments to track an object accelerating into speeds so many times greater than light that mathematics became weird paradoxes, and nothing existing in normal dimensions even makes sense.
Eventually the ship came back, and Braun with it. Nobody knew much more than that. No official announcements were made, no actual denials or accusations. Rumor hinted at ugliness, and an investigation going on. People made the usual wild and extravagant guesses, and there were the formless whispers that start nowhere and end nowhere.
Braun put his back to the bar and looked over the crowd soberly, one by one. This must have happened to him many times before, as it probably would again. Braun had his own way of dealing with such situations, and maybe he was right.
"I don't know what happened," he said slowly. "I'll say it again, just once. I don't know. If you don't like it, I'm here, waiting. One at a time, or the whole ratpack of you. How do you want it?"
In any real, deadly brawl, voices are rarely raised. There is no loud and explosive discussion. Instead, all movement jells, crystallizes in utter silence. Something breaks it. Something like a flung beermug. Then comes a five-ring circus of action.
Braun ducked. The beermug struck in foaming, splintering destruction. The backbar mirror dissolved in a chiming avalanche of glass.