Coit pecked at her, then shook hands with Landau. Before he could sit down, though, a swarthy lean-faced man sitting on the other side of the bed said loudly, "Here comes supermouth."
Kinsman started to say something, but Colt got there first. "Hey, it's a party—save the brain-damage stuff for later."
The guy was potted. Kinsman knew him slightly, a civilian engineer, one of Ernie Waterman's people. His name was . . . Kinsman searched his memory, then it clicked; Jerry Perotti.
"You been pretty mouthy all day long, Colt," Perotti said. "Why get shy with us here? Give us all the benefit of your keen military mouth."
"Stuff it," Colt snapped.
Everyone else in the room went silent. Kinsman's brain seemed to be working in slow motion. He panned across the 378 room, looking at the faces of the people: surprised, amused, upset. Perotti looked sore. God knows what Frank did to him today. Colt himself looked tense but fully in control, almost smiling. The fastest gun in the West, facing yet another foolhardy challenger. I ought to stop this right here and now . . .
"No, I won't stuff it," Perotti was saying. "You and your goddamned gold braid. Who the hell do you think you are?"
Colt abruptly turned and took three strides into the bathroom. Before anyone had a chance to say or do anything he came out again and tossed a precious roil of toilet paper at Perotti, who automatically snatched it, one-handed, against his chest.
"Here, that's what assholes need," Colt said.
There was a split-second of shocked silence, then every- one broke up. They roared. Everyone but Perotti. He pushed himself to his feet in the midst of the laughing people, face darkening. He slammed the toilet-paper roll down on the bed and stomped out of the room. Colt stood back from the doorway and let him lurch past.
"Another notch on the oF six-gun," Kinsman mumbled, suddenly realizing that the combination of lack of sleep, tension, and scotch had made him drunk already.
Colt spotted him and came over to squat on the floor beside him.
"What is there about you that makes people instantly want to give you a hard time?" Kinsman wondered aloud.
"Skin, man," said Colt.
"Oh, hell, Frank. There are dozens of blacks in Selene. We had a whole delegation from Chad last year. Nobody threw knives at them,"
"Yassuh, but they's nice folks," Colt said in his Dixie yokel accent. "Me, I'm a sonofabitch. If you're white and a sonofabitch, nobody hardly notices. But if you're black, it all hangs out."
The party glided on. Kinsman drank slowly, steadily, maintaining a soft glow that blurred the edges of reality just enough to make everything pleasant.
In the apartment's main room the drifting currents of humanity had washed Pat Kelly and Ernie Waterman into the same corner. They made an incongruous pair: the tall, 379 hound-sad engineer and the stubby, rabbit-faced major.
"Just how serious is this yellow alert?" Waterman was asking.
Kelly rubbed at his nose with a hand chilled from holding an iced drink. "About as serious as they come. I've been working all day on the logistics programming."
"I mean, shouldn't we be pretty damned careful about these Russians? They're right in our laps, for Chrissakes."
"I know," Kelly said. "I warned Chet about it. And now he's got 'em in our hospital and marrying into our people."
Waterman shook his head dismally. "You know what he said to me? He said we're not going to fight up here. Like he was guaranteeing it."
"Yeah? That's what he told you?"
"That's exactly what he said. Now, how can he keep from fighting here? If the orders come through he has to obey them, don't he?"
