But now he planned to blow it on more guzzle.

And not in this building, either. There were several dozen bars, nightclubs and restaurants in the high-rise and he had, in his time, been in all of them. But not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to pub crawl, and preferably in the cheapest areas of town. Why, he didn’t know, but he felt like slums, or the nearest thing to them the present world had to offer.

One automated bar faded into another. He seldom had more than one drink in any of them. He would sprawl at an empty table, put his Universal Credit Card in the payment slot and dial a tequila, or whatever. By this time he was mixing his drinks and feeling them to the point where he usually had to close one eye to be able to dial.

It was well into the night when the fog rolled out of his brain and he realized that he was zig-zag-ging down the street without remembering the last bar he had been in. He tried to concentrate. Had it been that one where the garish looking girl, or rather woman, had tried to pick him up? The place with the overly loud, harsh canned music and the overly loud, harsh crowd of drunks? He couldn’t remember. He had blacked out, somewhere along the line. He was going to have to get to a metro station and take the vacuum tube back to his apartment house. If he passed out on the street and was thrown in the drunk Nick, they’d turn him over to the Space Police when they learned his identity and then he would be in trouble.

And suddenly he was confronted by three men in the uniforms of Space Platform privates. In the Space Service those who manned the heavily armed Space Platforms which orbited not only Earth but Luna, Mars and the colonized satellites as well, were the low men on the totem pole. Of all the elements in the service, theirs was the least glamorous, the most undesirable. In a way, the platforms were something Like the Foreign Legion forts in the Sahara, a couple of centuries earlier. The space cafard incidence was high, particularly in view of the fact that a tour of duty lasted six months. Six months confined to a Space Platform! Most spacemen shuddered at the idea.