“Double Firewater,” I said. “Double soda for my friend.”

“Gas in the soda?” the bar wanted to know. “Hash? Phet? Sub?”

“Just plain soda. He trips on it.” All this in Spanglish, you unnastand. So it was a double Fire and a double soda and the glasses got kind of intertwined like the lovers on the floor. But I tried the Firewater and nearly had a convulsion.

“I nearly had a convulsion,” I said.

“You did,” he said. “It’s the strychnine we put in. The palefaces love it.”

“What d’you mean, ‘we’?”

“We moonshine it on the Erie reservation and sell it to the palefaces. Quite a switch, isn’t it? That’s how we got rich. Firewater and Ugly Poppies.”

“I’ll figure that one out later. I’m Prince. Ned Prince. Who you?”

“Guess.”

“Sure, but give me a hint.”

“No, no. That’s my name. Guess.” He gave me a deadpan glance. “Haven’t you ever heard about the late, great George Guess?”

“You?”

“My ancestor. That was the name the palefaces gave him. His real name was Sequoya.”

“Named after the tree?”

“They named the tree after him.”

I whistled. “He was that famous? What for?”

“He was the first great Indian scholar. Among other things, he invented the Cherokee alphabet.”

“You’re Dr. Guess?”

“R.”

“Physician?”

“Physicist, but they’re practically the same thing today.”

“Here at Union Carbide?”

“I teach here. I do my real work at JPL.”

“The Jet Propulsion Lab? What’s the real work?”

“I’m project scientist on the Pluto Mission.”