Free The Fury Out of Time by Lloyd Biggle jr. Page B

“What d’ya think I got the new bartender for? Ma takes off whenever she feels like it to visit her sisters, but I ain’t had a real vacation in years.”
    “That explains your nasty disposition,” Karvel said. “All right, we’ll go together. But not to collect butterflies. If even a one-wing butterfly was to light in my lap, I’d shoo it away.”
    They left that afternoon. Karvel took an imaginary compass reading on Lieutenant Ostrander’s laughing face, and chose a route that seemed to lead in the opposite direction. Whistler’s driving technique was a hair-raising blend of insolence and impetuosity, and they would have made excellent time had he not insisted on a professional visit to every bar that crossed his line of sight. They spent more time in bars than they did traveling, and before the end of the first afternoon Karvel made a startling discovery. Whistler never drank anything stronger than beer, and he drank very little of that.
    “I got too much respect for my insides,” he said.
    “I wish you had some respect for mine. How much lousy whiskey have you sold me in the last six months?”
    “Why should I sell you good whiskey? Guys that drink like you taste with their stomachs.”
    By the time they reached Kansas City, Karvel had convinced himself that Colonel Vukin was right. It was too soon for crutches, and Whistler handled the wheel chair as if it contained a load of nitroglycerin. He gave Karvel a luxuriously comfortable ride, maneuvering around bumps, easing the chair over curbs, coming to a dead stop at corners. Karvel would have preferred more speed with the chair and less with the car, but he suffered in silence.
    Another imaginary compass reading, and they turned south into Oklahoma and then Texas, with Ostrander’s face behind them and Karvel’s personal range of mountains filling the horizon.
    “If you aren’t going to drink, why are we spending all this time in bars?” Karvel asked impatiently.
    “I like to watch bartenders work. I been studying them all my life, everywhere I go. The good ones, they got a philosophy, and no two of ‘em work just alike.”
    “There can’t be that many ways to pour a glass of beer.”
    “You’re thinking about the mechanics. The philosophy is how you treat your customers. Look at this guy. He flatters everybody. Me, I give ‘em insults. It don’t matter as long as it’s genuine. Even a drunk customer can see through a phoney philosophy.”
    “This comes as a shock. I’ve never thought of you as a philosopher.”
    “That’s ‘cause I’m so good at it,” Whistler said.
    They drove west across New Mexico and into Arizona, and finally rented space in a trailer camp in Tucson. For a week Whistler visited bars, and Karvel soaked up sunshine and asked himself what he could have done to keep Ostrander from trying one more switch, and both of them became so bored that they stopped insulting each other. Then, late one night, Gerald Haskins came knocking at their trailer door.
    He handed Karvel his briefcase as casually as though they had parted two minutes before. “Hold the door,” he said, and was back a moment later with a motion picture projector and a screen.
    “Goody!” Whistler said. “Movies.”
    “We have another U.O.,” Haskins said.
    “Ostrander?” Karvel asked quickly.
    Haskins shook his head. “Set up the screen, will you, Bert?”
    “No trace at all of Ostrander?”
    “Another U.O., I said. It wiped out a little village in northeast France, which means that it belongs to the French. It was only through a stroke of luck that we even found out about it.”
    “Was there a passenger?”
    “Yes. Just as smashed as the last one. The French have agreed to exchange information with us. Colonel Stubbins is already in France, and some of my men went over with him. I had business to wind up on the West Coast, so I had the first reports flown to me there. I thought I might as well get your reaction on my way east.”
    “You’re