The Pelican Bar
“YOU MEAN SHE WAS SIMULATING IT WITH SOMEONE ELSE, too?” Jade asked.
“You betcha.”
“Like a VR parlor,” said the bartender.
“Those helmets were an early version of the VRs,” Sanchez said.
“VR parlor?” Jade asked. “What’s that?”
The bartender eyed Sanchez, then when he saw that the man was blushing slightly, he turned back to Jade.
“Virtual reality,” he said. “Simulating the full sensory spectrum. You know, visual, audial, tactile ...”
“Smell and taste, too?”
Sanchez coughed into his beer, sending up a small spray of suds.
The bartender nodded. “Yep, the whole nine yards. For a while back then, some of the wise guys in the video business figured they’d be able to do away with actors altogether. Gloria Lamour was their first experimental test, I guess.”
“But the public preferred real people,” Sanchez said. “Not that it made much difference in the videos, but with real people they had better gossip.”
Jade thought she understood. But, “So what’s a VR parlor? And where are they? I’ve never seen one.”
“Over at the joints in Hell Crater,” the bartender said. “Guys go there and they can get any woman they want, whole harem full, if they can afford it.”
“And it’s all simulated?” Jade prompted.
“Yeah.” The bartender grinned. “But it’s still a helluva lot of fun, eh Felix?”
“I prefer real women.”
“Do women go to the VR parlors?” Jade asked. “I mean, do they have programs of men?”
“Every male heartthrob from Hercules to President Pastoza,” said the bartender.
Jade grinned. “Gee, maybe I ought to check it out.”
“A nice young lady such as yourself should not go to Hell Crater,” Sanchez said firmly.
“Besides, you wouldn’t be able to afford it on your salary,” the bartender added.
Jade saw that they were slightly embarrassed. She allowed the subject to drop.
Sanchez finished his latest beer and put the pilsner glass on the bar a trifle unsteadily. One of the robot bartenders trundled to it and replaced it with a filled glass, as it had been doing all during his narrative.
“Poor old Sam prob’ly thought that Bronx Ball-Breaker was falling for him, didn’t he?” the bartender asked, watching the robot roll smoothly toward the knot of customers further down the bar.
Sanchez seemed happy to return to Sam’s story. “I suppose he did, at first. Funny thing is, I think he was actually starting to fall for her. At least a little. Maybe more sympathy than anything else, but Sam was a very empathetic guy, you know.”
“Did he ever see her again?” Jade asked.
“No, not her. He tried to call her a few times but she never responded. Not a peep.”
“Poor Sam.”
“Oh, don’t feel so bad about him. Sam had plenty of other fish to fry. He was never down for long. Not Sam.”
The bartender gave a hand signal to the nearer of the two robots and it quickly brought a fresh Coke for Jade and a thimble-sized glass of amber-colored liqueur for the bartender himself.
He raised his glass and said with utter seriousness, “To Sam Gunn, the best sonofabitch in the whole goddamned solar system.”
Jade felt a little foolish repeating the words, but she did it, as did Sanchez, and then sipped at her new drink.
“Y’know,” Sanchez said, after smacking his lips over the beer, “nobody gives a damn about Sam any more. Here he is, dead and gone, and just about everybody’s forgotten him.”
“Damn shame,” the bartender agreed.
“I wouldn’t have my business if it wasn’t for Sam,” Sanchez said. “He set me up when I needed the money to get started. Nobody else would even look at me! The banks—hah!”
“I was helping my Daddy at his bar down in Florida when I first met Sam,” said the bartender. “He’s the one who first gave me the idea of opening a joint up here. It was still called Moonbase when I started this
place. He had to argue a blue streak to get the base administrators to okay a saloon.”
Jade, her own troubles pushed to the back of her mind, told them, “You two guys—and Zach, my boss—you’re the first I’ve ever heard say a decent word about Sam. Everything I ever heard from the time I was a kid has been ... well, not very flattering.”
“That’s because the stories about him have mostly been spread by the guys who tangled with him,” said the bartender.
“The big corporations,” Sanchez agreed.
“And the government.”
“They hated Sam’s guts. All those guys with suits and ties.”
“Why?” asked Jade.
The bartender made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort. “Why? Because Sam was always fighting against them. He was the little guy, trying to get ahead, always bucking the big boys.”
Sanchez smiled again. “Don’t get the idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood,” he said, glancing at the bartender, then fixing his gaze once again on Jade’s lustrous green eyes.
The bartender guffawed. “Robin Hood? Sam? Hell no! All he wanted to do was to get rich.”
“Which he did. Many times.”
“And threw it all away, just as often.”
“And helped a lot of little guys like us, along the way.”
The bartender wiped at his eyes. “Hey, Felix, you remember the time...”
Jade did not think it was possible to get drunk on Coca-Cola, so the exhilarated feeling she was experiencing an hour or so later must have been from the two men’s tales of Sam Gunn.
“Why doesn’t somebody do a biography of him?” she blurted. “I mean, the networks would love it, wouldn’t they?”
Both men stopped the reminiscences in mid-sentence. The bartender looked surprised. Sanchez inexplicably turned glum.
“The networks? Pah!” Sanchez spat.
“They’d never do it,” said the bartender, turning sad.
“Why not?”
“Two reasons. One: the big corporations run the networks and they still hate Sam, even though he’s dead. They won’t want to see him glorified. And two: guys like us will tell you stories about Sam, but do you think we’d trust some smart-ass reporter from one of the networks?” “Oh,” said Jade. “I see—I guess.”
The men resumed their tales of their younger days. Jade half-listened as she sipped her Coke, thinking to herself, But they’re talking to me about Sam. Why couldn’t I get other people who knew him to talk to me?