Overdrive by Phillip W. Simpson Page B

stools. The carpet was yellow which Felix could only assume was to
hide beer spillage, although it didn’t look like the place to host a great deal
of swilling. The place was sparsely occupied which suited Felix. Two of the
booths had occupants. Three men sat talking quietly over beer in one and a
party of six more rowdy “Martians” occupied the corner both.
    Noticing his
reflection in the mirror facing the bar, Felix smoothed his fake mustache down.
As Horace Belloc, he was now a red head, had a bulbous nose and was a foot
taller thanks to platform boots. Not much of a disguise but then again he
certainly wasn’t an expert at this sort of thing. That was more Logan’s field.
He wondered what his two friends would make of his disappearance but there was
little he could do about it now.
    Felix ordered a
beer and for lack of better things to do, contented himself by watching the
Martians getting drunk in the corner booth.
    The Martians were
a product of typical human ingenuity. After watching humankind explore the
galaxy for a hundred years without finding a trace of intelligent, space faring
extra terrestrials, a small disheartened group of “first contact” extremists
decided to take the rather bizarre step of creating their own. Investing large
amounts of time and money into genetic engineering, and buying their own planet
off the Areopagites - known as New Mars -, the Martians were born. Genetically
modified to look like humans stereotypical little green men, the Martians were
now capable of propagating their own species, and in fact, New Mars had a
population of rather more than a billion.
    Felix had only encountered
them on two occasions before. Unsurprisingly, the Martians excelled at
Astroengineering, and in fact, their most prominent and well respected
University, Arthur C. Clarke, provided some of the best AstroEng graduates in
the galaxy. Felix had requested two research graduates from Arthur C. Clarke to
help out with one of the tricky phases in the Slipdrive development. Without
which, he doubted whether the drive would have been developed.
    Four foot tall,
green and all uniformly dressed in silver ship suits, the six Martians were
playing some form of drinking game. They were equipped with seven
disproportionately long, multi-jointed fingers on their hands, fingers they
were currently using to good effect. From what Felix could make out, the game
seemed to involve lots of drinking and string pulling. The Martians had ordered
their table to create a hole in the middle through which six strings could be
seen descending towards their mid riffs. After all six Martians had sculled
their glass, the loser would have to pull a string. The string, Felix finally worked out, must be attached to each players genitalia. If none of the players cried out, then
the string puller would then have to down another glass. If a player cried out,
then he (Felix assumed they were men), would have to drink his respective
glass. The wild card was of course if you pulled your own string so it was in
your best interests not to pull too hard, but of course hard enough to make
someone else cry out (hopefully not yourself).
    Felix watched
their rapid descent into extreme intoxication for about half an hour. One of
the string pulling Martians was now barely able to raise his glass to his lips.
Due to intoxication or merely through willpower, his drinking cohorts weren’t
uttering a sound at each string pulling episode. The unfortunate little green
man was drinking glass after glass in quick succession.
    Chuckling to
himself and now none too sober either, Felix was distracted by an attractive
brunette woman entering the bar. She pulled up a bar stool a couple down from
Felix and ordered herself a drink. The three men sitting at the other booth,
apparently in disgust at their neighbor’s behavior, decided to leave. One of
them exchanged a significant look with the brunette as he was leaving, a fact
that didn’t escape Felix’s