Larry did a brisk business for a few minutes while we sized the little guy up again. He definitely wasn't drunk, but the task of deciding whether he was being dead-pan-comic or just nasty was a sort of challenge that called for thought. "But you'd need extensive oceans to support so many fish," Willard Saxton argued, still taking it seriously. "And if Mars had oceans we'd have seen them long ago. They reflect light." "Mars is too level for oceans," the little man said. "The water spreads out thin to make one big marsh, and you can't see it because the weeds that grow up from the bottom camouflage it." Somebody down the bar said, "This gets curiouser and curiouser," and everybody laughed again but Willard and Larry and the little comic. Somebody else asked if he was a professional and what show was he on, but he didn't answer. He just pushed his shot glass forward instead. "Another bourbon," he said. The announcer came on screen again when the lizard cartoon went off and said that the Mars party's signal was beginning to come through and that as soon as it cleared up they would put it on the cable. Then he told us about a new kind of pretzel prepared with a special salt guaranteed not to give us hardening of the arteries, and after that we had another film cartoon. This one was about two crows at a circus, but nobody could follow it because Larry turned down the sound again. Between his third and fourth stingers Willard Saxton--who had a reputation to uphold, being science editor of the _Advertiser_--had made up his mind by now to put the little man in his place. It burned him brown to see this character drinking bourbon and sneering at himself in the mirror and not caring a damn what we thought, and it put Willard under a sort of obligation to show him up. "Reliable tests have conclusively proved," Willard said, "that the atmosphere of Mars contains only minute traces of water vapor, and that its oxygen content is less than one-hundredth the density necessary to sustain human life. Spectroanalysis findings--" "A spectroanalysis of Earth from Mars," the little man said, "shows nothing beyond our Heaviside layer, and proves that we can't live here because nothing can breathe pure ozone." * * * * * He finished his bourbon and made chains of wet rings on the bartop with his glass. The mixed look on his face was so strong that for a moment I almost thought of the name for it. Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger--a double, this time--and Abe Marker took over. "How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can you?" "Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of gnats." "_Gnats?_" we all said at once, and somebody down the bar, quicker-witted than the rest of us, added: "Gnats to you too, Charlie!"