Soma Blues by Robert Sheckley

final steep hairpin and saw ahead, where the road flattened across the saddle of the hill, the drystone fence that enclosed Harry Hamm’s finca.
    Hob parked the car in the space cut for it in the prickly cactus patch, alongside Harry’s SEAT. He walked around the edge of the stone fence, and then he could see the house, built on the back slope of the hill. It was a small farmhouse, about two hundred years old, with four or five hectares of land surrounding it. The grounds were scrupulously clean, as Ibicenco farms always were, unless they were being farmed by peninsulares , as Spaniards from the mainland were called. To one side were the sheds, still half full of algorobos , the ever-present carob. Hob could catch its characteristic sickly sweet aroma. It wasn’t a smell he much liked, but he associated it with the island, and so it had become dear to him.
    The house itself was typical, built of fitted stones that were encased in mud and brush and then cemented and plastered. As was traditional on the island, the size of the largest room was determined by the length of the trunk of white oak available for the ridgepole. Once the ridgepole was in place, right-angled oak limbs were fitted to either side, then brush was piled on top of that and packed with mud. The roof was flat and slanted toward the center to catch rainwater, which was led to gutters and then down to the underground storage tank from which Harry would pump what was needed up to a holding tank on the roof.
    Not even the windows had been modernized, although Harry had decided to do that someday. But he held off, appreciating the fact that in the old days the slit windows kept out the winter’s cold and provided no easy entry for the Saracen pirates from Algeria and Morrocco who used to ravage the island until late in the 1800s. The North African coast was less than a hundred miles away. The Saracens had been raiding these islands for hundreds of years, and the Ibicencos, far from any central government, had learned to take care of themselves. Every village and every outlying structure was a fortress, or at least a strong point, designed to hold up the invaders until men could be assembled to deal with them. There were no Saracen pirates anymore, only English and German tourists—and these tended to give more than they took. Hob sometimes wondered if the change had been advantageous. Dealing with raiders had developed hardiness and self-reliance in the Ibicencos; dealing with tourists had been aesthetically disastrous, bringing fast-food restaurants and entire Scandinavian, German, and French “villages,” newly built self-enclosed tourist centers whose architecture was all the more grotesque since it was a self-conscious attempt to imitate a small village from back home. No American villages so far, but that was sure to come.
    There were a few chickens scratching around the front yard at Harry’s place. Maria’s doing, no doubt. Hob had never believed that a guy like Harry Hamm was cut out to keep chickens. But what could you tell about Harry’s Ibicenco wife except that she was beautiful and stately and obviously much too good for Harry, who was an overweight, balding, retired cop from Jersey City, New Jersey, and Hob Draconian’s mostly unpaid partner in the Alternative Detective Agency.
    Hob kept to the roadside of the stone fence and hailed the house. “Harry! Are you there?” His voice boomed across the yard, amplified by the freak acoustics of the scalloped cliffside nearby. For a moment there was no answer. Then Harry came running out of the house, in khaki work pants and white shirt, wearing the soft rope-soled espadrilles of the island, a big balding man with a paunch.
    “Hob! Come in!” Harry swung open the little gate and led Hob through. Now Hob could see Harry’s car, a Spanish-built Citröen parked just around the side of the sheds.
    “About time you showed up,” Harry said. “You talk me into going into this agency with you, and