Soma Blues by Robert Sheckley Page A

then you split for Paris and leave me here to moulder.”
    “In Maria’s arms,” Hob reminded him.
    “Well, yeah, that’s right.” Harry grinned. “As a matter of fact I like it here fine. But it’s nice to have a fellow American to talk to from time to time.”
    “What’s the matter with the Ibicencos?”
    “You know I get along with them. It’s the French and English I don’t much care for.”
    It was Harry’s fate that, without being in any way an internationalist, he fit into the native life of Ibiza easily and well. He could have been a born Ibicenco, since he shared most of their prejudices and possessed more than a few of their virtues.
    “Everything okay?” Hob asked him.
    “Yeah, fine. I’ve got to see Novarro, though. He asked me to bring you if you happened to show up.”
    Novarro was a lieutenant in the Guardia Civil, stationed in Ibiza. Hob had known him for years in a formally friendly sort of way.
    “What’s it about?”
    “I had a little trouble couple nights ago. Nothing important. Tell you about it later.”
    Harry led Hob into the kitchen, which was large and cheerful, with colorful prints by local artists on the white plaster walls. There was a refrigerator and stove, both operating on bottled gas. There was a butane lamp, too, lit, although it was broad daylight, because the kitchen had only one window, a very narrow one. Harry usually didn’t like to use the gas lamp because it hissed and gave out a faint but unpleasant odor. He much preferred to fiddle with the Aladdin kerosene lamps because he liked the soft golden light they cast, and he had taken it upon himself to keep their mantles clean and the wicks trimmed since Maria, with her islander practicality, saw nothing romantic about kerosene lamps. Why use them when butane was so much cheaper and simpler? Why use either, for that matter, when for a couple of hundred dollars they could get an electric line put in from the transformer station on the main road? Harry wouldn’t have it. He liked to keep the finca electricity-less, since that suited his romantic streak. Maria liked that about him but found it difficult to explain to her sisters, to say nothing of the various aunts and uncles and cousins of her large extended family. “He doesn’t like electricity,” she told them. “He is a man of old-fashioned ways, even if he is an American.” Her family pointed out that Americans weren’t supposed to be that way. “Mine is,” Maria told them, thus clinching the argument since no one else in the family had one.
    Harry cleaned out the coffeepot, filled it, and put it on the stove. He opened two bottles of Damm beer to hold them while the coffee was brewing. Then he looked in the refrigerator for tapas , those delicious little appetizers that the Spanish are always nibbling at and which may account for the girth of some of the more prosperous among them.
    “Relax,” Hob said. “We’ll go out for dinner later. Is Juanito’s open?”
    “Next week. But La Estrella is open, and there’s a new place, Los Asparagatos, with Italian food. I hear it’s pretty good.”
    “I’ll try it out,” Hob said. “How’s Maria?”
    “She’s doing just great,” Harry said. He and Maria had married just six months previously, in the white-domed San Carlos church. Hob had been Harry’s best man. Maria had looked lovely in her grandmother’s handmade white satin and lace gown. Hob remembered her face, an olive oval, so much in contrast to Harry’s square, red, American face. Father Gomez, Maria’s priest, had officiated, first making sure that Harry’s seldom-practiced Catholicism had not totally lapsed. Harry had promised to do better by the church in the future. Father Gomez had known he wouldn’t, but protocol had been satisfied, and Gomez, a Catalan from Barcelona, was not one to put up barriers to the achievement of a little happiness on Earth.
    “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” Harry asked.
    “No time,”