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they don’t have reasons. Remember what they told us in Basic? There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the army way.”
    “Joey, I ever tell you? The Martians, they’re already out there amongst us.”
    A startling change of subject and a new wrinkle.
    “Uh, where?”
    “They’re out there all over. I betcha we pass them on the street every day.”
    “We do?”
    “They’ll show themselves when Mariner 4 snaps its snapshots. They’ll make their move. They got to.”
    “They do?”
    “Don’t you know shit, Joey? Their cities and bases, they’ll be exposed. Once we have bigger missiles, they’ll be sitting ducks.”
    To deflect the looniness, I asked, “Your Mariner 4’s still on course?”
    “A million miles out, steady as she goes,” Ziggy said.
    “Until that spaceship, nothing has ever seen Mars up close? Correct?”
    “Damn straight.”
    “Tell me again how much it weighs and when it was launched, Zig.”
    Ziggy took a long swig and handed me the Scotch. “Its dry weight is five-hundred-seventy-four pounds, sixty of it instrumentation. On
28 November 1964
, it lifted off from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas D booster.”
    He ticked off the gadgetry on sausage fingers. “TV camera, solar plasma probe, ionization chamber, trapped radiation detector, helium vector magnetometer, cosmic ray telescope, cosmic dust detector. Omnidirectional antenna, four solar panels, nitrogen gas jets for attitude control. You got your pressure vanes and gyroscopes too.”
    “And lookie at this.” He dug into the heap of pulp magazines and newspapers at the foot of his bunk and fished out a paper. “This article in here says Mars got no life on it. The guy claims to be a scientist, but he don’t know jack shit. He wants to get his name in the paper is all, the stupid motherfucker.”
    It was not prudent to argue with Ziggy on this subject. I said, “Yeah, some people are born dense.”
    “Joey, all you gotta do is look at them encyclopedia pitchers and the ones in that 1955 National Geographic I got down in my stuff somewheres . The fertile red soil. You could grow anything in that dirt. Canals and polar caps, they’re as plain as day. Tell me there ain’t no life on Mars.”
    “Not me, Zig.”
    “Percival Lowell, the astronomer, way back in 1895, he saw the canals and deserts and oases from his telescope.”
    Apocrypha or not apocrypha, that was the question Mariner 4 sought to answer. “No argument.”
    “How come they’re saying Martians ain’t there and here?”
    “Can’t tell you,” I said, although I didn’t think that even Ziggy’s most imaginative astronomers saw gondoliers and high priests and zombies.
    To steer the conversation elsewhere, I asked, “Hey, Zig, 4578 times 865?”
    “Cut it out, Joey.”
    “C’mon, Zig.”
    “Up yours, Joey. Up your butt.”
    “C’mon, Zig. C’mon.”
    “Up your nose with a rubber hose.”
    “C’mon. 4578 times 866.”
    “You said 865,” he corrected.
    I’d tried talking him into using his gift to benefit mankind, namely us in barroom bets. He’d have none of it. I wasn’t goading him to be cruel. I was fascinated, waiting for him to be stuck or wrong just one time.
    “How much?”
    “3,959,970.”
    “946 plus 454 divided by 8 times 25.”
    “4375.”
    “State capitals. Oregon .”
    “ Salem .”
    “ West Virginia .”
    “ Charleston .”
    “ South Dakota .”
    “ Pierre .”
    “The elements. Atomic weight of bismuth.”
    “208.9804.”
    “Zirconium.”
    “91.22.”
    “World Series champ, 1947. In how many games.”
    “Yankees in four.”
    “Are you sure it was four?” I teased.
    Ziggy ignored me. He wasn’t done on Mars. “In a matter of days, Mariner 4 will snap pitchers. Then they’ll find out.”
    “Sure will.”
    “Joey, ever see War of the Worlds ?”
    “Yeah. Scary flick. Those Martian machines zapping you with a death ray and a tin smile.”
    “I’d be pissed if I was a Martian.”
    “How come pissed,