Variable Star by Robert A HeinLein & Spider Robinson

ticket: no more cricket.
    “‘Ran away’?” I muttered. “ I’ll show you run away, lady. Watch me.”
    How did I get back down from that tree without breaking anything? I reject memory, which says I was assisted by a team of swans, but have no better explanation to offer.
    There are, as I said, a few more shards of memory after that, but I don’t think any of them represent real experiences. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s possible to do that with even an extremely cooperative goat. Certainly not without paying in advance.
    A
nd then , with the shocking suddenness of running full tilt into an unseen wall, I was instantly a hundred percent cold sober, and an ugly man with lemon breath was staring into my eyes from no more than ten or twenty centimeters away, so fixedly and intently that I sensed he was grading them, by some unknown criteria.
    I couldn’t stop him, so I decided to grade his eyes. At first they seemed the eyes of a man so tired he was on the verge of a temper tantrum. But on second look I could see that he was always that angry, and the fatigue merely blew his cover. On the third look, I learned something new. Until then I had believed that anger is always fear in disguise. My father had told me so once, in memorable circumstances, and I’d never seen a counterexample. But now I could see that at least some of this man’s anger derived not from fear, but from shame. In some way he had failed himself irredeemably—so irredeemably that there was no longer anything left to fear. His face tried to say that was my fault, especially his mouth—but his eyes knew damn well it wasn’t.
    “Am I finally addressing a sentient being?” he asked.
    Early sixties. Ruddy face. Strong lemon breath. Sour lemon. “I doubt it,” I said. “But I’m probably close enough to run for Parliament, at least.”
    He grunted and moved away. As his face receded I tried to follow it and fell off my chair, thereby learning that I had been sitting in a chair. Where this chair, mein herr ? There, mon cher . Well, I swear.
    He let me make my own way back up into the chair, leaning into the force of his contempt as if it were a strong wind. It took me a while. Before I had time to congratulate myself, he said, “I’m Dr. Rivera. Do you know where you are?”
    I rubbed a sore spot on my face. “On Terra, obviously. Barbaric gravity.”
    He didn’t have the energy to be impatient. “Where on Terra, specifically?”
    “In these pants,” I said, and giggled.
    “After what I gave you, you should be straight by now,” he said. “I conclude you must be a natural horse’s ass.”
    “Nonsense! I’ve had to work hard at it.”
    Humor was wasted on him. Or being wasted was not humorous to him. One of those. “You are in Tampa, Florida.”
    I giggled again. “Home of the tampon. Is this your pad?”
    “You are at the Tampa Spaceport.”
    “You don’t want to Tampa with a spaceport. Your complexion could end up even Florider.” I cracked myself up with that one. But as I laughed, rusty wheels finally began to turn slowly in my head.
    Tampa? Why the hell would I go to Tampa? Even if I had found some sort of pressing reason to visit a spaceport, Albuquerque was a hell of a lot closer to Vancouver than Tampa was—
    “Do you know why you are—”
    What did Tampa have that Albuquerque didn’t? Nothing. In fact, these days Tampa was almost completely closed to normal commercial traffic, due to—something. I forgot.
    “I said, do you even remember what you—”
    What made Tampa different from any other spaceport in this hemisphere?
    “Forget it,” he said suddenly. “You’re not up to this.”
    “The hell I’m not,” I said automatically. Whatever he was talking about, who the hell was he to be talking about it?
    His contempt reached a crescendo. “Young man, I doubt you’d be up to it even if your bloodstream were completely clean. It’s a big decision. Too big for you. Try again another time. You