The Launch Pad

Harvest Of Stars, 13.

Another of Poul Anderson's many fictional drinking places:

the Launch Pad is on Ellipse Lane off Oberth Passage off Hydra Square in Tychopolis on the Moon;

it is antique, with crowded tables and chairs, darts, spacefaring souvenirs on dusty shelves and faded photos and cards thick on the walls;

when Kyra enters, there is chromokinetic accompaniment to Beethoven's Fifth;

this is a meeting place for spacefarers, not for groundlings or tourists;

it is frequented by Fireball consortes and by employees of several lesser organizations such as Maharashtra Dynamics;

it is the antithesis of the kind of Earthside bar where, in another fictional future, the narrator comments:

"If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he's a spaceman."

-Robert Heinlein, Double Star (New York, 1957), 1, p. 5.