Bar Scene

We enjoy bars in real life and bar scenes in fiction. There are many inns in Poul Anderson's and SM Stirling's works and there is an understated bar scene in Anderson's "The Plague of Masters." Dominic Flandry has traveled in a Betelgeusean/Alfzarian tramp ship from Altai to Orma en route to Spica VI where he will catch the luxury liner, the Empress Maia, on its way to Terra. (Alfzar is the main inhabited planet in the Betelgeusean System just as Terra is in the Solar System.)

While waiting on Orma, Flandry sips raw local brandy and speaks Alfzarian with a blue-faced Betelguesean captain who trades for hides, natural fibers and fruit on the nearby human colony planet of Unan Besar where the single, small, antiquated spaceport, without even a bunkhouse for off-planet traders, is a hundred jungled kilometers away from the capital city and where, furthermore, the native longshoremen are forbidden to speak to the traders, as though the rulers of Unan Besar have something to hide. Flandry knows that if he files a recommendation that the planet be checked on, it will not be acted on, so he hires a space flitter to check for himself.