He had a mean streak, but he wasn’t a very imposing physical specimen, and his mastery of fisticuffs and self-defense left a lot to be desired. He felt no enormous compulsion to pay his debts, but since that was common knowledge nobody ever gave him a line of credit, and especially not bartenders. He carried an impressive sonic pistol on his hip, but he wasn’t very accurate with it, and more often than not he forgot to keep it charged.

But he had that name, and Orpheus couldn’t let it pass without putting it into a verse.

Since he wasn’t a very loquacious man, nobody knew exactly why he was called One-Time Charlie. Some people said it was because he had been married once in his youth, left his wife behind when he came out to the Frontier, and swore he would never live with a woman again. Others created a complex legend about how he had served time for some crime or another and vowed that he would commit every criminal act in the book just once, so that the police would never again be able to find a pattern to his behavior. A third story had it that he caused such havoc on his binges that he never returned to a world he had visited. A few of his enemies—and he certainly had a number of them—said it was a name created by Flat-Nosed Sal, one of the more notorious prostitutes of the Tumiga system, after he paid for an entire weekend of her time but could only perform once.

Orpheus wasn’t concerned with the origin of his name, but only with the fascinating images it evoked; and since he caught him on a bad day, when he had been drinking pretty heavily and wasn’t in one of his friendlier moods, the verse came out the way it did.

One-Time Charlie’s verse was a recent addition to the canon, and as a result very few people on Safe Harbor had heard it—which was probably all for the best, since sooner or later someone who had heard the song and the stories would start asking him about Flat-Nosed Sal, and as often as not he and his questioner would both wake up in the local jail or the local hospital.

He arrived on a typical Safe Harbor day—warm, sunny, somewhat humid—and spent the next few hours looking for work at the larger farming combines. He was still making the rounds when Cain awoke, shaved, showered, and walked into town.