NOW … (DURING THE EVENTS OF STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI)
Two bounty hunters sat in a bar, talking.
“Things aren’t what they used to be,” said Zuckuss morosely. As a member of one of the ammonia-breathing species of his homeworld Gand, he had to be careful in establishments such as this. Intoxicants and stimulants that produced feelings of well-being in other creatures often evoked a profound melancholy in him. Even in a high-class place that supposedly catered to all known physiologies—the soothing, programmed play of lights across the columned walls, the shifting spectra that were supposed to relax weary travelers’ central nervous systems, struck Zuckuss as crepuscular and depressing as the faded hopes of his youth. I had ambitions once, he told himself, leaning over the tall, blue-tinged glass in front of him. Big ones. Where had they gone?
“I wouldn’t know,” said Zuckuss’s companion. The droid bounty hunter 4-LOM sat across from him, an untouched drink—perhaps only water—in front of him. A mere formality: the drink had been taken away twice already and replaced with exactly the same thing, so the charges could be rung up on 4-LOM’s tab. That was the only way that nonimbibing constructs such as droids could make themselves welcome in any kind of watering hole. “Your attitude,” continued 4-LOM, “implies a value judgment on your part. That is, that things were better at one time than they are now. I don’t make those kinds of judgments. I merely deal with things as they are.”
