“Why?”
“I was high on the first one.”
“It made you drunk?”
“Not drunk, but I couldn’t think straight. My head was full of Monk words all trying to fit themselves to meanings. I was dizzy with nonhuman images and words I couldn’t pronounce.”
“Just how many pills did you take?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Swell.”
An image surfaced. “I do remember saying, ‘But how about something unusual?
Morris was no longer amused. “You’re lucky you can still talk. The chances you took, you should be a drooling idiot this morning!”
“It seemed reasonable at the time.”
“You don’t remember how many pills you took?”
I shook my head. Maybe the motion jarred something loose. “That bottle of little triangular pills. I know what they were. Memory erasers.”
“Good God! You didn’t…”
“No, no, Morris. They don’t erase your whole memory. They erase pill memories. The RNA in a Monk memory pill is tagged somehow, so that the eraser pill can pick it out and break it down.”
Morris gaped. Presently he said, “That’s incredible. The education pills are wild enough, but
He saw my expression and said, “Never mind, just take my word for it. They must have had the education pills for a hundred years before they worked out the eraser principle.”
“Probably. The pills must be very old.”
He pounced. “How do you know that?”
“The name for the pill has only one syllable, like
“Good!”
“Anyway, the Monks must have been peddling pills to aliens for thousands of years. I’d guess tens of thousands.”
“Just how many kinds of pill were in that case?”
I tried to remember. My head felt congested…
“I don’t know if there was more than one of each kind of pill. There were four stiff flaps like the leaves of a book, and each flap had rows of little pouches with a pill in each one. The flaps were maybe sixteen pouches long by eight across. Maybe. Morris, we ought to call Louise. She probably remembers better than I do, even if she noticed less at the time.”
“You mean Louise Schu the barmaid? She might at that. Or she might jar something loose in your memory.”
“Right.”
“Call her. Tell her we’ll meet her. Where’s she live, Santa Monica?”
He’d done his homework, all right.
Her phone was still ringing when Morris said, “Wait a minute. Tell her we’ll meet her at the Long Spoon. And tell her we’ll pay her amply for her trouble.”
Then Louise answered and told me I’d jarred her out of a sound sleep, and I told her she’d be paid amply for her trouble, and she said what the hell kind of a crack was
After I hung up I asked, “Why the Long Spoon?”
“I’ve thought of something. I was one of the last customers out last night. I don’t think you cleaned up.”
“I was feeling peculiar. We cleaned up a little, I think.”
“Did you empty the wastebaskets?”
“We don’t usually. There’s a guy who comes in in the morning and mops the floors and empties the wastebaskets and so forth. The trouble is, he’s been home with the flu the last couple of days. Louise and I have been going early.”
“Good. Get dressed, Frazer. We’ll go down to the Long Spoon and count the pieces of Monk cellophane in the wastebaskets. They shouldn’t be too hard to identify. They’ll tell us how many pills you took.”
I noticed it while I was dressing. Morris’s attitude had changed subtly. He had become proprietary. He tended to stand closer to me, as if someone might try to steal me, or as if I might try to steal away.
Imagination, maybe. But I began to wish I didn’t know so much about Monks.
I stopped to empty the percolator before leaving. Habit. Every afternoon I put the percolator in the dishwasher before I leave. When I come home at three A.M. it’s ready to load.
I poured out the dead coffee, took the machine apart, and stared.
The grounds in the top were fresh coffee, barely damp from steam. They hadn’t been used yet.
There was another Secret Service man outside my door, a tall Midwesterner with a toothy grin. His name was George Littleton. He spoke not a word after Bill Morris introduced us, probably because I looked like I’d bite him.
I would have. My balance nagged me like a sore tooth. I couldn’t forget it for an instant.
Going down in the elevator, I could feel the universe shifting around me. There seemed to be a four- dimensional map in my head, with me in the center and the rest of the universe traveling around me at various changing velocities.
The car we used was a Lincoln Continental. George drove. My map became three times as active, recording every touch of brake and accelerator.
“We’re putting you on salary,” said Morris, “if that’s agreeable. You know more about Monks than any living man. We’ll class you as a consultant and pay you a thousand dollars a day to put down all you remember about Monks.”
“I’d want the right to quit whenever I think I’m mined out.”
“That seems all right,” said Morris. He was lying. They would keep me just as long as they felt like it. But there wasn’t a thing I could do about it at the moment.
I didn’t even know what made me so sure.
So I asked, “What about Louise?”
“She spent most of her time waiting on tables, as I remember. She won’t know much. We’ll pay her a thousand a day for a couple of days. Anyway, for today, whether she knows anything or not.”
“Okay,” I said, and tried to settle back.
“You’re the valuable one, Frazer. You’ve been fantastically lucky. That Monk language pill is going to give us a terrific advantage whenever we deal with Monks. They’ll have to learn about us. We’ll know about them already. Frazer, what does a Monk look like under the cowl and robe?”
“Not human,” I said. “They only stand upright to make us feel at ease. And there’s a swelling along one side that looks like equipment under the robe, but it isn’t. It’s part of the digestive system. And the head is as big as a basketball, but it’s half hollow.”
“They’re natural quadrupeds?”
“Yah. Four-footed, but climbers. The animal they evolved from lives in forests of like giant dandelions. They
