The Fourth Profession

that he was acting strange. He was slow on orders. He got drinks wrong.

“I remembered that he had done that for awhile last fall, when he got his divorce…”

I felt my face go stiff. That was unexpected pain, that memory. I am far from being my own best customer; but there had been a long lost weekend about a year ago. Louise had talked me out of trying to drink and bartend too. So I had gone drinking. When it was out of my system I had gone back to tending bar.

She was saying, “Last night I thought it might be the same problem. I covered for him, said the orders twice when I had to, watched him make the drinks so he’d get them right.

“He was spending most of his time talking to the Monk. But Ed was talking English, and the Monk was making whispery noises in his throat. Remember last week, when they put the Monk speech on television? It sounded like that.

“I saw Ed take a pill from the Monk and swallow it with a glass of water.”

She turned to me, touched my arm. “I thought you were crazy. I tried to stop you.”

“I don’t remember.”

“The place was practically empty by then. Well, you laughed at me and said that the pill would teach you not to get lost! I didn’t believe it. But the Monk turned on his translator gadget and said the same thing.”

“I wish you’d stopped me,” I said.

She looked disturbed. “I wish you hadn’t said that. I took a pill myself.”

I started choking. She’d caught me with a mouthful of gin and tonic.

Louise pounded my back and saved my life, maybe. She said, “You don’t remember that?”

“I don’t remember much of anything coherent after I took the first pill.”

“Really? You didn’t seem loaded. Not after I’d watched you awhile.”

Morris cut in. “Louise, the pill you took. What did the Monk say it would do?”

“He never did. We were talking about me.” She stopped to think. Then, baffled and amused at herself, she said, “I don’t know how it happened. All of a sudden I was telling the story of my young life. To a Monk. I had the idea he was sympathetic.”

“The Monk?”

“Yes, the Monk. And at some point he picked out a pill and gave it to me. He said it would help me. I believed him. I don’t know why, but I believed him, and I took it.”

“Any symptoms? Have you learned anything new this morning?”

She shook her head, baffled and a little truculent now. Taking that pill must have seemed sheer insanity in the cold gray light of afternoon.

“All right,” said Morris. “Frazer, you took three pills. We knew what two of them were. Louise, you took one, and we have no idea what it taught you.” He closed his eyes a moment, then looked at me. “Frazer, if you can’t remember what you took, can you remember rejecting anything? Did the Monk offer you anything…” He saw my face and cut it off.

Because that had jarred something…

The Monk had been speaking his own language, in that alien whisper that doesn’t need to be more than a whisper because the basic sounds of the Monk language are so unambiguous, so easily distinguished, even to a human ear. This teaches proper swimming technique. A — can reach speeds of sixteen to twenty-four — per — using these strokes. The course also teaches proper exercises…

I said, “I turned down a swimming course for intelligent fish.”

Louise giggled. Morris said, “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And there was something else.” That swamped-in-data effect wasn’t as bad as it had been at noon. Bits of data must be reaching cubbyholes in my head, linking up, finding their places.

“I was asking about the shapes of aliens. Not about Monks, because that’s bad manners, especially from a race that hasn’t yet proven its sentience. I wanted to know about other aliens. So the Monk offered me three courses in unarmed combat techniques. Each one involved extensive knowledge of basic anatomy.”

“You didn’t take them?”

“No. What for? Like, one was a pill to tell me how to kill an armed intelligent worm, but only if I was an unarmed intelligent worm. I wasn’t that confused.”

“Frazer, there are men who would give an arm and a leg for any of those pills you turned down.”

“Sure. A couple of hours ago you were telling me I was crazy to swallow an alien’s education pill.”

“Sorry,” said Morris.

“You were the one who said they should have driven me out of my mind. Maybe they did,” I said, because my hypersensitive sense of balance was still bothering the hell out of me.

But Morris’s reaction bothered me worse. Frazer could start gibbering any minute. Better pump him for all he’s worth while I’ve got the chance.

No, his face showed none of that. Was I going paranoid?

“Tell me more about the pills,” Morris said. “It sounds like there’s a lot of delayed reaction involved. How long do we have to wait before we know we’ve got it all?”

“He did say something…” I groped for it, and presently it came.

It works like a memory, the Monk had said. He’d turned off his translator and was speaking his own language, now that I could understand him. The sound of his translator had been bothering him. That was why he’d given me the pill.

But the whisper of his voice was low, and the language was new, and I’d had to listen carefully to get it all. I remembered it clearly.

The information in the pills will become part of your memory. You will not know all that you have learned until you need it. Then it will surface. Memory works by association, he’d said.

And: There are things that cannot be taught by teachers. Always there is the difference between knowledge from school and knowledge from doing the work itself.

“Theory and practice,” I told Morris. “I know just what he meant. There’s not a bartending course in the country that will teach you to leave the sugar out of an Old Fashioned during rush hour.”

“_What_ did you say?”

“It depends on the bar, of course. No posh bar would let itself get that crowded. But in an ordinary bar, anyone who orders a complicated drink during rush hour deserves what he gets. He’s slowing the bartender down when it’s crucial, when every second is money. So you leave the sugar out of an Old Fashioned. It’s too much money.”

“The guy won’t come back.”

“So what? He’s not one of your regulars. He’d have better sense if he were.”

I had to grin. Morris was shocked and horrified. I’d shown him a brand new sin. I said, “It’s something every bartender ought to know about. Mind you, a bartending school is a trade school. They’re teaching you to survive as a bartender. But the recipe calls for sugar, so at school you put in the sugar or you get ticked off.”

Morris shook his head, tight-lipped. He said, “Then the Monk was warning you that you were getting theory, not practice.”

“Just the opposite. Look at it this way, Morris…”

“Bill.”

“Listen, Bill. The teleport pill can’t make a human nervous system capable of teleportation. Even my incredible balance, and it is incredible, won’t give me the muscles to do ten quick backflips. But I do know what it feels like to teleport. That’s what the Monk was warning me about. The pills give field training. What you have to watch out for are the reflexes. Because the pills don’t change you physically.”

“I hope you haven’t become a trained assassin.”

One must be wary of newly learned reflexes, the Monk had said.

Morris said, “Louise, we still don’t know what kind of an education you got last night. Any ideas?”

“Maybe I repair time machines.” She sipped her drink, eyed Morris demurely over the rim of the glass.

Morris smiled back. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

The idiot. He meant it.

“If you really want to know what was in the pill,” said Louise, “why not ask the Monk?” She gave Morris time to look startled, but no time to interrupt. “All we have to do is open up and wait. He didn’t even get through the