The Fourth Profession

It took him a moment to get it, and then his answering smile was wan. “Odd for a Monk.”

“Yah,” I said, and tried to concentrate. It was the wrong move. Bits of fact buzzed about my skull, trying to fit themselves together.

Morris was saying, “Just talk, if you will. The Monk came back Tuesday night. About what time?”

“About four thirty. He had a case of—pills—RNA…”

It was no use. I knew too many things, all at once, all unrelated. I knew the name of the Garment to Wear Among Strangers, its principle and its purpose. I knew about Monks and alcohol. I knew the names of the five primary colors, so that for a moment I was blind with the memory of the colors themselves, colors no man would ever see.

Morris was standing over me, looking worried. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Ask me anything.” My voice was high and strange and breathless with giddy laughter. “Monks have four limbs, all hands, each with a callus heel behind the fingers. I know their names, Morris. Each hand, each finger. I know how many eyes a Monk has. One. And the whole skull is an ear. There’s no word for ear, but medical terms for each of the—resonating cavities—between the lobes of the brain…”

“You look dizzy. You don’t sample your own wares, do you, Frazer?”

“I’m the opposite of dizzy. There’s a compass in my head. I’ve got absolute direction. Morris, it must have been the pills.”

“Pills?” Morris had small, squarish ears that couldn’t possibly have come to point. But I got that impression.

“He had a sample case full of—education pills…”

“Easy now.” He put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy. Just start at the beginning, and talk. I’ll make some coffee.”

“Good.” Coffee sounded wonderful, suddenly. “Pot’s ready. Just plug it in. I fix it before I go to sleep.”

Morris disappeared around the partition that marks off the kitchen alcove from the bedroom/living room in my small apartment. His voice floated back. “Start at the beginning. He came back Tuesday night.”

“He came back Tuesday night,” I repeated.

“Hey, your coffee’s already perked. You must have plugged it in in your sleep. Keep talking.”

“He started his drinking where he’d left off, four bottles from the end of the top row. I’d have sworn he was cold sober. His voice didn’t give him away…”

* * *

His voice didn’t give him away because it was only a whisper, too low to make out. His translator spoke like a computer, putting single words together from a man’s recorded voice. It spoke slowly and with care. Why not? It was speaking an alien tongue.

The Monk had had five tonight. That put him through the ryes and the bourbons and the Irish whiskeys, and several of the liqueurs. Now he was tasting the vodkas.

At that point I worked up the courage to ask him what he was doing.

He explained at length. The Monk starship was a commercial venture, a trading mission following a daisy chain of stars. He was a sampler for the group. He was mightily pleased with some of the wares he had sampled here. Probably he would order great quantities of them, to be freeze-dried for easy storage. Add alcohol and water to reconstitute.

“Then you won’t be wanting to test all the vodkas,” I told him. “Vodka isn’t much more than water and alcohol.”

He thanked me.

“The same goes for most gins, except for flavorings.” I lined up four gins in front of him. One was Tanqueray. One was a Dutch gin you have to keep chilled like some liqueurs. The others were fairly ordinary products. I left him with these while I served customers.

I had expected a mob tonight. Word should have spread. Have a drink in the Long Spoon, you’ll see a Thing from Outer Space. But the place was half empty. Louise was handling them nicely.

I was proud of Louise. As with last night, tonight she behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The mood was contagious. I could almost hear the customers thinking: We like our privacy when we drink. A Thing from Outer Space is entitled to the same consideration.

It was strange to compare her present insouciance with the way her eyes had bugged at her first sight of a Monk.

The Monk finished tasting the gins. “I am concerned for the volatile fractions,” he said. “Some of your liquors will lose taste from condensation.”

I told him he was probably right. And I asked, “How do you pay for your cargos?”

“With knowledge.”

“That’s fair. What kind of knowledge?”

The Monk reached under his robe and produced a flat sample case. He opened it. It was full of pills. There was a large glass bottle full of a couple of hundred identical pills; and these were small and pink and triangular. But most of the sample case was given over to big, round pills of all colors, individually wrapped and individually labelled in the wandering Monk script.

No two labels were alike. Some of the notations looked hellishly complex.

“These are knowledge,” said the Monk.

“Ah,” I said, and wondered if I was being put on. An alien can have a sense of humor, can’t he? And there’s no way to tell if he’s lying.

“A certain complex organic molecule has much to do with memory,” said the Monk. “Ribonucleic acid. It is present and active in the nervous systems of most organic beings. Wish you to learn my language?”

I nodded.

He pulled a pill loose and stripped it of its wrapping, which fluttered to the bar like a shred of cellophane. The Monk put the pill in my hand and said, “You must swallow it now, before the air ruins it, now that it is out of its wrapping.”

The pill was marked like a target in red and green circles. It was big and bulky going down.

* * *

“You must be crazy,” Bill Morris said wonderingly.

“It looks that way to me, too, now. But think about it. This was a Monk, an alien, an ambassador to the whole human race. He wouldn’t have fed me anything dangerous, not without carefully considering all the possible consequences.”

“He wouldn’t, would he?”

“That’s the way it seemed.” I remembered about Monks and alcohol. It was a pill memory, surfacing as if I had known it all my life. It came too late…

“A language says things about the person who speaks it, about the way he thinks and the way he lives. Morris, the Monk language says a lot about Monks.”

“Call me Bill,” he said irritably.

“Okay. Take Monks and alcohol. Alcohol works on a Monk the way it works on a man, by starving his brain cells a little. But in a Monk it gets absorbed more slowly. A Monk can stay high for a week on a night’s dedicated drinking.

“I knew he was sober when he left Monday night. By Tuesday night he must have been pretty high.”

I sipped my coffee. Today it tasted different, and better, as if memories of some Monk staple foods had worked their way as overtones into my taste buds.

Morris said, “And you didn’t know it.”

“Know it? I was counting on his sense of responsibility!”

Morris shook his head in pity, except that he seemed to be grinning inside.

“We talked some more after that—and I took some more pills.”