The Fourth Profession

second shelf last night, did he, Ed?”

“No, by God, he didn’t.”

Louise swept an arm about her. “The place is a mess, of course. We’d never get it clean in time. Not without help. How about it, Bill? You’re a government man. Could you get a team to work here in time to get this place cleaned up by five o’clock?”

“You know not what you ask. It’s three-fifteen now!”

Truly, the Long Spoon was a disaster area. Bars are not meant to be seen by daylight. Just because our worlds had been turned upside down, and just because the Long Spoon was clearly unfit for human habitation, we had been thinking in terms of staying closed tonight. Now it was too late…

“Tip Top Cleaners,” I remembered. “They send out a four-man team with its own mops. Fifteen bucks an hour. But we’d never get them here in time.”

Morris stood up abruptly. “Are they in the phone book?”

“Sure.”

Morris moved.

I waited until he was in the phone booth before I asked, “Any new thoughts on what you ate last night?”

Louise looked at me closely. “You mean the pill? Why so solemn?”

“We’ve got to find out before Morris does.”

“Why?”

“If Morris has his way,” I said, “they’ll classify my head Top Secret. I know too much. I’m likely to be a political prisoner the rest of my life; and so are you, if you learned the wrong things last night.”

What Louise did then, I found both flattering and comforting. She turned upon the phone booth where Morris was making his call, a look of such poisonous hatred that it should have withered the man where he stood.

She believed me. She needed no kind of proof, and she was utterly on my side.

Why was I so sure? I had spent too much of today guessing at other people’s thoughts. Maybe it had something to do with my third and fourth professions…

I said, “We’ve got to find out what kind of pill you took. Otherwise Morris and the Secret Service will spend the rest of their lives following you around, just on the off chance that you know something useful. Like me. Only they know I know something useful. They’ll be picking my brain until Hell freezes over.”

Morris yelled from the phone booth. “They’re coming! Forty bucks an hour, paid in advance when they get here!”

“Great!” I yelled.

“I want to call in. New York.” He closed the folding door.

Louise leaned across the table. “Ed, what are we going to do?”

It was the way she said it. We were in it together, and there was a way out, and she was sure I’d find it— and she said it all in the sound of her voice, the way she leaned toward me, the pressure of her hand around my wrist. We. I felt power and confidence rising in me; and at the same time I thought: She couldn’t do that yesterday.

I said, “We clean this place up so we can open for business. Meanwhile you try to remember what you learned last night. Maybe it was something harmless, like how to catch trilchies with a magnetic web.”

“Tril…?”

“Space butterflies, kind of.”

“Oh. But suppose he taught me how to build a faster-than-light monitor?”

“We’d bloody have to keep Morris from finding out. But you didn’t. The English words for going faster than light—hyperdrive, space warp—they don’t have Monk translations except in math. You can’t even say ‘faster than light’ in Monk.”

“Oh.”

Morris came back grinning like an idiot. “You’ll never guess what the Monks want from us now.”

He looked from me to Louise to me, grinning, letting the suspense grow intolerable. He said, “A giant laser cannon.”

Louise gasped “What?” and I asked, “You mean a launching laser?”

“Yes, a launching laser. They want us to build it on the Moon. They’d feed our engineers pills to give them the specs and to teach them how to build it. They’d pay off in more pills.”

I needed to remember something about launching lasers. And how had I known what to call it?

“They put the proposition to the United Nations,” Morris was saying. “In fact, they’ll be doing all of their business through the UN, to avoid charges of favoritism, they say, and to spread the knowledge as far as possible.”

“But there are countries that don’t belong to the UN,” Louise objected.

“The Monks know that. They asked if any of those nations had space travel. None of them do, of course. And the Monks lost interest in them.”

“Of course,” I said, remembering. “A species that can’t develop spaceflight is no better than animals.”

”Huh?”

“According to a Monk.”

Louise said, “But what for? Why would the Monks want a laser cannon? And on our Moon!”

“That’s a little complicated,” said Morris. “Do you both remember when the Monk ship first appeared, two years ago?”

“No,” we answered more or less together.

Morris was shaken. “You didn’t notice? It was in all the papers. Noted Astronomer Says Alien Spacecraft Approaching Earth. No?”

“No.”

“For Christ’s sake! I was jumping up and down. It was like when the radio astronomers discovered pulsars, remember? I was just getting out of high school.”

“Pulsars?”

“Excuse me,” Morris said overpolitely. “My mistake. I tend to think that everybody I meet is a science fiction fan. Pulsars are stars that give off rhythmic pulses of radio energy. The radio astronomers thought at first that they were getting signals from outer space.”

Louise said, “You’re a science fiction fan?”

“Absolutely. My first gun was a GyroJet rocket pistol. I bought it because I read Buck Rogers.”

I said, “Buck who?” But then I couldn’t keep a straight face. Morris raised his eyes to Heaven. No doubt it was there that he found the strength to go on.

“The noted astronomer was Jerome Finney. Of course he hadn’t said anything about Earth. Newspapers always get that kind of thing garbled. He’d said that an object of artificial, extraterrestrial origin had entered the solar system.

“What had happened was that several months earlier, Jodrell Bank had found a new star in Sagittarius. That’s the direction of the galactic core. Yes, Frazer?”

We were back to last names because I wasn’t a science fiction fan. I said, “That’s right. The Monks came from the galactic hub.” I remembered the blazing night sky of Center. My Monk customer couldn’t possibly have seen it in his lifetime. He must have been shown the vision through an education pill, for patriotic reasons, like kids are taught what the Star Spangled Banner looks like.

“All right. The astronomers were studying a nearby nova, so they caught the intruder a little sooner. It showed a strange spectrum, radically different from a nova and much more constant. It got even stranger. The light was growing brighter at the same time the spectral lines were shifting toward the red.

“It was months before anyone identified the spectrum.

“Then one Jerome Finney finally caught wise. He showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.”

“Oh!” I got it then. “That would mean a light-sail!”