The Fourth Profession

humiliated.”

“That could cause an international incident.” Morris’s jaw tightened heroically. “We’ve got ways of passing the warning along so that it won’t happen.”

Louise said, “There are some countries I wouldn’t mind seeing it happen to.”

Morris got a thoughtful look—and I wondered if everybody would get the warning.

The cleaning team arrived then. We’d used Tip Top Cleaners before, but these four dark women were not our usual team. We had to explain in detail just what we wanted done. Not their fault. They usually clean private homes, not bars.

Morris spent some time calling New York. He must have been using a credit card; he couldn’t have that much change.

“That may have stopped a minor war,” he said when he got back. And we returned to the padded booth. But Louise stayed to direct the cleaning team.

The four dark women moved about us with pails and spray bottles and dry rags, chattering in Spanish, leaving shiny surfaces wherever they went. And Morris resumed his inquisition.

“What powers the ground-to-orbit ship?”

“A slow H-bomb going off in a magnetic bottle.”

“Fusion?”

“Yah. The attitude jets on the main starship use fusion power too. They all link to one magnetic bottle. I don’t know just how it works. You get fuel from water or ice.”

“Fusion. But don’t you have to separate out the deuterium and tritium?”

“What for? You melt the ice, run a current through the water, and you’ve got hydrogen.”

“Wow,” Morris said softly. “Wow.”

“The launching laser works the same way,” I remembered. What else did I need to remember about launching lasers? Something dreadfully important.

“Wow. Frazer, if we could build the Monks their launching laser, we could use the same techniques to build other fusion plants. Couldn’t we?”

“Sure.” I was in dread. My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding. I almost knew why. “What do you mean, if?”

“And they’d pay us to do it! It’s a damn shame. We just don’t have the hardware.”

“What do you mean? We’ve got to build the launching laser!”

Morris gaped. “Frazer, what’s wrong with you?”

The terror had a name now. “My God! What have you told the Monks? Morris, listen to me. You’ve got to see to it that the Security Council promises to build the Monks’ launching laser.”

“Who do you think I am, the Secretary-General? We can’t build it anyway, not with just Saturn launching configurations.” Morris thought I’d gone mad at last. He wanted to back away through the wall of the booth.

“They’ll do it when you tell them what’s at stake. And we can build a launching laser, if the whole world goes in on it. Morris, look at the good it can do! Free power from seawater! And light-sails work fine within a system.”

“Sure, it’s a lovely picture. We could sail out to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We could smelt the asteroids for their metal ores, using laser power…” His eyes had momentarily taken on a vague, dreamy look. Now they snapped back to what Morris thought of as reality. “It’s the kind of thing I daydreamed about when I was a kid. Someday we’ll do it. Today—we just aren’t ready.”

“There are two sides to a coin,” I said. “Now, I know how this is going to sound. Just remember there are reasons. Good reasons.”

“Reasons? Reasons for what?”

“When a trading ship travels,” I said, “it travels only from one civilized system to another. There are ways to tell whether a system has civilization that can build a launching laser. Radio is one. The Earth puts out as much radio flux as a small star.

“When the Monks find that much radio energy coming from a nearby star, they send a trade ship. By the time the ship gets there, the planet that’s putting out all the energy is generally civilized. But not so civilized that it can’t use the knowledge a Monk trades for.

“Do you see that they need the launching laser? That ship out there came from a Monk colony. This far from the axis of the galaxy, the stars are too far apart. Ships launch by starlight and laser, but they brake by starlight alone, because they can’t count on the target star having a launching laser. If they had to launch by starlight too, they probably wouldn’t make it. A plant-and-animal cycle as small as the life support system on a Monk starship can last only so long.”

“You said yourself that the Monks can’t always count on the target star staying civilized.”

“No, of course not. Sometimes a civilization hits the level at which it can build a launching laser, stays there just long enough to send out a mass of radio waves, then reverts to animal. That’s the point. If we tell them we can’t build the laser, we’ll be animals to the Monks.”

“Suppose we just refuse? Not can’t but won’t.”

“That would be stupid. There are too many advantages. Controlled fusion…”

“Frazer, think about the cost.” Morris looked grim. He wanted the laser. He didn’t think he could get it. “Think about politicians thinking about the cost,” he said. “Think about politicians thinking about explaining the cost to the taxpayers.”

“Stupid,” I repeated, “and inhospitable. Hospitality counts high with the Monks. You see, we’re cooked either way. Either we’re dumb animals, or we’re guilty of a criminal breach of hospitality. And the Monk ship still needs more light for its light-sail than the sun can put out.”

“So?”

“So the captain uses a gadget that makes the sun explode.”

“The,” said Morris, and “He,” and “Explode?” He didn’t know what to do. Then suddenly he burst out in great loud cheery guffaws, so that the women cleaning the Long Spoon turned with answering smiles. He’d decided not to believe me.

I reached across and gently pushed his drink into his lap.

It was two-thirds empty, but it cut his laughter off in an instant. Before he could start swearing, I said, “I am not playing games. The Monks will make our sun explode if we don’t build them a launching laser. Now go call your boss and tell him so.”

The women were staring at us in horror. Louise started toward us, then stopped, uncertain.

Morris sounded almost calm. “Why the drink in my lap?”

“Shock treatment. And I wanted your full attention. Are you going to call New York?”

“Not yet.” Morris swallowed. He looked down once at the spreading stain on his pants, then somehow put it out of his mind. “Remember, I’d have to convince him. I don’t believe it myself. Nobody and nothing would blow up a sun for a breach of hospitality!”

“No, no, Morris. They have to blow up the sun to get to the next system. It’s a serious thing, refusing to build the launching laser! It could wreck the ship!”

“Screw the ship! What about a whole planet?”

“You’re just not looking at it right…”

“Hold it. Your ship is a trading ship, isn’t it? What kind of idiots would the Monks be, to exterminate one market just to get on to the next?”

“If we can’t build a launching laser, we aren’t a market.”

“But we might be a market on the next circuit!”

“What next circuit? You don’t seem to grasp the size of the Monks’ marketplace. The communications gap between Center and the nearest Monk colony is about…” I stopped to transpose. “…sixty- four thousand years! By the time a ship finishes one circuit, most of the worlds she’s visited have already forgotten her. And then what? The colony world that built her may have failed, or refitted the spaceport to service a different style of ship, or reverted to animal; even Monks do that. She’d have to go on to the next system for refitting.

“When you trade among the stars, there is no repeat business.”

“Oh,” said Morris.

Louise had gotten the women back to work. With a corner of my mind I heard their giggling discussion as to