by Larry Niven
“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 whether Morris would fight, whether he could whip me, etc.
Morris asked, “How does it work? How do you make a sun go nova?”
“There's a gadget the size of a locomotive fixed to the—main supporting strut, I guess you'd call it. It points straight astern, and it can swing sixteen degrees or so in any direction. You turn it on when you make departure orbit. The math man works out the intensity. You beam the sun for the first year or so, and when it blows, you're just far enough away to use the push without getting burned.”
“But how does it work?”
“You just turn it on. The power comes from the fusion tube that feeds the attitude jet system ... Oh, you want to know why does it make a sun explode. I don't know that. Why should I?”
“Big as a locomotive. And it makes suns explode.” Morris sounded slightly hysterical. Poor bastard, he was beginning to believe me. The shock had hardly touched me, because truly I had known it since last night.
He said, “When we first saw the Monk light-sail, it was just to one side of a recent nova in Sagittarius. By any wild chance, was that star a market that didn't work out?”
“I haven't the vaguest idea.”
That convinced him. If I'd been making it up, I'd have said yes. Morris stood up and walked away without a word. He stopped to pick up a bar towel on his way to the phone booth.
I went behind the bar to make a fresh drink. Cutty over ice, splash of soda; I wanted to taste the burning power of it.
Through the glass door I saw Louise getting out of her car with her arms full of packages. I poured soda over ice, squeezed a lime in it, and had it ready when she walked in.
She dumped the load on the bar top. “Irish coffee makings,” she said. I held the glass out to her and she said, “No thanks, Ed. One's enough.”
“Taste it.”
She gave me a funny look, but she tasted what I handed her. “Soda water. Well, you caught me.”
“Back on the diet?”
“Yes.”
“You never said yes to that question in your life. Don't you want to tell me all the details?”
She sipped at her drink. “Details of someone else's diet are boring. I should have known that a long time ago. To work! You'll notice we've only got twenty minutes.”
I opened one of her paper bags and fed the refrigerator with cartons of whipping cream. Another bag held ground coffee. The flat, square package had to be a pizza.
“Pizza. Some diet,” I said.
She was setting out the percolators. “That's for you and Bill.”
I tore open the paper and bit into a pie-shaped slice. It was a deluxe, covered with everything from anchovies to salami. It was crisp and hot, and I was starving.
I snatched bites as I worked.
There aren't many bars that will keep the makings for Irish coffee handy. It's too much trouble. You need massive quantities of whipping cream and ground coffee, a refrigerator, a blender, a supply of those glass figure-eight-shaped coffee perkers, a line of hot plates, and—most expensive of all—room behind the bar for all of that. You learn to keep a line of glasses ready, which means putting the sugar in them at spare moments to save time later. Those spare moments are your smoking time, so you give that up. You learn not to wave your arms around because there are hot things that can burn you. You learn to half-whip the cream, a mere spin of the blender,
because you have to do it over and over again, and if you overdo it the cream turns to butter.
There aren't many bars that will go to all that trouble. That's why it pays off. Your average Irish coffee addict will drive an extra twenty minutes to reach the Long Spoon. He'll also down the drink in about five minutes, because otherwise it gets cold. He'd have spent half an hour over a Scotch and soda.
While we were getting the coffee ready, I found time to ask, “Have you remembered anything?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“I don't mean I know what was in the pill. Just—I can do things I couldn't do before. I think my way of thinking has changed. Ed, I'm worried.”
“Worried?”
She got the words out in a rush. “It feels like I've been falling in love with you for a very long time. But I haven't. Why should I feel that way so suddenly?”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I'd had thoughts like this—and put them out of my mind, and when they came back I did it again. I couldn't afford to fall in love. It would cost too much. It would hurt too much.
“It's been like this all day. It scares me, Ed. Suppose I feel like this about every man? What if the Monk thought I'd make a good call girl?”
I laughed much harder than I should have. Louise was getting really angry before I was able to stop.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you in love with Bill Morris too?”
“No, of course not!”
“Then forget the call girl bit. He's got more money than I do. A call girl would love him more, if she loved anyone, which she wouldn't, because call girls are generally frigid.”
“How do you know?” she demanded.
“I read it in a magazine.”
Louise began to relax. I began to see how tense she really had been.
“All right,” she said, “but that means I really am in love with you.”
I pushed the crisis away from us. “Why didn't you ever get married?”
“Oh...” She was going to pass it off, but she changed her mind. “Every man I dated wanted to sleep with me. I thought that was wrong, so...”
She looked puzzled. “Why did I think that was wrong?”
“Way you were brought up.”
“Yes, but...” She trailed off.
“How do you feel about it now?”
“Well, I wouldn't sleep with anyone, but if a man was worth dating he might be worth marrying, and if he was worth marrying he'd certainly be worth sleeping with, wouldn't he? And I'd be crazy to marry someone I hadn't slept with, wouldn't I?”
“I did.”
“And look how that turned out! Oh, Ed, I'm sorry. But you did bring it up.”
“Yah,” I said, breathing shallow.
“But I used to feel that way too. Something's changed.”
We hadn't been talking fast. There had been pauses, gaps, and we had worked through them. I had had time to eat three slices of pizza. Louise had had time to wrestle with her conscience, lose, and eat one.
Only she hadn't done it. There was the pizza, staring at her, and she hadn't given it a look or a smell. For Louise, that was unusual.
Half-joking, I said, “Try this as a theory. Years ago you must have sublimated your sex urge into an urge for food. Either that or the rest of us sublimated our appetites into a sex urge, and you didn't.”
“Then the pill un-sublimated me, hmm?” She looked thoughtfully at the pizza. Clearly its lure was gone. “That's what I mean. I didn't used to be able to outstare a pizza.”
“Those olive eyes.”
“Hypnotic, they were.”
“A good call girl should be able to keep herself in shape.” Immediately I regretted saying it. It wasn't funny. “Sorry,” I said.
“It's all right.” She picked up a tray of candles in red glass vases and moved away, depositing the candles on the small square tables. She moved with grace and beauty through the twilight of the Long Spoon, her hips swaying just enough to avoid the sharp corners of tables.
I'd hurt her. But she'd known me long enough; she must know I had foot-in-mouth disease...
I had seen Louise before and known that she was beautiful. But it seemed to me that she had never been beautiful with so little excuse.
She moved back by the same route, lighting the candles as she went. Finally she put the tray down, leaned across the bar and said, “I'm sorry. I can't joke about it when I don't know.”
“Stop worrying, will you? Whatever the Monk fed you, he was trying to help you.”
“I love you.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
“Okay. I love you too.” I use those words so seldom that they clog in my throat, as if I'm lying, even when it's the truth. “Listen, I want to marry you. Don't shake your head. I want to marry you.”
Our voices had dropped to whispers. In a tormented whisper, then, she said, “Not until I find out what I do, what was in the pill. Ed, I can't trust myself until then!”
“Me too,” I said with great reluctance. “But we can't wait. We don't have time.”
“What?”
“That's right, you weren't in earshot. Sometime between three and ten years from now, the Monks may blow up our sun.”
Louise said nothing. Her forehead wrinkled.
“It depends on how much time they spend trading. If we can't build them the launching laser, we can still con them into waiting for awhile. Monk expeditions have waited as long as...”
“Good Lord. You mean it. Is that what you and Bill were fighting over?”
“Yah.”
Louise shuddered. Even in the dimness I saw how pale she had become. And she said a strange thing.
She said, “All right, I'll marry you.”
“Good,” I said. But I was suddenly shaking. Married. Again. Me. Louise stepped up and put her hands on my shoulders, and I kissed her.
I'd been wanting to do that for—five years? She fitted wonderfully into my arms. Her hands closed hard on the muscles of my shoulders, massaging. The tension went out of me, drained away somewhere. Married. Us. At least we could have three to ten years.
“Morris,” I said.
She drew back a little. “He can't hold you. You haven't done anything. Oh, I wish I knew what was in that pill I took! Suppose I'm the trained assassin?”
“Suppose I am? We'll have to be careful of each other.”
“Oh, we know all about you. You're a starship commander, an alien teleport and a translator for Monks.”
“And one thing more. There was a fourth profession. I took four pills last night, not three.”
“Oh? Why didn't you tell Bill?”
“Are you kidding? Dizzy as I was last night, I probably took a course in how to lead a successful revolution. God help me if Morris found that out.”
She smiled. “Do you really think that was what it was?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why did we do it? Why did we swallow those pills? We should have known better.”
“Maybe the Monk took a pill himself. Maybe there's a pill that teaches a Monk how to look trustworthy to a generalized alien.”
“I did trust him,” said Louise. “I remember. He seemed so sympathetic. Would he really blow up our sun?”
“He really would.”
“That fourth pill. Maybe it taught you a way to stop him.”
“Let's see. We know I took a linguistics course, a course in teleportation for Martians, and a course in how to fly a light-sail ship. On that basis ... I probably changed my mind and took a karate course for worms.”
“It wouldn't hurt you, at least. Relax.... Ed, if you remember taking the pills, why don't you remember what was in them?”
“But I don't. I don't remember anything.”
“How do you know you took four, then?”
“Here.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out the scrap of Monk cellophane. And knew immediately that there was something in it. Something hard
and round.
We were staring at it when Morris came back.
“I must have cleverly put it in my pocket,” I told them. “Sometime last night, when I was feeling sneaky enough to steal from a Monk.”
Morris turned the pill like a precious jewel in his fingers. Pale blue it was, marked on one side with a burnt orange triangle. “I don't know whether to get it analyzed or take it myself, now. We need a miracle. Maybe this will tell us—”
“Forget it. I wasn't clever enough to remember how fast a Monk pill deteriorates. The wrapping's torn. That pill has been bad for at least twelve hours.”
Morris said a dirty thing.
“Analyze it,” I said. “You'll find RNA, and you may even be able to tell what the Monks use as a matrix. Most of the memories are probably intact. But don't swallow the damn thing. It'll scramble your brains. All it takes is a few random changes in a tiny percentage of the RNA.”
“We don't have time to send it to Douglass tonight. Can we put it in the freezer?”
“Good. Give it here.”
I dropped the pill in a sandwich-size plastic Baggy, sucked the air out the top, tied the end, and dropped it in the freezer. Vacuum and cold would help preserve the thing. It was something I should have done last night.
“So much for miracles,” Morris said bitterly. “Let's get down to business. We'll have several men outside the place tonight, and a few more in here. You won't know who they are, but go ahead and guess if you like. A lot of your customers will be turned away tonight. They'll be told to watch the newspapers if they want to know why. I hope it won't cost you too much business.”
“It may make our fortune. We'll be famous. Were you maybe doing the same thing last night?”
“Yes. We didn't want the place too crowded. The Monks might not like autograph hounds.”
“So that's why the place was half empty.”
Morris looked at his watch. “Opening time. Are we ready?”
“Take a seat at the bar. And look nonchalant, dammit.”
Louise went to turn on the lights.
Morris took a seat to one side of the middle. One big square hand was closed very tightly on the bar edge. “Another gin and tonic. Weak. After that one, leave out the gin.”