Larry Niven - The Fourth Profession

“She may have had a big breakfast.”

“Yah.” I knew she hadn’t. She’d eaten diet food. For years she’d kept a growing collection of diet food, but she’d never actively tried to survive on it before. But how could I make such a claim to Morris? I’d never even been in Louise’s apartment.

“Anything else?”

“She’s gotten good at nonverbal communication. It’s a very womanly skill. She can say things just by the tone of her voice or the way she leans on an elbow or…”

“But if mind reading is one of your new skills…”

“Damn. Well—it used to make Louise nervous if someone touched her. And she never touched anyone else.” I felt myself flushing. I don’t talk easily of personal things.

Morris radiated skepticism. “It all sounds very subjective. In fact, it sounds like you’re making yourself believe it. Frazer, why would Louise Schu want such a capsule course? Because you haven’t described a housewife at all. You’ve described a woman looking to persuade a man to marry her.” He saw my face change. “What’s wrong?”

“Ten minutes ago we decided to get married.”

“Congratulations,” Morris said, and waited.

“All right, you win. Until ten minutes ago we’d never even kissed. I’d never made a pass, or vice versa. No, damn it, I don’t believe it! I know she loves me; I ought to!”

“I don’t deny it,” Morris said quietly. “That would be why she took the pill. It must have been strong stuff, too, Frazer. We looked up some of your history. You’re marriage shy.”

It was true enough. I said, “If she loved me before, I never knew it. I wonder how a Monk could know.”

“How would he know about such a skill at all? Why would he have the pill on him? Come on, Frazer, you’re the Monk expert!”

“He’d have to learn from human beings. Maybe by interviews, maybe by—well, the Monks can map an alien memory into a computer space, then interview that. They may have done that with some of your diplomats.”

“Oh, great .”

Louise appeared with an order. I made the drinks and set them on her tray. She winked and walked away, swaying deliciously, followed by many eyes.

“Morris. Most of your diplomats, the ones who deal with the Monks, they’re men, aren’t they?”

“Most of them. Why?”

“Just a thought.”

It was a difficult thought, hard to grasp. It was only that the changes in Louise had been all to the good from a man’s point of view. The Monks must have interviewed many men. Well, why not? It would make her more valuable to the man she caught—or to the lucky man who caught her…

“Got it.”

Morris looked up quickly. “Well?”

“Falling in love with me was part of her pill learning. A set . They made a guinea pig of her.”

“I wondered what she saw in you.” Morris’s grin faded. “You’re serious. Frazer, that still doesn’t answer…”

“It’s a slave indoctrination course. It makes a woman love the first man she sees, permanently, and it trains her to be valuable to him. The Monks were going to make them in quantity and sell them to men.”

Morris thought it over. Presently he said, “That’s awful. What’ll we do?”

“Well, we can’t tell her she’s been made into a domestic slave! Morris, I’ll try to get a memory eraser pill. If I can’t—I’ll marry her, I guess. Don’t look at me that way,” I said, low and fierce. “I didn’t do it. And I can’t desert her now!”

“I know. It’s just—oh, put gin in the next one.”

“Don’t look now,” I said.

In the glass of the door there was darkness and motion. A hooded shape, shadow-on-shadow, supernatural, a human silhouette twisted out of true…

He came gliding in with the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. Nothing was to be seen of him but his flowing gray robe, the darkness in the hood and the shadow where his robe parted. The real estate men broke off their talk of land and stared, popeyed, and one of them reached for his heart attack pills.

The Monk drifted toward me like a vengeful ghost. He took the stool we had saved him at one end of the bar.

It wasn’t the same Monk.

In all respects he matched the Monk who had been here the last two nights. Louise and Morris must have been fooled completely. But it wasn’t the same Monk.

“Good evening,” I said.

He gave an equivalent greeting in the whispered Monk language. His translator was half on, translating my words into a Monk whisper, but letting his own speech alone. He said, “I believe we should begin with the Rock and Rye.”

I turned to pour. The small of my back itched with danger.

When I turned back with the shot glass in my hand, he was holding a fist-sized tool that must have come out of his robe. It looked like a flattened softball, grooved deeply for five Monk claws, with two parallel tubes poking out in my direction. Lenses glinted in the ends of the tubes.

“Do you know this tool? It is a…” and he named it.

I knew the name. It was a beaming tool, a multi-frequency laser. One tube locked on the target; thereafter the aim was maintained by tiny flywheels in the body of the device.

Morris had seen it. He didn’t recognize it, and he didn’t know what to do about it, and I had no way to signal him.

“I know that tool,” I confirmed.

“You must take two of these pills.” The Monk had them ready in another hand. They were small and pink and triangular. He said, “I must be convinced that you have taken them. Otherwise you must take more than two. An overdose may affect your natural memory. Come closer.”

I came closer. Every man and woman in the Long Spoon was staring at us, and each was afraid to move. Any kind of signal would have trained four guns on the Monk. And I’d be fried dead by a narrow beam of X-rays.

The Monk reached out with a third hand/foot/claw. He closed the fingers/toes around my throat, not hard enough to strangle me, but hard enough.

Morris was cursing silently, helplessly. I could feel the agony in his soul.

The Monk whispered, “You know of the trigger mechanism. If my hand should relax now, the device will fire. Its target is yourself. If you can prevent four government agents from attacking me, you should do so.”

I made a palm-up gesture toward Morris. Don’t do anything. He caught it and nodded very slightly without looking at me.

“You can read minds,” I said.

“Yes,” said the Monk—and I knew instantly what he was hiding. He could read everybody’s mind, except mine.

So much for Morris’s little games of deceit. But the Monk could not read my mind, and I could see into his own soul.

And, reading his alien soul, I saw that I would die if I did not swallow the pills.

I placed the pink pills on my tongue, one at a time, and swallowed them dry. They went down hard. Morris watched it happen and could do nothing. The Monk felt them going down my throat, little lumps moving past his finger.

And when the pills had passed across the Monk’s finger, I worked a miracle.

“Your pill-induced memories and skills will be gone within two hours,” said the Monk. He picked up the shot glass of Rock and Rye and moved it into his hood. When it reappeared it was half empty.

I asked, “Why have you robbed me of my knowledge?”

“You never paid for it.”

“But it was freely given.”

“It was given by one who had no right,” said the Monk. He was thinking about leaving. I had to do something. I knew now, because I had reasoned it out with great care, that the Monk was involved in an evil enterprise. But he must stay to hear me or I could not convince him.

Even then, it wouldn’t be easy. He was a Monk crewman. His ethical attitudes had entered his brain through an RNA pill, along with his professional skills.