Larry Niven - The Fourth Profession

“You have spoken of rights,” I said. In Monk. “Let us discuss rights.” The whispery words buzzed oddly in my throat; they tickled; but my ears told me they were coming out right.

The Monk was startled. “I was told that you had been taught our speech, but not that you could speak it.”

“Were you told what pill I was given?”

“A language pill. I had not known that he carried one in his case.”

“He did not finish his tasting of the alcohols of Earth. Will you have another drink?”

I felt him guess at my motives, and guess wrong. He thought I was taking advantage of his curiosity to sell him my wares for cash. And what had he to fear from me? Whatever mental powers I had learned from Monk pills, they would be gone in two hours.

I set a shot glass before him. I asked him, “How do you feel about launching lasers?”

The discussion became highly technical. “Let us take a special case,” I remember saying. “Suppose a culture has been capable of starflight for some sixty-fours of years—or even for eights of times that long. Then an asteroid slams into a major ocean, precipitates an ice age…” It had happened once, and well he knew it. “A natural disaster can’t spell the difference between sentience and non-sentience, can it? Not unless it affects brain tissue directly.”

At first it was his curiosity that held him. Later it was me. He couldn’t tear himself loose. He never thought of it. He was a sailship crewman, and he was cold sober, and he argued with the frenzy of an evangelist.

“Then take the general case,” I remember saying. “A world that cannot build a launching laser is a world of animals, yes? And Monks themselves can revert to animal.”

Yes, he knew that.

“Then build your own launching laser. If you cannot, then your ship is captained and crewed by animals.”

At the end I was doing all the talking. All in the whispery Monk tongue, whose sounds are so easily distinguished that even I, warping a human throat to my will, need only whisper. It was a good thing. I seemed to have been eating used razor blades.

Morris guessed right. He did not interfere. I could tell him nothing, not if I had had the power, not by word or gesture or mental contact. The Monk would read Morris’s mind. But Morris sat quietly drinking his tonic-and-tonics, waiting for something to happen, while I argued in whispers with the Monk.

“But the ship!” he whispered. “What of the ship?” His agony was mine; for the ship must be protected…

At one fifteen the Monk had progressed halfway across the bottom row of bottles. He slid from the stool, paid for his drinks in one-dollar bills, and drifted to the door and out.

All he needed was a scythe and hour glass, I thought, watching him go. And what I needed was a long morning’s sleep. And I wasn’t going to get it.

“Be sure nobody stops him,” I told Morris.

“Nobody will. But he’ll be followed.”

“No point. The Garment to Wear Among Strangers is a lot of things. It’s bracing; it helps the Monk hold human shape. It’s a shield and an air filter. And it’s a cloak of invisibility.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll tell you about it if I have time. That’s how he got out here, probably. One of the crewmen divided, and then one stayed and one walked. He had two weeks.”

Morris stood up and tore off his sport jacket. His shirt was wet through. He said, “What about a stomach pump for you?”

“No good. Most of the RNA-enzyme must be in my blood by now. You’ll be better off if you spend your time getting down everything I can remember about Monks, while I can remember anything at all. It’ll be nine or ten hours before everything goes.” Which was a flat-out lie, of course.

“Okay. Let me get the dictaphone going again.”

“It’ll cost you money.”

Morris suddenly had a hard look. “Oh? How much?”

I’d thought about that most carefully. “One hundred thousand dollars. And if you’re thinking of arguing me down, remember whose time we’re wasting.”

“I wasn’t.” He was, but he’d changed his mind.

“Good. We’ll transfer the money now, while I can still read your mind.”

“All right.”

He offered to make room for me in the booth, but I declined. The glass wouldn’t stop me from reading Morris’s soul.

He came out silent; for there was something he was afraid to know. Then: “What about the Monks? What about our sun?”

“I talked that one around. That’s why I don’t want him molested. He’ll convince others.”

“Talked him around? How?”

“It wasn’t easy.” And suddenly I would have given my soul to sleep. “The profession pill put it in his genes; he must protect the ship. It’s in me too. I know how strong it is.”

“Then…”

“Don’t be an ass, Morris. The ship’s perfectly safe where it is, in orbit around the Moon. A sailship’s only in danger when it’s between stars, far from help.”

“Oh.”

“Not that that convinced him. It only let him consider the ethics of the situation rationally.”

“Suppose someone else unconvinces him?”

“It could happen. That’s why we’d better build the launching laser.”

The next twelve hours were rough.

In the first four hours I gave them everything I could remember about the Monk teleport system, Monk technology, Monk family life, Monk ethics, relations between Monks and aliens, details on aliens, directions of various inhabited and uninhabited worlds—everything. Morris and the Secret Service men who had been posing as customers sat around me like boys around a campfire, listening to stories. But Louise made us fresh coffee, then went to sleep in one of the booths.

Then I let myself slack off.

By nine in the morning I was flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, dictating a random useless bit of information every thirty seconds or so. By eleven there was a great black pool of lukewarm coffee inside me, my eyes ached marginally more than the rest of me, and I was producing nothing.

I was convincing, and I knew it.

But Morris wouldn’t let it go at that. He believed me. I felt him believing me. But he was going through the routine anyway, because it couldn’t hurt. If I was useless to him, if I knew nothing, there was no point in playing soft. What could he lose?

He accused me of making everything up. He accused me of faking the pills. He made me sit up, and damn near caught me that way. He used obscure words and phrases from mathematics and Latin and fan vocabulary. He got nowhere. There wasn’t any way to trick me.

At two in the afternoon he had someone drive me home.

Every muscle in me ached; but I had to fight to maintain my exhausted slump. Else my hindbrain would have lifted me onto my toes and poised me against a possible shift in artificial gravity. The strain was double, and it hurt. It had hurt for hours, sitting with my shoulders hunched and my head hanging. But now—if Morris saw me walking like a trampoline performer…

Morris’s man got me to my room and left me.

I woke in darkness and sensed someone in my room. Someone who meant me no harm. In fact, Louise. I went back to sleep.

I woke again at dawn. Louise was in my easy chair, her feet propped on a corner of the bed. Her eyes were open. She said, “Breakfast?”

I said, “Yah. There isn’t much in the fridge.”

“I brought things.”

“All right.” I closed my eyes.

Five minutes later I decided I was all slept out. I got up and went to see how she was doing.

There was bacon frying, there was bread already buttered for toasting in the Toast-R-Oven, there was a pan hot for eggs, and the eggs scrambled in a bowl. Louise was filling the percolator.