Larry Niven - The Fourth Profession

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.