The Fourth Profession Read online

  “I've thought of something. I was one of the last customers out last night. I don't think you cleaned up.”

  “I was feeling peculiar. We cleaned up a little, I think.”

  “Did you empty the wastebaskets?”

  “We don't usually. There's a guy who comes in in the morning and mops the floors and empties the wastebaskets and so forth. The trouble is, he's been home with the flu the last couple of days. Louise and I have been going early.”

  “Good. Get dressed, Frazer. We'll go down to the Long Spoon and count the pieces of Monk cellophane in the wastebaskets. They shouldn't be too hard to identify. They'll tell us how many pills you took.”

  * * * *

  I noticed it while I was dressing. Morris's attitude had changed subtly. He had become proprietary. He tended to stand closer to me, as if someone might try to steal me, or as if I might try to steal away.

  Imagination, maybe. But I began to wish I didn't know so much about Monks.

  I stopped to empty the percolator before leaving. Habit. Every afternoon I put the percolator in the dishwasher before I leave. When I come home at three A.M. it's ready to load.

  I poured out the dead coffee, took the machine apart, and stared.

  The grounds in the top were fresh coffee, barely damp from steam. They hadn't been used yet.

  * * * *

  There was another Secret Service man outside my door, a tall Midwesterner with a toothy grin. His name was George Littleton. He spoke not a word after Bill Morris introduced us, probably because I looked like I'd bite him.

  I would have. My balance nagged me like a sore tooth. I couldn't forget it for an instant.

  Going down in the elevator, I could feel the universe shifting around me. There seemed to be a four-dimensional map in my head, with me in the center and the rest of the universe traveling around me at various changing velocities.

  The car we used was a Lincoln Continental. George drove. My map became three times as active, recording every touch of brake and accelerator.

  “We're putting you on salary,” said Morris, “if that's agreeable. You know more about Monks than any living man. We'll class you as a consultant and pay you a thousand dollars a day to put down all you remember about Monks.”

  “I'd want the right to quit whenever I think I'm mined out.”

  “That seems all right,” said Morris. He was lying. They would keep me just as long as they felt like it. But there wasn't a thing I could do about it at the moment.

  I didn't even know what made me so sure.

  So I asked, “What about Louise?”

  “She spent most of her time waiting on tables, as I remember. She won't know much. We'll pay her a thousand a day for a couple of days. Anyway, for today, whether she knows anything or not.”

  “Okay,” I said, and tried to settle back.

  “You're the valuable one, Frazer. You've been fantastically lucky. That Monk language pill is going to give us a terrific advantage whenever we deal with Monks. They'll have to learn about us. We'll know about them already. Frazer, what does a Monk look like under the cowl and robe?”

  “Not human,” I said. “They only stand upright to make us feel at ease. And there's a swelling along one side that looks like equipment under the robe, but it isn't. It's part of the digestive system. And the head is as big as a basketball, but it's half hollow.”

  “They're natural quadrupeds?”

  “Yah. Four-footed, but climbers. The animal they evolved from lives in forests of like giant dandelions. They can throw rocks with any foot. They're still around on Center; that's the home planet. You're not writing this down.”

  “There's a tape recorder going.”

  “Really?” I'd been kidding.

  “You'd better believe it. We can use anything you happen to remember. We still don't even know how your Monk got out here to California.”

  My Monk, forsooth.

  “They briefed me pretty quickly yesterday. Did I tell you? I was visiting my parents in Carmel when my supervisor called me yesterday morning. Ten hours later I knew just about everything anyone knows about Monks. Except you, Frazer.

  “Up until yesterday we thought that every Monk on Earth was either in the United Nations Building or aboard the Monk ground-to-orbit ship.

  “We've been in that ship, Frazer. Several men have been through it, all trained astronauts wearing lunar exploration suits. Six Monks landed on Earth—unless more were hiding somewhere aboard. Can you think of any reason why they should do that?”

  “No.”

  “Neither can anyone else. And there are six Monks accounted for this morning. All in New York. Your Monk went home last night.”

  That jarred me. “How?”

  “We don't know. We're checking plane flights, silly as that sounds. Wouldn't you think a stewardess would notice a Monk on her flight? Wouldn't you think she'd go to the newspapers?”

  “Sure.”

  “We're also checking flying saucer sightings.”

  I laughed. But by now that sounded logical.

  “If that doesn't pan out, we'll be seriously considering teleportation. Would you...”

  “That's it,” I said without surprise. It had come the way a memory comes, from the back of my mind, as if it had always been there. “He gave me a teleportation pill. That's why I've got absolute direction. To teleport I've got to know where in the universe I am.”

  Morris got bug-eyed. “You can teleport?”

  “Not from a speeding car,” I said with reflexive fear. “That's death. I'd keep the velocity.”

  “Oh.” He was edging away as if I had sprouted horns.

  More memory floated up, and I said, “Humans can't teleport anyway. That pill was for another market.”

  Morris relaxed. “You might have said that right away.”

  “I only just remembered.”

  “Why did you take it, if it's for aliens?”

  “Probably for the location talent. I don't remember. I used to get lost pretty easily. I never will again. Morris, I'd be safer on a high wire than you'd be crossing a street with the Walk sign.”

  “Could that have been your ‘something unusual'?”

  “Maybe,” I said. At the same time I was somehow sure that it wasn't.

  * * * *

  Louise was in the dirt parking lot next to the Long Spoon. She was getting out of her Mustang when we pulled up. She waved an arm like a semaphore and walked briskly toward us, already talking. “Alien creatures in the Long Spoon, forsooth!” I'd taught her that word. “Ed, I keep telling you the customers aren't human. Hello, are you Mr. Morris? I remember you. You were in last night. You had four drinks. All night.”

  Morris smiled. “Yes, but I tipped big. Call me Bill, okay?”

  Louise Schu was a cheerful blonde, by choice, not birth. She'd been working in the Long Spoon for five years now. A few of my regulars knew my name; but they all knew hers.

  Louise's deadliest enemy was the extra twenty pounds she carried as padding. She had been dieting for some decades. Two years back she had gotten serious about it and stopped cheating. She was mean for the next several months. But, clawing and scratching and half starved every second, she had worked her way down to one hundred and twenty-five pounds. She threw a terrific celebration that night and—to hear her tell it afterward—ate her way back to one-forty-five in a single night.

  Padding or not, she'd have made someone a wonderful wife. I'd thought of marrying her myself. But my marriage had been too little fun, and was too recent, and the divorce had hurt too much. And the alimony. The alimony was why I was living in a cracker box, and I couldn't afford to get married again.

  While Louise was opening up, Morris bought a paper from the coin rack.

  The Long Spoon was a mess. Louise and I cleaned off the tables and collected the dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays into waste bins. But the collected glasses were still dirty and the waste bins were still full.

  Morris began spreading new
spaper over an area of floor.

  And I stopped with my hand in my pocket.

  Littleton came out from behind the bar, hefting both of the waste bins. He spilled one out onto the newspaper, then the other. He and Morris began spreading the trash apart.

  My fingertips were brushing a scrap of Monk cellophane.

  I'd worn these pants last night, under the apron.

  Some impulse kept me from yelling out. I brought my hand out of my pocket, empty. Louise had gone to help the others sift the trash with their fingers. I joined them.

  Presently Morris said, “Four. I hope that's all. We'll search the bar too.”

  And I thought: Five.

  And I thought: I learned five new professions last night. What were the odds that I'll want to hide at least one of them?

  If my judgment was bad enough to make me take a teleport pill intended for something with too many eyes, what else might I have swallowed last night?

  I might be an advertising man, or a superbly trained thief, or a Palace Executioner skilled in the ways of torture. Or I might have asked for something really unpleasant, like the profession followed by Hitler or Alexander the Great.

  “Nothing here,” Morris said from behind the bar. Louise shrugged agreement. Morris handed the four scraps to Littleton and said, “Run these out to Douglass. Call us from there.

  “We'll put them through chemical analysis,” he said to Louise and me. “One of them may be real cellophane off a piece of candy. Or we might have missed one or two. For the moment, let's assume there were four.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Does it sound right, Frazer? Should it be three, or five?”

  “I don't know.” As far as memory went, I really didn't.

  “Four, then. We've identified two. One was a course in teleportation for aliens. The other was a language course. Right?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “What else did he give you?”

  I could feel the memories floating back there, but all scrambled together. I shook my head.

  Morris looked frustrated.

  “Excuse me,” said Louise. “Do you drink on duty?”

  “Yes,” Morris said without hesitation.

  And Louise and I weren't on duty. Louise mixed us three gin-and-tonics and brought them to us at one of the padded booths.

  Morris had opened a flattish briefcase that turned out to be part tape recorder. He said, “We won't lose anything now. Louise, let's talk about last night.”

  “I hope I can help.”

  “Just what happened in here after Ed took his first pill?”

  “Mmm.” Louise looked at me askance. “I don't know when he took that first pill. About one A.M. I noticed that he was acting strange. He was slow on orders. He got drinks wrong.

  “I remembered that he had done that for awhile last fall, when he got his divorce...”

  I felt my face go stiff. That was unexpected pain, that memory. I am far from being my own best customer; but there had been a long lost weekend about a year ago. Louise had talked me out of trying to drink and bartend too. So I had gone drinking. When it was out of my system I had gone back to tending bar.

  She was saying, “Last night I thought it might be the same problem. I covered for him, said the orders twice when I had to, watched him make the drinks so he'd get them right.

  “He was spending most of his time talking to the Monk. But Ed was talking English, and the Monk was making whispery noises in his throat. Remember last week, when they put the Monk speech on television? It sounded like that.

  “I saw Ed take a pill from the Monk and swallow it with a glass of water.”

  She turned to me, touched my arm. “I thought you were crazy. I tried to stop you.”

  “I don't remember.”

  “The place was practically empty by then. Well, you laughed at me and said that the pill would teach you not to get lost! I didn't believe it. But the Monk turned on his translator gadget and said the same thing.”

  “I wish you'd stopped me,” I said.

  She looked disturbed. “I wish you hadn't said that. I took a pill myself.”

  I started choking. She'd caught me with a mouthful of gin and tonic.

  Louise pounded my back and saved my life, maybe. She said, “You don't remember that?”

  “I don't remember much of anything coherent after I took the first pill.”

  “Really? You didn't seem loaded. Not after I'd watched you awhile.”

  Morris cut in. “Louise, the pill you took. What did the Monk say it would do?”

  “He never did. We were talking about me.” She stopped to think. Then, baffled and amused at herself, she said, “I don't know how it happened. All of a sudden I was telling the story of my young life. To a Monk. I had the idea he was sympathetic.”

  “The Monk?”

  “Yes, the Monk. And at some point he picked out a pill and gave it to me. He said it would help me. I believed him. I don't know why, but I believed him, and I took it.”

  “Any symptoms? Have you learned anything new this morning?”

  She shook her head, baffled and a little truculent now. Taking that pill must have seemed sheer insanity in the cold gray light of afternoon.

  “All right,” said Morris. “Frazer, you took three pills. We knew what two of them were. Louise, you took one, and we have no idea what it taught you.” He closed his eyes a moment, then looked at me. “Frazer, if you can't remember what you took, can you remember rejecting anything? Did the Monk offer you anything...” He saw my face and cut it off.

  Because that had jarred something...

  The Monk had been speaking his own language, in that alien whisper that doesn't need to be more than a whisper because the basic sounds of the Monk language are so unambiguous, so easily distinguished, even to a human ear. This teaches proper swimming technique. A—can reach speeds of sixteen to twenty-four—per—using these strokes. The course also teaches proper exercises....

  I said, “I turned down a swimming course for intelligent fish.”

  Louise giggled. Morris said, “You're kidding.”

  “I'm not. And there was something else.” That swamped-in-data effect wasn't as bad as it had been at noon. Bits of data must be reaching cubbyholes in my head, linking up, finding their places.

  “I was asking about the shapes of aliens. Not about Monks, because that's bad manners, especially from a race that hasn't yet proven its sentience. I wanted to know about other aliens. So the Monk offered me three courses in unarmed combat techniques. Each one involved extensive knowledge of basic anatomy.”

  “You didn't take them?”

  “No. What for? Like, one was a pill to tell me how to kill an armed intelligent worm, but only if I was an unarmed intelligent worm. I wasn't that confused.”

  “Frazer, there are men who would give an arm and a leg for any of those pills you turned down.”

  “Sure. A couple of hours ago you were telling me I was crazy to swallow an alien's education pill.”

  “Sorry,” said Morris.

  “You were the one who said they should have driven me out of my mind. Maybe they did,” I said, because my hypersensitive sense of balance was still bothering the hell out of me.

  But Morris's reaction bothered me worse. Frazer could start gibbering any minute. Better pump him for all he's worth while I've got the chance.

  No, his face showed none of that. Was I going paranoid?

  “Tell me more about the pills,” Morris said. “It sounds like there's a lot of delayed reaction involved. How long do we have to wait before we know we've got it all?”

  “He did say something...” I groped for it, and presently it came.

  It works like a memory, the Monk had said. He'd turned off his translator and was speaking his own language, now that I could understand him. The sound of his translator had been bothering him. That was why he'd given me the pill.

  But the whisper of his voice was low, and the lan
guage was new, and I'd had to listen carefully to get it all. I remembered it clearly.

  The information in the pills will become part of your memory. You will not know all that you have learned until you need it. Then it will surface. Memory works by association, he'd said.

  And: There are things that cannot be taught by teachers. Always there is the difference between knowledge from school and knowledge from doing the work itself.

  “Theory and practice,” I told Morris. “I know just what he meant. There's not a bartending course in the country that will teach you to leave the sugar out of an Old Fashioned during rush hour.”

  “What did you say?”

  “It depends on the bar, of course. No posh bar would let itself get that crowded. But in an ordinary bar, anyone who orders a complicated drink during rush hour deserves what he gets. He's slowing the bartender down when it's crucial, when every second is money. So you leave the sugar out of an Old Fashioned. It's too much money.”

  “The guy won't come back.”

  “So what? He's not one of your regulars. He'd have better sense if he were.”

  I had to grin. Morris was shocked and horrified. I'd shown him a brand new sin. I said, “It's something every bartender ought to know about. Mind you, a bartending school is a trade school. They're teaching you to survive as a bartender. But the recipe calls for sugar, so at school you put in the sugar or you get ticked off.”

  Morris shook his head, tight-lipped. He said, “Then the Monk was warning you that you were getting theory, not practice.”

  “Just the opposite. Look at it this way, Morris...”

  “Bill.”

  “Listen, Bill. The teleport pill can't make a human nervous system capable of teleportation. Even my incredible balance, and it is incredible, won't give me the muscles to do ten quick backflips. But I do know what it feels like to teleport. That's what the Monk was warning me about. The pills give field training. What you have to watch out for are the reflexes. Because the pills don't change you physically.”

  “I hope you haven't become a trained assassin.”

  One must be wary of newly learned reflexes, the Monk had said.

  Morris said, “Louise, we still don't know what kind of an education you got last night. Any ideas?”