“What?” I didn’t understand him.
“Why did the Monk ship have to dive so deep into the solar system?”
“Oh, that. That’s the solar wind. You get the same problem around any yellow sun. With a light-sail you can get push from the solar wind as well as from light pressure. The trouble is, the solar wind is just stripped hydrogen atoms. Light bounces from a light-sail, but the solar wind just hits the sail and sticks.”
Morris nodded thoughtfully. Louise was blinking as if she had double vision.
“You can’t tack against it. Tilting the sail does from nothing. To use the solar wind for braking you have to bore straight in, straight toward the sun,” I explained.
Morris nodded. I saw that his eyes were as glassy as Louise’s eyes.
“Oh,” I said. “Damn, I must be stupid today. Morris, that was the third pill.”
“Right,” said Morris, still nodding, still glassy-eyed. “That must have been the unusual, really unusual profession you wanted. Crewman on an interstellar liner. Jesus.”
And he should have sounded disgusted, but he sounded envious.
His elbows were on the table, his chin rested on his fists. It is a position that distorts the mouth, making one’s expression unreadable. But I didn’t like what I could read in Morris’s eyes.
There was nothing left of the square and honest man I had let into my apartment at noon. Morris was a patriot now, and an altruist, and a fanatic. He must have the stars for his nation and for all mankind. Nothing must stand in his way. Least of all, me.
Reading minds again, Frazer? Maybe being captain of an interstellar liner involves having to read the minds of the crew, to be able to put down a mutiny before some idiot can take a heat point to the mpff glip habbabub, or however a Monk would say it; it has something to do with straining ketones out of the breathing-air.
My urge to acrobatics had probably come out of the same pill. Free fall training. There was a lot in that pill.
This was the profession I should have hidden. Not the Palace Torturer, who was useless to a government grown too subtle to need such techniques; but the captain of an interstellar liner, a prize too valuable to men who have not yet reached beyond the Moon.
And I had been the last to know it. Too late, Frazer.
“Captain,” I said. “Not crew.”
“Pity. A crewman would know more about how to put a ship together. Frazer, how big a crew are you equipped to rule?”
“Eight and five.”
“Thirteen?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you say eight and five?”
The question caught me off balance. Hadn’t I… ? Oh. “That’s the Monk numbering system. Base eight. Actually, base two, but they group the digits in threes to get base eight.”
“Base two. Computer numbers.”
“Are they?”
“Yes. Frazer, they must have been using computers for a long time. Eons.”
“All right.” I noticed for the first time that Louise had collected our glasses and gone to make fresh drinks. Good, I could use one. She’d left her own, which was half full. Knowing she wouldn’t mind, I took a swallow.
It was soda water.
With a lime in it. It looked just like our gin and tonics. She must be back on the diet. Except that when Louise resumed a diet, she generally announced it to all and sundry…
Morris was still on the subject. “You use a crew of thirteen. Are they Monk or human or something else?”
“Monk,” I said without having to think.
“Too bad. Are there humans in space?”
“No. A lot of two-feet, but none of them are like any of the others, and none of them are quite like us.”
Louise came back with our drinks, gave them to us, and sat down without a word.
“You said earlier that a species that can’t develop space flight is no better than animals.”
“According to the Monks,” I reminded him.
“Right. It seems a little extreme even to me, but let it pass. What about a race that develops spaceflight and then loses it?”
“It happens. There are lots of ways a space-going species can revert to animal. Atomic war. Or they just can’t live with the complexity. Or they breed themselves out of food, and the world famine wrecks everything. Or waste products from the new machinery ruins the ecology.”
“’Revert to animal.’ All right. What about nations? Suppose you have two nations next door, same species, but one has space flight…”
“Right. Good point, too. Morris, there are just two countries on Earth that can deal with the Monks without dealing through the United Nations. Us, and Russia. If Zimbabwe or Brazil or France tried it, they’d be publicly humiliated.”
“That could cause an international incident.” Morris’s jaw tightened heroically. “We’ve got ways of passing the warning along so that it won’t happen.”
Louise said, “There are some countries I wouldn’t mind seeing it happen to.”
Morris got a thoughtful look—and I wondered if everybody would get the warning.
The cleaning team arrived then. We’d used Tip Top Cleaners before, but these four dark women were not our usual team. We had to explain in detail just what we wanted done. Not their fault. They usually clean private homes, not bars.
Morris spent some time calling New York. He must have been using a credit card; he couldn’t have that much change.
“That may have stopped a minor war,” he said when he got back. And we returned to the padded booth. But Louise stayed to direct the cleaning team.
The four dark women moved about us with pails and spray bottles and dry rags, chattering in Spanish, leaving shiny surfaces wherever they went. And Morris resumed his inquisition.
“What powers the ground-to-orbit ship?”
“A slow H-bomb going off in a magnetic bottle.”
“Fusion?”
“Yah. The attitude jets on the main starship use fusion power too. They all link to one magnetic bottle. I don’t know just how it works. You get fuel from water or ice.”
“Fusion. But don’t you have to separate out the deuterium and tritium?”
“What for? You melt the ice, run a current through the water, and you’ve got hydrogen.”
“Wow,” Morris said softly. “Wow.”
“The launching laser works the same way,” I remembered. What else did I need to remember about launching lasers? Something dreadfully important.
“Wow. Frazer, if we could build the Monks their launching laser, we could use the same techniques to build other fusion plants. Couldn’t we?”
“Sure.” I was in dread. My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding. I almost knew why. “What do you mean, if?”
“And they’d pay us to do it! It’s a damn shame. We just don’t have the hardware.”
“What do you mean? We’ve got to build the launching laser!”
Morris gaped. “Frazer, what’s wrong with you?”
The terror had a name now. “My God! What have you told the Monks? Morris, listen to me. You’ve got to see to it that the Security Council promises to build the Monks’ launching laser.”
“Who do you think I am, the Secretary-General? We can’t build it anyway, not with just Saturn launching configurations.” Morris thought I’d gone mad at last. He wanted to back away through the wall of the booth.
“They’ll do it when you tell them what’s at stake. And we can build a launching laser, if the whole world goes in on it. Morris, look at the good it can do! Free power from seawater! And light-sails work fine within a system.”
“Sure, it’s a lovely picture. We could sail out to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We could smelt the asteroids for their metal ores, using laser power…” His eyes had momentarily taken on a vague, dreamy look. Now they snapped back to what Morris thought of as reality. “It’s the kind of thing I daydreamed about when I was a kid. Someday we’ll do it. Today—we just aren’t ready.”