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Louise gasped "What?" and I asked, "You mean a launching laser?"
"Yes, a launching laser! They want us to build it on the Moon. They'd feed our engineers pills to give them the specs and to teach them how to build it. They'd pay off in more pills."
I needed to remember something about launching lasers. And how had I known what to call it?
"They put the proposition to the United Nations," Morris was saying. "In fact, they'll be doing all of their business through the UN, to avoid charges of favoritism, they say, and to spread the knowledge as far as possible."
"But there are countries that don't belong to the UN," Louise objected.
"The Monks know that. They asked if any of ‘those nations had space travel. None of them do, of course. And the Monks lost interest in them."
"Of course," I said, remembering. "A species that can't develop spaceflight is no better than animals."
"Huh?"
"According to a Monk."
Louise said, "But what for? Why would the Monks want a laser ca
"That's a little complicated," said Morris. "Do you both remember when the Monk ship first appeared, two years ago?"
"No," we answered more or less together.
Morris was shaken., "You didn't notice? It was in all the papers. Noted Astronomer Says Alien Spacecraft Approaching Earth. No?"
"No."
"For Christ's sake! I was jumping up and down. It was like when the radio astronomers discovered pulsars, remember? I was just getting out of high school."
"Pulsars?"
"Excuse me," Morris said overpolitely. "My mistake. I tend to think that everybody I meet is a science fiction fan. Pulsars are stars that give off rhythmic pulses of radio energy. The radio astronomers thought at first that they were getting signals from outer space."
Louise said, "You're a science fiction fan?"
"Absolutely. My first gun was a Gyrojet rocket pistol. I bought it because I read Buck Rogers."
I said, "Buck who?" But then I couldn't keep a straight face. Morris raised his eyes to Heaven. No doubt it was there that he found the strength to go on.
"The noted astronomer was Jerome Fi
"What had happened was that several months earlier, Jodrell Bank had found a new star in Sagittarius. That's the direction of the galactic core. Yes, Frazer?"
We were back to last names because I wasn't a science fiction fan. I said, "That's right. The Monks came from the galactic hub." I remembered the blazing night sky of Center. My Monk customer couldn't possibly have seen it in his lifetime. He must have been shown the vision through an education pill, for patriotic reasons, like kids are taught what the Star Spangled Ba
"All right. The astronomers were studying a nearby nova, so they caught the intruder a little sooner. It showed a strange spectrum, radically different from a nova and much more constant. It got even stranger. The light was growing brighter at the same time the spectral lines were shifting toward the red.
"It was months before anyone identified the spectrum.
"Then one Jerome Fi
"Oh!" I got it then. "That would mean a light-sail!"
"Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew."
"No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read the Sunday supplements."
Morris was exasperated. "But you knew enough to call the laser ca
"I just now realized why it's called that."
Morris stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, "I forgot. You got it out of the Monk language course."
"I guess so."
He got back to business. "The newspapers gave poor Fi
"Signals. With dots and dashes? You could do that just by tacking the sail."
"You must have read about it."
"Why? It's so obvious."
Morris looked unaccountably ruffled. Whatever his reasons, he let it pass. "The sail is a few molecules thick and nearly five hundred miles across when it's extended. On light pressure alone they can build up to interstellar velocities, but it takes them a long time. The acceleration isn't high.
"It took them two years to slow down to solar system velocities. They must have done a lot of braking before our telescopes found them, but even so they were going far too fast when they passed Earth's orbit. They had to go inside Mercury's orbit and come up the other side of the sun's gravity well, backing all the way, before they could get near Earth."
I said, "Sure. Interstellar speeds have to be above half the speed of light, or you can't trade competitively."
"What?"
"There are ways to get the extra edge. You don't have to depend on sunlight, not if you're launching from a civilized system. Every civilized system has a moon-based launching laser. By the time the sun is too far away to give the ship a decent push, the beam from the laser ca
"Naturally," said Morris, but he seemed confused.
"So that if you're heading for a strange system, you'd naturally spend most of the trip decelerating. You can't count on a strange system having a launching laser. If you know your destination is civilized, that's a different matter."
Morris nodded.
"The lovely thing about the laser ca
"Don't take it wrong," said Morris. "But how does a paunchy bartender come to know so much about flying an interstellar trading ship?"
"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, Fraser? 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 mpH glip habbabub, or however a Monk would say it, it has something to do with straining the breathing-air.