N-Space Part 15

"Yes, Louis."

"I realized something, back there. You've been claiming that you're insane because you demonstrate courage. Right?" realized something, back there. You've been claiming that you're insane because you demonstrate courage. Right?"

"How tactful you are, Louis. Your delicacy of tongue-."

"Be serious. You and all the other puppeteers have been making the same wrong a.s.sumption. A puppeteer instinctively turns to run from danger. Right?"

"Yes, Louis."

"Wrong. A puppeteer instinctively turns away away from danger. It's to free his hind leg for action. That hoof makes a deadly weapon, Nessus." from danger. It's to free his hind leg for action. That hoof makes a deadly weapon, Nessus."

All in one motion, the puppeteer had spun on his forelegs and lashed out with his single hind leg. His heads were turned backwards and spread wide, Louis remembered, to triangulate on his target. Nessus had accurately kicked a man's heart out through his splintered spine.

"I could not run," he said. "I would have been leaving my vehicle. That would have been dangerous."

"But you didn't stop to think about it," said Louis. "It was instinctive. You automatically turn your back on an enemy. Turn, and kick. A sane puppeteer turns to fight, not to run. You're not crazy."

"You are wrong, Louis. Most puppeteers run from danger."

''But-''

"The majority is always sane, Louis."

Herd animal! Louis gave it up. He lifted his eyes to watch the last sliver of sun disappear. Louis gave it up. He lifted his eyes to watch the last sliver of sun disappear.

Some mistakes we must carry with us...

But Speaker must have been thinking of something else when he said that. Thinking of what?

At the zenith swarmed a ring of black rectangles. The one that hid the sun was framed in a pearly coronal glow. The blue Ringworld formed a paraboloid arch over it all, framed against a star-dotted sky.

It looked like something done with a Build-A-City set, by a child too young to know what he was doing.

Nessus had been steering when they left Zignamuclickclick. Later he had turned the fleet over to Speaker. They had flown all night. Now, overhead, a brighter glow along one edge of the central shadow square showed that dawn was near.

Sometime during these past hours, Louis had found a way to visualize the scale of the Ringworld.

It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth-a common, rectangular, cla.s.sroom wall map-but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale. One could relief-sculpt such a map, so that standing near the equator would be exactly like standing on the real Earth. But one could draw forty such maps, edge to edge, across the width of the Ringworld.

Such a map would be greater in area than the Earth. But one could map it into the Ringworld's topography, and look away for a moment, and never be able to find it again.

One could play cuter tricks than that, given the tools that shaped the Ringworld. Those matching salt oceans, one on each side on the ring, had each been larger in area than any world in human s.p.a.ce. Continents, after all, were only large islands. One could map the Earth on to such an ocean and still have room left over at the borders.

"I shouldn't have laughed," Louis told himself. It took me long enough to grasp the scale of this It took me long enough to grasp the scale of this . . . . . . artifact. Why should I expect the natives to be more sophisticated? artifact. Why should I expect the natives to be more sophisticated?

Nessus had seen it earlier. Night before last, when they had first seen the arch, Nessus had screamed and tried to hide.

"Oh, what the tanj. . ." . ." It didn't matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at twelve hundred miles per hour. It didn't matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at twelve hundred miles per hour.

Speaker-to-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a kzin, a simple scream of rage is simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap." sufficient. You scream and you leap."

RINGWORLD, 1970.

THE FOURTH PROFESSION.

The doorbell rang around noon on Wednesday.

I sat up in bed and-it was the oddest of hangovers. My head didn't didn't spin. My sense of balance was quiveringly alert. At the same time my mind was clogged with the things I knew: facts that wouldn't relate, churning in my head. spin. My sense of balance was quiveringly alert. At the same time my mind was clogged with the things I knew: facts that wouldn't relate, churning in my head.

It was like walking the high wire while simultaneously trying to solve an Agatha Christie mystery. Yet I was doing neither. I was just sitting up in bed, blinking.

I remembered the Monk, and the pills. How many pills?

The bell rang again.

Walking to the door was an eerie sensation. Most people pay no attention to their somesthetic senses. Mine were clamoring for attention, begging to be tested-by a backflip, for instance. I resisted. I don't have the muscles for doing backflips.

I couldn't remember taking any acrobatics pills.

The man outside my door was big and blond and blocky. He was holding an unfamiliar badge up to the lens of my spy-eye, in a wide hand with short, thick fingers. He had candid blue eyes, a square, honest face-a face I recognized. He'd been in the Long Spoon last night, at a single table in a corner.

Last night he had looked morose, introspective, like a man whose girl had left him for Mr. Wrong. A face guaranteed to get him left alone. I'd noticed him only because he wasn't drinking enough to match the face.

Today he looked patient, endlessly patient, with the patience of a dead man.

And he had a badge. I let him in.

"William Morris," he said, identifying himself. "Secret Service. Are you Edward Harley Frazer, owner of the Long Spoor Bar?"

"Part-owner."

"Yes, that's right. Sony to bother you, Mr. Frazer. I see you keep bartender's hours." He was looking at the wrinkled pair of underpants I had on.

"Sit down," I said, waving at the chair. I badly needed to sit down myself. Standing, I couldn't think about anything but standing. My balance was all-conscious. My heels would not rest solidly on the floor. They barely touched. My weight was all on my toes; my body insisted on standing that way.

So I dropped onto the edge of the bed, but it felt like I was giving a trampoline performance. The poise, the grace, the polished ease! h.e.l.l. "What do you want from me, Mr. Morris? Doesn't the Secret Service guard the President?"

His answer sounded like rote-memory. "Among other concerns, such as counterfeiting, we do guard the President and his immediate family and the President-elect, and the Vice President if he asks us to." He paused. "We used to guard foreign dignitaries too."

That connected. "You're here about the Monk."

"Right." Morris looked down at his hands. He should have had an air of professional self-a.s.surance to go with the badge. It wasn't there. "This is an odd case, Frazer. We took it because it used to be our job to protect foreign visitors, and because n.o.body else would touch it."

"So last night you were in the Long Spoon guarding a visitor from outer s.p.a.ce."

"Just so."

"V/here were you night before last?"

"Was that when he first appeared?"

"Yah," I said, remembering. "Monday night..."

He came in an hour after opening time. He seemed to glide, with the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. By his gait he might have been, moving on wheels. His shape was wrong, in a way that made your eyes want to twist around to straighten it out.

There is something queer about the garment that gives a Monk his name. The hood is open in front, as if eyes might hide within its shadow, and the front of the robe is open too. But the loose cloth hides more than it ought to. There is too much shadow.

Once I thought the robe parted as he walked toward me. But there seemed to be nothing inside.

In the Long Spoon was utter silence. Every eye was on the Monk as he took a stool at one end of the bar, and ordered.

He looked alien, and was. But he seemed seemed supernatural. supernatural.

He used the oddest of drinking systems. I keep my house brands on three long shelves, more or less in order of type. The Monk moved down the top row of bottles, right to left, ordering a shot from each bottle. He took his liquor straight, at room temperature. He drank quietly, steadily, and with what seemed to be total concentration.

He spoke only to order.

He showed nothing of himself but one hand. That hand looked like a chicken's foot, but bigger, with lumpy-looking, very flexible joints, and with five toes instead of four.

At closing time the Monk was four bottles from the end of the row. He paid me in one dollar bills, and left, moving steadily, the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. I testify as an expert: he was sober. The alcohol had not affected him at all.

"Monday night," I said. "He shocked the h.e.l.l out of us. Morris, what was a Monk doing in a bar in Hollywood? I thought all the Monks were in New York."

"So did we."

"Oh?"

'We didn't know he was on the West Coast until it hit the newspapers yesterday morning. That's why you didn't see more reporters yesterday. We kept them off your back. I came in last night to question you, Frazer. I changed my mind when I saw that the Monk was already here."

"Question me me. Why? All I did was serve him drinks."

"Okay, let's start there. Weren't you afraid the alcohol might kill a Monk?"

'It occurred to me."

"Well?"

"I served him what he asked for. It's the Monks' own doing that n.o.body knows anything about Monks. We don't even know what shape they are, let alone how they're put together. If liquor does things to a Monk, it's his own lookout. Let him him check the chemistry." check the chemistry."

"Sounds reasonable."

"Thanks."

"It's also the reason I'm here," said Morris. "We know too little about the Monks. We didn't even know they existed until something over two years ago."

"Oh?" I'd only started reading about them a month ago.

"It wouldn't be that long, except that all the astronomers were looking in that direction already, studying a recent nova in Sagittarius. So they caught the Monk starship a little sooner, but it was already inside Pluto's...o...b..t.

"They've been communicating with us for over a year. Two weeks ago they took up orbit around the Moon. There's only one Monk starship, and only one ground-to-orbit craft, as far as we know. The ground-to-orbit craft has been sitting in the ocean off Manhattan Island, convenient to the United Nations Building, for those same two weeks. Its crew are supposed to be all the Monks there are in the world.

"Mr. Frazer, we don't even know how your Monk got out here to the West Coast! Almost anything you could tell us would help. Did you notice anything odd about him, these last two nights?"

"Odd?" I grinned. "About a Monk?"

It took him a moment to get it, and then his answering smile was wan. "Odd for a Monk."

"Yah," I said, and tried to concentrate. It was the wrong move. Bits of fact buzzed about my skull, trying to fit themselves together.

Morris was saying, "Just talk, if you will. The Monk came back Tuesday night. About what time?"

"About four-thirty. He had a case- of-pills-RNA..."

It was no use. I knew too many, things, all at once, all unrelated. I knew the name of the Garment to Wear Among Strangers, its principle and its purpose. I knew about Monks and alcohol. I knew the names of the five primary colors,, so that for a moment I was blind with the memory of the colors themselves, colors no man would ever see.

Morris was standing over me, looking worried. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Ask me anything." My voice was high and strange and breathless with giddy laughter. "Monks have four limbs, all hands, each with a callus heel behind the fingers. I know their names, Morris. Each hand, each finger. I know how many eyes a Monk has. One. And the whole skull is an ear. There's no word for ear ear, but medical terms for each of the-resonating cavities-between the lobes of the brain-"

"You look dizzy. You don't sample your own wares, do you,' Frazer?"

"I'm the opposite of dizzy. There's a compa.s.s in my head. I've got absolute direction. Morris, it must have been the pills."

"Pills?" Morris bad small, squarish ears that couldn't possibly have come to point. But I got that impression.

"He had a sample case full of-education pills-"

"Easy now." He put a steadying hand on my shoulder. "Take it easy. Just start at the beginning, and talk. I'll make some coffee."

"Good." Coffee sounded wonderful, suddenly. "Pot's ready. Just plug it in. I fix it before I go to sleep."

Morris disappeared around the part.i.tion that marks off the kitchen alcove from the bedroom/living room in my small apartment. His voice floated back, "Start at the beginning: He came back Tuesday night."

"He came back Tuesday night," I repeated.

"Hey, your coffee's already perked. You must have plugged it in in your sleep. Keep talking." '

"He started his drinking where he'd left off, four bottles from the end of the top row. I'd have sworn he was cold sober. His voice didn't give him away..."

His voice didn't give him away because it was only a whisper, too low to make out. His translator spoke like a computer, putting single words together from a man's recorded voice. It spoke slowly and with care. Why not? It was speaking an alien tongue.