He said, "When we first saw the Monk light-sail, it was just to one side of a recent nova in Sagittarius. By any wild chance, was that star a market that didn't work out?"
"I haven't the vaguest idea."
That convinced him. If I'd been making it up, I'd have said yes. Morris stood up and walked away without a word. He stopped to pick up a bar towel on his way to the phone booth.
I went behind the bar to make a fresh drink. Cutty over ice, splash of soda; I wanted to taste the burning power of it.
Through the glass door I saw Louise getting out of her car with her arms full of packages. I poured soda over ice; squeezed a lime in it, and had it ready when she walked in.
She dumped the load on the bar top. "Irish coffee makings," she said. I held the glass out, to her and she said, "No thanks, Ed. One's enough."
"Taste it."
She gave me a funny look, but she tasted what I handed her. "Soda water. Well, you caught me."
"Back on the diet?"
"Yes."
"You never said yes to that question in your life. Don't you want to tell me all the details?"
She sipped at her drink. "Details of someone else's diet are boring. I should have known that a long time ago. To work! You'll notice we've only got twenty minutes,"
I opened one of her paper bags' and fed the refrigerator with cartons of whipping cream. Another bag held fresh ground coffee. The flat, square package had to be a pizza.
‘Pizza. Some diet," I said.
She was setting out the glass coffee-makers. "That's for you and Bill."
I tore open the paper and bit into a pie-shaped slice. It was a deluxe, covered with everything from anchovies to salami. It was crisp and hot, and I was starving.
I snatched bites as I worked.
There aren't many bars that will keep the makings for Irish coffee handy. It's too much trouble. You'need massive quantities of whipping cream and ground coffee, a refrigerator, a blender, a supply of those glass figure-eight-shaped coffee-makers, a line of hot plates, and—most expensive of all—room behind the bar for all of that. You learn to keep a line of glasses ready, which means putting the sugar in them at spare moments to save time later. Those spare moments are your smoking time, so you give that up. You learn not to wave your arms around because there are hot things that can burn you. You learn to half-whip the cream, a mere spin of the blender, because you have to do it over and over again, and if you overdo it the cream turns to butter.
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 flow?"
"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."