“Great!” I yelled.
“I want to call in. New York.” He closed the folding door.
Louise leaned across the table. “Ed, what are we going to do?”
It was the way she said it. We were in it together, and there was a way out, and she was sure I’d find it—and she said it all in the sound of her voice, the way she leaned toward me, the pressure of her hand around my wrist. We. I felt power and confidence rising in me; and at the same time I thought: She couldn’t do that yesterday.
I said, “We clean this place up so we can open for business. Meanwhile you try to remember what you learned last night. Maybe it was something harmless, like how to catch trilchies with a magnetic web.”
“Tril…?”
“Space butterflies, kind of.”
“Oh. But suppose he taught me how to build a faster-than-light monitor?”
“We’d bloody have to keep Morris from finding out. But you didn’t. The English words for going faster than light—hyperdrive, space warp—they don’t have Monk translations except in math. You can’t even say ‘faster than light’ in Monk.”
“Oh.”
Morris came back grinning like an idiot. “You’ll never guess what the Monks want from us now.”
He looked from me to Louise to me, grinning, letting the suspense grow intolerable. He said, “A giant laser cannon.”
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 cannon? And on our Moon!”
“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 Finney. Of course he hadn’t said anything about Earth. Newspapers always get that kind of thing garbled. He’d said that an object of artificial, extraterrestrial origin had entered the solar system.
“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 Banner looks like.
“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 Finney finally caught wise. He showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.”
“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 cannon a launching laser!”
“I just now realized why it’s called that.”
Morris stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, “You got it out of the Monk language course.”
“I guess so.”
He got back to business. “The newspapers gave poor Finney a terrible time. You didn’t see the political cartoons either? Too bad. But when the Monk ship got closer it started sending signals. It was an interstellar sailing ship, riding the sunlight on a reflecting sail, and it was coming here.”
“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 cannon is spreading just enough to give the sail a hefty acceleration without vaporizing anything.”
“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 cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there’s a civilized world right there to fix it. You go sailing out to the stars with trade goods, but you leave your launching motor safely at home. Why is everybody looking at me funny?”
“Don’t take it wrong,” said Morris. “But how does a paunchy bartender come to know so much about flying an interstellar trading ship?”