“You just turn it on. The power comes from the fusion tube that feeds the attitude jet system … Oh, you want to know why does it make a sun explode. I don’t know that. Why should I?”
“Big as a locomotive. And it makes suns explode.” Morris sounded slightly hysterical. Poor bastard, he was beginning to believe me. The shock had hardly touched me, because truly I had known it since last night.
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 ground coffee. The flat, square package had to be a pizza.
“Pizza. Some diet,” I said.
She was setting out the percolators. “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 perkers, 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 now?”
“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.