At that point I worked up the courage to ask him what he was doing.
He explained at length. The Monk starship was a commercial venture, a trading mission following a daisy chain of stars. He was a sampler for the group. He was mightily pleased with some of the wares he had sampled here. Probably he would order great quantities of them, to be freeze-dried for easy storage. Add alcohol and water to reconstitute.
“Then you won’t be wanting to test all the vodkas,” I told him. “Vodka isn’t much more than water and alcohol.”
He thanked me.
“The same goes for most gins, except for flavorings.” I lined up four gins in front of him. One was Tanqueray. One was a Dutch gin you have to keep chilled like some liqueurs. The others were fairly ordinary products. I left him with these while I served customers.
I had expected a mob tonight. Word should have spread. Have a drink in the Long Spoon, you’ll see a Thing from Outer Space. But the place was half empty. Louise was handling them nicely.
I was proud of Louise. As with last night, tonight she behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The mood was contagious. I could almost hear the customers thinking: We like our privacy when we drink. A Thing from Outer Space is entitled to the same consideration.
It was strange to compare her present insouciance with the way her eyes had bugged at her first sight of a Monk.
The Monk finished tasting the gins. “I am concerned for the volatile fractions,” he said. “Some of your liquors will lose taste from condensation.”
I told him he was probably right. And I asked, “How do you pay for your cargos?”
“With knowledge.”
“That’s fair. What kind of knowledge?”
The Monk reached under his robe and produced a flat sample case. He opened it. It was full of pills. There was a large glass bottle full of a couple of hundred identical pills; and these were small and pink and triangular. But most of the sample case was given over to big, round pills of all colors, individually wrapped and individually labelled in the wandering Monk script.