"What do you plan to do?"
"The power the boy nominally owns is far too dangerous and cumbersome for him to handle. So we throw it away."
"How the hell do you go about giving away that much money?"
"You don't. You can't. It's impossible. The very act of giving it away would be an exercise of its latent power, it would change the balance of power - and any attempt to do so would cause the boy to be examined on his competence to manage in jig time. So, instead, we let the tiger run like hell while hanging onto its ears for dear life. Ben, let me outline the fait accompli I intend to hand to Douglas� then you do your damnedest to pick holes in it. Not the legality of it, as Douglas' legal staff will write the double-talk and I'll check it for boobytraps - don't worry about that; the idea is to give Douglas a plan be won't want to booby-trap because he'll like it. I want you to sniff it for its political feasibility, whether or not we can put it over. Now here's what we are going to do-"
XIX
THE MARTIAN DIPLOMATIC DELEGATION amp; Inside Straight Sodality, Unlimited, as organized by Jubal Harshaw, landed on the flat of the Executive Palace shortly before ten o'clock the next morning. The unpretentious pretender to the Martian throne, Mike Smith, had not worried about the purpose of the trip; he had simply enjoyed every minute of the short flight south, with utter and innocent delight.
The trip was made in a chartered Flying Greyhound, and Mike sat up in the astrodome above the driver, with Jill on one side and Dorcas on his other, and stared and stared in awed wonderment as the girls pointed out sights to him and chattered in his ears. The seat, being intended for two people, was very crowded, but Mike did not mind, as a warming degree of growing closer necessarily resulted. He sat with an arm around each, and looked and listened and tried to grok and could not have been happier if he had been ten feet under water.
It was, in fact, his first view of Terran civilization He had seen nothing at all in being removed from the Champion to suite K-12 at Bethesda Center; he had indeed spent a few minutes in a taxi ten days earlier going from the hospital to Ben's apartment but at the time he had grokked none of it. Since that time his world had been bounded by a house and a swimming pool, plus surrounding garden and grass and trees - he had not been as far as Jubal's gate.
But now he was enormously more sophisticated than he had been ten days ago. He understood windows, realized that the bubble surrounding him was a window and meant for looking out of and that the changing sights he saw were indeed the cities of these people. He understood maps and could pick out, with the help of the girls, where they were and what they were seeing on the map flowing across the lap board in front of them. But of course he had always known about maps; he simply had not known until recently that humans knew about maps. It had given him a twinge of happy homesickness the first time he had grokked a human map. Sure, it was static and dead compared with the maps used by his people - but it was a map. Mike was not disposed by nature and certainly not by training to invidious comparisons even human maps were very Martian in essence - he liked them.
Now he saw almost two hundred miles of countryside, much of it sprawling world metropolis, and savored every inch of it, tried to grok it. He was startled by the enormous size of human cities and by their bustling activity visible even from the air, so very different from the slow motion, monestary-garden pace of cities of his own people. It seemed to him that a human city must wear out almost at once, becoming so choked with living experience that only the strongest of the Old Ones could bear to visit its deserted streets and grok in contemplation the events and emotions piled layer on endless Layer in it. He himself had visited abandoned cities at home only on a few wonderful and dreadful occasions, and then his teachers had stopped having him do so, grokking that he was not strong enough for such experience.
Careful questions to Jill and Dorcas, the answers of which he then related to what he had read, enabled him to grok in part enough to relieve his mind somewhat the city was very young; it had been founded only a little over two Earth centuries ago. Since Earth time units had no real flavor for him, he converted to Martian years and Martian numbers years (3^4 + 3^3 = 108 Martian years).
Terrifying and beautiful! Why, these people must even now be preparing to abandon the city to its thoughts before it shattered under the strain and became not. And yet, by mere time, the city was only an egg.
Mike looked forward to returning to Washington in a century or two to walk its empty streets and try to grow close to its endless pain and beauty, grokking thirstily until he was Washington and the city was himself - if he were strong enough by then. Then he firmly filed the thought away as he knew that he must grow and grow and grow before he would be able to praise and cherish the city's mighty anguish.
The Greyhound driver swung far east at one point in response to a temporary rerouting of unscheduled traffic (caused, unknown to Mike, by Mike's own presence), and Mike, for the first time, saw the sea.
Jill had to point it out to him and tell him that it was water, and Dorcas added that it was the Atlantic Ocean and traced the shore line on the map. Mike was not ignorant: he had known since he was a nestling that the planet next nearer the Sun was almost covered with the water of life and lately he had learned that these people accepted this lavish richness casually. He had even taken, unassisted, the much more difficult hurdle of grokking at last the Martian orthodoxy that the water ceremony did not require water, that water was merely symbol for the essence beautiful but not indispensable.
But, like many a human still virgin toward some major human experience, Mike discovered that knowing a fact in the abstract was not at all the same thing as experiencing its physical reality; the sight of the Atlantic Ocean filled him with such awe that Jill squeezed him and said sharply, "Stop it, Mike! Don't you dare!"
Mike chopped off his emotion and stored it away for later use. Then he stared at the ocean, stretching out to an unimaginably distant horizon, and tried to measure its size in his mind until his head was buzzing with threes and powers of threes and superpowers of powers.
As they landed Jubal called out, "Now remember, girls, form a square around him and don't be at all backward about planting a heel in an instep or jabbing an elbow into some oaf's solar plexus. Anne, I realize you'll be wearing your cloak but that's no reason not to step on a foot if you're crowded. Or is it?"
"Quit fretting, Boss; nobody crowds a Witness - but I'm wearing spike heels and I weigh more than you do."
"Okay. Duke, you know what to do - but get Larry back here with the bus as soon as possible. I don't know when I'll need it."
"I grok it, Boss. Quit jittering."
"I'll jitter as I please. Let's go." Harshaw, the four girls with Mike, and Caxton got out; the bus took off at once. To Harshaw's mixed relief and apprehension the landing flat was not crowded with newsmen.
But it was far from empty. A man picked him out at once, stepped briskly forward and said heartily, "Dr. Harshaw? I'm Tom Bradley, senior executive assistant to the Secretary General. You are to go directly to Mr. Douglas' private office. He will see you for a few moments before the conference starts."
"No."
Bradley blinked. "I don't think you understood me. These are instructions from the Secretary General. Oh, he said that it was all right for Mr. Smith to come with you - the Man from Mars, I mean-"
"No. This party stays together, even to go to the washroom. Right now we're going to that conference room. Have somebody lead the way. And have all these people stand back; they're crowding us. In the meantime, I have an errand for you. Miriam, that letter."
"But, Dr. Harshaw-"
"I said, 'No!' Can't you understand plain English? But you are to deliver this letter to Mr. Douglas at once and to him personally, and fetch back his receipt to me." Harshaw paused to write his signature across the flap of the envelope Miriam had handed to him, pressed his thumb print over the signature, and handed it to Bradley. "Tell him that it is most urgent that he read this at onc
e - before the meeting."
"But the Secretary General specifically desires-"
"The Secretary desires to see that letter. Young man, I am endowed with second sight� and I predict that you won't be working here later today if you waste any time getting it to him."
Bradley locked eyes with Jubal, then said, "Jim, take over," and left, with the letter. Jubal sighed inwardly. He had sweated over that letter; Anne and he had been up most of the night preparing draft after draft. Jubal had every intention of arriving at an open settlement, in full view of the world's news cameras and microphones - but he had no intention of letting Douglas be taken by surprise by any proposal.
Another man stepped forward in answer to Bradley's order; Jubal sized him up as a prime specimen of the clever, conscienceless young-men-on-the-way-up who gravitate to those in power and do their dirty work; he disliked him on sight. The man smiled heartily and said smoothly, "The name's Jim Sanforth, Doctor - I'm the Chief's press secretary. I'll be buffering for you from now on - arranging your press interviews and so forth. I'm sorry to say that the conference room is not quite ready; there have been last minute changes and we've had to move to a larger room. Now it's my thought that-"
"It's my thought that we'll go to that conference room right now. We'll stand up until chairs are fetched for us."
"Doctor, I'm sure you don't understand the situation. They are still stringing wires and things, and that room is swarming with reporters and commentators."
"Very well. We'll chat with 'em till you're ready."
"No, Doctor. I have instructions"
"Youngster, you can take your instructions, fold them until they are all corners and shove them in your oubliette. We are not at your beck and call. You will not arrange press interviews for us. We are here for just one purpose: a public conference. If the conference is not ready to meet, we'll see the press now - in the conference room."
"But-"
"And that's not all. You're keeping the Man from Mars standing on a windy roof" Harshaw raised his voice. "Is there anyone here smart enough to lead us straight to this conference room without getting lost?"
Sanforth swallowed and said, 'Follow me, Doctor."
The conference room was indeed crowded with newsmen and technicians but there was a big oval table, plenty of chairs, and several smaller tables. Mike was spotted at once and Sanforth's protests did not keep them from crowding in on him. But Mike's flying wedge of amateur Amazons got him as far as the big table; Jubal sat him against it with Dorcas and Jill in chairs flanking him and the Fair Witness and Miriam seated behind him. Once this was done, Jubal made no attempt to fend oft questions or pictures. Mike had been warned that he would meet lots of people and that many of them would do strange things and Jubal had most particularly warned him to take no sudden actions (such as causing persons or things to go away, or to stop) unless Jill told him to.
Mike took the confusion gravely, without apparent upset; Jill was holding his hand and her touch reassured him.
Jubal wanted news pictures taken, the more the better; as for questions put directly to Mike, Jubal did not fear them and made no attempt to field them. A week of trying to talk with Mike had convinced him that no reporter could possibly get anything of importance out of Mike in only a few minutes - without expert help. Mike's habit of answering a question as asked, answering it literally and stopping, would be enough to nullify most attempts to pump him.
And so it proved. Most questions Mike answered with a polite: "I do not know," or an even less committal; "Beg pardon?"
But one question backfired on the questioner. A Reuters correspondent, anticipating a monumental fight over Mike's status as an heir, tried to sneak in his own test of Mike's competence: "Mr. Smith? What do you know about the laws of inheritance here?"
Mike was aware that he was having trouble grokking in fullness the human concept of property and, in particular, the ideas of bequest and inheritance. So he most carefully avoided inserting his own ideas and stuck to the book - a book which Jubal recognized shortly as Ely on Inheritance and Bequest, chapter one.
Mike related what he had read, with precision and careful lack of expression, like a boring but exact law professor, for page after tedious page, while the room gradually settled into stunned silence and his interrogator gulped.
Jubal let it go on until every newsman there knew more than he wanted to know about dower and curtesy, consanguinean and uterine, per stirpes and per capita, and related mysteries. At last Jubal touched his shoulder, "That's enough, Mike."
Mike looked puzzled. "There is much more."
"Yes, but later. Does someone have a question on some other subject?"
A reporter for a London Sunday paper of enormous circulation jumped in with a question closer to his employer's pocketbook: "Mr. Smith, we understand you like the girls here on Earth. But have you ever kissed a girl?"
"Yes."
"Did you like it?"
"Yes."
"How did you like it?"
Mike barely hesitated over his answer. "Kissing girls is a goodness," he explained very seriously. "It is a growing-closer. It beats the hell out of card games."
Their applause frightened him. But he could feel that Jill and Dorcas were not frightened, that indeed they were both trying to restrain that incomprehensible noisy expression of pleasure which he himself could not learn. So he calmed his fright and waited gravely for whatever might happen next.
By what did happen next he was saved from further questions, answerable or not, and was granted a great joy; he saw a familiar face and figure just entering by a side door, "My brother Dr. Mahmoud!" Mike went on talking in overpowering excitement - but in Martian.
The Champion's staff semanticist waved and smiled and answered in the same jarring language while hurrying to Mike's side. The two continued talking in unhuman symbols, Mike in an eager torrent, Mahmoud not quite as rapidly, with sound effects like a rhinoceros ramming an ironmonger's lorry.
The newsmen stood it for some time, those who operated by sound recording it and the writers noting it as local color. But at last one interrupted. "Dr. Mahmoud! What are you saying? Clue us!"
Mahmoud turned, smiled briefly and said in clipped Oxonian speech, "For the most part, I've been saying, 'Slow down, my dear boy - do, please.'
"And what does he say?"
"The rest of our conversation is personal, private, of no possible interest to others, I assure you. Greetings, y'know. Old friends." He turned back to Mike and continued to chat - in Martian.
In fact, Mike was telling his brother Mahmoud all that had happened to him in the fortnight since he had last seen him, so that they might grok closer - but Mike's abstraction of what to tell was purely Martian in concept, it being concerned primarily with new water brothers and the unique flavor of each� the gentle water that was Jill� the depth of Anne� the strange not-yet-fully-grokked fact that Jubal tasted now like an egg, then like an Old One, but was neither-the ungrokkable vastness of ocean-
Mahmoud had less to tell Mike since less had happened in the interim to him, by Martian standards - one Dionysian excess quite un-Martian and of which he was not proud, one long day spent lying face down in Washington's Suleiman Mosque, the results of which he had not yet grokked and was not ready to discuss. No new water brothers.
He stopped Mike presently and offered his hand to Jubal. "You're Dr. Harshaw, I know. Valentine Michael thinks he has introduced me to all of you - and he has, by his rules."
Harshaw looked him over as he shook hands with him. Chap looked and sounded like a huntin', shootin', sportin' Britisher, from his tweedy, expensively casual clothes to a clipped grey moustache� but his skin was naturally swarthy rather than ruddy tan and the genes for that nose came from somewhere close to the Levant. Harshaw did not like fake anything and would choose to eat cold compone over the most perfect syntho "sirloin."
But Mike treated him as a friend, so "friend" he was, until proved otherwise.
To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a "Yank"-vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, of course, although they were hardly to be blamed for that� their cooking (cooking!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts� and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris. Four of them here, crowded around Valentine Michael - at a meeting which certainly should be all male. But Valentine Michael had offered him all these people - including these ubiquitous female creatures - offered them proudly and eagerly as his water brothers, thereby laying on Mahmoud a family obligation closer and more binding than that owed to the sons of one's father's brother - since Mahmoud understood the Martian term for such accretive relationships from direct observation of what it meant to Martians and did not need to translate it clumsily and inadequately as "catenative assemblage," nor even as "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other." He had seen Martians at home; he knew their extreme poverty (by Earth standards); he had dipped into - and had guessed at far more - of their cultural extreme wealth; and had grokked quite accurately the supreme value that Martians place on interpersonal relationships.
Well, there was nothing else for it - he had shared water with Valentine Michael and now he must justify his friend's faith in him� he simply hoped that these Yanks were not complete bounders.
So he smiled warmly and shook hands firmly. "Yes. Valentine Michael has explained to me - most proudly - that you are all in-" (Mahmoud used one word of Martian.) "-to him."
A Stranger in a Strange Land Page 28