A Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert Anson Heinlein

  "Oh, what poppycock! I hope you disabused them?"

  "Who am I to destroy a myth? Perhaps you do read minds - I'm sure you wouldn't tell me. They are just a touch afraid of you - YOU eat babies for breakfast and when you roar the ground trembles. Any of them would be delighted to have you call them over� but they won't force themselves on you. They know that even Mike stands at attention and says 'sir' when you speak."

  Jubal dismissed the whole idea with one short, explosive word.

  "Certainly," Ben agreed. "Even Mike has his blind spots - I told you he was only human. But that's how it is. You're the patron saint of this church - and you're stuck with it."

  "Well� there's somebody I know, just came in. Jill! Jill! Turn around, dear!"

  The woman turned rather hesitantly. "I'm Dawn. But thank you." She came over, however, and Jubal thought for an instant that she was going to kiss him� and decided not to duck it. But she either had not that intention, or changed her mind. She dropped to one knee, took his hand and kissed it. "Father Jubal. We welcome you and drink deep of you."

  Jubal snatched his hand away. "Oh, for heaven's sake, child! Get up from there and sit with us. Share water."

  "Yes, Father Jubal."

  "Uh� and call me Jubal - and pass the word around that I don't appreciate being treated like a leper. I'm in the bosom of my family - I hope."

  "You are� Jubal."

  "So I expect to be called Jubal and treated as a water brother - no more, no less. The first one who treats me with respect will be required to stay in after school. Grok?"

  "Yes, Jubal," she answered demurely. "I've told them. They will."

  "Huh?"

  "Dawn means," explained Ben, "that she's told Patty, probably, since Mike is withdrawn at the moment� and that Patty is telling everybody who can hear easily - with his inner ear - and they are passing the word to any who are still a bit deaf, like myself."

  "Yes," agreed Dawn, "except that I told Jill - Patty has gone outside for something Michael wants. Jubal, have you been watching any of what is showing in the stereo tank? It's very exciting."

  "Eh? No."

  "You mean the jail break, Dawn?"

  "Yes, Ben"

  "We hadn't discussed that - and Jubal doesn't like stereo. Jubal, Mike didn't merely crush out and come home when he felt like it; he gave them a dilemma to sit on. Here he has just been arrested for everything but raping the Statue of Liberty, with Bigmouth Short denouncing him as the Antichrist on the same day. So he gave 'em miracles to chew on. He threw away every bar and door in the county jail as he left� did the same at the state prison just out of town for good measure, and disarmed all the police forces, city, county, and state. Partly to keep 'em busy and interested� and partly because Mike just purely despises locking a man up for any reason at all. He groks a great wrongness in it."

  "That fits," Jubal agreed. "Mike is gentle, always. It would hurt him to have anybody locked up. I agree."

  Ben shook his head. "Mike isn't gentle, Jubal. Killing a man wouldn't worry him. But he's the ultimate anarchist - locking a man up is a wrongness. Freedom of self-and utter personal responsibility for self. Thou art God."

  "Wherein lies the conflict, sir? Killing a man might be necessary. But confining him is an offense against his integrity - and your own."

  Ben looked at him. "I grok Mike was right. You do grok in fullness - his way. I don't quite - I'm still learning." He added, "How are they taking it, Dawn?"

  She giggled slightly. "Like a stirred-up hornets' nest. The mayor has been on� and he's frothing at the mouth. He's demanded help from the state and from the Federation - and he's getting it; we've seen lots of troop carriers landing. But as they pour out, Mike is stripping them - not just their weapons. even their shoes - and as soon as the troop carrier is empty, it goes, too."

  Ben said, "I grok he'll stay withdrawn until they get tired and give up. Handling that many details he would almost have to stay in it and on eternal time."

  Dawn looked thoughtful. "No, I don't think so, Ben. Of course I would have to, in order to handle even a tenth so much. But I grok Michael could do it riding a bicycle while standing on his head."

  "Mmm� I wouldn't know, I'm still making mud pies." Ben stood up. "Sometimes you miracle workers give me a slight pain, honey child. I'm going to go watch the tank for a while." He stopped to kiss her. "You entertain old Pappy Jubal; he likes little girls." Caxton left and a package of cigarettes he had left on a coffee table got up, followed him, and placed themselves in one of his pockets.

  Jubal said, "Did you do that? Or Ben?"

  "Ben did. I don't smoke, unless the man I'm with wants to smoke. But he's always forgetting his cigarettes; they chase him all over the Nest."

  "Hmmm� pretty fair-sized mud pies he makes these days."

  "Ben is advancing much more rapidly than he will ever admit. He's a very holy person - but he hates to admit it. He's shy."

  "Umph. Dawn, you are the Dawn Ardent I met at Foster Tabernacle about two and half years ago, aren't you?"

  "Oh, you remember!!" She looked as if he had handed her a lollipop.

  "Of course I remember. But I was slightly puzzled. You've changed some. All for the better. You seem much more beautiful."

  "That's because I am more beautiful," she said simply. "You mistook me for Gillian. And she is more beautiful, too."

  "Where is that child? I haven't seen her� and I expected to see her at once."

  "She's been working." Dawn paused. "But I told her and she says she's coming in." She paused again. "And I am to take her place. If you will excuse me."

  "Oh, certainly. Run along, child."

  "There's no hurry." But she did get up and leave almost at once as Dr. Mahmoud sat down.

  Jubal looked at him sourly. "You might at least have had the common courtesy to let me know that you were in this country instead of letting me meet my goddaughter for the first time through the good offices of a snake."

  "Oh, Jubal, you're always in such a bloody hurry,"

  "Sir, when one is of-" Jubal was interrupted by two hands placed over his eyes from behind. A well-remembered voice demanded:

  "Guess who?"

  "Beelzebub?"

  "Try again."

  "Lady Macbeth?"

  "Much closer. Third guess, or a forfeit."

  "Gillian, stop that and come around here and sit beside me."

  "Yes, Father." She obeyed.

  "And knock off calling me 'Father' anywhere but home. Sir, I was saying that when one is of my age, one is necessarily in a hurry about some things. Each sunrise is a precious jewel� for it may never be followed by its sunset. The world may end at any moment."

  Mahmoud smiled at him. "Jubal, are you under the impression that if you stop cranking, the world stops going around?"

  "Most certainly, sir - from my viewpoint." Miriam joined them silently, sat down on Jubal's free side; he put an arm around her. "While I might not be honing to see your ugly face again� nor even to gaze on the somewhat more acceptable one of my former secretary-"

  Miriam whispered, "Boss, are you honing for a kick in the stomach? I'm exquisitely beautiful; I have it on highest authority."

  "Quiet. -new goddaughters are in another category. Through your failure to drop me so much as a postcard, I might have missed seeing Fatima Michele. In which case I would have returned to haunt you."

  "In which case," Miriam pointed out, "you could take a took at Micky at the same time� rubbing strained carrots in her hair. A disgusting sight."

  "I was speaking metaphorically."

  "I wasn't. She's a sloppy trencherman."

  "Why," asked Jill quietly, "were you speaking metaphorically, Boss?"

  "Eh? The concept 'ghost' is one I feel no need for, other than as a figure of speech."

  "It's more than a figure of speech," insisted Jill.

  "Uh� as may be. I prefer to meet baby girls in the flesh, including my own."

  Dr. Malmou
d said, "But that is what I was saying, Jubal. You aren't about to die; you aren't even close to it. Mike has grokked you to be certain. He says you have a long stretch of years ahead of you."

  Jubal shook his head. "I set a top limit of three figures years ago. No more."

  "Which three figures, Boss?" Miriam inquired innocently. "The three Methuselah used?"

  He shook her shoulders. "Don't be obscene!"

  "Stinky says women should be obscene but not heard."

  "Your husband speaks rightly. So pipe down. The day my machine first shows three figures on its mileage meter is the day I discorporate, whether Martian style or by my own crude methods. You can't take that away from me. Going to the showers is the best part of the game."

  "I grok you speak rightly, Jubal," Jill said slowly, "about its being the best part of the game. But I wouldn't count on it any time soon. Your fullness is not yet. Allie cast a horoscope on you just last week."

  "A horoscope? Oh, my God! Who is 'Ailie?' And how dare she cast a horoscope on me! Show her to me! Swelp me, I'll turn her in to the Better Business Bureau."

  "I'm afraid you can't, Jubal," Mahmoud put in, "just now, as she is working on our dictionary. As to who she is, she's Madame Alexandra Vesant."

  Jubal sat up and looked pleased. "Becky? Is she in this nut house, too? I should have known it. Where is she?"

  "Yes, Becky. But we call her 'Allie' because we've got another Becky. But you'll have to wait. And don't scoff at her horoscopes, Jubal; she has the Sight."

  "Oh, balderdash, Stinky. Astrology is nonsense and you know it."

  "Oh, certainly. Even Allie knows it. And a percentage of astrologers are clumsy frauds. Nevertheless Allie practices it even more assiduously than she used to, when she did it for the public - using Martian arithmetic now and Martian astronomy - much fuller than ours. But it's her device for grokking, It could be gazing into a pool of water, or a crystal ball, or examining the entrails of a chicken. The means she uses to get into the mood do not matter and Mike has advised her to go on using the symbols she is used to. The point is: she has the Sight."

  "What the hell do you mean by 'the Sight,' Stinky?"

  "The ability to grok more of the universe than that little piece you happen to be sitting on at the moment. Mike has it from years of Martian discipline; Allie was an untrained semi-adept. The fact that she used as meaningless a symbol as astrology is beside the point. A rosary is meaningless, too - I speak of a Muslim rosary, of course; I'm not criticizing our competitors across the street." Mahmoud reached into his pocket, got out one, started fingering it. "If it helps to turn your hat around during a poker game - then it helps. It is irrelevant that the hat has no magic powers and cannot grok."

  Jubal looked at the Islamic device for meditation and ventured a question he had hesitated to put before. "Then I take it you are still one of the Faithful? I had thought perhaps that you had joined Mike's church all the way."

  Mahmoud put away the beads. "I have done both."

  "Huh? Stinky, they're incompatible. Or else I don't grok either one."

  Mahmoud shook his head. "Only on the surface. You could say, I suppose, that Maryam took my religion and I took hers; we consolidated. But, Jubal my beloved brother, I am still God's slave, submissive to His will� and nevertheless can say: 'Thou art God, I am God, all that groks is God.' The Prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say - only fanatics after his lifetime insisted on those two very misleading fallacies. Submission to God's will is not to become a blind robot, incapable of free decision and thus of sin - and the Koran does not say that. Submission can include - and does include - utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden or to rend and destroy." He smiled. "'With God all things are possible,' if I may borrow for a moment - except one thing� the one Impossible. God cannot escape Himself, He cannot abdicate His own total responsibility - He forever must remain submissive to His own will. Islam remains - He cannot pass the buck. It is His - mine� yours Mike's."

  Jubal heaved a sigh. "Stinky, theology always gives me the pip. Where's Becky? Can't she knock off this dictionary work and say hello to an old friend? I've seen her only once in the last twenty-odd years; that's too long."

  "You'll see her. But she can't stop now, she's dictating. Let me explain the technique, so that you won't insist. Up to now, I've been spending part of each day in rapport with Mike - just a few moments although it feels like an eight-hour day. Then I would immediately dictate all that he had poured into me onto tape. From those tapes several other people, trained in Martian phonetics but not necessarily advanced students, would make long-hand phonetic transcriptions. Then Maryam would type them out, using a special typer - and this master copy Mike or I - Mike by choice, but his time is choked - would correct by hand.

  "But our schedule has been disturbed now, and Mike groks that he is going to send Maryam and me away to some Shangri-la to finish the job - or, more correctly, he has grokked that we will grok such a necessity. So Mike is getting months and years of tape completed in order that I can take it away and unhurriedly break it into a phonetic script that humans can learn to read. Besides that, we have stacks of tapes of Mike's lectures - in Martian - that need to be transcribed into print when the dictionary is finished� lectures that we understood at the time with his help but later will need to be printed, with the dictionary.

  "Now I am forced to assume that Maryam and I will be leaving quite soon, because, busy as Mike is with a hundred other things, he's changed the method. There are eight bedrooms here equipped with tape recorders. Those of us who can do it best - Patty, Jill, myself; Maryam, your friend Allie, some others - take turns in those rooms. Mike puts us into a short trance, pours language - definitions, idioms, concepts - into us for a few moments that feel like hours� then we dictate at once just what he has poured into us, exactly, while it's still fresh. But it can't be just anybody, even of the Innermost Temple. It requires a sharp accent and the ability to join the trance rapport and then spill out the results. Sam, for example, has everything but the clear accent - he manages, God knows how, to speak Martian with a Bronx accent. Can't use him, it would cause endless errata in the dictionary. And that is what Allie is doing now - dictating. She's still in the semi-trance needed for total recall and, if you interrupt her, she'll lose what she still hasn't recorded."

  "I grok," Jubal agreed, "although the picture of Becky Vesey as a Martian adept shakes me a little. Still, she was once one of the best mentalists in show business; she could give a cold reading that would scare any mark right out of his shoes - and loosen his pocketbook. Say, Stinky, if you are going to be sent away for peace and quiet while you unwind all this data, why don't you and Maryam come home? Plenty of room for a study amp; bedroom suite in the new wing."

  "Perhaps we shall. Waiting still is."

  "Sweetheart," Miriam said earnestly, "that's a solution I would just plain love if Mike pushes us out of the Nest."

  "If we grok to leave the Nest, you mean."

  "Same thing� you grok."

  "You speak rightly, my dear. But when do we eat around here? I feel a most un-Martian urgency inside. The service was better in the Nest."

  "You can't expect Patty to work on your dratted old dictionary, see to it that everyone who arrives is comfortable, run errands for Mike, and still have food on the table the instant you get hungry, my love. Jubal, Stinky will never achieve priesthood - he's a slave to his stomach."

  "Well, so am I."

  "And you girls might give Patty a hand," her husband added.

  "That sounds like a crude hint. You know we do, dear, all she will let us - and Tony will hardly allow anyone in his kitchen� even this kitchen." She stood up. "Come on, Jubal, and let's see what's cooking. Tony will be very flattered if you visit his kitchen."

  Jubal went with her, was a bit bemused to see telekinesis used in prep
aring food, met Tony, who scowled until he saw who was with her, then was beamingly proud to show off his workshop, accompanied by a spate of invective in mixed English and Italian at the scoundrels who had destroyed "his" kitchen in the Nest. In the meantime a spoon, unassisted, continued to keel a big pot of spaghetti sauce.

  Shortly thereafter Jubal declined to be jockeyed into a seat at the head of a long table, grabbed one elsewhere. Patty sat at one end; the head chair remained vacant� except for an eerie feeling which Jubal suppressed that the Man from Mars was sitting there and that everyone present but himself could see him which was true only in some cases.

  Across the table from him was Dr. Nelson.

  Jubal discovered that he would have been surprised only if Dr. Nelson had not been present. He nodded and said, "Hi, Sven."

  "Hi, Doc. Share water."

  "Never thirst. What are you around here? Staff physician?" Nelson shook his bead. "Medical student."

  "So. Learn anything?"

  "I've learned that medicine isn't necessary."

  "If youda ast me, I coulda told yah. Seen Van?"

  "He ought to be in sometime late tonight or early tomorrow. His ship grounded today."

  "Does he always come here?" inquired Jubal.

  "Call him an extension student. He can't spend much time here."

  "Well, it will be good to see him. I haven't laid eyes on him for a year and half, about." Jubal picked up a conversation with the man on his right while Nelson talked with Dorcas on his right. Jubal noticed the same tingling expectancy at the table which he had felt before, but reinforced. Yet there was still nothing he could put his finger on, just a quiet family dinner in relaxed intimacy. Once, a glass of water was passed all around the table, but, if there was ritual of words with it, they were spoken too low to carry. When it reached Jubal's placer he took a sip and passed it along to the girl on his left - round-eyed and too awed to make chit-chat with him - and himself said in a low voice, "I offer you water."