A Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert Anson Heinlein

"That's better. When did you start drinking in the morning? Do that at your age and you'll ruin your stomach. You'll never live to be a happy old soak, like me."

  Mike looked at his partly emptied glass. "I drink when it's a sharing to do so. It doesn't have any effect on me, nor on most of the others, unless we want it to. Once I let it have its effect without stopping it, until I passed out. It's an odd sensation. Not a goodness, I grok. Just a way to discorporate for a while without discorporating. I can get a similar effect, only much better and with no damage to be repaired afterwards, by withdrawing."

  "Economical, at least."

  "Uh huh, our liquor bill isn't anything. Matter of fact, running that whole Temple hasn't cost what it costs you to keep up our home. Except for the initial investment and replacing some of the props, coffee and cakes was about all - we made our own fun. We were happy. We needed so little that I used to wonder what to do with all the money that came in."

  "Then why did you take collections?"

  "Huh? Oh, you have to charge 'em, Jubal. The marks won't pay serious attention to anything that's free."

  "I knew that, I just wondered if you did."

  "Oh, yes, I grok marks, Jubal. At first I did try to preach free - just give it away. I had plenty of money, I thought it was all right. It didn't work. We humans have to make considerable progress before we can accept a free gift, and value it. Usually I never let them have anything free until about Sixth Circle. By then they can accept� and accepting is much harder than giving."

  "Hmm� son, I think maybe you should write a book on human psychology."

  "I have. But it's in Martian. Stinky has the tapes." Mike looked again at his glass, took a slow sybaritic sip. "We do use some liquor. A few of us - Saul, myself, Sven, some others - like it. And I've learned that I can let it have just a little effect, then hold it right at that point, and gain a euphoric growing-closer much like trance without having to withdraw. The minor damage is easy to repair." He sipped again. "That's what I'm doing this morning - letting myself get just the mildest glow and be happy with you."

  Jubal studied him closely. "Son, you aren't drinking entirely to be sociable; you've got something on your mind."

  "Yes, I have."

  "Do you want to talk it out?"

  "Yes. Father, it's always a great goodness to be with you, even if nothing is troubling me. But you are the only human I can always talk to and know that you will grok and that you yourself won't be overwhelmed by it, too. Jill� Jill always groks - but if it hurts me, it hurts her still more. Dawn the same. Patty� well, Patty can always take my hurt away, but she does it by keeping it herself. All three of them are too easily hurt for me to risk sharing in full with them anything I can't grok and cherish before I share it." Mike looked very thoughtful. "Confession is needful. The Catholics know that, they have it - and they have a corps of strong men to take it. The Fosterites have group confession and pass it around among themselves and thin it out. I need to introduce confession into this church, as part of the early purging - oh, we have it now, but spontaneously, after the pilgrim no longer really needs it. We need strong men for that - 'sin' is hardly ever concerned with a real wrongness but sin is what the sinner groks as sin - and when you grok it with him, it can be very disturbing. I know."

  Mike went on earnestly, "Goodness is not enough, goodness is never enough. That was one of my first mistakes, because among Martians goodness and wisdom are the same thing, identical. But not with us. Take Jill. Her goodness was perfect when I met her. Nevertheless she was all mixed up inside - and I almost destroyed her, and myself too - for I was just as mixed up - before we got squared away. Her endless patience (not very common on this planet) was all that saved us� while I was learning to be a human and she was learning what I knew.

  "But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil." He smiled and his face lit up. "And that's why I need you, Father, as well as loving you. I need to make confession to you.,'

  Jubal squirmed. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Mike, don't make a production out of it. Just tell me what's eating you. We'll find a way out."

  "Yes, Father."

  But Mike did not go on. Finally Jubal said, "Do you feel busted up by the destruction of your Temple? I wouldn't blame you. But you aren't broke, you can build again."

  "Oh, no, that doesn't matter in the slightest!"

  "Eh?"

  "That temple was a diary with all its pages filled. Time for a new one, rather than write over and deface the filled pages. Fire can't destroy the experience in it� and strictly from a standpoint of publicity and practical church politics, being run out of it in so spectacular a fashion will be helpful, in the long run. No, Jubal, the last couple of days have simply been an enjoyable break in a busy routine. No harm done." His expression changed. "Father� lately I learned that I was a spy."

  "What do you mean, son? Explain yourself."

  "For the Old Ones. They sent me here to spy on our people."

  Jubal thought about it. Finally he said, "Mike, I know that you are brilliant. You obviously possess powers that I don't have and that I have never seen before. But a man can be a genius and still fall ill with delusions."

  "I know. Let me explain and you can decide whether or not I'm crazy. You know how the surveillance satellites used by the Security Forces operate."

  "No."

  "I don't mean the details that would interest Duke; I mean the general scheme. They orbit around the globe, picking up data and storing it. At a particular point, the Sky-Eye is keyed and it pours out in a spate all that it has seen. That is what was done with me. You know that we of the Nest use what is called telepathy."

  "I've been forced to believe it."

  "We do. By the way, this conversation is completely private - and besides that, no one of us would ever attempt to read you; I'm not sure we could. Even last night the link was through Dawn's mind, not yours."

  "Well, that is some slight comfort."

  "Uh, I want to get to that later. I am 'only an egg' in this art; the Old Ones are past masters. They stayed linked with me but left me on my own, ignored me - then they triggered me and all that I had seen and heard and done and felt and grokked poured out of me and became part of their permanent records. I don't mean that they wiped my mind of my experiences; they simply played the tape, so to speak, made a copy. But the triggering I was aware of - and it was over before I could possibly do anything to stop it. Then they dropped me, cut off the linkage; I couldn't even protest."

  "Well� it seems to me that they used you pretty shabbily-"

  "Not by their standards. Nor would I have objected - I would have been happy to volunteer - had I known about it before I left Mars. But they didn't want me to know; they wanted me to see and grok without interference."

  "I was going to add," Jubal said, "that if you are free of this damnable invasion of your privacy now, then what harm has been done? It seems to me that you could have had a Martian at your elbow all these past two and a half years, with no harm other than attracting stares."

  Mike looked very sober. "Jubal, listen to a story. Listen all the way through." Mike told him of the destruction of the missing Fifth Planet of Sol, whose ruins are the asteroids. "Well, Jubal?"

  "It reminds me a little of the myths about the Flood."

  "No, Jubal. The Flood you aren't sure about. Are you sure about the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum?"

  "Oh, yes. Those are established historical facts."

  "Jubal, the destruction of the Fifth Planet by the Old Ones is as historically certain as that eruption of Vesuvius - and it is recorded in much greater detail. No myth. Fact."

  "Uh, stipulate it as such. Do I understand that you fear that the Old Ones of Mars will decide to give this planet the same treatment? Will you forgive me if I say that is a bit hard for me to swallow?"

  "Why, Jubal, it wouldn't take the Old Ones to do
it. It merely takes a certain fundamental knowledge of physics, how matter is put together - and the same sort of control that you have seen me use time and again. Simply necessary first to grok what you want to manipulate. I can do it unassisted, right now. Say a piece near the core of the planet about a hundred miles in diameter - much bigger than necessary but we want to make this fast and painless, if only to please Jill. Feel out its size and place, then grok carefully how it is put together-" His face lost all expression as he talked and his eyeballs started to turn up.

  "Hey!" broke in Harshaw. "Cut it out! I don't know whether you can or you can't but I'm certain I don't want you to try!"

  The face of the Man from Mars became normal. "Why, I would never do it. For me, it would be a wrongness - I am human."

  "But not for them?"

  "Oh, no. The Old Ones might grok it as beauty. I don't know. Oh, I have the discipline to do it� but not the volition. Jill could do it - that is, she could contemplate the exact method. But she could never will to do it; she is human too; this is her planet. The essence of the discipline is, first, self-awareness, and then, self-control. By the time a human is physically able to destroy this planet by this method - instead of by clumsy things like cobalt bombs - it is not possible, I grok fully, for him to entertain such a volition. He would discorporate. And that would end any threat; our Old Ones don't hang around the way they do on Mars."

  "Mmmm� son, as long as we are checking you for bats in your belfry, clear up something else. You've always spoken of these 'Old Ones' as casually as I speak of the neighbor's dog - but I find ghosts hard to swallow. What does an 'Old One' look like?"

  "Why, just like any other Martian� except that there is more variety in the appearance of adult Martians than there is in us."

  "Then how do you know it's not just an adult Martian? Doesn't he walk through walls, or some such?"

  "Any Martian can do that. I did, just yesterday."

  "Uh� shimmers? Or anything?"

  "No. You see, hear, feel them - everything. It's like an image in a stereo tank, only perfect and put right into your mind. But - Look, Jubal, the whole thing would be a silly question on Mars, but I realize it isn't, here. But if you had been present at the discorporation - death - of a friend, then you helped eat his body� and then you saw his ghost, talked with it, touched it, anything - would you then believe in ghosts?"

  "Well, either ghosts, or I myself had slipped my leash."

  "All right. Here it would be an hallucination� if I grok correctly that we don't stay here when we discorporate. But in the case of Mars, there is either an entire planet with a very rich and complex civilization all run by mass hallucination - or the straightforward explanation is correct the one I was taught and the one all my experience led me to believe. Because on Mars the 'ghosts' are by far the most important and most powerful and much the most numerous part of the population. The ones still alive, the corporate ones, are the hewers of wood and drawers of water, servants to the Old Ones."

  Jubal nodded. "Okay. I'll never boggle at slicing with Occam's razor. While it runs contrary to my own experience, my experience is limited to this planet - provincial. All right, son, you're scared that they might destroy us?"

  Mike shook his head. "Not especially. I think - this is not a grokking but a mere guess - that they might do one of two things: either destroy us or attempt to conquer us culturally, make us over into their own image."

  "But you're not fretted that they might blow us up? That's a pretty detached viewpoint, even for me."

  "No. Oh, I think they might reach that decision. You see, by their standards, we are a diseased and crippled people - the things that we do to each other, the way we fail to understand each other, our almost complete failure to grok with one another, our wars and diseases and famines and cruelties - these will be complete idiocy to them. I know. So I think they may very probably decide on a mercy killing. But that's a guess, I'm not an Old One. But, Jubal, if they decide to do this, it will be-" Mike stopped and thought for quite a long time. "-an utter minimum of five hundred years, more likely five thousand, before anything would be done."

  "That's a long time for a jury to be out."

  "Jubal, the most different thing about the two races is that Martians never hurry - and humans always do. They would much rather think about it an extra century or half a dozen, just to be sure that they have grokked all the fullness."

  "In that case, son, I suggest that you not worry about it. If, in another five hundred or a thousand years, the human race can't handle its neighbors, you and I can't help it. However, I suspect that they will be able to."

  "So I grok, but not in fullness. But I said I wasn't worried about that. The other possibility troubled me more, that they might move in and try to make us over. Jubal, they can't do it. An attempt to make us behave like Martians would kill us just as certainly but much less painlessly. It would all be a great wrongness."

  Jubal took time to answer. "But, son, isn't that exactly what you have been trying to do?"

  Mike looked unhappy. "Yes and no. It was what I started out to do. It is not what I am trying to do now. Father, I know that you were disappointed in me when I started this."

  "Your business, son."

  "Yes. Self. I must grok and decide at each cusp myself alone. And so must you� and so must each self. Thou art God."

  "I don't accept the nomination."

  "You can't refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok. Father, I saw the horrible shape this planet is in and I grokked, though not in fullness, that I could change it. What I had to teach couldn't be taught in schools or colleges; I was forced to smuggle it into town dressed up as a religion - which it is not - and con the marks into tasting it by appealing to their curiosity and their desire to be entertained. In part it worked exactly as I knew it would; the discipline and the knowledge was just as available to others as it was to me, who was raised in a Martian nest. Our brothers get along together - you've seen us, you've shared - live in peace and happiness with no bitterness, no jealousy.

  "That last alone was a triumph that proved I was right. Male-femaleness is the greatest gift we have - romantic physical love may be unique to this planet. I don't know. If it is, the universe is a much poorer place than it could be� and I grok dimly that we-who-are-God will save this precious invention and spread it. The actual joining and blending of two physical bodies with simultaneous merging of souls in shared ecstasy of love, giving and receiving and delighting in each other - well, there's nothing on Mars to touch it, and it's the source, I grok in fullness, of all that makes this planet so rich and wonderful. And, Jubal, until a person, man or woman, has enjoyed this treasure bathed in the mutual bliss of having minds linked as closely as bodies, that person is still as virginal and alone as if he had never copulated. But I grok that you have; your very reluctance to risk a lesser thing proves it� and, anyhow, I know it directly. You grok. You always have. Without even needing the aid of the language of grokking. Dawn told us that you were as deep into her mind as you were into her body."

  "Unh� the lady exaggerates."

  "It is impossible for Dawn to speak other than rightly about this. And - forgive me - we were there. In her mind but not in yours� and you were there with us, sharing."

  Jubal refrained from saying that the only times he had ever felt even faintly that he could read minds was precisely in that situation� and then not thoughts, but emotions. He simply regretted without bitterness that he was not half a century younger - in which case he knew that Dawn would have had that "Miss" taken off the front of her name and he would have boldly risked another marriage, in spite of his scars. Also that he would not trade the preceding night for all the years that might be left to him. In essence, Mike was dead right. "Go on, sir."

  "That's what it should be. But that's what I slowly grokked it rarely was. Instead it was indiffe
rence and acts mechanically performed and rape and seduction as a game no better than roulette but with poorer odds and prostitution and celibacy by choice and by no choice and fear and guilt and hatred and violence and children brought up to think that sex was 'bad' and 'shameful' and 'animal' and something to be hidden and always distrusted. This lovely perfect thing, male-femaleness, turned upside down and inside out and made horrible.

  "And every one of those wrong things is a corollary of 'jealousy.' Jubal, I couldn't believe it. I still don't grok 'jealousy' in fullness, it seems an insanity to me, a terrible wrongness. When I first learned what this ecstasy was, my first thought was that I wanted to share it, share it at once with all my water brothers - directly with those female, indirectly by inviting more sharing with those male. The notion of trying to keep this never-failing fountain to myself would have horrified me, had I thought of it. But I was incapable of thinking of it. And in perfect corollary I had not the slightest wish to attempt this miracle with anyone I did not already love and trust - Jubal, I am physically unable even to attempt love with a female who has not already shared water with me. And this same thing runs all through the Nest. Psychic impotence unless our spirits blend as our flesh blends."

  Jubal had been listening and thinking mournfully that it was a fine system - for angels - when a sky car landed on the private landing flat diagonally in front of him. He turned his head to see and, as its skids touched, it disappeared, vanished.

  "Trouble?" he said.

  "No trouble," Mike denied. "It's just that they are beginning to suspect that we are here - that I am here, rather. They think the rest are dead. The Innermost Temple, I mean. The other circles aren't being bothered especially� and many of them have left town until it blows over." He grinned. "We could get a good price for these hotel rooms; the city is filling up 'way past capacity with Bishop Short's shock troops."

  "Well? Isn't it about time to get the family elsewhere?"

  "Jubal, don't worry about it. That car never had a chance to report, even by radio. I'm keeping a close watch. It's no trouble, now that Jill is over her misconceptions about 'wrongness' in discorporating persons who have wrongness in them. I used to have to go to all sorts of complicated expedients to protect us. But now Jill knows that I do it only as fullness is grokked." The Man from Mars grinned boyishly. "Last night she helped me with a hatchet job� nor was it the first time she has done so."