A Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert Anson Heinlein

  Jubal thought about it, admitted that he was damnably eager to hear from Mike himself just what the score was - and chew him out for having gotten into such a mess - but admitted, too, that disturbing Mike while he was in a trance was almost certainly much worse than disturbing Jubal himself when he was dictating a story - the boy always came out of his self-hypnosis when he had "grokked the fullness," whatever that was - and if he hadn't, then he always needed to go back into it. As pointless as disturbing a hibernating bear.

  "All right, I'll wait. But I want to talk to him when he wakes up."

  "You will. Now relax and be happy. Let the trip get out of your system." Ben urged him toward the group around the stereo tank.

  Anne looked up. "Hello, Boss." She moved over and made room. "Sit down."

  Jubal joined her. "May I ask what the devil you are doing here?"

  "The same thing you're doing - nothing. Watching stereo. Jubal, please don't get heavy-handed because we didn't do what you told us. We belong here as much as you do. You shouldn't have told us not to come� but you were too upset for us to argue with you. So relax and watch what they're saying about us. The sheriff has just announced that he's going to run all us whores out of town." She smiled. "I've never been run out of town before. It should be interesting. Does a whore get ridden on a rail? Or will I have to walk?"

  "I don't think there's protocol in the matter. You all came?"

  "Yes, but don't fret. Jed McClintock is sleeping in the house. Larry and I made a standing arrangement with the McClintock boys for one of them to do so, more than a year ago - just in case. They know how the furnace works and where the switches are and things; it's all right."

  "Hmm! I'm beginning to think I'm just a boarder there."

  "Were you ever anything else, Boss? You expect us to run it without bothering you. We do. But it's a shame you didn't relax and let us all travel together. We got here more than two hours ago - you must have had some trouble."

  "I did, A terrible trip. Anne, once I get home I don't intend ever to set foot off the place again in my life� and I'm going to yank out the telephone and take a sledgehammer to the babble box."

  "Yes, Boss."

  "This time I mean it." He glanced at the giant babble box in front of him. "Do those commercials go on forever? Where's my goddaughter? Don't tell me you left her to the mercies of McClintock's idiot sons!"

  "Oh, of course not. She's here. She even has her own nursemaid, thank God."

  "I want to see her."

  "Patty will show her to you. I'm bored with her - she was a perfect little beast all the way down. Patty dear! Jubal wants to see Abby."

  The tattooed woman checked one of her unhurried dashes through the room - so far as Jubal could see, she was the only one of the several present who was doing any work, and she seemed to be everywhere at once. "Certainly, Jubal. I'm not busy. Down this way.

  "I've got the kids in my room," she explained, while Jubal strove to keep up with her, "so that Honey Bun can watch them."

  Jubal was mildly startled to see, a moment later, what Patricia meant by that. The boa was arranged on one of twin double beds in squared-off loops that formed a nest - a twin nest, as one bight of the snake had been pulled across to bisect the square, making two crib-sized pockets, each padded with a baby blanket and each containing a baby.

  The ophidian nursemaid raised her head inquiringly as they came in. Patty stroked it and said, "It's all right, dear. Father Jubal wants to see them. Pet her a little, and let her grok you, so that she will know you next time."

  First Jubal coochey-cooed at his favorite girl friend when she gurgled at him and kicked, then petted the snake. He decided that it was the handsomest specimen of Bojdae he had ever seen, as well as the biggest - longer, he estimated, than any other boa constrictor in captivity. Its cross bars were sharply marked and the brighter colors of the tail quite showy. He envied Patty her blue-ribbon pet and regretted that he would not have more time in which to get friendly with it.

  The snake rubbed her head against his hand like a cat. Patty picked up Abby and said, "Just as I thought. Honey Bun, why didn't you tell me?"- then explained, as she started to change diapers, "She tells me at once if one of them gets tangled up, or needs help, or anything, since she can't do much for them herself - no hands - except nudge them back if they try to crawl out and might fall. But she just can't seem to grok that a wet baby ought to be changed - Honey Bun doesn't see anything wrong about that. And neither does Abby."

  "I know. We call her 'Old Faithful.' Who's the other cutie pie?"

  "Huh? That's Fatima Michele, I thought you knew."

  "Are they here? I thought they were in Beirut!"

  "Why, I believe they did come from some one of those foreign parts. I don't know just where. Maybe Maryam told me but it wouldn't mean anything to me; I've never been anywhere. Not that it matters; I grok all places are alike - just people. There, do you want to hold Abigail Zenobia while I check Fatima?"

  Jubal did so and assured her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world, then shortly thereafter assured Fatima of the same thing. He was completely sincere each time and the girls believed him - Jubal had said the same thing on countless occasions starting in the Harding administration, had always meant it and had always been believed. It was a Higher Truth, not bound by mundane logic.

  Regretfully he left them, after again petting Honey Bun and telling her the same thing, and just as sincerely.

  They left and at once ran into Fatima's mother. "Boss honey!" She kissed him and patted his tummy. "I see they've kept you fed."

  "Some. I've just been in smooching with your daughter, She's an angel doll, Miriam."

  "Pretty good baby, huh? We're going to sell her down to Rio - get a fancy price for her."

  "I thought the market was better in Yemen?"

  "Stinky says not. Got to sell her to make room." She put his hand on her belly. "Feel the bulge? Stinky and I are making a boy now - got no time for daughters."

  "Maryam," Patricia said chidingly, "that's no way to talk, even in fun."

  "Sorry, Patty. I won't talk that way about your baby - Aunt Patty is a lady, and groks that I'm not."

  "I grok that you aren't, too, you little hellion, But if Fatima is for sale, I'll give you twice your best commercial offer."

  "You'll have to take it up with Aunt Patty; I'm merely allowed to see her occasionally."

  "And you don't bulge, so you may want to keep her yourself. Let me see your eyes. Mmm� could be."

  "Is. And Mike has grokked it most carefully and tells Stinky he's made a boy."

  "How can Mike grok that? Impossible. I'm not even sure you're pregnant-"

  "Oh, she is, Jubal," Patricia confirmed.

  Miriam looked at him serenely. "Still the skeptic, Boss. Mike grokked it while Stinky and I were still in Beirut, before we were sure we had caught. So Mike phoned us. And the next day Stinky told the university that we were taking a sabbatical for field work - or his resignation, if they wished. So here we are."

  "Doing what?"

  "Working. Working harder than you ever made me work, Boss - my husband is a slave driver."

  "Doing what?"

  "They're writing a Martian dictionary," Patty told him.

  "Martian to English? That must be difficult."

  "Oh, no, no, no!" Miriam looked almost shocked. "That wouldn't be difficult, that would be impossible. A Martian dictionary in Martian. There's never been one before; the Martians don't need such things. Uh, my part of it is just clerical; I type what they do. Mike and Stinky - mostly Stinky - worked out a phonetic script for Martian, eighty-one characters. So we had an I.B.M. typer worked over for those characters, using both upper and lower case - Boss darling, I'm ruined as a secretary; I type touch system in Martian now. Will you love me anyhow? When you shout 'Front!' and I'm not good for anything? I can still cook� and I'm told that I have other talents."

  "I'll learn to dictate in Martian."

&n
bsp; "You will, before Mike and Stinky get through with you. I grok. Eh, Patty?"

  "You speak rightly, my brother."

  They returned to the living room, Caxton joined them and suggested finding a quieter place, away from the giant babble box, led Jubal down a passage and into another living room. "You seem to have most of this floor"

  "All of it," agreed Ben. "Four suites - the Secretarial; the Presidential, the Royal, and Owner's Cabin, opened into one and not accessible other than by our own landing fiat. except through a foyer that is not very healthy without help. You were warned about that?"

  "Yes."

  "We don't need so much room right now� but we may: people are flocking in."

  "Ben, how can you hide from the cops as openly as this? The hotel staff alone will give you away."

  "Oh, there are ways - the staff doesn't come up here. You see, Mike owns the hotel."

  "So much the worse, I would think-"

  "So much the better� unless our doughty police chief has Mr. Douglas on his payroll, which I doubt. Mike bought it through about four links of dummies and Douglas doesn't snoop into why Mike wants things done. Douglas doesn't despise me quite as much since Os Kilgallen took over my column, I think, but nevertheless he doesn't want to surrender control to me - he does what Mike wants. The hotel is a sound investment; it makes money but the owner of record is one of our clandestine Ninth Circle. So the owner decides he wants this floor for the season and the manager can't and doesn't and wouldn't want to inquire into why, or how many guests of his own the owner has coming or going - he likes his job; Mike is paying him more than he's worth. It's a pretty good hide-out, for the time being. 'Till Mike groks where we will go next."

  "Sounds like Mike had anticipated a need for a hide-out."

  "Oh, I'm sure he did. Almost two weeks ago Mike cleared out the nestlings' nest except for Maryam and her baby; Maryam is needed for the job she's on. Mike sent the parents with children to other cities - places he means to open temples, I think - and when the time came, there were just about a dozen of us to move. No sweat."

  "As it was, you barely got out with your lives, I take it." Jubal wondered how they had even managed to grab clothes in view of how they probably were not dressed. "You lost all the contents of the Nest? All your personal possessions?"

  "Oh, no, not anything we really wanted. Stuff like Stinky's language tapes and a trick typer that Maryam uses; even that horrible Madame Tussaud picture of you. And Mike grabbed our clothes and some cash that was on hand."

  Jubal objected, "You say Mike did this? But I thought Mike was in jail when the fire broke out."

  "Uh, he was and he wasn't. His body was in jail� curled up in withdrawal. But he was actually with us. You understand?"

  "Uh, I don't grok."

  "Rapport. He was inside Jill's head, mostly, but we were all pretty closely tied in together. Jubal, I can't explain it; you have to do it. When the explosion hit, he moved us over here. Then he went back and saved the minor stuff worth saving."

  Jubal frowned. Caxton said impatiently, "Teleportation, of course. What's so hard to grok about it, Jubal? You yourself told me to come down here and open my eyes and know a miracle when I saw one. So I did and they were. Only they aren't miracles, any more than radio is a miracle. Do you grok radio? Or stereovision? Or electronic computers?"

  "Me? No."

  "Nor do I, I've never studied electronics. But I'm sure I could if I took the time and the hard sweat to learn the language of e1ctronics. I don't think it's miraculous - just complex. Teleportation is quite simple, once you learn the language - it's the language that is so difficult."

  "Ben, you can teleport things?"

  "Me? Oh, no, they don't teach that in kindergarten. Oh, I'm a deacon by courtesy, simply because I'm 'First Called' and Ninth Circle - but my actual progress is about Fourth Circle, bucking for Fifth. Why, I'm just beginning to get control of my own body. Patty is the only one of us who uses teleportation herself with any regularity� and I'm not sure she ever does it without Mike's support. Oh, Mike says she's quite capable of it, but Patty is such a curiously naive and humble person for the genius she is that she is quite dependent on Mike. Which she needn't be. Jubal, I grok this: we don't actually need Mike - Oh, I'm not running him down; don't get me wrong. But you could have been the Man from Mars. Or even me.

  It's like the first man to discover fire. Fire was there all along - and after he showed that it could be used, anybody could use it� anybody with sense and savvy enough not to get burned with it. Follow me?"

  "I grok, somewhat at least."

  "Mike is our Prometheus - but remember, Prometheus was not God. Mike keeps emphasizing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God that groks. Mike is a man along with the rest of us� even though he knows more. A very superior man, admittedly - a lesser man, taught the things the Martians know, probably would have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus� but that's all,"

  Jubal said slowly, "As I recall, Prometheus paid a high price for bringing fire to mankind."

  "And don't think that Mike doesn't! He pays with twenty-four hours of work every day, seven days a week, trying to teach a few of us how to play with matches without getting burned. Jill and Patty lowered the boom on him, started making him take one night a week off, long before I joined up." Caxton smiled. "But you can't stop Mike. This burg is loaded with gambling joints, no doubt you know, and most of them crooked since it's against the law here. Mike usually spends his night off bucking crooked games - and winning. Picks up ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a night. They tried to mug him, they tried to kill him, they tried knock-out drops and muscle boys - nothing worked; he simply ran up a reputation as the luckiest man in town� which brought more people into the Temple; they wanted to see this man who always won. So they tried to shut him out of the games - which was a mistake. Their cold decks froze solid, their wheels wouldn't spin, their dice would roll nothing but box cars. At last they started putting up with him� and requesting him politely to please move along after he had won a few grand. Mike would always do so, if asked politely."

  Caxton added, "Of course that's one more power bloc we've got against us. Not just the Fosterites and some of the other churches - but the gambling syndicate and the city political machine. I rather suppose that job done on the Temple was by professionals brought in from out of town - I doubt if the Fosterite goon squads touched it. Too professional."

  While they talked, people came in, went out again, formed groups themselves or joined Jubal and Ben. Jubal found in them a most unusual feeling, an unhurried relaxation that at the same time was a dynamic tension. No one seemed excited, never in a hurry� yet everything they did seemed purposeful, even gestures as apparently accidental and unpremeditated as encountering one another and marking it with a kiss or a greeting - or sometimes not. It felt to Jubal as if each move had been planned by a master choreographer� yet obviously was not.

  The quiet and the increasing tension - or rather "expectancy," he decided; these people were not tense in any morbid fashion - reminded Jubal of something he had known in the past. Surgery? With a master at work, no noise, no lost motions? A little.

  Then he recalled it. Once, many years earlier when gigantic chemically powered rockets were used for the earliest probing of space from the third planet, he had watched a count-down in a block house� and he recalled now the same low voices, the same relaxed, very diverse but coordinated actions, the same rising exultant expectancy as the count grew ever smaller. They were "waiting for fullness," that was certain. But for what? Why were they so happy? Their Temple and all they had built had just been destroyed� yet they seemed like kids on the night before Christmas.

  Jubal had noted in passing, when he arrived, that the nudity Ben had been so disturbed by on his abortive first visit to the Nest did not seem to be the practice in this surrogate Nest, although private enough in location. Then Jubal realized later that he had failed to
notice such cases when they did appear; he had himself become so much in the unique close-family mood of the place that being dressed or not had become an unnoticeable irrelevancy.

  When he did notice, it was not skin but the thickest, most beautiful cascade of black hair he had ever seen, gracing a young woman who came in, spoke to someone, threw Ben a kiss, glanced gravely at Jubal, and left. Jubal followed her with his eyes, appreciating that flowing mass of midnight plumage. Only after she left did he realize that she had not been dressed other than in her queenly crowning glory� and then realized, too, that she was not the first of his brothers in that fashion.

  Ben noticed his glance. "That's Ruth," he said. "New high priestess. She and her husband have been away, clear on the other coast - their mission was to prepare a branch temple, I think. I'm glad they're back. It's beginning to look as if the whole family will be home at once - like an oldfashioned Christmas dinner."

  "Beautiful head of hair. I wish she had tarried."

  "Then why didn't you call her over?"

  "Eh?"

  "Ruth almost certainly found an excuse to come in here just to catch a glimpse of you - I suppose they must have just arrived. But haven't you noticed that we have been left pretty much alone, except for a few who sat down with us, didn't say much, then left?"

  "Well� yes." Jubal had noticed and had been a touch disappointed, as he had been braced, by all that he had heard, to ward off undue intimacy - and had found that he had stepped on a top step that wasn't there. He had been treated with hospitality and politeness, but it was more like the politeness of a cat than that of an over-friendly dog.

  "They are all terribly interested in the fact that you are here and are very anxious to see you� but they are a little bit afraid of you, too."

  "Me?"

  "Oh, I told you this last summer. You're a venerable tradition of the church, not quite real and a bit more than life size. Mike has told them that you are the only human being he knows of who can 'grok in fullness' without needing to learn Martian first. Most of them suspect that you can read minds as perfectly as Mike does."