Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Miriam.” She put down her needle point and stood up.

  “I’ve never figured out how these girls divide up the work.”

  “Boss, how would you know?—you never do any.” Dorcas patted him on the stomach. “But you never miss any meals.”

  A gong sounded, they went in to eat. If Miriam had cooked dinner, she had done so with modern shortcuts; she was seated at the foot of the table and looked cool and beautiful. In addition to the secretaries there was a man slightly older than Larry called “Duke” who treated Jill as if she always lived there. Service was by non-android machines, keyed from Miriam’s end of the table. The food was excellent and, so far as Jill could tell, none was syntho.

  But it did not suit Harshaw. He complained that his knife was dull, the meat was tough; he accused Miriam of serving leftovers. No one seemed to hear him but Jill was becoming embarrassed on Miriam’s account when Anne put down her fork. “He mentioned his mother’s cooking,” she stated.

  “He is beginning to think he is boss again,” agreed Dorcas.

  “How long has it been?”

  “About ten days.”

  “Too long.” Anne gathered Dorcas and Miriam by eye; they stood up. Duke went on eating.

  Harshaw said hastily, “Girls, not at meals! Wait until—” They moved toward him; a machine scurried out of the way. Anne took his feet, each of the others an arm; French doors slid aside; they carried him out, squawking.

  The squaws ended in a splash.

  The women returned, not noticeably mussed. Miriam sat down and turned to Jill. “More salad, Jill?”

  Harshaw returned in pajamas and robe instead of evening jacket. A machine had covered his plate as he was dragged away; it now uncovered it, he went on eating. “As I was saying,” he remarked, “a woman who can’t cook is a waste of skin. If I don’t start having service I’m going to swap you all for a dog and shoot the dog. What’s dessert, Miriam?”

  “Strawberry shortcake.”

  “That’s more like it. You are all reprieved till Wednesday.”

  After dinner Jill went into the living room intending to view a news stereocast, being anxious to find out if she played a part in it. She could find no receiver, nor anything which could conceal a tank. Thinking about it, she could not recall having seen one. Nor any newspapers, although there were plenty of books and magazines.

  No one joined her. She began to wonder what time it was. She had left her watch upstairs, so she looked around for a clock. She failed to find one, then searched her memory and could not remember seeing clock or calendar in any room she had been in. She decided that she might as well go to bed. One wall was filled with books; she found a spool of Kipling’s Just So Stories and took it happily upstairs.

  The bed in her room was as modern as next week, with automassage, coffee dispenser, weather control, reading machine, etc.—but the alarm circuit was missing. Jill decided that she would probably not oversleep, crawled into bed, slid the spool into the reading machine, lay back and scanned the words streaming across the ceiling. Presently the control slipped from relaxed fingers, lights went out, she slept.

  Jubal Harshaw did not get to sleep as easily; he was vexed with himself. His interest had cooled and reaction set in. Half a century earlier he had sworn a mighty oath never again to pick up a stray cat—and now, so help him, by the multiple paps of Venus Genetrix he had picked up two at once . . . no, three, if he counted Caxton.

  That he had broken his oath more times than there were years intervening did not trouble him; he was not hobbled by consistency. Nor did two more pensioners under his roof bother him; pinching pennies was not in him. In most of a century of gusty living he had been broke many times, had often been wealthier than he now was; he regarded both as shifts in the weather and never counted his change.

  But the foofooraw that was bound to ensue when the busies caught up with these children disgruntled him. He considered it certain that catch up they would; that naive Gillian infant would leave a trail like a club-footed cow!

  Whereupon people would barge into his sanctuary, asking questions, making demands . . . and he would have to make decisions and take action. He was convinced that all action was futile, the prospect irritated him.

  He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; most people were candidates for protective restraint. He simply wished they would leave him alone!—all but the few he chose for playmates. He was convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn’t they leave a man alone?

  Around midnight he put out his twenty-seventh cigarette and sat up; lights came on. “Front!” he shouted at a microphone.

  Dorcas came in, dressed in robe and slippers. She yawned and said, “Yes, Boss?”

  “Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I’ve been a worthless, no-good parasite.”

  She yawned again. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to stop being sensible—a time to stand up and be counted—strike a blow for liberty—smite the wicked.”

  “Ummm . . .”

  “So quit yawning, the time has come.”

  She glanced down. “Maybe I had better get dressed.”

  “Yes. Get the other girls up, too; we’re going to be busy. Throw a bucket of water over Duke and tell him to dust off the babble machine and hook it up in the study. I want the news.”

  Dorcas looked startled. “You want stereovision?”

  “You heard me. Tell Duke, if it’s out of order, to pick a direction and start walking. Now git; we’ve got a busy night.”

  “All right,” Dorcas agreed doubtfully, “but I ought to take your temperature first.”

  “Peace, woman!”

  Duke had Harshaw’s receiver hooked up in time to let Jubal see a rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the “Man from Mars.” The commentary included a rumor about moving Smith to the Andes. Jubal put two and two together, after which he was calling people until morning. At dawn Dorcas brought him breakfast, six eggs beaten into brandy. He slurped them while reflecting that one advantage of a long life was that eventually a man knew almost everybody of importance—and could call on them in a pinch.

  Harshaw had prepared a bomb but did not intend to trigger it until the powers-that-be forced him. He realized that the government could haul Smith back into captivity on grounds that he was incompetent. His snap opinion was that Smith was legally insane and medically psychopathic by normal standards, the victim of a double-barreled situational psychosis of unique and monumental extent, first from being raised by non-humans and second from being pitched into another alien society.

  But he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as irrelevant. This human animal had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to a non-human society—but as a malleable infant. Could he, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical and much more difficult for an adult? Dr. Harshaw intended to find out; it was the first time in decades he had taken real interest in the practice of medicine.

  Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government filled him with sharper zest than he had felt in a generation.

  XI.

  AROUND A minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide
; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.

  On the fourth pebble the ancient Martians were not disturbed by contact with Earth. Nymphs bounced joyously around the surface, learning to live and eight out of nine dying in the process. Adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from nymphs, huddled in faerie, graceful cities and were as quiet as nymphs were boisterous—yet were even busier and led a rich life of the mind.

  Adults were not free of work in the human sense; they had a planet to supervise; plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed ’prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized; the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and metamorphosed into adults. All these must be done—but they were no more the “life” of Mars than is walking the dog twice a day the “life” of a man who bosses a planet-wide corporation between those walks—even though to a being from Arcturus III those walks might seem to be the tycoon’s most significant activity—as a slave to the dog.

  Martians and humans were both self-aware life forms but they had gone in vastly different directions. All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. The same was true of Mars, but in mirror corollary. Mars had the efficient bipolar pattern so common in that galaxy, but Martians had it in form so different from Terran form that it would be “sex” only to a biologist and emphatically not have been “sex” to a human psychiatrist. Martian nymphs were female, all adults were male.

  But in each in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polarity which controlled human lives could not exist on Mars. There was no possibility of “marriage.” Adults were huge, reminding the first humans to see them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentally active. Nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindless energy. There was no parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.

  Mars, geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the Envoy and the Champion. The events were too recent to be significant—if Martians had used newspapers, one edition a Terran century would have been ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to Martians; it had happened before, would happen again. When a new other race was thoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium or so) would be time for action, if needed.

  On Mars the currently important event was a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters. Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.

  Unexpected discorporation was rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death at the appropriate selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied that he forgot to come in out of the cold; when his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He had not noticed his discorporation and had gone on composing his sequence.

  Martian art was divided into two categories; that sort created by living adults, which was vigorous, often radical, and primitive; and that of the Old Ones, which was usually conservative, extremely complex, and was expected to show much higher standards of technique; the two sorts were judged separately.

  By what standards should this opus be judged? It bridged from corporate to discorporate; its final form had been set throughout by an Old One—yet the artist, with the detachment of all artists everywhere, had not noticed the change in his status and had continued to work as if corporate. Was it a new sort of art? Could more such pieces be produced by surprise discorporation of artists while they were working? The Old Ones had been discussing the exciting possibilities in ruminative rapport for centuries and all corporate Martians were eagerly awaiting their verdict.

  The question was of greater interest because it was religious art (in the Terran sense) and strongly emotional: it described contact between the Martian Race and the people of the fifth planet, an event that had happened long ago but which was alive and important to Martians in the sense in which one death by crucifixion remained alive and important to humans after two Terran millennia. The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed. This new work of art was one of many attempts to grok the whole beautiful experience in all its complexity in one opus. But before it could be judged it was necessary to grok how to judge it.

  It was a pretty problem.

  On the third planet Valentine Michael Smith was not concerned with this burning issue; he had never heard of it. His Martian keeper and his keeper’s water brothers had not mocked him with things he could not grasp. Smith knew of the destruction of the fifth planet just as any human school boy learns of Troy and Plymouth Rock, but he had not been exposed to art that he could not grok. His education had been unique, enormously greater than that of his nestlings, enormously less than that of an adult; his keeper and his keeper’s advisers among the Old Ones had taken passing interest in seeing how much and of what sort this alien nestling could learn. The results had taught them more about the human race than that race had yet learned about itself, for Smith had grokked readily things that no other human being had ever learned.

  At present Smith was enjoying himself. He had won a new water brother in Jubal, he had acquired many new friends, he was enjoying delightful new experiences in such kaleidoscopic quantity that he had no time to grok them; he could only file them away to be relived at leisure.

  His brother Jubal told him that he would grok this strange and beautiful place more quickly if he would learn to read, so he took a day off to do so, with Jill pointing to words and pronouncing. It meant staying out of the swimming pool that day, which was a great sacrifice, as swimming (once he got it through his head that it was permitted) was not merely a delight but almost unbearable religious ecstasy. If Jill and Jubal had not told him to, he would never have come out of the pool at all.

  Since he was not permitted to swim at night he read all night long. He was zipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica and sampling Jubal’s medicine and law libraries as dessert. His brother Jubal saw him leafing through one of the books, stopped and questioned him about what he had read. Smith answered carefully, as it reminded him of tests the Old Ones had given him. His brother seemed upset at his answers and Smith found it necessary to go into meditation—he was sure that he had answered with the words in the book even though he did not grok them all.

  But he preferred the pool to the books, especially when Jill and Miriam and Larry and the rest were all splashing each other. He did not learn at once to swim, but discovered that he could do something they could not. He went to the bottom and lay there, immersed in bliss—whereupon they hauled him out with such excitement that he was almost forced to withdraw, had it not been clear that they were concerned for his welfare.

  Later he demonstrated this for Jubal, remaining on the bottom a delicious time, and tried to teach it to his brother Jill—but she became disturbed and he desisted. It was his first rea
lization that there were things he could do that these new friends could not. He thought about it a long time, trying to grok its fullness.

  Smith was happy; Harshaw was not. He continued his usual loafing, varied by casual observation of his laboratory animal. He arranged no schedule for Smith, no program of study, no regular physical examinations, but allowed Smith to run wild, like a puppy on a ranch. What supervision Smith received came from Gillian—more than enough, in Jubal’s grumpy opinion; he took a dim view of males’ being reared by females.

  However, Gillian did little more than coach Smith in social behavior. He ate at the table now, dressed himself (Jubal thought he did; he made a note to ask Jill if she still had to assist him); he conformed to the household’s informal customs and coped with new experiences on a “monkey-see-monkey-do” basis. Smith started his first meal at the table using only a spoon and Jill cut up his meat. By the end of the meal he was attempting to eat as others ate. At the next meal his manners were a precise imitation of Jill’s, including superfluous mannerisms.

  Even the discovery that Smith had taught himself to read with the speed of electronic scanning and appeared to have total recall of all that he read did not tempt Jubal Harshaw to make a “project” of Smith, with controls, measurements, and curves of progress. Harshaw had the arrogant humility of a man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance; he saw no point in “measurements” when he did not know what he was measuring.