Stranger in a Strange Land

“Nothing,” Harshaw answered. “Because I intend to run this show myself. Or almost nothing. I expect you to refrain from chewing out Joe Douglas over this coming settlement in that daily poop you write—maybe even praise him a little for ‘statesmanlike restraint’—”

“You’re making me vomit!”

“Not in the grass, please. Use your hat.—because I’m going to tell you ahead of time what I’m going to do, and why, and why Joe Douglas is going to agree to it. The first principle in riding a tiger is to hang on tight to its ears.”

“Quit being pompous. What’s the deal?”

“Quit being obtuse and listen. If this boy were a penniless nobody, there would be no problem. But he has the misfortune to be indisputably the heir to more wealth than Croesus ever dreamed of… plus a highly disputable claim to political power even greater through a politico-judicial precedent unparalleled in pure jug-headedness since the time Secretary Fall was convicted of receiving a bribe that Doheny was acquitted of having given him.”

“Yes, but—”

“I have the floor. As I told Jill, I have no slightest interest in ‘True Prince’ nonsense. Nor do I regard all that wealth as ‘his’; he didn’t produce a shilling of it. Even if he had earned it himself—impossible at his age—‘property’ is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.”

“Come again?”

“Ownership, of anything, is an extremely sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship, truly. God knows our legal theorists make this mystery complicated enough—but I didn’t begin to see how subtle it was until I got the Martian slant on it. Martians don’t have property. They don’t own anything… not even their own bodies.”

“Wait a minute, Jubal. Even animals have property. And the Martians aren’t animals; they’re a highly developed civilization, with great cities and all sorts of things.”

“Yes. ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests.’ And nobody understands a property line and the ‘meus-et-tuus’ involved better than a watch dog. But not Martians. Unless you regard an undistributed joint ownership of everything by a few millions or billions of senior citizens—‘ghosts’ to you, my friend—as being ‘property.’”

“Say, Jubal, how about these ‘Old Ones’ Mike talks about?”

“Do you want the official version? Or my private opinion?”

“Huh? Your private opinion. What you really think.”

“Then keep it to yourself. I think it is a lot of pious poppycock, suitable for enriching lawns. I think it is a superstition burned into the boy’s brain at so early an age that he stands no chance of ever breaking loose from it.”

“Jill talks as if she believed it.”

“At all other times you will hear me talk as if I believed it, too. Ordinary politeness. One of my most valued friends believes in astrology; I would never offend her by telling her what I think of it. The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their own children—has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don’t argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible. Mike’s faith in his ‘Old Ones’ is surely no more irrational than a conviction that the dynamics of the universe can be set aside through prayers for rain. Furthermore, he has the weight of evidence on his side; he has been there. I haven’t.”

“Mmm, Jubal, I’ll confess to a sneaking suspicion that immortality is a fact—but I’m glad that my grandfather’s ghost doesn’t continue to exercise any control over me. He was a cranky old devil.”

“And so was mine. And so am I. But is there any really good reason why a citizen’s franchise should be voided simply because he happens to be dead? Come to think of it, the precinct I was raised in had a very large graveyard vote—almost Martian. Yet the town was a pleasant one to live in. As may be, our lad Mike can’t own anything because the ‘Old Ones’ already own everything. So you see why I have had trouble explaining to him that he owns over a million shares of Lunar Enterprises, plus the Lyle Drive, plus assorted chattels and securities? It doesn’t help that the original owners are dead; that makes it worse, they are ‘Old Ones’—and Mike wouldn’t dream of sticking his nose into the business of ‘Old Ones.’”

“Uh… damn it, he’s obviously legally incompetent.”

“Of course he is. He can’t manage property because he doesn’t believe in its mystique—any more than I believe in his ghosts. Ben, all that Mike owns at the present time is a toothbrush I gave him—and he doesn’t know he owns that. If you took it away from him, he wouldn’t object, he wouldn’t even mention it to me—he would simply assume conclusively that the ‘Old Ones’ had authorized the change.”

Jubal sighed. “So he is incompetent… even though he can recite the law of property verbatim. Such being the case I shan’t allow his competency to be tried… nor even mentioned—for what guardian would be appointed?”