Stranger in a Strange Land

“Go ahead and buy her a present, dear. She has to tell you that but you give her a present anyhow. Hmm… Anne vetoed clothes and jewelry, finally selected for him a present which puzzled him—Jill already smelled exactly the way Jill should smell.

The small size and apparent unimportance of the present, when it arrived, added to his misgivings—and when Anne let him whiff it before having him give it to Jill, Mike was more in doubt than ever; the odor was very strong and smelled not at all like Jill.

Nevertheless, Anne was right; Jill was delighted with the perfume and insisted on kissing him at once. In kissing her he grokked fully that this gift was what she wanted and that it made them grow closer.

When she wore it at dinner that night, he discovered that the fragrance truly did not differ from that of Jill herself; in some unclear fashion it simply made Jill smell more deliciously like Jill than ever. Still stranger, it caused Dorcas to kiss him and whisper, “Mike hon… the negligee is lovely and just what I wanted—but perhaps someday you’ll give me perfume?”

Mike could not grok why Dorcas would want it, since Dorcas did not smell at all like Jill and therefore perfume would not be proper for her nor, he realized, would he want Dorcas to smell like Jill; he wanted Dorcas to smell like Dorcas.

Jubal interrupted with: “Quit nuzzling the lad and let him eat his dinner. Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don’t wheedle Mike for more stinkum.”

“Boss, you mind your own business.”

It was all very puzzling—both that Jill could smell still more like Jill and that Dorcas should wish to smell like Jill when she already smelled like herself… and that Jubal would say that Dorcas smelled like a cat when she did not. There was a cat who lived on the place (not as a pet, but as co-owner); on rare occasion it came to the house and deigned to accept a handout. The cat and Mike had grokked each other at once, and Mike had found its carniverous thoughts most pleasing and quite Martian. He had discovered, too, that the cat’s name (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was not the cat’s name at all, but he had not told anyone this because he could not pronounce the cat’s real name; he could only hear it in his head.

The cat did not smell like Dorcas.

Giving presents was a great goodness and the buying thereof taught Mike much about the true value of money. But he had not forgotten even momentarily that there were other things he was eager to grok. Jubal had put off Senator Boone’s invitation to Mike twice without mentioning it to Mike and Mike had not noticed, since his quite different grasp of time made “next Sunday” no particular date.

But the next repetition of the invitation came by mall and was addressed to Mike; Senator Boone was under pressure from Supreme Bishop Digby to produce the Man from Mars and Boone had sensed that Harshaw was stalling him and might stall indefinitely.

Mike took it to Jubal, stood waiting. “Well?” Jubal growled. “Do you want to go, or don’t you? You don’t have to attend a Fosterite service. We can tell ’em to go to hell.”

So a Checker Cab with a human driver (Harshaw refused to trust his life to an autocab) picked them up the next Sunday morning and delivered Mike, Jill, and Jubal to a public landing fiat just outside the sacred grounds of Archangel Foster Tabernacle of the Church of the New Revelation.

XXIII

JUBAL HAD BEEN TRYING to warn Mike all the way to church; of what, Mike was not certain. He had listened, he always listened—but the landscape below them tugged for attention, too; he had compromised by storing what Jubal said. “Now look, boy,” Jubal had admonished, “these Fosterites are after your money. That’s all right, most everybody is after your money; you just have to be firm. Your money and the prestige of having the Man from Mars join their church. They’re going to work on you—and you have to be firm about that, too.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Damn it, I don’t believe you’ve been listening.”

“I am sorry, Jubal.”