Stranger in a Strange Land

“Dear Mike.” She touched his cheek. “Good Mike. Believe me, dearest, it was better far to do only what you did do. Neither one of them will ever live it down—and I’ll bet that there won’t be another attempt to arrest anyone for indecent exposure in that township for another fifty years. Let’s talk about something else. I have been wanting to say that I am sorry, truly sorry, that your act didn’t go over. I did my best in writing the patter for it, dear—but I guess I’m no showman, either.”

“It was my lack, Jill. Tim speaks rightly—I don’t grok the chumps. Nevertheless it has been good to be with Baxter’s Combined Shows… I have grokked closer to the chumps each day.”

“Only we must not call them chumps any longer, nor marks, now that we are no longer with it. Just people—not ‘chumps.’”

“I grok that they are chumps.”

“Yes, dear. But it isn’t polite to say so.”

“I will remember.”

“Have you decided where we are going now?”

“No. When the time comes, I will know.”

“Yes, dear.” Jill reflected that Mike always did know. From his first change from docility to dominance he had grown steadily in strength and sureness in all ways. The boy (he had seemed like a boy then) who had found it tiring to hold an ash tray in the air, could now not only hold her in the air (and it did feel like “floating on clouds”; that was why she had written it into the patter that way) while doing several other things and continuing to talk, but also could exert any other strength he needed. She recalled one very rainy lot where one of the trucks had bogged down. Twenty men were crowded around it, trying to get it free—Mike had added his shoulder… and the truck moved.

She had seen how it had happened; the sunken hind wheel had simply lifted itself out of the mud. But Mike, much more sophisticated now, had not allowed anyone to guess.

She recalled, too, when he had at last grokked that the injunction about “wrongness” being necessary before he could make things go away applied only to living, grokking things—her dress did not have to have “wrongness” for him to toss it away. The injunction was merely a precaution in the training of nestlings; an adult was free to do as he grokked.

She wondered what his next major change would be? But she did not worry about it; Mike was good and wise. All she could teach him were little details of how to live among humans—while learning much more from him, in perfect happiness, greater happiness than she had known since her father died. “Mike, wouldn’t it be nice to have Dorcas and Anne and Miriam all here in the tub, too? And Father Jubal and the boys and—oh, our whole family!”

“It would take a bigger tub.”

“Who minds a little crowding? But Jubal’s pool would do nicely. When are we making another visit home, Mike? Jubal asks me every time I talk to him.”

“I grok it will be soon.”

“Martian ‘soon’? Or Earth ‘soon’? Never mind, darling, I know it will be when the waiting is filled. But that reminds me that Aunt Patty will be here soon and I do mean Earth ‘soon.’ Wash me off?”

She stood up, he stayed where he was. The soap lifted out of the soap dish, traveled all over her, replaced itself, and the soapy layer slathered into bubbles of lather. “Oooh! That’s enough. You tickle.”

“Rinse?”

“I’ll just dunk.” Quickly she squatted down, sloshed suds off her, stood up. “Just in time, too.”

Someone was knocking at the outer door. “Dearie? Are you decent?”

“Coming, Pat!” Jill shouted and added as she stepped out of the tub, “Dry me, please?”

At once she was dry, leaving not even wet footprints on the bath mat. “Dear? You’ll remember to put on some clothes before you come out? Patty’s a lady—not like me.”

“I will remember.”

XXVII

JILL STOPPED TO GRAB a negligee from a well-stocked wardrobe, hurried out into the living room and let in Mrs. Paiwonski. “Come in, dear. We were grabbing baths in a hurry; he’ll be right out. I’ll get you a drink—then you can have your second drink in the tub if you like. Loads of hot water.”

“I had a shower after I put Honey Bun to bed, but—yes, I’d love a tub bath. But, Jill baby, I didn’t come here to borrow your bath tub; I came because I’m just heartsick that you kids are leaving the show.”

“We won’t lose track of you.” Jill was busy with glasses. The hotel was so old that not even the “Bridal Suite” had its own ice dispenser but the night bellman, indoctrinated and subsidized, had left a carton of ice cubes. “Tim was right and you know he was. Mike and I have got to slick up our act a lot before we can hold up our end.”

“Your act is okay. Needs a few laughs in it, maybe, but—Hi, Smitty.” As Mike came in, she offered him a gloved hand. Mrs. Paiwonski always wore gloves away from the lot, and a high-necked dress and stockings. Dressed so, she looked like a middle-aged, most respectable widow, who had kept her figure trim in spite of her years—looked so, because she was precisely that.

“I was just telling Jill,” she went on, “that you’ve got a good act, you two.”