Stranger in a Strange Land

They went to the town’s station flat and caught the first Greyhound going anywhere. A week or two later they stopped at home, shared water for a couple of days, left again without saying good-by—or, rather, Mike did not; saying good-by was one human custom Mike stubbornly resisted and never used with his own. He used it formally with strangers under circumstances in which Jill required him to.

Shortly they were in Las Vegas, stopping in an unfashionable hotel near but not on the Strip. Mike tried all the games in all the casinos while Jill filled in the time as a show girl-gambling bored her. Since she couldn’t sing or dance and had no act, standing or parading slowly in a tall improbable hat, a smile, and a scrap of tinsel was the job best suited to her in the Babylon of the West. She preferred to work if Mike was busy and, somehow, Mike could always get her the job she picked out. Since the casinos never closed, Mike was busy almost all their time in Las Vegas.

Mike was careful not to win too much in any one casino, keeping to limits Jill set for him. After he had milked each one for a few thousand he carefully put it all back, never letting himself be the big-money player at any game, whether winning or losing. Then he took a job as a croupier, studying people, trying to grok why they gambled. He grokked unclearly a drive in many of the gamblers that seemed to be intensely sexual in nature—but he seemed to grok wrongness in this. He kept the job quite a while, letting always the little ball roll without interference.

Jill was amused to discover that the customers in the palatial theater restaurant where she worked were just marks… marks with more money but still marks. She discovered something about herself, too; she enjoyed displaying herself, as long as she was safe from hands that she did not want to grab her. With her steadily increasing Martian honesty she examined this newly uncovered facet in herself. In the past, while she had known that she enjoyed being admired, she had sincerely believed that she wanted it only from a select few and usually only from one—she had been irked at the discovery, now long past, that the sight of her physical being really didn’t mean anything to Mike even though he had been and remained as aggressively and tenderly devoted to her physically as a woman could dream of—if he wasn’t preoccupied.

And he was even generous about that, she reminded herself. If she wished, he would always let her call him out of his deepest withdrawal trances, shift gears without complaint and be smiling and eager and loving.

Nevertheless, there it was—one of his strangenesses, like his inability to laugh. Jill decided, after her initiation as a show girl, that she enjoyed being visually admired because that was the one thing Mike did not give her.

But her own perfecting self-honesty and steadily growing empathy did not allow that theory to stand. The male half of the audience always had that to-be-expected high percentage who were too old, too fat, too bald, and in general too far gone along the sad road of entropy to be likely to be attractive to a female of Jill’s youth, beauty, and fastidiousness—she had always been scornful of “lecherous old wolves”—although not of old men per se, she reminded herself in her own defense; Jubal could look at her, even use crude language in deliberate indecencies, and not give her the slightest feeling that he was anxious to get her alone and grope her. She was so serenely sure of Jubal’s love for her and its truly spiritual nature that she told herself that she could easily share a bed with him, go right to sleep—and be sure that be would also, with only the goodnight peck she always gave him.

But now she found that these unattractive males did not set her teeth on edge. When she felt their admiring stares or even their outright lust—and she found that she did feel it, could even identify the source—she did not resent it; it warmed her and made her feel smugly pleased.

“Exhibitionism” had been to her simply a word used in abnormal psychology—a neurotic weakness she had held in contempt. Now, in digging out her own and looking at it, she decided that either this form of narcissism was normal, or she was abnormal and had not known it. But she didn’t feel abnormal; she felt healthy and happy—healthier than she had ever been. She had been always of better than average health-nurses need to be—but she hadn’t had a sniffle nor even an upset stomach in she couldn’t remember when… why, she thought wonderingly, not even cramps.

Okay, she was healthy—and if a healthy woman liked to be looked at—and not as a side of beef!—then it follows as the night from day that healthy men should like to look at them, else there was just no darn sense to it! At which point she finally understood, intellectually, Duke and his pictures… and begged his pardon in her mind.