Stranger in a Strange Land

“What, dear? I will if you want me to. It’s just that if I ever make a pass at Duke—and I might, now that you’ve put the idea into my little pointy head—I’d rather grab his shoulders and look him in the eye and say, ‘Duke, how about it?—I’m willing.’ I don’t want to do it by sending him a naughty picture through the mail, like those nasty women used to send to you. But if you want me to, okay. Uh, I needn’t make it too naughty—I could make it obviously a show girl’s professional picture and tell him what I’m doing and ask him if he has room for it in his scrap book. He might not take it as a pass.”

Mike frowned. “I spoke incompletely. If you wish to send Duke a naughty picture, do so. If you do not wish, then do not. But I had hoped to see the naughty picture taken. Jill, what is a ‘naughty’ picture?”

Mike was baffled by the whole idea—Jill’s reversal from an attitude that he had never understood but had learned to accept into exactly the opposite attitude of pleasure—sexual pleasure, he understood—at being stared at… plus a third and long-standing bafflement at Duke’s “art” collection—it certainly was not art. But the pale, wan Martian thing which parallels tumultuous human sexuality gave him no foundation for grokking either narcissism or voyeurism, modesty or display.

He added, “‘Naughty’ means a wrongness, usually a small wrongness, but I grokked that you did not mean even a small wrongness, but a goodness.”

“A naughty picture could be either one, I guess—depending on who it’s for—now that I’m over some prejudice. But—Mike, I’ll have to show you; I can’t tell you. But first close those slats, will you?”

The Venetian blinds flipped themselves shut. “All right,” she said. “Now this pose would be just a little bit naughty—any of the show girls would use it as a professional pic… and this one is just a little bit more so, some of the girls would use it. But this one is unmistakably naughty and this one is quite naughty… and this one is so extremely naughty that I wouldn’t pose for it with my face wrapped in a towel—unless you wanted it.”

“But if your face was covered, why would I want it?”

“Ask Duke. That’s all I can say.”

He continued to look puzzled. “I grok not wrongness, I grok not goodness. I grok—” He used a Martian word indicating a null state of all emotions.

But he was interested because he was so baffled; they went on discussing it, in Martian as much as possible because of its extremely fine discriminations for emotions and values—and in English, too, because Martian, rich as it is, simply couldn’t cope with the concepts.

Mike showed up at a ringside table that night, Jill having coached him in how to bribe the maître d’hôtel to give him such a spot; he was determined to pursue this mystery. Jill was not averse. She came strutting out in the first production number, her smile for everyone but a quick wink for Mike as she turned and her eyes passed across his. She discovered that, with Mike present, the warm, pleased sensation she had been enjoying nightly was greatly amplified—she suspected that, if the lights were out, she would glow in the dark.

When the parade stopped and the girls formed a tableau, Mike was no more than ten feet from her—she had been promoted her first week to a front position. The director had looked her over on her fourth day with the show and had said, “I don’t know what it is, kid. We’ve got girls around town begging for just any job with twice the shape you’ve got—but when the lights hit you, you’ve got what the customers look at. Okay, I’m moving you up where they can see better. The standard raise… and I still don’t know why.”

She posed and talked with Mike in her mind. (“Feel anything?”)

(“I grok but not in fullness.’)

(“Look where I am looking, my brother. The small one. He quivers. He thirsts for me.”)

(“I grok his thirst.”)

(“Can you see him?”) Jill stared straight into the customer’s eyes and gave him a warm smile… not alone to increase his interest in her but also to let Mike use her eyes, if possible. As her grokking of Martian thought had increased and as they had grown steadily closer in other ways they had begun to be able to use this common Martian convenience. Not fully as yet, but with increasing ease—Jill had no control over it; Mike could see through her eyes simply by calling to her, she could see through his only if he gave it his attention.

(“We grok him together,” Mike agreed. (“Great thirst for my little brother.”)

(“!!!!”)

(“Yes. Beautiful agony.”)

A music cue told Jill to break her pose and resume her slow strut. She did so, moving with proud sensuousness and feeling lust boil up in herself in response to emotions she was getting both from Mike and from the stranger. The routine caused her to walk away from Mike and almost toward the rutty little stranger, approaching him during her first few steps. She continued to lock eyes with him.