Stranger in a Strange Land

“Yes,” agreed Jill. “Ben, you won’t believe it until you’ve had it done for you, but Mike can lend you strength—physical strength, I mean, not just moral support. I can do it a little bit. Mike can really do it.”

“Jill can do it quite a lot.” Mike caressed her. “Little Brother is a tower of strength to everybody. Last night she certainly was.” He smiled down at her, then sang:

“You’ll never find a girl like Jill.
No, not one in a billion.
Of all the tarts who ever will
The willingest is our Gillian!

—isn’t that right, Little Brother?”

“Pooh,” answered Jill, obviously pleased, covering his hand with her own and pressing it to her. “Dawn is exactly like me and you know it—and every bit as willing.”

“Maybe. But you’re here… and Dawn is downstairs interviewing the possibles out of the tip. She’s busy—you ain’t. That’s an important difference—isn’t it, Ben?”

“Could be.” Caxton was finding that their unself-conscious behavior was beginning to embarrass him, even in this uniquely relaxed atmosphere—he wished that they would either knock off necking… or give him an excuse to leave.

Instead Mike went right on cuddling Jill with one hand while keeping his other arm snug around Ben’s waist… and Ben was forced to admit that Jill encouraged him, rather than otherwise. Mike said very seriously, “Ben, a night like last night—helping a group to make the big jump to Eighth Circle—gets me terribly keyed up. Let me tell you something out of the lessons for Sixth, Ben. We humans have something that my former people don’t even dream of. They can’t. And I can tell you how precious it is… how especially precious I know it to be, because I have known what it is not to have it. The blessing of being male and female. Man and Woman created He them—the greatest treasure We-Who-Are-God ever invented. Right, Jill?”

“Beautifully right, Mike—and Ben knows it is Truth. But make a song for Dawn, too, darling.”

“Okay—

Ardent is our lovely Dawn;”

Ben grokked that in her glance—

“She buys new dresses every morn.
But never shops for pants!”

Jill giggled and squirmed. “Did you tune her in?”

“Yes, and she gave me a big Bronx cheer—with a kiss behind it for Ben. Say, isn’t there anybody in the kitchen this morning? I just remembered I haven’t eaten for a couple of days. Or years, maybe; I’m not sure.”

“I think Ruth is,” Ben said, untangling himself and standing up. “I’ll go see.”

“Duke can do it. Hey, Duke! See if you can find somebody who’ll fix me a stack of wheat cakes as tall as you are and a gallon of maple syrup.”

“Right, Mike!” Duke called back.

Ben Caxton hesitated, without an excuse to run an errand. He thought of a trumped-up excuse and glanced back over his shoulder.

* * *

“Jubal,” Caxton said earnestly, “I wouldn’t tell you this part at all if it weren’t essential to explaining how I feel about the whole thing, why I’m worried about them—all of them, Duke and Mike as well as Jill and Mike’s other victims, too. By that morning I was myself half conned into thinking everything was all right—weird as hell in spots—but jolly. Mike himself had me fascinated, too—his new personality is pretty powerful. Cocky and too much supersalesman… but very compelling. Then he—or both of them—got me rather embarrassed, so I took that chance to get up from the couch.

“Then I glanced back—and couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t been turned away five seconds… and Mike had managed to get rid of every stitch of clothes… and so help me, they were going to it, with myself and three or four others in the room at the time—just as boldly as monkeys in a zoo!

“Jubal, I was so shocked I almost lost my breakfast.”

XXXIII

“WELL,” SAID JUBAL, “what did you do? Cheer?”

“Like hell. I left, at once. I dashed for the outer door, grabbed my clothes and shoes—forgot my bag and didn’t go back for it—ignored the sign on the door, went on through—jumped in that bounce tube with my clothes in my arms. Blooie! Gone without saying good-by.”

“Rather abrupt.”

“I felt abrupt. I had to leave. In fact I left so fast that I durn near killed myself. You know the ordinary bounce tube—”

“I do not.”

“Well, unless you set it to take you up to a certain level, when you get into it you simply sink slowly, like cold molasses I didn’t sink, I fell and I was about six stories up. But just when I thought I had made my last mistake, something caught me. Not a safety net—a field of some sort I didn’t quite splash. But Mike needs to smooth out that gadget. Or put in the regular sort of bounce tube.”

Jubal said, “I’ll stick to stairs and, when unavoidable, elevators.”