Stranger in a Strange Land

“Me? Oh, no, they don’t teach that in kindergarten. Oh, I’m a deacon by courtesy, simply because I’m ‘First Called’ and Ninth Circle—but my actual progress is about Fourth Circle, bucking for Fifth. Why, I’m just beginning to get control of my own body. Patty is the only one of us who uses teleportation herself with any regularity… and I’m not sure she ever does it without Mike’s support. Oh, Mike says she’s quite capable of it, but Patty is such a curiously naive and humble person for the genius she is that she is quite dependent on Mike. Which she needn’t be. Jubal, I grok this: we don’t actually need Mike—Oh, I’m not running him down; don’t get me wrong. But you could have been the Man from Mars. Or even me. It’s like the first man to discover fire. Fire was there all along—and after he showed that it could be used, anybody could use it… anybody with sense and savvy enough not to get burned with it. Follow me?”

“I grok, somewhat at least.”

“Mike is our Prometheus—but remember, Prometheus was not God. Mike keeps emphasizing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God that groks. Mike is a man along with the rest of us… even though he knows more. A very superior man, admittedly—a lesser man, taught the things the Martians know, probably would have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that’s all.”

Jubal said slowly, “As I recall, Prometheus paid a high price for bringing fire to mankind.”

“And don’t think that Mike doesn’t! He pays with twenty-four hours of work every day, seven days a week, trying to teach a few of us how to play with matches without getting burned. Jill and Patty lowered the boom on him, started making him take one night a week off, long before I joined up.” Caxton smiled. “But you can’t stop Mike. This burg is loaded with gambling joints, no doubt you know, and most of them crooked since it’s against the law here. Mike usually spends his night off bucking crooked games—and winning. Picks up ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a night. They tried to mug him, they tried to kill him, they tried knock-out drops and muscle boys—nothing worked; he simply ran up a reputation as the luckiest man in town… which brought more people into the Temple; they wanted to see this man who always won. So they tried to shut him out of the games—which was a mistake. Their cold decks froze solid, their wheels wouldn’t spin, their dice would roll nothing but box cars. At last they started putting up with him… and requesting him politely to please move along after he had won a few grand. Mike would always do so, if asked politely.”

Caxton added, “Of course that’s one more power bloc we’ve got against us. Not just the Fosterites and some of the other churches—but the gambling syndicate and the city political machine. I rather suppose that job done on the Temple was by professionals brought in from out of town—I doubt if the Fosterite goon squads touched it. Too professional.”

While they talked, people came in, went out again, formed groups themselves or joined Jubal and Ben. Jubal found in them a most unusual feeling, an unhurried relaxation that at the same time was a dynamic tension. No one seemed excited, never in a hurry… yet everything they did seemed purposeful, even gestures as apparently accidental and unpremeditated as encountering one another and marking it with a kiss or a greeting—or sometimes not. It felt to Jubal as if each move had been planned by a master choreographer… yet obviously was not.

The quiet and the increasing tension—or rather “expectancy,” he decided; these people were not tense in any morbid fashion—reminded Jubal of something he had known in the past. Surgery? With a master at work, no noise, no lost motions? A little.

Then he recalled it. Once, many years earlier when gigantic chemically powered rockets were used for the earliest probing of space from the third planet, he had watched a count-down in a block house… and he recalled now the same low voices, the same relaxed, very diverse but coordinated actions, the same rising exultant expectancy as the count grew ever smaller. They were “waiting for fullness,” that was certain. But for what? Why were they so happy? Their Temple and all they had built had just been destroyed… yet they seemed like kids on the night before Christmas.

Jubal had noted in passing, when he arrived, that the nudity Ben had been so disturbed by on his abortive first visit to the Nest did not seem to be the practice in this surrogate Nest, although private enough in location. Then Jubal realized later that he had failed to notice such cases when they did appear; he had himself become so much in the unique close-family mood of the place that being dressed or not had become an unnoticeable irrelevancy.