Stranger in a Strange Land

“We do. By the way, this conversation is completely private—and besides that, no one of us would ever attempt to read you; I’m not sure we could. Even last night the link was through Dawn’s mind, not yours.”

“Well, that is some slight comfort.”

“Uh, I want to get to that later. I am ‘only an egg’ in this art; the Old Ones are past masters. They stayed linked with me but left me on my own, ignored me—then they triggered me and all that I had seen and heard and done and felt and grokked poured out of me and became part of their permanent records. I don’t mean that they wiped my mind of my experiences; they simply played the tape, so to speak, made a copy. But the triggering I was aware of—and it was over before I could possibly do anything to stop it. Then they dropped me, cut off the linkage; I couldn’t even protest.”

“Well… it seems to me that they used you pretty shabbily—”

“Not by their standards. Nor would I have objected—I would have been happy to volunteer—had I known about it before I left Mars. But they didn’t want me to know; they wanted me to see and grok without interference.”

“I was going to add,” Jubal said, “that if you are free of this damnable invasion of your privacy now, then what harm has been done? It seems to me that you could have had a Martian at your elbow all these past two and a half years, with no harm other than attracting stares.”

Mike looked very sober. “Jubal, listen to a story. Listen all the way through.” Mike told him of the destruction of the missing Fifth Planet of Sol, whose ruins are the asteroids. “Well, Jubal?”

“It reminds me a little of the myths about the Flood.”

“No, Jubal. The Flood you aren’t sure about. Are you sure about the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum?”

“Oh, yes. Those are established historical facts.”

“Jubal, the destruction of the Fifth Planet by the Old Ones is as historically certain as that eruption of Vesuvius—and it is recorded in much greater detail. No myth. Fact.”

“Uh, stipulate it as such. Do I understand that you fear that the Old Ones of Mars will decide to give this planet the same treatment? Will you forgive me if I say that is a bit hard for me to swallow?”

“Why, Jubal, it wouldn’t take the Old Ones to do it. It merely takes a certain fundamental knowledge of physics, how matter is put together—and the same sort of control that you have seen me use time and again. Simply necessary first to grok what you want to manipulate. I can do it unassisted, right now. Say a piece near the core of the planet about a hundred miles in diameter—much bigger than necessary but we want to make this fast and painless, if only to please Jill. Feel out its size and place, then grok carefully how it is put together—” His face lost all expression as he talked and his eyeballs started to turn up.

“Hey!” broke in Harshaw. “Cut it out! I don’t know whether you can or you can’t but I’m certain I don’t want you to try!”

The face of the Man from Mars became normal. “Why, I would never do it. For me, it would be a wrongness—I am human.”

“But not for them?”

“Oh, no. The Old Ones might grok it as beauty. I don’t know. Oh, I have the discipline to do it… but not the volition. Jill could do it—that is, she could contemplate the exact method. But she could never will to do it; she is human too; this is her planet. The essence of the discipline is, first, self-awareness, and then, self-control. By the time a human is physically able to destroy this planet by this method—instead of by clumsy things like cobalt bombs—it is not possible, I grok fully, for him to entertain such a volition. He would discorporate. And that would end any threat; our Old Ones don’t hang around the way they do on Mars.”

“Mmmm… son, as long as we are checking you for bats in your belfry, clear up something else. You’ve always spoken of these ‘Old Ones’ as casually as I speak of the neighbor’s dog—but I find ghosts hard to swallow. What does an ‘Old One’ look like?”

“Why, just like any other Martian… except that there is more variety in the appearance of adult Martians than there is in us.”

“Then how do you know it’s not just an adult Martian? Doesn’t he walk through walls, or some such?”

“Any Martian can do that. I did, just yesterday.”

“Uh… shimmers? Or anything?”

“No. You see, hear, feel them—everything. It’s like an image in a stereo tank, only perfect and put right into your mind. But—Look, Jubal, the whole thing would be a silly question on Mars, but I realize it isn’t, here. But if you had been present at the discorporation—death—of a friend, then you helped eat his body… and then you saw his ghost, talked with it, touched it, anything—would you then believe in ghosts?”

“Well, either ghosts, or I myself had slipped my leash.”