Stranger in a Strange Land

“Please, please! Of course I trust you! I wouldn’t think of letting anyone else perform a calculation for me. Now listen carefully. No one can hear from your side?”

“Of course not, dear.”

“I want you to cast a horoscope for Valentine Michael Smith.”

“‘Valentine Mich—’ The Man from Mars?”

“Yes, yes. Allie, he’s been kidnapped. We’ve got to find him.”

Some two hours later Madame Alexandra Vesant pushed herself back from her work table and sighed. She had had her secretary cancel all appointments and she really had tried; several sheets of paper, covered with diagrams and figures, and a dog-eared nautical almanac were in front of her and testified to her efforts. Alexandra Vesant differed from some other practicing astrologers in that she really did attempt to calculate the “influences” of the heavenly bodies, using a paper-backed book titled The Arcane Science of Judicial Astrology and Key to Solomon’s Stone which had been given to her by her late husband, Professor Simon Magus, the well known mentalist, stage hypnotist and illusionist, and student of the secret arts.

She trusted the book as she had trusted him; there was no one who could cast a horoscope like Simon, when he was sober—half the time he had not even needed to refer to the book, he knew it so well. She knew that she would never have that degree of skill, so she always referred to the almanac and to the manual. Her calculations were sometimes a little fuzzy, for the same reason that her checkbook sometimes did not balance; Becky Vesey (as she had been known as a child) had never really mastered the multiplication tables and she was inclined to confuse sevens with nines.

Nevertheless her horoscopes were eminently satisfactory; Mrs. Douglas was not her only distinguished client.

But this time she had been a touch panicky when the wife of the Secretary General demanded that she cast a horoscope for the Man from Mars. She had felt the way she used to feel when some officious idiot from the audience committee had insisted on retying her blindfold just before the Professor was to ask her questions. But she had discovered way back then, as a mere child, that she had natural stage presence and inner talent for the right answer; she had suppressed her panic and gone on with the show.

Now she had demanded of Agnes the exact hour, date, and place of birth of the Man from Mars, being fairly sure that the data could not be supplied.

But the information had been supplied, and most precisely, after a short delay, from the log of the Envoy. By then she was no longer panicky, had simply accepted the information and promised to call back as soon as the horoscopes were ready.

But now, after two hours of painful arithmetic, although she had completed new findings for Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, she was no farther ahead with Smith than when she had started. The trouble was very simple—and insuperable. Smith had not been born on Earth.

Her astrological bible did not include the idea of human beings born anywhere else; its anonymous author had lived and died before even the first rocket to the Moon. She had tried very hard to find a logical way out of the dilemma, on the assumption that all the principles were included in her manual and that what she must do was to find a way to correct for the lateral displacement. But she found herself lost in a mass of unfamiliar relationships; when it came right down to it she was not even sure whether or not the signs of the Zodiac were the same when seen from Mars and what could one possibly do without the signs of the Zodiac?

She could just as easily have tried to extract a cube root, that being the hurdle that had caused her to quit school.

She got out from a bottom desk drawer a tonic she kept at hand for such difficult occasions. She took one dose quickly, measured out a second, and thought about what Simon would have done. After a while she could hear his even, steady tones: “Confidence, kiddo, confidence! Have confidence in yourself and the yokels will have confidence in you. You owe it to them.”

She felt much better now and started writing out the results of the two horoscopes for the Douglases. That done, it turned out to be easy to write one for Smith, and she found, as she always did, that the words on paper proved themselves—they were all so beautifully true! She was just finishing as Agnes Douglas called again. “Allie? Haven’t you finished yet?”

“Just completed,” Madame Vesant answered with brisk self-confidence. “You realize, of course, that young Smith’s horoscope presented an unusual and very difficult problem in the Science. Born, as he was, on another planet, every aspect and attitude had to be recalculated. The influence of the Sun is lessened; the influence of Diana is missing almost completely. Jupiter is thrown into a novel, perhaps I should say ‘unique,’ aspect, as I am sure you will see. This required computation of—”