Stranger in a Strange Land

Smith stood quietly at the edge of the thick green lawn and stared. Here was a place so new as not to be grokked at once but he felt immediately pleased. It was less exciting than the moving place they had been in, but more suited for enfolding the self. He looked with interest at the view window at one end but did not recognize it as such, mistaking it for a living picture like those at home … his suite at Bethesda had no windows, it being in a new wing; he had never acquired the idea of «window.»

He noticed with approval that simulation of depth and movement in the «picture» was perfect — some very great artist must have created it. Up to now he had seen nothing to cause him to think that these people possessed art; his grokking of them was increased by this new experience and he felt warmed.

A movement caught his eye; he turned to find his brother removing false skins and slippers from its legs.

Jill sighed and wiggled her toes in the grass. «Gosh, how my feet hurt!» She glanced up and saw Smith watching with that curiously disturbing baby-faced stare. «Do it yourself. You'll love it.»

He blinked. «How do?»

«I keep forgetting. Come here. I'll help.» She got his shoes off, untaped the stockings and peeled them off. «There, doesn't that feel good?»

Smith wiggled his toes in the grass, then said timidly, «But these live?»

«Sure, it's alive, it's real grass. Ben paid a lot to have it that way. Why, the special lighting circuits alone cost more than I make in a month. So walk around and let your feet enjoy it.»

Smith missed most of this but did understand that grass was living beings and that he was being invited to walk on them. «Walk on living things?» He asked with incredulous horror.

«Huh? Why not? It doesn't hurt this grass; it was specially developed for house rugs.»

Smith was forced to remind himself that a water brother could not lead him into wrongful action. He let himself be encouraged to walk around — and found that he did enjoy it and the living creatures did not protest. He set his sensitivity for such as high as possible; his brother was right, this was their proper being — to be walked on. He resolved to enfold and praise it, an effort like that of a human trying to appreciate the merits of cannibalism — a custom which Smith found proper.

Jill let out a sigh. «I must stop playing. I don't know how long we will be safe.»

«Safe?»

«We can't stay here. They may be checking on everything that left the Center.» She frowned in thought. Her place would not do, this place would not do — and Ben had intended to take him to Jubal Harshaw. But she did not know Harshaw, nor where he lived — somewhere in the Poconos, Ben had said. Well, she would have to find out; she had nowhere else to turn.

«Why are you not happy, my brother?»

Jill snapped out of it and looked at Smith. Why, the poor infant didn't know anything was wrong! She tried to look at it from his point of view. She failed, but did grasp that he had no notion that they were running away from … from what? The cops? The hospital authorities? She was not sure what she had done, what laws she had broken; she simply knew that she had pitted herself against the Big People, the Bosses.

How could she tell the Man from Mars what they were up against when she herself did not know? Did they have policemen on Mars? Half the time talking to him was like shouting down a rain barrel.

Heavens, did they even have rain barrels on Mars? Or rain?

«Never mind,» she said soberly. «You just do what I tell you to.»

«Yes.»

It was an unlimited acceptance, an eternal yea. Jill suddenly felt that Smith would jump out the window if she told him to — and she was correct; he would have jumped, enjoyed every second of the twenty-story drop, and accepted without surprise or resentment discorporation on impact. Nor would he have been unaware that such a fall would kill him; fear of death was an idea beyond him. If a water brother selected for him such strange discorporation, he would cherish it and try to grok.

«Well, we can't stand here. I've got to feed us, I've got to get you into different clothes, and we've got to leave. Take those off.» She left to check Ben's wardrobe.

She selected a travel suit, a beret, shirt, underclothes, shoes, then returned. Smith was snarled like a kitten in knitting; he had one arm prisoned and his face wrapped in the skirt. He had not removed the cape before trying to take off the dress.

Jill said, «Oh, dear!» and ran to help.

She got him loose from the clothes, then stuffed them down the oubliette … she would pay Etta Schere later and she did not want cops finding them — just in case. «You are going to have a bath, my good man, before I dress you in Ben's clean clothes. They've been neglecting you. Come along.» Being a nurse, she was inured to bad odors, but (being a nurse) she was fanatic about soap and water … and it seemed that no one had bathed this patient recently. While Smith did not stink, he did remind her of a horse on a hot day.