Stranger in a Strange Land

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; most people were candidates for protective restraint. He simply wished they would leave him alone! — all but the few he chose for playmates. He was convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana … dived into his belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man alone?

Around midnight he put out his twenty-seventh cigarette and sat up; lights came on. «Front!» he shouted at a microphone.

Dorcas came in, dressed in robe and slippers. She yawned and said, «Yes, Boss?»

«Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.»

She yawned again. «Everybody knows that.»

«Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible — a time to stand up and be counted — strike a blow for liberty — smite the wicked.»

«Ummm …

«So quit yawning, the time has come.»

She glanced down. «Maybe I had better get dressed.»

«Yes. Get the other girls up, too; we're going to be busy. Throw a bucket of water over Duke and tell him to dust off the babble machine and hook it up in the study. I want the news.»

Dorcas looked startled. «You want stereovision?»

«You heard me. Tell Duke, if it's out of order, to pick a direction and start walking. Now git; we've got a busy night.»

«All right,» Dorcas agreed doubtfully, «but I ought to take your temperature first.»

«Peace, woman!»

Duke had Harshaw's receiver hooked up in time to let Jubal see a rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the «Man from Mars.» The commentary included a rumor about moving Smith to the Andes. Jubal put two and two together, after which he was calling people until morning. At dawn Dorcas brought him breakfast, six eggs beaten into brandy. He slurped them while reflecting that one advantage of a long life was that eventually a man knew almost everybody of importance — and could call on them in a pinch.

Harshaw had prepared a bomb but did not intend to trigger it until the powers-that-be forced him. He realized that the government could haul Smith back into captivity on grounds that he was incompetent. His snap opinion was that Smith was legally insane and medically psychopathic by normal standards, the victim of a double-barreled situational psychosis of unique and monumental extent, first from being raised by non-humans and second from being pitched into another alien society.

But he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as irrelevant. This human animal had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to a non-human society — but as a malleable infant. Could he, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical and much more difficult for an adult? Dr. Harshaw intended to find out; it was the first time in decades he had taken real interest in the practice of medicine.

Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government filled him with sharper zest than he had felt in a generation.

XI

AROUND A minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.

On the fourth pebble the ancient Martians were not disturbed by contact with Earth. Nymphs bounced joyously around the surface, learning to live and eight out of nine dying in the process. Adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from nymphs, huddled in faerie, graceful cities and were as quiet as nymphs were boisterous — yet were even busier and led a rich life of the mind.

Adults were not free of work in the human sense; they had a planet to supervise; plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized; the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and metamorphosed into adults. All these must be done — but they were no more the «life» of Mars than is walking the dog twice a day the «life» of a man who bosses a planet-wide corporation between those walks — even though to a being from Arcturus III those walks might seem to be the tycoon's most significant activity — as a slave to the dog.