Jubal said gently, "Shall I speak, Mr. Secretary?"

            "Please do."

            "Very well." Jubal paused, slowly took out a big handkerchief and blew his nose in a prolonged blast, producing a minor chord three octaves below middle C. He then fixed Kung with his eye and said solemnly, "Mr. Assemblyman, I'll address this to you-because I know it is unnecessary to address it to the government in the person of the Secretary. Once a long, long tine ago, when I was a little boy, another little boy, equally young and foolish, and I formed a club. Just the two of us. Since we had a club, we had to have rules . . - and the first rule we passed, unanimously, I should add-was that henceforth we would always call our mothers, 'crosspatch.' Silly, of course . . . but we were very young. Mr. Kung, can you deduce the outcome of that 'rule'?"

            "I won't guess, Dr. Harshaw."

            "I tried to implement our 'Crosspatch' decision once. Once was enough and it saved my chum from making the same mistake. All it got me was my young bottom well warmed with a peach switch. And. that was the end of the 'crosspatch' decision."

            Jubal cleared his throat. "Just a moment Mr. Kung. Knowing that someone was certain to raise this non-existent issue I tried to explain the Larkin Decision to my client. At first be had trouble realizing that anyone could think that this legal fiction would apply to Mars. After all, Mars is inhabited, by an old and wise race-much older than yours, sir, and possibly wiser. But when he did understand it, he was amused. Just that, sir- tolerantly amused. Once-just once-I under-rated my mother's power to punish a small boy's impudence. That lesson was cheap, a bargain- But this planet cannot afford such a lesson on a planetary scale. Before we attempt to parcel out lands which do not belong to us, it behooves us to be very sure what peach switches are hanging in the Martian kitchen."

            Kung looked blandly unconvinced- "Dr. Harshaw, if the Larkin Decision is no more than a small boy's folly . . . why were national honors rendered to Mr. Smith?"

            Jubal shrugged- "That question should be put to the government, not me. But I can tell you how I interpreted them-as elementary politeness to the Ancient Ones of Mars."

            "Please?"

            "Mr. Kung, those honors were no hollow echo of the Larkin Decision. In a fashion quite beyond human experience, Mr. Smith is the Planet Mars."

            Kung did not even blink. "Continue."

            "Or, rather, the entire Martian race. In Smith's person, the Ancient Ones of Mars are visiting us. Honors rendered to him are honors rendered to them-and harm done to him is harm done to them. This is true in a very literal but utterly unhuman sense. It was wise and prudent for us to render honors to our neighbors today-but the wisdom in it has nothing to do with the Larkin Decision. No responsible person has argued that the Larkin precedent applies to an inhabited planet-I venture to say that no one ever will." Jubal paused and looked up, as if asking Heaven for help. "But, Mr. Kung, be assured that the ancient rulers of Mars do not fail to notice how we treat their ambassador. The honors rendered to them through him were a gracious symbol. I am certain that the government of this planet showed wisdom thereby. In time, you will learn that it was a most prudent act as well."

            Kung answered blandly, "Doctor, if you are trying to frighten me, you have not succeeded."

            "I did not expect to. But, fortunately for the welfare of this planet, your opinion did not control." Jubal turned back to Douglas. "Mr. Secretary, this is the longest public appearance I have made in years . . and I find that I am fatigued. Could we recess these talks? While we await your decision?"

XXI

            THE MEETING ADJOURNED. Jubal found his intention of getting his flock out of the Palace balked by the presence of the American President and of Senator Boone; both wanted to chat with Mike, both were practical politicians who realized fully the freshly enhanced value of being seen on intimate terms with the Man from Mars-and both were well aware that the eyes of the world, via stereovision, were still on them.

            And other hungry politicos were closing in.

            Jubal said quickly, "Mr. President, Senator-we're leaving at once to have lunch. Can you join us?" He reflected that two in private would be easier to handle than two dozen in public-and he had to get Mike out of there before anything came unstuck.

            To his relief both had other duties elsewhere. Jubal found himself promising not only to fetch Mike to that obscene Fosterite service but also to bring him to the White House-ob, well, the boy could always get sick, if necessary. "Places, girls."

            With his escort again around him Mike was convoyed to the roof, Anne leading the way since she would remember it-and creating quite a bow wave with her height, her Valkyrie blonde beauty, and her impressive cloak of a Fair Witness. Jubal, Ben, and the three officers from the Champion covered the rear. Larry and the Greyhound bus were waiting on the roof; a few minutes later the driver left them on the roof of the New Mayflower. Newsmen caught up with them there, of course, but the girls guarded Mike on down to the suite Duke had taken earlier. They were becoming quite good at it and were enjoying it; Miriam and Dorcas in particular displayed ferocity that reminded Jubal of a mother cat defending her young-only they made a game of it, keeping score against each other. A reporter that closed within three feet of either of them courted a spiked instep.

            They found their corridor patrolled by S.S. troopers and an officer outside the door of their suite.

            Jubal's back hair rose, but he realized (or "hoped," he corrected himself) that their presence meant that Douglas was carrying out his half of the bargain in full measure. The letter Jubal had sent to Douglas before the conference, explaining what he was going to do and say, and why, had included a plea to Douglas to use his power and influence to protect Mike's privacy from here on-so that the unfortunate lad could begin to lead a normal life. (If a "normal" life was possible for Mike, Jubal again corrected himself.)

            So Jubal merely called out, "Jill! Keep Mike under control. It's okay."

            "Right, Boss."

            And so it was. The officer at the door simply saluted. Jubal glanced at him, "Well! Howdy, Major. Busted down any doors lately?"

            Major Bloch turned red but kept his eyes forward and did not answer. Jubal wondered if the assignment was punishment? No, likely just coincidence; there probably wouldn't be more than a handful of S.S. officers of appropriate rank available for the chore in this area. Jubal considered rubbing it in by saying that a skunk had wandered in that door and ruined his living room furniture-and what was the major going to do about that? But he decided against it; it would not only be ungracious but untrue- Duke had rigged a temporary closure out of plywood before the party got too wet for such tasks.

            Duke was waiting inside. Jubal said, "Sit down, gentlemen. How about it, Duke?"

            Duke shrugged. "Who knows? Nobody has bugged this suite since I took it; I guarantee that. I turned down the first suite they offered me, just as you said to, and I picked this one because it's got a heavy ceiling-the ballroom is above us. And I've spent the time since searching the place. But, Boss, I've pushed enough electrons to know that any dump can be bugged, so that you can't find it without tearing the building down."

            "Fine, fine-but I didn't mean that. They can't keep a hotel this big bugged throughout just on the chance that we might take a room in it-at least, I don't think they can. I mean, 'How about the supplies?' I'm hungry, boy, and very thirsty-and we've three more for lunch."

            "Oh, that. That stuff was unloaded under my eyes, carried down the same way, placed just inside the door; I put it all in the pantry. You've got a suspicious nature, Boss."

            "I sure have-and you'd better acquire one if you want to live as long as I have." Jubal had just trusted Douglas with a fortune equivalent to a medium-sized national debt-but he had not assumed that Douglas' overeager lieutenants would not tamper with food and drink. So to avoid the services of a food taster he had fetched all the way from the Poconos plenty of food, more than a plenty of liquor-and a little water. And, of course, ice cubes. He wondered how Caesar had licked the Gauls without ice cubes.

            "I don't hanker to," Duke answered.

            "Matter of taste. I've had a pretty good time, on the whole. Get crackin', girls. Anne, douse your cloak and get useful. First girl back in here with a drink for me skips her next turn at 'Front.' After our guests, I mean. Do please sit down, gentlemen. Sven, what's your favorite poison? Akvavit, I suppose-Larry, tear down, find a liquor store and fetch back a couple of bottles of akvavit. Fetch Bols gin for the captain, too."

            "Hold it, Jubal," Nelson said firmly. "I won't touch akvavit unless it's chilled overnight-and I'd rather have Scotch."

            "Me, too," agreed van Tromp.

            "All right. Got enough of that to drown a horse. Dr. Mahmoud? If you prefer soft drinks, I'm pretty sure the girls tucked some in."

            Mahmoud looked wistful. "I should not allow myself to be tempted by strong drink."

            "No need to be. Let me prescribe for you, as a physician." Jubal looked him over. "Son, you look as if you had been under considerable nervous strain. Now we could alleviate that with meprobamate but since we don't have that at hand, I'm forced to substitute two ounces of ninety proof ethanol, repeat as needed. Any particular flavor you prefer to kill the medicinal taste? And with or without bubbles?"

            Mahmoud smiled and suddenly did not look at all English. "Thank you, Doctor-but I'll sin my own sins, with my eyes open. Gin, please, with water on the side. Or vodka. Or whatever is available."

            "Or medicinal alcohol," Nelson added. "Don't let him pull your leg, Jubal. Stinky drinks anything-and always regrets it."

            "I do regret it," Mahmoud said earnestly, "because I know it is sinful."

            "Then don't needle him about it, Sven," Jubal said brusquely. "If Stinky gets more mileage out of his sins by regretting them, that's his business. My own regretter burned out from overload during the market crash in '29 and I've never replaced it-and that's my business. To each his own. How about victuals, Stinky? Anne probably stuffed a ham into one of those hampers-and there might be other unclean items not as clearly recognizable. Shall I check?"

            Mahmoud shook his head. "I'm not a traditionalist, Jubal. That legislation was given a long time ago, according to the needs of the time. The times are different now."

            Jubal suddenly looked sad. "Yes. But for the better? Never mind, this too shall pass and leave not a rack of mutton behind. Eat what you will, my brother-God forgives necessity."

            "Thank you. But, truthfully, I often do not eat in the middle of the day."

            "Better eat, or the prescribed ethanol will do more than relax you. Besides, these kids who work for me may sometimes misspell words but they are all superb cooks."

            Miriam had come up behind Jubal with a tray bearing four drinks, orders having been filled at once while Jubal ranted. "Boss," she broke in, "I heard that. Will you put it in writing?"

            "What?" He whirled around and glared at her. "Snooping! You stay in after school and write one thousand times~ 'I will not flap my ears at private conversations.' Stay until you finish it."

            "Yes, Boss. This is for you, Captain .. and for you, Dr. Nelson and this is yours, Dr. Mahmoud. Water on the side, you said?"

            "Yes, Miriam. Thank you."

            "Usual Harshaw service-sloppy but fast. Here's yours, Boss." "You put water in it!"

            "Anne's orders. She says you're too tired to have it on the rocks."

            Jubal looked long-suffering. "You see what I have to put up with, gentlemen? We should never have put shoes on 'em. Miriam, make that 'one thousand times' in Sanskrit."

            "Yes, Boss. Just as soon as I find time to learn it." She patted him on the head. "You go right ahead and have your tizzy, dear; you've earned it. We're all proud of you."

            "Back to the kitchen, woman. Hold it-has everybody else got a drink? Where's Ben's drink? Where's Ben?"

            "They have by now. Ben is phoning in his column, His drink is at his elbow."

            "Very well. You may back out quietly, without formality-and send Mike in. Gentlemen! Me ke aloha pau ole!-for there are fewer of us every year." He drank, they joined him.

            "Mike's helping. He loves to help-I think he's going to be a butler when he grows up."

            "I thought you had left. Send him in anyhow; Dr. Nelson wants to give him a physical examination."

            "No hurry," put in the ship's surgeon. "Jubal, this is excellent Scotch -but what was the toast?"

            "Sorry. Polynesian. 'May our friendship be everlasting.' Call it a footnote to the water ceremony this morning. By the way, gentlemen, both Larry and Duke are water brothers to Mike, too, but don't let it fret you. They can't cook . . - but they're the sort to have at your back in a dark alley."

            "If you vouch for them, Jubal," van Tromp assured him, "admit them and tyle the door. But let's drink to the girls while we're alone. Sven, what's that toast of yours to the flickas?"

            "You mean the one to all pretty girls everywhere? Let's drink just to the four who are here. Skim!!" They drank to their female water brothers and Nelson continued, "Jubal, where do you find them?"

            "Raise 'em in my own cellar. Then just when I've got 'em trained and some use to me, some city slicker always comes along and marries them. It's a losing game."

            "I can see how you suffer," Nelson said sympathetically.

            "I do. I trust all of you gentlemen are married?"

            Two were. Mahmoud was not. Jubal looked at him bleakly. "Would you have the grace to discorporate yourself? After lunch, of course-I wouldn't want you to do it on an empty stomach."

            "I'm no threat, I'm a permanent bachelor."

            "Come, come, sir! I saw Dorcas making eyes at you ... and you were purring."

            "I'm safe, I assure you." Mahmoud thought of telling Jubal that he would never marry out of his faith, decided that a gentile would take it amiss-even a rare exception like Jubal. He changed the subject. "But, Jubal, don't make a suggestion like that to Mike. He wouldn't grok that you were joking-and you might have a corpse on your hands. I don't know . . . I don't know that Mike can actually think himself dead. But he would try . . . and if he were truly a Martian, it would work."

            "I'm sure he can," Nelson said firmly. "Doctor-'Jubal,' I mean- have you noticed anything odd about Mike's metabolism?"

            "Uh, let me put it this way. There isn't anything about his metabolism which I have noticed that is not odd. Very."

            "Exactly."

            Jubal turned to Mahmoud. "But don't worry that I might invite Mike to suicide. I've learned not to joke with him, not ever. I grok that he doesn't grok joking." Jubal blinked thoughtfully. "But I don't grok 'grok' -not really. Stinky, you speak Martian."

            "A little."

            "You speak it fluently, I heard you. Do you grok 'grok'?"

            Mahmoud looked very thoughtful. "No. Not really. 'Grok' is the most important word in the Martian language-and I expect to spend the next forty years trying to understand it and perhaps use some millions of printed words trying to explain it. But I don't expect to be successful. You need to think in Martian to grok the word 'grok.' Which Mike does and I don't. Perhaps you have noticed that Mike takes a rather veering approach to some of the simplest human ideas?"

            "Have I! My throbbing head!"

            "Mine, too."

            "Food," announced Jubal. "Lunch, and about time, too. Girls, put it down where we can reach it and maintain a respectful silence. Go on talking, Doctor, if you will. Or does Mike's presence make it better to postpone it?"

            "Not at all." Mahmoud spoke briefly in Martian to Mike. Mike answered him, smiled sunnily; his expression became blank again and he applied himself to food, quite content to be allowed to eat in silence. "I told him what I was trying to do and he told me that I would speak rightly; this was not his opinion but a simple statement of fact, a necessity. I hope that if I fail to, he will notice and tell me. But I doubt if he will. You see, Mike thinks in Martian-and this gives him an entirely different 'map' of the universe from that which you and I use. You follow me?"

            "I grok it," agreed Jubal. "Language itself shapes a man's basic ideas."

            "Yes, but- Doctor, you speak Arabic, do you not?"

            "Eh? I used to, badly, many years ago," admitted Jubal. "Put in a while as a surgeon with the American Field Service, in Palestine. But I don't now. I still read it a little . . . because I prefer to read the words of the Prophet in the original."

            "Proper. Since the Koran cannot be translated-the 'map' changes on translation no matter how carefully one tries. You will understand, then, how difficult I found English. It was not alone that my native language has much simpler inflections and more limited tenses; the whole 'map' changed. English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language-this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible-despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as 'the King's English'-for 'the King's English' was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!-enormously. Until no one could hope to be an educated man unless he did his best to embrace this monster.

            "Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. It almost drove me crazy . . . until I learned to think in it-and that put a new 'map' of the world on top of the one I grew up with. A better one, in many ways-certainly a more detailed one.

            "But nevertheless there are things which can be said in the simple Arabic tongue that cannot be said in English."

            Jubal nodded agreement. "Quite true. That's why I've kept up my reading of it, a little."

            "Yes. But the Martian language is so much more complex than is English-and so wildly different in the fashion in which it abstracts its picture of the universe-that English and Arabic might as well be considered one and the same language, by comparison. An Englishman and an Arab can learn to think each other's thoughts, in the other's language. But I'm not certain that it will ever be possible for us to think in Martian (other than by the unique fashion Mike learned it)-oh, we can learn a sort of a 'pidgin' Martian, yes-that is what I speak.

            "Now take this one word: 'grok.' Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking, speaking creatures-and which throws light on their whole 'map'-is quite easy. 'Grok' means 'to drink.'"

            "Huh?" said Jubal. "But Mike never says 'grok' when he's just talking about drinking. He-"

            "Just a moment." Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.

            Mike looked faintly surprised and said, "'Grok' is drink," and dropped the matter.

            "But Mike would also have agreed," Mahmoud went on, "if I had named a hundred other English words, words which represent what we think of as different concepts, even pairs of antithetical concepts. And 'grok' means all of these, depending on how you use it. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'-proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you-then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourse1f~ But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate- and (I think) that Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste."

            Mahmoud screwed up his face. "It means 'identically equal' in the mathematical sense. The human cliché, 'This hurts me worse than it does you' has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace. The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed simply through the process of observation. 'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed-to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science-and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man." Mahmoud paused. "Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a Stew of you, you and the stew, whatever else was in it, would grok-and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the chopping up and eating."

            "It would to me!" Jubal said firmly.

            "You aren't a Martian." Mahmoud stopped again to talk to Mike in Martian.

            Mike nodded. "You spoke rightly, my brother Dr. Mahmoud. I am been saying so. Thou art God."

            Mahmoud shrugged helplessly. "You see how hopeless it is? All I got was a blasphemy. We don't think in Martian. We can't"

            "Thou art God," Mike said agreeably. "God groks."

            "Hell, let's change the subject! Jubal, could I impose on my fraternal status for some more gin?"

            "I'll get it," said Dorcas, and jumped up.

            It was a pleasant family picnic, made easy by Jubal's gift for warm informality, a gift shared by his staff, plus the fact that the three newcomers were themselves the same easy sort of people-each learned, acclaimed, and with no need to strive. And all four men shared a foster-father interest in Mike. Even Dr. Mahmoud, rarely truly off guard with those who did not share with him the one true faith in submission to the Will of God, always beneficent, merciful, found himself relaxed and happy. It had pleased him very much to learn that Jubal read the words of the Prophet and, now that he stopped to notice it, the women of Jubal's household were really much plumper than he had thought at first glance. That dark one- But he put the thought out of his mind; he was a guest.

            But it pleased him very much that these women did not chatter, did not intrude themselves into the sober talk of men, but were very quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam's casual disrespect toward her master-then recognized it for what it was: liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

            Jubal explained early that they were doing nothing but waiting on word from the Secretary General. "If he means business-and I think he's ready to deal-we may hear from him yet today. If not, we'll go home this evening . . and come back if we have to. But if we had stayed in the Palace, he might have been tempted to dicker. Here, dug into our own hole, we can refuse to dicker."

            "Dicker for what?" asked Captain van Tromp. "You gave him what he wanted."

            "Not all that he wanted. Douglas would rather have that power of attorney be utterly irrevocable . . . instead of on his good behavior, with the power reverting to a man he despises and is afraid of-namely that scoundrel there with the innocent smile, our brother Ben, But there are others besides Douglas who are certain to want to dicker, too. That bland buddha Kung-hates my guts, I've just snatched the rug out from under him. But if he could figure a deal that might tempt us-before Douglas nails this down-he would offer it. So we stay out of his way, too. Kung is one reason why we are eating and drinking nothing that we did not fetch with us."

            "You really feel that's something to worry about?" asked Nelson. "Truthfully, Jubal, I had assumed that you were a gourmet who insisted on his own cuisine even away from home. I can't imagine being poisoned, in a major hotel such as this."

            Jubal shook his head sorrowfully. "Sven, you're the sort of honest man who thinks everybody else is honest-and you are usually right. No, nobody is going to try to poison you . . . but your wife might collect your insurance simply because you shared a dish with Mike."

            "You really think that?"

            "Sven, I'll order anything you want. But I won't touch it and I won't let Mike touch it. For I'll lay heavy odds that any waiter who comes to this suite will be on Kung's payroll . . . and maybe on two or three others'. I'm not seeing boogie men behind bushes; they know where we are-and they've had a couple of hours in which to act. Sven, in cold seriousness, my principal worry has been to keep this lad alive long enough to figure out a way to sterilize and stabilize the power he represents . . . so that it would be to no one's advantage to have him dead."

            Jubal sighed. "Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.

            "The black widow can't help it, it has no way to avoid its venomous power.

            "Mike is in the same dilemma. He isn't as pretty as a black widow spider-"

            "Why, Jubal!" Dorcas said indignantly. "What a mean thing to say! And how utterly untrue!"

            "Sorry, child. I don't have your glandular bias in the matter. Pretty or not, Mike can't get rid of that money, nor is it safe for him to have it. And not just Kung. The High Court is not as 'non-political' as it might be although their methods would probably make a prisoner out of him rather than kill him-a fate which, for my taste, is worse. Not to mention a dozen other interested parties, in and out of public office . . . persons who might or might not kill him, but who have certainly turned over in their minds just how it would affect their fortunes if Mike were guest of honor at a funeral. I-"

            "Telephone, Boss."

            "Anne, you have just interrupted a profound thought. You hail from Porlock."

            "No, Dallas."

            "And I will not answer the phone for anyone."

            "She said to tell you it was Becky."

            "Why didn't you say so?" Jubal hurried out of the living room, found Madame Vesant's friendly face in the screen. "Becky! I'm glad to see you, girl!" He did not bother to ask how she had known where to call him.

            "Hi, Doc. I caught your act-and I just had to call and tell you so."

            "How'd it look?"

            "The Professor would have been proud of you. I've never seen a tip turned more expertly. Then you spilled 'em before the marks knew what had hit 'em. Dot, the profession lost a great talker when you weren't born twins."

            "That's high praise, coming from you, Becky." Jubal thought rapidly. "But you set up the act; I just cashed in on it-and there's plenty of cash. So name your fee, Becky, and don't be shy." He decided that, whatever figure she picked, he would double it. That drawing account he had demanded for Mike would never feel it . . . and it was better, far better, to pay Becky off lavishly than to let the obligation stay open.

            Madame Vesant frowned. "Now you've hurt my feelings."

            "Becky, Becky! You're a big girl now, dear. Anybody can clap and cheer-but applause worthwhile will be found in a pile of soft, green, folding money. Not my money. The Man from Mars picks up this tab and, believe me, he can afford it." He grinned. "But all you'll get from me is thanks, and a hug and a kiss that will crack your ribs the first time I see you."

            She relaxed and smiled. "I'll hold you to it. I remember how you used to pat my fanny while you assured me that the Professor was sure to get well-you always could make a body feel better."

            "I can't believe that I ever did anything so unprofessional."

            "You did, you know you did. And you weren't very fatherly about it, either."

            "Maybe so. Maybe I thought it was the treatment you needed. I've given up fanny-patting for Lent-but I'll make an exception in your case."

            "You'd better."

            "And you'd better figure out that fee. Don't forget the zeroes."

            "Uh, I'll think about it. But, truthfully, Doc, there are more ways of collecting a fee than by making a fast count on the change. Have you been watching the market today?"

            "No, and don't tell me about it. Come over and have a drink instead."

            "Uh, I'd better not. I promised, well, a rather important client that I would be available for instant consultation."

            "I see. Mmm ... Becky do you suppose that the stars would show that this whole matter would turn out best for everybody if it were all wrapped up, signed, sealed, and notarized today? Maybe just after the stock market closes?"

            She looked thoughtful. "I could look into it."

            "You do that. And come stay with us when you aren't so busy. Stay as long as you like and never wear your hurtin' shoes the whole time. You'll like the boy. He's as weird as snake's suspenders but sweet as a stolen kiss, too."

            "Uh... I will. As soon as I can. Thanks, Doc."

            They said good-by and Jubal returned to find that Dr. Nelson had taken Mike into one of the bedrooms and was checking him over. He joined them to offer Nelson the use of his kit since Nelson had not had with him his professional bag.

            Jubal found Mike stripped down and the ship's surgeon looking baffled. "Doctor," Nelson said, almost angrily, "I saw this patient only ten days ago. Tell me where he got those muscles?"

            "Why, he sent in a coupon from the back cover of Rut: The Magazine for He-Men. You know, the ad that tells how a ninety-pound weakling can-"

            "Doctor, please!"

            "Why don't you ask him?" Jubal suggested.

            Nelson did so. "I thinked them," Mike answered.

            "That's right," Jubal agreed. "He 'thinked' 'em. When I got him, just over a week ago, he was a mess, slight, flabby, and pale. Looked as if he had been raised in a cave-which I gather he was, more or less. So I told him he had to grow strong. So he did."

            "Exercises?" Nelson said doubtfully.

            "Nothing systematic. Swimming, when and as he wished."

            "A week of swimming won't make a man look as if he had been sweating over bar bells for years!" Nelson frowned. "I am aware that Mike has voluntary control over the so-called 'involuntary' muscles, But that is not entirely without precedent. This, on the other hand, requires one to assume that-"

            "Doctor," Jubal said gently, "why don't you just admit that you don't grok it and save the wear and tear?"

            Nelson sighed. "I might as well. Put your clothes on, Michael."

            Somewhat later, Jubal, under the mellowing influence of congenial company and the grape, was unburdening to the three from the Champion his misgivings about his morning's work. "The financial end was simple enough: just tie up Mike's money so that a struggle over it couldn't take place. Not even if he dies, because I've let Douglas know privately that Mike's death ends his stewardship whereas a rumour from a usually reliable source-me, in this case-has reached Kung and several others to the effect that Mike's death will give Douglas permanent control. Of course, if I had had magical powers, I would have stripped the boy not only of all political significance but also of every penny of his inheritance. That-"

            "Why would you have done that, Jubal?" the captain inteirupted.

            Harshaw looked surprised. "Are you wealthy, Skipper? I don't mean: 'Are your bills paid and enough in the sock to buy any follies your taste runs to?' I mean rich . . . so loaded that the floor sags when you walk around to take your place at the head of a board-room table."

            "Me?" Van Tromp snorted. "I've got my monthly check, a pension eventually, a house with a mortgage and two girls in college. I'd like to try being wealthy for a while, I don't mind telling you!"

            "You wouldn't like it."

            "Huh! You wouldn't say that ... if you had two daughters in school."

            "For the record, I put four daughters through college, and I went in debt to my armpits to do it. One of them justified the investment; she's a leading light in her profession which she practices under her husband's name because I'm a disreputable old bum who makes money writing popular trash instead of having the grace to be only a revered memory in her paragraph in Who's Who. The other three are nice people who always remember my birthday and don't bother me otherwise I can't say that an education hurt them. But my offspring are not relevant save to show that I understand that a man often needs more than he's got. But you can fix that easily; you can resign from the service and take a job with some engineering firm that will pay you several times what you're getting just to put your name on their letterhead General Atomics. Several others, You've had offers, haven't you?"

            "That's beside the point," Captain van Tromp answered stiffly. "I'm a professional man."

            "Meaning there isn't enough money on this planet to tempt you into giving up ~0~mafl lg space ships. i understand that."

            "But I wouldn't mind having money, too."

            "A little more money won't do you any good, because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation regardless of the amount. That's a widely experienced but previously unformulated law of nature, to be known henceforth as 'Harshaw's Law.' But, Captain, real wealth, on the scale that causes its owner to hire a battery of finaglers to hold down his taxes, would ground you just as certainly as resigning would."

            "Why should it? I would put it all in bonds and just clip coupons."

            "Would you? Not if you were the sort of person who acquires great wealth in the first place. Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of singlem1~ed devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests. They say that the age of opportunity has passed. Nonsense! Seven out of ten of the wealthiest men on this planet started life without a shilling_-and there are plenty more such strivers on the way up. Such people are not stopped by high taxation nor even by socialism; they simply adapt themselves to new rules and presently they change the rules. But no premiere ballerina ever works harder, nor more narrowly, than a man who acquires riches. Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to have money-in order to spend it."

            "Correct, sir! Which is why I can't see why you should want to take Mike's wealth away from him."

            "Because Mike doesn't need it and it would cripple him worse than any physical handicap. Wealth-great wealth-is a curse . . . unless you are devoted to the money making game for its own sake. And even then it has serious drawbacks."

            "Oh, nonsense, Jubal, you talk like a harem guard trying to convince a whole man of the advantages of being a eunuch. Pardon me."

            "Very possibly." agreed Jubal, "and perhaps for the same reason; the human mind's ability to rationalize its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited, and I am no exception. Since I, like yourself, sir, have no interest in money other than to spend it, there has never been the slightest chance that I would acquire any significant degree of wealth just enough for my vices. Nor any teal danger that I would fail to scrounge that modest amount, since anyone with the savvy not to draw to a small pair can always manage to feed his vices, whether they be tithing or chewing betel nut. But great wealth? You saw that performance this morning. Now answer me truthfully. Do you think I could have revised it slightly so that I myself acquired all that plunder-become its sole manager and de-facto owner while milking off for my own use any income I cared to name-and still have rigged the other issues so that Douglas would have supported the outcome? Could I have done that, sir? Mike trusts me; I am his water brother. Could I have stolen his fortune and so arranged it that the government in the person of Mr. Douglas would have condoned it?"

            "Uh ... damn you, Jubal, I suppose you could have."

            "Most certainly I could have. Because our sometimes estimable Secretary General is no more a money-seeker than you are. His drive is political power-a drum whose beat I do not hear. Had I guaranteed to Douglas (oh, gracefully, of course-there is decorum even among thieves) that the Smith estate would continue to bulwark his administration, then I would have been left undisturbed to do as I liked with the income and had my acting guardianship made legal."

            Jubal shuddered. "I thought that I was going to have to do exactly that, simply to protect Mike from the vultures gathered around him-and I was panic-stricken. Captain, you obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship-indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one.

            "Worse yet, his life and the lives of his family are always in danger. Captain, have your daughters ever been threatened with kidnapping?"

            "What? Good Lord, I should hope not!"

            "If you possessed the wealth Mike had thrust on him, you would have those girls guarded night and day-and even then you would not rest, because you would never be sure that those very guards were not tempted. Look at the records of the last hundred or so kidnappings in this country and note how many of them involved a trusted employee - - and note, too, how few victims escaped alive. Then ask yourself: is there any luxury wealth can buy which is worth having your daughters' pretty necks always in a noose?"

            Van Tromp looked thoughtful. "No. I guess I'll keep my mortgaged house-it's more my speed. Those girls are all I've got, Jubal."

            "Amen. I was appalled at the prospect. Wealth holds no charm for me. All I want is to live my own lazy, useless life, sleep in my own bed- and not be bothered! Yet I thought I was going to be forced to spend my last few years sitting in an office, barricaded by buffers, and working long hours as Mike's man of business.

            "Then I had an inspiration. Douglas already lived behind such barricades, already had such a staff. Since I was forced to surrender the power of that money to Douglas merely to ensure Mike's continued health and freedom, why not make the beggar pay for it by assuming all the headaches, too? I was not afraid that Douglas would steal from Mike; only pipsqueak, second-rate politicians are money hungry-and Douglas, whatever his faults, is no pipsqueak. Quit scowling, Ben, and hope that he never dumps the load on you.

            "So I dumped the whole load on Douglas-and now I can go back to my garden. But, as I have said, the money was relatively simple, once I figured it out. It was the Larkin Decision that fretted me."

            Caxton said, "I thought you had lost your wits on that one, Jubal. That silly business of letting them give Mike sovereign 'honors.' Honors indeed! For God's sake, Jubal, you should simply have had Mike sign over all right, title, and interest, if any, under that ridiculous Larkin theory. You knew Douglas wanted him to-Jill told you."

            "Ben m'boy," Jubal said gently, "as a reporter you are hard-working and sometimes readable."

            "Gee, thanks! My fan."

            "But your concepts of strategy are Neanderthal."

            Caxton sighed. "I feel better, Jubal. For a moment there I thought you had become softly sentimental in your old age."

            "When I do, please shoot me. Captain, how many men did you leave on Mars?"

            "Twenty-three."

            "And what is their status, under the Larkin Decision?"

            Van Tromp looked troubled. "I'm not supposed to talk."

            "Then don't," Jubal reassured him. "I can deduce it, and so can Ben."

            Dr. Nelson said, "Skipper, both Stinky and I are civilians again. I shall talk where and how I please-"

            "And shall I," agreed Mahmoud.

            "-and if they want to make trouble for me, they know what they can do with my reserve commission. What business has the government, telling us we can't talk? Those chair-warmers didn't go to Mars. We did."

            "Stow it, Sven. I intended to talk-these are our water brothers. But, Ben, I would rather not see this in your column. I would like to command a space ship again."

            "Captain, I know the meaning of 'off the record.' But if you'll feel easier, I'll join Mike and the girls for a while-I want to see Jill anyhow."

            "Please don't leave. But ... this is among water brothers. The government is in a stew about that nominal colony we left behind. Every man in it joined in signing away his so-called Larkin rights-assigned them to the government-before we left Earth. Mike's presence when we got to Mars confused things enormously. I'm no lawyer, but I understood that, if Mike did waive his rights, whatever they might be, that would put the administration in the driver's seat when it came to parceling out things of value."

            "What things of value?" demanded Caxton. "Other than pure science, I mean. Look, Skipper, I'm not running down your achievement, but from all I've seen and heard, Mars isn't exactly valuable real estate for human beings. Or are there assets that are still classified 'drop dead before reading'?"

            Van Tromp shook his head. "No, the scientific and technical reports are all declassified, I believe. But, Ben, the Moon was a worthless hunk of rock when we first got it. Now look at it."

            "Touché," Caxton admitted. "I wish my grandpappy had bought Lunar Enterprises instead of Canadian uranium. I don't have Jubal's objections to being rich." He added, "But, in any case, Mars is already inhabited."

            Van Tromp looked unhappy. "Yes. But- Stinky, you tell him."

            Mahmoud said, "Ben, there is plenty of room on Mars for human colonization . . . and, so far as I was ever able to find out, the Martians would not interfere. They did not object when we told them we intended to leave a colony behind. Nor did they seem pleased. Not even interested. We're flying our flag and claiming extraterritoriality right now. But our status may be more like that of one of those ant cities under glass one sometimes sees in school rooms. I was never able to grok it."

            Jubal nodded. "Precisely. Myself, too. This morning I did not have the slightest idea of the true situation . . . except that I knew that the government was anxious to get those so-called Larkin rights from Mike. Beyond that I was ignorant. So I assumed that the government was equally ignorant and went boldly ahead. 'Audacity, always audacity'-soundest principle of strategy. In practicing medicine I learned that when you are most at loss is the time when you must appear confident. In law I had learned that, when your case seems hopeless, you must impress the jury with your relaxed certainty."

            Jubal grinned. "Once, when I was a kid in high school, I won a debate on shipping subsidies by quoting an overwhelming argument from the files of the British Colonial Shipping Board. The opposition was totally unable to refute me-because there never was a 'British Colonial Shipping Board.' I had made it up, whole cloth.

            "I was equally shameless this morning. The administration wanted Mike's 'Larkin rights' and was scared silly that we might make a deal with Kung or somebody. So I used their greed and worry to wring out of them that ultimate logical absurdity of their fantastic legal theory, a public acknowledgment in unmistakable diplomatic protocol that Mike was a sover eign equal of the Federation itself-and must be treated accordingly!" Jubal looked smug.

            "Thereby," Ben said dryly, "putting yourself up the well-known creek without a paddle."

            "Ben, Ben," Jubal said chidingly. "Wrong metaphor. Not a canoe, but a tiger. Or a throne. By their own logic they had publicly crowned Mike. Need I point out that, despite the old saw about uneasy heads and crowns, it is nevertheless safer to be publicly a king than it is to be a pretender in hiding? A king can usually abdicate to save his neck; a pretender may renounce his pretensions but it makes his neck no safer-less so, in fact; it leaves him naked to his enemies. No, Ben, Kung saw that Mike's position had been enormously strengthened by a few bars of music and an old sheet, even if you did not-and Kung did not like it a bit.

            "But I acted through necessity, not choice, and, while Mike's position was improved, it was still not an easy one. Mike was, for the nonce, the acknowledged sovereign of Mars under the legalistic malarky of the Larkin precedent . . . and, as such, was empowered to hand out concessions, trading rights, enclaves, ad nauseam. He must either do these things himself . . . and thus be subjected to pressures even worse than those attendant on great wealth and for which he is even less fitted-or he must abdicate his titular position and allow his Larkin rights to devolve on those twenty-three men now on Mars, i.e., to Douglas."

            Jubal looked pained. "I disliked these alternatives almost equally, since each was based on the detestable doctrine that the Larkin Decision could apply to inhabited planets. Gentlemen, I have never met any Martians, I have no vocation to be their champion-but I could not permit a client of mine to be trapped into such a farce. The Larkin Decision itself had to be rendered void, and all 'rights' under it, with respect to the planet Mars-while the matter was still in our hands and without giving the High Court a chance to rule."

            Jubal grinned boyishly. "So I appealed to a higher court for a decision that would nullify the Larkin precedent-I cited a mythical 'British Colonial Shipping Board.' I lied myself blue in the face to create a new legal theory. Sovereign honors had been rendered Mike; that was fact, the world had seen it. But sovereign honors may be rendered to a sovereign . . . or to a sovereign's alter ego, his viceroy or ambassador. So I asserted that Mike was no cardboard sovereign under a silly human precedent not in point-but in awful fact the ambassador of the great Martian nation!"

            Jubal sighed. "Sheer bluff ... and I was scared silly that I would be required to prove my claims. But I was staking my bluff on my hope and strong belief that others-Douglas, and in particular, Kung-would be no more certain of the facts than was I." Jubal looked around him. "But I ventured to risk that bluff because you three were sitting with us, were Mike's water brethren. If you three sat by and did not challenge my lies, then Mike must be accepted as the Martian equivalent of ambassador- and the Larkin Decision was a dead issue."

            "I hope it is," Captain van Tromp said soberly, "but I did not take your statements as lies, Jubal; I took them as simple truth."

            "Eh? But I assure you they were not. I was spinning fancy words, extemporizing."

            "No matter. Inspiration or deduction-I think you told the truth." The skipper of the Champion hesitated. "Except that I would not call Mike an ambassador-I think he's an expeditionary force."

            Caxton's jaw dropped. Harshaw did not dispute him but answered with equal soberness. "In what way, sir?"

            Van Tromp said, "I'll amend that. It would be better to say that I think he's a scout for an expeditionary force, reconnoitering us for his Martian masters. It is even possible that they are in telepathic contact with him at all times, that he doesn't even need to report back. I don't know- but I do know that, after visiting Mars, I find such ideas much easier to swallow . . . and I know this: everybody seems to take it for granted that, finding a human being on Mars, we would of course bring him home and that he would be anxious to come home. Nothing could be further from the truth. Eh, Sven?"

            "Mike hated the idea," agreed Nelson. "We couldn't even get close to him at first; he was afraid of us. Then he was ordered to go back with us and from then on he did exactly what we told him to do. He behaved like a soldier carrying out with perfect discipline orders that scared him silly."

            "Just a moment," Caxton protested. "Captain, even so-Mars attack us? Mars? You know more about these things than I do, but wouldn't that be about like us attacking Jupiter? I mean to say, we have about two and a half times the surface gravity that Mars has, just as Jupiter has about two and a half times our surface gravity. Somewhat analogous differences, each way, on pressure, temperature, atmosphere, and so forth. We couldn't stay alive on Jupiter . . . and I don't see how Martians could stand our conditions. Isn't that true?"

            "Close enough," admitted van Tromp.

            "Then tell me why we should attack Jupiter? Or Mars attack us?"

            "Mmm ... Ben, have you seen any of the proposals to attempt a beach head on Jupiter?"

            "Yes, but- Well, nothing has ever gotten beyond the dream stage. It isn't practical."

            "Space flight wasn't practical less than a century ago. Go back in the files and see what your own colleagues said about it-oh, say about 1940. These Jupiter proposals are, at best, no farther than drawing board-but the engineers working on them are quite serious. They think that, by using all that we've learned from deep ocean exploration, plus equipping men with powered suits in which to float, it should be possible to put human beings on Jupiter. And don't think for a moment that the Martians are any less clever than we are. You should see their cities."

            "Uh-" said Caxton. "Okay, I'll shut up. I still don't see why they would bother."

            "Captain?"

            "Yes, Jubal?"

            "I see another objection-a cultural one. You know the rough division of cultures into 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian.'"

            "I know in general what you mean."

            "Well, it seems to me that even the Zuni culture would be called 'Dionysian' on Mars. Of course, you've been there and I haven't-but I've been talking steadily with Mike. That boy was raised in an extremely Apollonian culture-and such cultures are not aggressive."

            "Mmm ... I see your point-but I wouldn't count on it."

            Mahmoud said suddenly, "Skipper, there's strong evidence to support Jubal's conclusion. You can analyse a culture from its language, every time -and there isn't any Martian word for 'war.'" He stopped and looked puzzled. "At least, I don't think there is. Nor any word for 'weapon' nor for 'fighting.' If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize."

            "Oh, twaddle, Stinky! Animals fight-and ants even conduct wars. Are you trying to tell me they have to have words for it before they can do it?"

            "I mean exactly that," Mahmoud insisted, "when it applies to any verbalizing race. Such as ourselves. Such as the Martians-even more highly verbalized than we are. A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic. If the Martians know what 'war' is, then they have a word for it."

            "There is a quick way to settle it," Jubal suggested. "Call in Mike.

            "Just a moment, Jubal," van Tromp objected. "I learned years ago never to argue with a specialist; you can't win. But I also learned that the history of progress is a long, long list of specialists who were dead wrong when they were most certain-SOr1~Y, Stinky."

            "You're quite right, Captain-Only I'm not wrong this time."

            "As may be, all Mike can settle is whether or not he knows a certain word . . . which might be like asking a two-year-old to define 'calculus.' Proves nothing. I'd like to stick to facts for a moment. Sven? About Agnew?"

            Nelson answered, "It's up to you, Captain"

            "Well ... this is still private conversation among water brothers, gentlemen. Lieutenant Agnew was our junior medical officer. Quite brilliant in his line, Sven tells me, and I had no complaints about him otherwise; he was well-enough liked. But he had an unsuspected latent xenophobia. Not against humans. But he couldn't stand Martians. Now I bad given orders against going armed outside the ship once it appeared that the Martians were peaceful-too much chance of an incident.

            "Apparently young Agnew disobeyed me-at least we were never able to find his personal side arm later and the two men who last saw him alive say that he was wearing it. But all my log shows is: 'Missing and presumed dead.'

            "Here is why. Two crewmen saw Agnew go into a sort of passage between two large rocks_rather scarce on Mars; mostly it's monotonous. Then they saw a Martian enter the same way . . whereupon they hurried, as Dr. Agnew's peculiarity was well known.

            "Both say that they heard a shot. One says that he reached this opening in time to glimpse Agnew past the Martian, who pretty well filled the space between the rocks; they're so big. And then he didn't see him. The second man says that when he got there the Martian was just exiting, simply sailed on past them and went his way-which is characteristically Martian; if he has no business with you, he simply ignores you. With the Martian out of the way they could both see the space between the two rocks . . . and it was a dead end, empty.

            "That's all, gentlemen ... except to say that Agnew might have jumped that rock wall, under Mars' low surface gravity and the impetus of fear-but I could not and I tried-and to mention that these two crewmen were wearing breathing gear-have to, on Mars-and hypoxia can make a man's senses quite unreliable. I don't know that the first crewman was drunk through oxygen shortage; I just mention it because it is an explanation easier to believe than what he reported . . . which is that Agnew simply disappeared~ in the blink of an eye. In fact I suggested as much to him and ordered him to check the demand valve and the rest of his breather gear before he went outside again.

            "You see, I thought Agnew would show up presently ... and I was looking forward to chewing him out and slapping him under hack for going armed (if he was) and for going alone (which seemed certain), both being flagrant breaches of discipline.

            "But he never returned, we never found him nor his body. I do not know what happened. But my own misgivings about Martians date to that incident. They never again seemed to me to be just big, gentle~ harmless, rather comical creatures, even though we never had any trouble with them and they always gave us anything we wanted, once Stinky figured out how to ask for it. I played down the incident-Can't let men panic when you're a hundred million miles from home. Oh, I couldn't play down the fact that Dr. Agnew was missing and the whole ship's company searched for him. But I squelched any suggestion that there had been anything mysterious about it-Agnew had gotten lost among those rocks. had eventually died, no doubt, when his oxygen ran out . . . and was buried under sand drift or something. You do get quite a breeze both at sunrise and sundown on Mars; it does cause the sand to drift. So I used it as a reason to clamp down ever harder on always traveling in company, always staying in radio contact with the ship, always checking breather gear . . . with Agnew as a horrible example. I did not tell that crewman to keep his mouth shut; I simply hinted that his story was unbelievable, especially as his mate was not able to back it up. I think the official version prevailed."

            Mahmond said slowly, "It did with me, Captain-this is the first time I've heard that there was any mystery about Agnew. And truthfully, I prefer your 'ofticial' version-I'm not inclined to be superstitious."

            Van Tromp nodded. "That's what I had hoped for. Only Sven and myself heard that crewman's wild tale-and we kept it to ourselves. But, just the same-" The space ship captain suddenly looked old. "-I still wake up in the night and ask myself: 'What became of Agnew?'"

            Jubal listened to the story without comment. He was still wondering what he should add to it when it ended. He wondered, too, if Jill had told Ben about Berquist and that other fellow-JOhThsO~~ He knew that he bad not. There hadn't been time the night Ben had been rescued . . . and in the sober light of the following dawn it had seemed better to let such things ride.

            Had the kids told Ben about the battle of the swimming pool? And the two carloads of cops who were missing afterwards? Again, it seemed most unlikely; the kids knew that the "official" version was that the first task force had never showed up~ they had all heard his phone call with Douglas. All Jubal's family were discreet; whether guests or employees, gossipy persons were quickly ousted-Jubal regarded gossip as his own prerogative, solely. But Jill might have told Ben-Well, if she had, she must have bound him to silence; Ben had not mentioned disappearances to Jubal . . . and he wasn't trying to catch Jubal's eye now.

            Damn it, the only thing to do was to keep quiet and go on trying to impress on the boy that he simply must not go around making unpleasant strangers disappear!

            Jubal was saved from further soul-searching (and the stag conversation was broken up) by Anne's arrival. "Boss, that Mr. Bradley is at the door. The one who called himself 'senior executive assistant to the Secretary General.'

            "You didn't let him in?"

            "No. I looked at him through the one-way and talked to him through the speakie. He says he has papers to deliver to you, personally, and that he will wait for an answer."

            "Have him pass them through the flap. And you tell him that you are my 'senior executive assistant' and that you will fetch my receipt acknowledging personal delivery if that is what he wants. This is still the Martian Embassy-until I check what's in those papers."

            "Just let him stand in the corridor?"

            "I've no doubt that Major Bloch can find him a chair. Anne, I am aware that you were gently reared-but this is a situation in which rudeness pays off. We don't give an inch, nor a kind word, until we get exactly what we want."

            "Yes, Boss."

            The package was bulky because there were many copies; there was one document only. Jubal called in everyone and passed them around. "Girls, I am offering one lollipop for each loophole, boobytrap, or ambiguity-prizes of similar value to males. Now everybody keep quiet."

            Presently Jubal broke the silence. "He's an honest politician-he stays bought."

            "Looks that way," admitted Caxton.

            "Anybody?" No one claimed a prize; Douglas had kept it simple and straightforward, merely implementing the agreement reached earlier. "Okay," said Jubal, "everybody is to witness every copy, after Mike signs it-especially you, Skipper, and Sven and Stinky. Get your seal, Miriam. Hell, let Bradley in now and have him witness, too-then give the poor guy a drink. Duke, call the desk and tell 'em to send up the bill; we're checking out. Then call Greyhound and tell 'em we want our go-buggy. Sven, Skipper, Stinky-we're getting out of here the way Lot left Sodom...why don't you three come up in the country with us, take off your shoes, and relax? Plenty of beds, home cooking, and no worries."

            The two married men asked for, and received, rain checks; Dr. Mahmoud accepted. The signing took rather long, mostly because Mike enjoyed signing his name, drawing each letter with great care and artistic satisfaction. The salvageable remains of the picnic (mostly unopened bottles) had been sent up and loaded by the time all copies were signed and sealed, and the hotel bill had arrived.

            Jubal glanced at the fat total and did not bother to add it. Instead he wrote on it: "Approved for payment-J. Harshaw for V. M. Smith," and handed it to Bradley.

            "This is your boss's worry now," he told Bradley.

            Bradley blinked. "Sir?"

            "Oh, just to keep it 'via channels.' Mr. Douglas will doubtless turn it over to the Chief of Protocol. Isn't that the usual procedure? I'm rather green about these things."

            Bradley accepted the bill. "Yes," he said slowly. "Yes, that's right. LaRue will voucher it-I'll give it to him."

            "Thank you, Mr. Bradley. Thanks for everything!"

PART THREE HIS ECCENTRIC EDUCATION

XXII

            IN ONE LIMB OF A SPIRAL GALAXY, close to a star known as "Sol" to some of its dependents, another star of the same type underwent catastrophic readjustment and became nova. Its glory would be seen on Mars in another three-replenished (729) years, or 1370 Terran years. The Old Ones noted the coming event as being useful, shortly, for instruction of the young, while never ceasing the exciting and crucial discussion of esthetic problems concerning the new epic woven around the death of the Fifth Planet.

            The departure of the spaceship Champion for its home planet was noted without comment and a watch was kept on the strange nestling sent back in it, but nothing more, since it would be some time yet before it would be fruitful to grok the outcome. The twenty-three humans left behind on Mars coped, successfully in most ways, with an environment lethal to naked humans but less difficult, on the whole, than that in the Free State of Antarctica. One of them discorporated through an undiagnosed illness sometimes called "heartbreak" and at other times "homesickness." The Old Ones cherished the wounded spirit and sent it back where it belonged for further healing; aside from that the Martians left the Terrans alone.

            On Earth the exploding neighbor star was not noticed at all, human astronomers still being limited by speed of light. The Man from Mars, having been briefly back in the news, had dropped out of the news again. The minority leader in the Federation Senate called for "a bold, new approach" to the twin problems of population and malnutrition in southeast Asia, starting with increased emergency grants-in-aid to families with more than five children. Mrs. Percy B. S. Souchek sued the supervisors of Los Angeles City-County over the death of her pet poodle Piddle which had taken place during a five-day period of stationary inversion layer. Cynthia Duchess announced that she was going to have the Perfect Baby by a scientifically selected anonymous donor and an equally perfect host mother just as soon as a battery of experts completed calculating the exact instant for conception to insure that the wonder child would be equally a genius in music, art, and statesmanship-and that she would (with the aid of hormonal treatments) nurse her child herself. She gave out a statement to the press on the psychological benefits of natural feeding and permitted, or insisted, that the press take pictures of her to prove that she was physically endowed for this happy duty-a fact that her usual publicity pictures had never really left undecided-

            Supreme Bishop Digby denounced her as the Harlot of Babylon and forbade any Fosterite to accept the commission, either as donor or hostmother. Alice Douglas was quoted as saying: "While I do not know Miss Duchess personally, one cannot help but admire her. Her brave example should be an inspiration to mothers everywhere."

            By accident, Jubal Harshaw saw one of the pictures and the accompanying story in a magazine some visitor had left in his house- He chuckled over it and posted it on the bulletin board in the kitchen ... then noted (as he had expected) that it did not stay up long, which made him chuckle again.

            He did not have too many chuckles that week; the world had been too much with him. The working press soon ceased bothering Mike and the Harshaw household when it was clear that the story was over and that Harshaw did not intend to let any fresh news happen-but a great many thousands of other people, not in the news business, did not forget Mike. Douglas honestly tried to insure Mike's privacy; S. S. troopers now patrolled Harshaw's fence and an S.S. car circled over the grounds and challenged any car that tried to land. But Harshaw resented the necessity of having guards.

            Guards kept people out; the mail and the telephone came through. The telephone Jubal coped with by changing his call number and having all calls routed through an answering service to which was given a very limited list of persons from whom Harshaw would accept calls-and, at that, he kept the instrument in the house set on "refuse & record" most of the time.

            But the mail always comes through.

            At first, Harshaw told Jill that the problem was Mike's. The boy had to grow up someday; he could start by handling his own mail and she could help and advise him. "But don't bother me with it; I have enough trouble with screwball mail of my own!"

            Jubal could not make his decision stick; there was too much of it and Jill simply did not know how.

            Just sorting the mail into categories was a headache. Jubal solved that by first making a phone call to the local postmaster (which got no results), then by a phone call to Bradley, which did get results after a "suggestion" from on high trickled back down to local level; thereafter mail for Mike arrived sacked as first class, second class, third class, and fourth class, with mail for everyone else in the household in still another sack.

            Second and third class mail was used to insulate a new root cellar north of the house, the old root cellar having been dug by the former owner as a fallout shelter and never having been satisfactory as root cellar. Once the new root cellar was heavily over-insulated and could use no more, Jubal told Duke to dump such mail as fill to check erosion in gullies; combined with a small amount of brush such mail compacted very nicely.

            Fourth class mail was a problem, especially as one package exploded prematurely in the village post office, blowing several years of "Wanted" announcements off the notice board and ruining one "Use Next Window" sign-by great good luck the postmaster was out for coffee and his assistant, an elderly lady with weak kidneys, was safe in the washroom. Jubal considered having all fourth class mail addressed to Mike processed by the bomb-disposal specialists of the S.S, who performed the same service for the Secretary General.

            This turned out not to be necessary; Mike could spot a "wrongness" about a package without opening it. Thereafter all fourth class mail was unsacked in a heap just inside the gate; then, after the postman had left, Mike would pry through the pile from a distance, cause to disappear any harmful parcel; then Larry would truck the remainder to the house. Jubal felt that this method was far better than soaking suspect packages, opening them in darkness, X-raying them, or any other conventional method.

            Mike loved opening the harmless packages; it made every day Christmas for him. He particularly enjoyed reading his own name on address labels. The plunder inside might or might not interest him; usually he gave it to one of the others-and, in the process, at last learned what "property" was in discovering that he could make gifts to his friends. Anything that nobody wanted wound up in a gully; this included, by definition, all gifts of food, as Jubal was not certain that Mike's nose for "wrongness" extended to poisons - especially after Mike had drunk, through error, a beaker of a poisonous solution Duke had left in the refrigerator he used for his photographic work. Mike had simply said mildly that the "Iced tea" had a flavor he was not sure that he liked.

            Jubal told 'iii that it was otherwise all right to keep anything that caine to Mike by parcel post provided that none of it was (a) ever paid for, (b) ever acknowleged, (c) nor ever returned no matter how marked. Some of the items were legitimatly gifts; more of it was unordered merchandise. Either way, Jubal assumed conclusively that unsolicted chattels from strangers always represented efforts to make use of the Man from Mars and therefore merited no thanks.

            An exception was made for live stock, from baby chicks to baby alligators which Jubal advised her to return unless she was willing to guarantee the care and feeding thereof, and the responsibilitY of keeping same from falling into the pool.

            First class mail was a separate headache. After looking over a bushel or so of Mike's first class mail Jubal set up a list of categories:

            A.  Begging letters, personal and institutionaa-erosion fill.

            B.  Threatening letters-file unanswered. Second and later letters

            from any one source to be turned over to S.S.

            C.  Offers of business deals of any nature forward to Douglas

            unanswered.

            D.  Crackpot letters not containing threat-Pass around any real

            dillies; the rest to go in a gully.

            E.  Friendly letters-answer only if accompanied by stamped, self

            addressed envelope, in which case use one of several form

            letters to be signed by Jill (Jubal pointed out that

            letters signed by the Man from Mars were valuable per se,

            and an open invitation to more useless mail.)

            F.  Scatological letters-Pass to Jubal (who had a bet with himself

            that no such letter would ever show the faintest sign of

            literary novelty) for further disposition- i.e., gully.

            G.  Proposals of marriage and propositions not quite so formal --

            ignore and file. Use procedure under "B" on third offense.

            H.  Letters from scientific and educatiional institutions-handle

            as under "E"; if answered at all, use form letter

            explaining that the Man from Mars was not available for

            anything; if Jill felt that a form brushoff would not do,

            pass along to Jubal.

            I.  Letters from persons who actually had met Mike, such as all

            the crew of the Champion, the President of the United

            States, and a few others-let Mike answer them exactlY as

            he pleased; the exercise in penmanship would be good for

            him and the exercise in humam personal relations he needed

            even more (and if he wanted advice, let him ask for it).

            This guide cut the number of letters that had to be answered down to manageable size-a few each day for Jill, seldom even one for Mike. Just opening the mail took a major effort, but Jill found that she could skim and classify in about one hour each day, after she got used to it. The first four categofles remained large at all times; category "G" waS very large during the fortnight following the world stereocast from the Palace, then dwindled and the curve flattened to a steady trickle.

            Jubal cautioned Jill that, while Mike should himself answer letters only from acquaintances and friends, mail addressed to him was his to read if he wished.

            The third morning after the category system had gone into effect Jill brought a letter, category "G," to Jubal. More than half of the ladies and other females (plus a few misguided males) who supplied this category included pictures alleged to be of themselves; some of these pictures left little to the imagination, as did the letters themselves in many cases-

            This letter enclosed a picture which managed not only to leave nothing to the imagination, but started over by stimulating fresh imaginings. Jill said, "Look at this, Boss! I ask you!"

            Jubal read the letter, then looked at the picture. "She seems to know what she wants. What does Mike think of it?"

            "He hasn't seen it. That's why I brought it to you."

            Jubal glanced again at the picture. "A type which, in my youth, we referred to as 'stacked.' Well, her sex is not in doubt, nor her agility. But why are you showing it to me? I've seen better, I assure you."

            "But what should I do with it? The letter is bad enough ... but that disgusting picture-should I tear it up? Before Mike sees it?"

            "Oh- Siddown, Nurse. What does it say on the envelope?"

            "Nothing. Just the address and the return address."

            "How does the address read?"

            "Huh? 'Mr. Valentine Michael Smith, the Man from-"

            "Oh. Then it's not addressed to you."

            "Why, no, of course-"

            "That's all I wanted to be sure of. Now let's get something straight. I am not Mike's guardian. You are neither his mother nor his chaperon. I've simply co-opted you as his secretary. If Mike wants to read everything that comes in here addressed to him, including third class junk mail, he is free to do so."

            "Well, he does read almost all of those ads. But surely you don't want him to see filth? Jubal, Mike doesn't know what the world is like. He's innocent.

            "So? How many men has he killed so far, Jill?"

            Jill did not answer; she looked unhappy. Jubal went on: "If you want to help him, you will concentrate on teaching him that casual killing is frowned on in this society. Otherwise he is bound to be unpleasantly conspicuous when he goes out into the world."

            "Uh, I don't think he wants to 'go out into the world.'"

            "Well, I'm damned well going to push him out of the nest as soon as I think he can fly. He can come back later, if he wishes -- But I shan't make it possible for him to live out his life here, as an arrested infant. For one thing, I can't even if I wanted to . . because Mike will probably outlive me by sixty or seventy years and this nest will be gone. But you are correct; Mike is innocent our standards. Nurse, have you ever seen that sterile laboratory at Notre Dame?"

            "No. I've read about it."

            "Healthiest animals in the world_hut they can't ever leave the laboratory. Child, I'm not running a sterile laboratorY. Mike has got to get acquainted with 'filth,' as you call it-and get immunized to it. One day he's going to meet the gal who wrote this letter, or her spiritual twin sister -in fact he's going to meet her by the dozens and hundreds ~hucks, with his notoriety and his looks he can spend his life skipping from one warm bed to another, if he likes. You can't stop it, I can't stop it; it's up to Mike. Furthermore, I wouldn't want to stop it, although for my taste it's a silly way to spend one's life-doing the same monotonous exercises over and over again, I mean- What do you think?"

            "I-" Jill stopped and blushed.

            "I withdraw the question. Maybe you don't find them monotonous but none of my business, either way. But if you don't want Mike's feet kicked out from under him by the first five hundred women that get him alone_and I don't regard it as a good idea, either; he should have other interests as well-then don't try to intercept his mail. Letters like that may vaccinate him a little - . . or at least tend to put him on guard. Don't make a thing out of it; just pass it along in the stack, cum 'filthy' picture. Answer his questionS if he asks them . . . and try not to blush."

            "Uh, all right. Boss, you're infuriating when you're logical." "Yes, a most uncouth way to argue. Now run along."

            "All right. But I'm going to tear up that picture after Mike has seen it."

            "Oh, don't do that!"

            "What? Do you want it, Boss?"

            "Heaven forbid! I told you I bad seen much better. But Duke is not as jaundiced as I am; he collects such pictures- If Mike doesn't want it-and five-to-one he doesn't-give it to Duke- He'll be delighted."

            "Duke collects such trash? But he seems such a nice person.

            "He is. A very nice person indeed. Or I'd kick him out."

            "But- I don't understand it"

            Jubal sighed. "And 1 could sit here all day explaining it and you still wouldn't understand it. My dear, there are aspects of sex on which it is jmpossible to communicate between the two sexes of our race. They are sometimes grokked by intuition across the gulf that separates us, by a few exceptionally gifted individuals. But words are useless, so I won't try. Just take my word for it: Duke is a perfect knight, sans peur et sans reproche- and he would like to have that picture."

            "All right, he can have it if Mike doesn't keep it. But I'll just pass it along to you. I won't give it to Duke myself_be might get ideas."

            "Sissy. You might enjoy his ideas- Anything startling in the mail otherwise?"

            "No. The usual crop of people who want Mike to endorse this and that, or peddle 'Official Man-from-Mars this's and that's-one character had the nerve to ask for a five-year monopoly royalty free, on the name, but wants Mike to finance it as well."

            "I admire that sort of whole-hearted thief. Encourage him. Tell him that Mike is so rich that he makes crepes suzettes with Napoleon brandy and needs some tax losses-so how much guarantee would he like?"

            "Are YOU serious, Boss? I'll have to dig it out of the group already sacked for Mr. Douglas."

            "Of course I'm not serious. The gonif would show up here tomorrow, with his family. But you've given me a fine Idea for a story, so run along. Front!"

            Mike was not uninterested in the "disgusting" picture. He grokked correctly (if only theoreticly) what the letter and the picture symbolized-and studied the picture with the clear-eyed delight With which he studied each passing butterfly. He found both butterflies and women tremendously interesting-in fact, all the grokking world around him was enchanting and he wanted to drink so deep of it all that his own grokking would be perfect.

            He understood, intellectually, the mechanical and biological processes being offered to him in these letters but he wondered why these strangers wanted his help in quickening their eggs? Mike understood (without grokking it) that these people made ritual of this simple necessity, a "growing closer" possibly almost as important and precious as the water ceremony. He was eager to grok it.

            But he was not in a hurry, "hurry" being one human concept he had failed to grok at all. He was sensitively aware of the key importance of correct timing in all acts-but with the Martian approach: correct timing was accomplished by waiting. He had noticed, of course, that his human brothers lacked his own fine discrimination of time and often were forced to wait a little faster than a Martian would-but he did not hold their innocent awkwardness against them; he simply learned to wait faster himself to cover their lack.

            In fact, he sometimes waited faster so efficiently that a human would have concluded that he was hurrying at breakneck speed. But the human would have been mistaken-Mike was simply adjusting his own waiting in warm consideration for the needs of others.

            So he accepted Jill's edict that he was not to reply to any of these brotherly offers from female humans, but he accepted it not as a final veto but as a waiting-possibly a century hence would be better; in any case now was not the correct time since his water brother Jill spoke rightly.

            Mike readily assented when Jill suggested, quite firmly, that he give this picture to Duke. He went at once to do so and would have done so anyhow; Mike knew about Duke's collection, he had seen it, looked through it with deep interest, trying to grok why Duke said, "That one ain't much in the face, but look at those legs-brother!" It always made Mike feel good to be called "brother" by one of his water brothers but legs were just legs, save that his own people had three each while humans each had only two-without being crippled thereby, he reminded himself~ two legs were proper for humans, he must always grok that this was correct.

            As for faces, Jubal had the most beautiful face Mike had ever seen, clearly and distinctly his own. It seemed to Mike that these human females in Duke's picture collection could hardly be said to have grown faces as yet, so much did one look like the other in the face. All young human females had much the same face-how could it be otherwise? Of course he had never had any trouble recognizing Jill's face; she was not only the first woman he had ever seen but, most important, his first female water brother-Mike knew every pore on her nose, every incipient wrinkle in her face and had praised each one in happy meditation.

            But, while he now knew Anne from Dorcas and Dorcas from Miriam by their faces alone, it had not been so when first he came here. For several days Mike had distinguished between them by size and coloration-and, of course, by voice, since no two voices were ever alike. But, as sometimes did happen, all three females would be quiet at once and then it was well that Anne was so much bigger, Dorcas so small, and that Miriam, who was bigger than Dorcas but smaller than Anne, nevertheless need not be mistaken for the missing one if either Anne or Dorcas was absent because Miriam had unmistakable hair called "red," even though it was not the color called "red" when speaking of anything but hair.

            This special meaning for "red" did not trouble Mike; he knew before he reached Earth that every English word held more than one meaning. It was a fact one could get used to, without grokking, just as the sameness of all girl faces could be gotten used to . . . and, after waiting, they were no longer quite the same. Mike now could call up Anne's face in his mind and count the pores in her nose as readily as with Jill's. In essence, even an egg was uniquely itself, different from all other eggs any where and when- Mike had always known that. So each girl had her own face, no matter how small those differences might be.

            Mike gave the "disgusting" picture to Duke and was warmed by Duke's pleasure. Mike did not feel that he was depriving himself in parting with the picture; he had seen it once, he could see it in his mind whenever he wished-even the face in that picture, as it had glowed with a most unusual expression of beautiful pain.

            He accepted Duke's thanks gravely and went happily back to read the rest of his mail.

            Mike did not share Jubal's annoyance at the avalanche of mail; he reveled in it, the insurance ads quite as much as the marriage proposals. His trip to the Palace had opened his eyes to the enonnous variety in this world and he was resolved to grok it all. He could see that it would take him several centuries and that he must grow and grow and grow, but he was undaunted and in no hurry-he grokked that eternity and the everbeautifully-changing now were identical.

            He had decided not to reread the Encyclopedia Britannica; the flood of mail gave him brighter glimpses of the world. He read it, grokked what he could, remembered the rest for contemplation at night while the household slept.

            From these nights of meditation he was beginning, he thought, to grok "business," and "money," and "buying," and "selling," and related unMartian activities-the articles in the Encyclopedia had always left him feeling unfilled, as (he now grokked) each one had assumed that he knew many things that he did not know. But there arrived in the mail, from Mr. Secretary General Joseph Edgerton Douglas, a check book and other papers, and his brother Jubal had taken great pains to explain to him what money was and how it was used.

            Mike had failed utterly to understand it at first, even though Jubal showed him how to make out his first check, gave him "money" in exchange for it, taught him how to count it.

            Then suddenly, with a grokking so blinding that he trembled and forced himself not to withdraw, he understood the abstract symbolic nature of money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not "money"; they were concrete symbols for an abstract idea which spread all through these people, all through their world. But these things were not money, any more than water shared in water ceremony was the growingcloser. Water was not necessary to the ceremony . . . and these pretty things were not necessary to money. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One's thoughts-money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.

            Mike was dazzled with the magnificent beauty of money.

            The flow and change and countennarching of the symbols was another matter, beautiful in small, but reminding him of games taught to nestlings to encourage them to learn to reason correctly and grow. It was the total structure that dazzled him, the idea that an entire world could be reflected in one dynamic, completely interconnected, symbol structure. Mike grokked then that the Old Ones of this race were very old indeed to have composed such beauty, and he wished humbly that he might soon be allowed to meet one of them.

            Jubal encouraged him to spend some of his money and Mike did so, with the timid, uncertain eagerness of a bride being brought to bed. Jubal suggested that he "buy presents for his friends" and Jill helped him with it, starting by placing arbitrary limits: only one present for each friend and a total cost that was not even a reciprocal filled-three of the sum that had been placed to his account-Mike's original intention had been to spend all of that pretty balance on his friends.

            He quickly learned how difficult it is to spend money. There were so many things from which to choose, all of them wonderful and most of them incomprehensible. Surrounded by thick catalogs from Marshall Field's to the Ginza, and back by way of Bombay and Copenhagen, he felt smothered in a plethora of riches. Even the Sears & Montgomery catalog was too much for him.

            But Jill helped. "No, Mike, Duke would not want a tractor."

            "Duke likes tractors."

            "Um, maybe-but he's got one, or Jubal has, which is the same thing. He might like one of those cute little Belgian unicycles-be could take it apart and put it together and shine it all day long. But even that is too expensive, what with the taxes. Mike dear, a present ought not to be very expensive-unless you are trying to get a girl to marry you, or something. Especially 'something.' But a present should show that you thought about it and considered that person's tastes. Something he would enjoy but probably would not buy for himself."

            "How?"

            "That's always the problem. Wait a minute. I just remembered something in this morning's mail-I hope Larry hasn't carted it oft' yet." She was back quickly. "Found it! Listen to this: 'Living Aphrodite: A de-luxe Album of Feminine Beauty in Gorgeous Stereo-Color by the World's Greatest Artists of the Camera. Notice: this item will not be sent by mail. It will be forwarded at purchaser's risk by prepaid express only. Orders cannot be accepted from addresses in the following states-' Um, Pennsylvania is on the verboten list-but don't let that worry you; if it is addressed to you, it will be delivered-and if I know Duke's vulgar tastes, this is just what he would like."

            Duke did like it. It was delivered, not by express, but via the S.S. patrol car capping the house-and the next ad for the same item to arrive in the house boasted: "-exactly as supplied to the Man from Mars, by special appointment," which pleased Mike and annoyed Jill.

            Other presents were just as difficult, but picking a present for Jubal was supremely difficult. Jill was stumped. What does one buy for a man who has everything-everything~ that is to say, that be wants which money can buy? The Sphinx? Three Wishes? The fountain that Ponce de Leon failed to find? Oil for his ancient bones, or one golden day of youth? Jubal had long ago even foresworn pets, because he outlived them, or (worse yet) it was now possible that a pet would outlive him, be orphaned.

            Privately they consulted the others. "Shucks," Duke told them, "didn't you know? The boss likes statues."

            "Really?" Jill answered. "I don't see any sculpture around."

            "That's because most of the stuff he likes isn't for sale. He says that the crud they're making nowdays looks like disaster in a junk yard and any idiot with a blow torch and astigmatism can set himself up as a sculptor."

            Anne nodded thoughtfully. "I think Duke is right. You can tell what Jubal's tastes in sculpture are by looking at the books in his study. But I doubt if it will help much."

            Nevertheless they looked, Anne and Jill and Mike, and Anne picked out three books as bearing evidence (to her eyes) of having been looked at most often. "Hmm .." she said. "It's clear that the Boss would like anything by Rodin. Mike, if you could buy one of these for Jubal, which one would you pick? Oh, here's a pretty one-'Eternal Springtime.'"

            Mike barely glanced at it and turned the page. "This one."

            "What?" Jill looked at it and shuddered. "Mike, that one is perfectly dreadful! I hope I die long before I look like that."

            "That is beauty," Mike said firmly.

            "Mike!" Jill protested. "You've got a depraved taste-you're worse than Duke. Or else you just don't know any better."

            Ordinarily such a rebuke from a water brother, most especially from Jill, would have shut Mike up, forced him to spend the following night in trying to understand his fault. But this was art in which he was sure of himself. The portrayed statue was the first thing he had seen on Earth which felt like a breath of home to him. Although it was clearly a picture of a human woman it gave him a feeling that a Martian Old One should be somewhere around, responsible for its creation. "It is beauty," he insisted stubbornly. "She has her own face. I grok."

            "Jill," Anne said slowly, "Mike is right."

            "Huh? Anne! Surely you don't like that?"

            "It frightens me. But Mike knows what Jubal likes. Look at the book itself. It falls open naturally to any one of three places. Now look at the pages-this page has been handled more than the other two. Mike has picked the Boss's favorite. This other one-'The Caryatid Who has Fallen under the Weight of Her Stone'-he likes almost as well. But Mike's choice is Jubal's pet."

            "I buy it," Mike said decisively.

            But it was not for sale. Anne telephoned the Rodin Museum in Paris on Mike's behalf and only Gallic gallantry and her beauty kept them from laughing in her face. Sell one of the Master's works? My dear lady, they are not only not for sale but they may not be reproduced. Non, non, non! Quelle idét!

            But for the Man from Mars some things are possible which are not possible for others. Anne called Bradley; a couple of days later he called her back. As a compliment from the French government-no fee, but a strongly couched request that the present never be publicly exhibited- Mike would receive, not the original, but a full-size, microscopically-exact replica, a bronze photopantogram of "She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmiêre."

            Jill helped Mike select presents for the girls, here she knew her ground. But when he asked her what he should buy for her; she not only did not help but insisted that he must not buy her anything.

            Mike was beginning to realize that, while a water brother always spoke rightly, sometimes they spoke more rightly than others, i.e., that the English language had depths to it and it was sometimes necessary to probe to reach the right depth. So he consulted Anne.

            "Go ahead and buy her a present, dear. She has to tell you that but you give her a present anyhow. Hmm...Anne vetoed clothes and jewelry, finally selected for him a present which puzzled hint-Jill already smelled exactly the way Jill should smell.

            The small size and apparent unimportance of the present, when it arrived, added to his misgivings-and when Anne let him whiff it before having him give it to Jill, Mike was more in doubt than ever; the odor was very strong and smelled not at all like Jill.

            Nevertheless, Anne was right; Jill was delighted with the perfume and insisted on kissing him at once. In kissing her he grokked fully that this gift was what she wanted and that it made them grow closer.

            When she wore it at dinner that night, he discovered that the fragrance truly did not differ from that of Jill herself; in some unclear fashion it simply made Jill smell more deliciously like Jill than ever. Still stranger, it caused Dorcas to kiss him and whisper, "Mike hon ... the negligee is lovely and just what I wanted-but perhaps someday you'll give me perfume?"

            Mike could not grok why Dorcas would want it, since Dorcas did not smell at all like Jill and therefore perfume would not be proper for her nor, he realized, would he want Dorcas to smell like Jill; he wanted Dorcas to smell like Dorcas.

            Jubal interrupted with: "Quit nuzzling the lad and let him eat his dinned Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don't wheedle Mike for more stinkum."

            "Doss, you mind your own business."

            It was all very puzzling-both that Jill could smell still more like Jill and that Dorcas should wish to smell like Jill when she already smelled like herself . . . and that Jubal would say that Dorcas smelled like a cat when she did not. There was a cat who lived on the place (not as a pet, but as co-owner); on rare occasion it came to the house and deigned to accept a handout. The cat and Mike had grokked each other at once, and Mike had found its carniverous thoughts most pleasing and quite Martian. He had discovered, too, that the cat's name (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was not the cat's name at all, but he had not told anyone this because he could not pronounce the cat's real name; he could only hear it in his head.

            The cat did not smell like Dorcas.

            Giving presents was a great goodness and the buying thereof taught Mike much about the true value of money. But he had not forgotten even momentarily that there were other things he was eager to grok. Jubal had put off Senator Boone's invitation to Mike twice without mentioning it to Mike and Mike had not noticed, since his quite different grasp of time made "next Sunday" no particular date.

            But the next repetition of the invitation came by mall and was addressed to Mike; Senator Boone was under pressure from Supreme Bishop Digby to produce the Man from Mars and Boone had sensed that Harshaw was stalling him and might stall indefinitely.

            Mike took it to Jubal, stood waiting. "Well?" Jubal growled. "Do you want to go, or don't you? You don't have to attend a Fosterite service. We can tell 'em to go to hell."

            So a Checker Cab with a human driver (Harshaw refused to trust his life to an autocab) picked them up the next Sunday morning and delivered Mike, Jill, and Jubal to a public landing fiat just outside the sacred grounds of Archangel Foster Tabernacle of the Church of the New Revelation.

XXIII

            JUBAL HAD BEEN TRYING to warn Mike all the way to church; of what, Mike was not certain. He had listened, he always listened-but the landscape below them tugged for attention, too; he had compromised by storing what Jubal said. "Now look, boy," Jubal had admonished, "these Fosterites are after your money. That's all right, most everybody is after your money; you just have to be firm. Your money and the prestige of having the Man from Mars join their church. They're going to work on you-and you have to be firm about that, too."

            "Beg pardon?"

            "Damn it, I don't believe you've been listening."

            "I am sorry, Jubal."

            "Well ... look at it this way. Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' -we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud. It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance-mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day. We peddled the only authentic brand of Lydia Pinkham's-"

            "Jubal!" Jill said sharply. "He doesn't grok it."

            "Uh? Sorry. I got carried away. My folks tried to make a preacher out of me and missed by a narrow margin; I guess it still shows."

            "It does."

            "Don't rub it in, girl. I would have made a good one if I hadn't fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist. Shucks, this place we're headed for today would have been known as the 'Archangel Jubal Tabernacle.'"

            Jill made a face. "Jubal, please! Not so soon after breakfast."

            "I mean it. A confidence man knows that he's lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman ropes himself first; he believes what he says -and such belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope. But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never become a prophet . . . just a critic-which is a poor thing at best, a sort of fourthrate prophet suffering from delusions of gender." Jubal frowned. "That's what worries me about Fosterites, Jill. I think that they are utterly sincere and you and I know that Mike is a sucker for sincerity."

            "What do you think they'll try to do to him?"

            "Convert him, of course. Then get their hands on his fortune."

            "I thought you had things fixed so that nobody could do that?"

            "No, I just fixed it so that nobody could take it away from him against his will. Ordinarily he couldn't even give it away without the government stepping in. But giving it to a church, especially a politically powerful church like the Fosterites, is another matter."

            "I don't see why."

            Jubal sighed. "My dear, religion is practically a null area under the law. A church can do anything any other human organization can do- and has no restrictions. It pays no taxes, need not publish records, is effectively immune to search, inspection, or control-and a church is anything that calls itself a church. Attempts have been made to distinguish between 'real' religions entitled to these immunities and 'cults.' This can't be done, short of establishing a state religion . . . which is a cure worse than the disease. In any case, we haven't done it, and both under what's left of the old United States Constitution and under the Treaty of Federation, all churches are equal and equally immune-especially if they swing a big bloc of votes. If Mike is converted to Fosterism . . . and makes a will in favor of his church . . . and then 'goes to heaven' some sunrise, it will all be, to put it in the correct tautology, 'as legal as church on Sunday.'"

            "Oh, dear! I thought we had him safe at last."

            "There is no safety this side of the grave."

            "Well ... what are you going to do about it, Jubal?"

            "Nothing. Just fret, that's all."

            Mike stored their conversation without any effort to grok it. He recognized the subject as one of utter simplicity in his own language but amazingly slippery in English. Since his failure to achieve mutual grokking on this subject, even with his brother Mahmoud, with his admittedly imperfect translation of the all-embracing Martian concept as: "Thou art God," be had simply waited until grokking was possible. He knew that the waiting would fructify at its time; his brother Jill was learning his language and he would be able to explaln it to her. They would grok together.

            In the meantime the scenery flowing beneath him was a never-ending delight, and he was filled with eagerness for experience to come. He expected, or hoped, to meet a human Old One.

            Senator Tom Boone was waiting to meet them at the landing flat. "Howdy, folks! And may the Good Lord bless you on this beautiful Sabbath. Mr. Smith, I'm happy to see you again. And you, too, Doctor." He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at Jill. "And this little lady- didn't I see you at the Palace?"

            "Yes, Senator. I'm Gillian Boardman."

            "Thought so, m'dear. Are you saved?"

            "Uh, I guess not, Senator."

            "Well, it's never too late. We'll be very happy to have you attend the seekers' service in the Outer Tabernacle-I'll find a Guardian to guide you. Mr. Smith and the Doc will be going into the Sanctuary, of course." The Senator looked around.

            "Senator-"

            "Uh, what, Doc?"

            "If Miss Boardmnan can't go into the Sanctuary, I think we had all better attend the seekers' service. She's his nurse and translator."

            Boone looked slightly perturbed. "Is he ill? He doesn't look it. And why does he need a translator? He speaks English-I heard him."

            Jubal shrugged. "As his physician, I prefer to have a nurse to assist me, if necessary. Mr. Smith is not entirely adjusted to the conditions of this planet. An interpreter may not be necessary. But why don't you ask hint? Mike, do you want Jill to come with you?"

            "Yes, Jubal."

            "But- Very well, Mr. Smith." Boone again removed his cigar, put two fingers between his lips and whistled. "Cherub here!"

            A youngster in his early teens came dashing up. He was dressed in a short robe, tights, and slippers, and had what appeared to be pigeon's wings (because they were) fastened, spread, on his shoulders. He was bareheaded, had a crop of tight golden curls, and a sunny smile. Jill thought that he was as cute as a ginger ale ad.

            Boone ordered, "Fly up to the Sanctum office and tell the Warden on duty that I want another pilgrim's badge sent to the Sanctuary gate right away. The word is Mars."

            "'Mars,'" the kid repeated, threw Boone a Boy Scout salute, turned and made a mighty sixty-foot leap over the heads of the crowd. Jill realized why the short robe had looked so bulky; it concealed a personal jump harness.

            "Have to be careful of those badges," Boone remarked. "You'd be surprised how many sinners would like to sneak in and sample a little of God's Joy without having their sins washed away first. Now we'll just mosey along and sight-see a little while we wait for the third badge. I'm glad you folks got here early."

            They pushed through the crowd and entered the huge building, found themselves in a long high hallway. Boone stopped. "I want you to notice something. There is economics in everything, even in the Lord's work. Any tourist coming here, whether he attends seekers' service or not-and services run twenty-four hours a day-has to come in through here. What does he see? These happy chances." Boone waved at slot machines lining both walls of the hall. "The bar and quick lunch is at the far end, he can't even get a drink of water without running this gauntlet. And let me tell you, it's a remarkable sinner who can get that far without shedding his loose change.

            "But we don't take his money and give him nothing. Take a look-" Boone shouldered his way to a machine, tapped the woman playing it on the shoulder; she was wearing around her neck a Fosterite rosary. "Please, Daughter."

            She looked up, her annoyance changed to a smile. "Certainly, Bishop."

            "Bless you. You'll note," Boone went on, as he fed a quarter into the machine, "that no matter whether it pays off in worldly goods or not, a sinner playing this machine is always rewarded with a blessing and an appropriate souvenir text."

            The machine stopped whirring and, lined up in the windows, was: GOD-WATCHES-YOU.

            "That pays three for one," Boone said briskly and fished the pay-off out of the receptacle, "and here's your souvenir text." He tore a paper tab off that had extruded from a slot, and handed it to Jill. "Keep it, little lady, and ponder it."

            Jill sneaked a glance at it before putting it into her purse: "But the Sinner's belly is filled with filth- N.R. XXII 17"

            "You'll note," Boone went on, "that the pay-off is in tokens, not in coin-and the bursar's cage is clear back past the bar . . . and there is plenty of opportunity there to make love offerings for charity and other good works. So the sinner probably feeds them back in . . . with a blessing each time and another text to take home. The cumulative effect is tremendous, really tremendous! Why, some of our most diligent and pious sheep got their start right here in this room."

            "I don't doubt it," agreed Jubal.

            "Especially if they hit a jackpot. You understand, every combination is a complete sentence, a blessing. All but the jackpot. That's the three Holy Eyes. I tell you, when they see those eyes all lined up and starin' at 'em and all that manna from Heaven coming down, it really makes 'em think. Sometimes they faint. Here, Mr. Smith-" Boone offered Mike one of the slugs the machine had just paid. "Give it a whirl."

            Mike hesitated. Jubal quickly took the proffered token himself- damn it, he didn't want the boy getting hooked by a one-armed bandit! "I'll try it, Senator." He fed the machine.

            Mike really hadn't intended to do anything. He had extended his time sense a little and was gently feeling around inside the machine trying to discover what it did and why they were stopping to look at it. But he had been too timid to play it himself.

            But when Jubal did so, Mike watched the cylinders spin around, noted the single eye pictured on each, and wondered what this "jackpot" was when all three were lined up. The word had only three meanings, so far as he knew, and none of them seemed to apply. Without really thinking about it, certainly without intending to cause any excitement, he slowed and stopped each wheel so that the eyes looked out through the window.

            A bell tolled, a choir sang hosannas, the machine lighted up and started spewing slugs into the receptacle and on into a catch basin below it, in a flood. Boone looked delighted. "Well, bless you! Doc, this is your day! Here, I'll help you-and put one back in to take the jackpot off." He did not wait for Jubal but picked up one of the flood and fed it back in.

            Mike was wondering why all this was happening, so he lined up the three eyes again. The same events repeated, save that the flood was a mere trickle. Boone stared at the machine. "Well, I'll be-blessedl It's not supposed to hit twice in a row. But never mind; it did-and I'll see that you're paid on both of them." Quickly he put a slug back in.

            Mike still wanted to see why this was a "jackpot." The eyes lined up again.

            Boone stared at them. Jill suddenly squeezed Mike's hand and whispered, "Mike ... stop it!"

            "But, Jill, I was seeing-"

            "Don't talk about it. Just stop. Oh, you just wait till I get you home!" Boone said slowly, "I'd hesitate to call this a miracle. Machine probably needs a repairman." He shouted, "Cherub here!" and added, "We'd better take the last one off, anyhow," and fed in another slug.

            Without Mike's intercession, the wheels slowed down on their own and announced: "FOSTER-LOVES-YOU," and the mechanism tried, but failed, to deliver ten more slugs. A Cherub, older and with sleek black hair, came up and said, "Happy day. You need help?"

            "Three jackpots," Boone told him.

            "'Three'?"

            "Didn't you hear the music? Are you deef? We'll be at the bar; fetch the money there. And have somebody check this machine."

            "Yes, Bishop."

            They left the Cherub scratching his head while Boone hurried them on through the Happiness Room to the bar at the far end. "Got to get you out of here," Boone said jovially, "before you bankrupt the Church. Doc, are you always that lucky?"

            "Always," Harshaw said solemnly. He had not looked at Mike and did not intend to-he told himself that he did not know that the boy had anything to do with it . . . but he wished mightily that this ordeal were over and all of them home again.

            Boone took them to a stretch of the bar counter marked "Reserved" and said, "This'll do-or would the little lady like to sit down?"

            "This is fine." (-and if you call me "little lady" just once more I'll turn Mike loose on you!)

            A bartender hurried up. "Happy day. Your usual, Bishop?"

            "Double. What'll it be, Doc? And Mr. Smith? Don't be bashful; you're the Supreme Bishop's guests."

            "Brandy, thank you. Water on the side."

            "Brandy, thank you," Mike repeated ... thought about it, and added, "No water for me, please." While it was true that the water of life was not the essence in the water ceremony, nevertheless he did not wish to drink water here.

            "That's the spirits" Boone said heartily. "That's the proper spirit with spirits! No water. Get it? It's a joke." Re dug Jubal in the ribs. "Now what'll it be for the little lady? Cola? Milk for your rosy cheeks? Or do you want a real Happy Day drink with the big folks?"

            "Senator," Jill said carefully, "Would your hospitality extend to a martini?"

            "Would it! Best martinis in the whole world right here-we don't use any vermouth at all. We bless 'em instead. Double martini for the little lady. Bless you, son, and make it fast." He turned to the others. "We've just about tIme for a quick one, then pay our respects to Archangel Foster and on into the Sanctuary in time to hear the Supreme Bishop."

            The drinks arrived and the jackpots' payoff. They drank with Boone's blessing, then he wrangled in a friendly fashion with Jubal over the three hundred dollars just delivered, insisting that all three prizes belonged to Jubal even though Boone had inserted the slugs on the second and third. Jubal settled it by scooping up all the money and depositing it in a loveoffering bowl near them on the bar.

            Boone nodded approvingly. "That's a mark of grace, Doc. We'll save you yet. Another round, folks?"

            Jill hoped that someone would say yes. The gin was watered, she decided, and the flavor was poor; nevertheless it was starting a small flame of tolerance in her middle. But nobody spoke up, so she trailed along as Boone led them away, up a flight of stairs, past a sign reading: POSITIVELY NO SEEKERS NOR SINNERS ALLOWED ON THIS LEVEL-THIS MEANS YOU!

            Beyond the sign was a heavy grilled gate. Boone said to it: "Bishop Boone and three pilgrims, guests of the Supreme Bishop."

            The gate swung open. He led them around a curved passage and into a room.

            It was a moderately large room, luxuriously appointed in a style that reminded Jill of undertakers' parlors, but it was filled with cheerful music. The basic theme seemed to be "Jingle Bells" but a Congo beat had been added and the arrangement so embroidered that its ancestry was not certain. Jill found that she liked it and that it made her want to dance.

            The far wall of the room was clear glass and appeared to be not even that. Boone said briskly, "Here we are, folks-in the Presence." He knelt quickly, facing the empty wall. "You don't have to kneel, you'rt pilgrims -but do so if it makes you feel better. Most pilgrims do. And there he is just as he was when he was called up to Heaven."

            Boone gestured with his cigar. "Don't he look natural? Preserved by a miracle, his flesh incorruptible. That's the very chair he used to sit in when he wrote his Messages . . . and that's just the pose he was in when he went to Heaven. He never moved and he's never been moved-we just built the Tabernacle right around him . . . removing the old church, naturally, and preserving its sacred stones." Opposite them about twenty feet away, facing them, seated in a big arm chair remarkably like a throne, was an old man. Re looked as if he were alive - . and he reminded Jill strongly of an old goat that had been on the farm where she had spent her childhood summers-Yes, even to the out-thrust lower lip, the cut of the whiskers, and the fierce, brooding eyes. Jill felt her skin prickle; the Archangel Foster made her uneasy. Mike said to her in Martian, "My brother, this is an Old One?"

            "I don't know, Mike. They say he is."

            He answered in Martian, "I do not grok an Old One here."

            "I don't know, I tell you."

            "I grok wrongness."

            "Mike! Remember!"

            "Yes, Jill."

            Boone said, "What was he saying, little lady? What was your question, Mr. Smith?"

            Jill said quickly, "It wasn't anything. Senator, can I get out of here? I feel faint." She glanced back at the corpse. There were billowing clouds above it and one shaft of light always cut through and sought out the face. The light changed enough so that the face seemed to change and the eyes seemed bright and alive.

            Boone said soothingly, "It sometimes has that effect, the first time. But you ought to look at him from the seekers' gallery below us-looking up at him and with entirely different music. Entirely. Heavy music, with subsonics in it, I believe it is-reminds 'em of their sins. Now this room is a Happy Thoughts meditation chamber for high officials of the Church-I often come here and sit and smoke a cigar for an hour if I'm feeling the least bit low."

            "Please, Senator!"

            "Oh, certainly. You just wait outside, m'dear. Mr. Smith, you stay as long as you like."

            Jubal said, "Senator, hadn't we best get on into the services?"

            They all left. Jill was shaking and squeezed Mike's hand-she had been scared silly that Mike might do something to that grisly exhibit-and get them all lynched, or worse.

            Two guards, dressed in uniforms much like the Cherubim but more ornate, thrust crossed spears in their path when they reached the portal of the Sanctuary. Boone said reprovingly, "Come, come! These pilgrims are the Supreme Bishop's personal guests. Where are their badges?"

            The confusion was straightened out, the badges produced~ and with them their door prize numbers. A respectful usher said, "This way, Bishop," and led them up wide stairs and to a center box directly facing the stage.

            Boone stood back for them to go in. "You first, little lady." There followed a tussle of wills; Boone wanted to sit next to Mike in order to answer his questions. }larshaW won and Mike sat between Jill and Jiib~~l, with Boone on the aisle.

            The box was roomy and luxurious, with very comfortable, self-adjusting seats, ash trays for each seat and drop tables for refreshments folded against the rail in front of them. Their balcony position placed them about fifteen feet over the heads of the congregation and not more than a hundred feet from the altar. In front of it a young priest was warming up the crowd, shuffling to the music and shoving his heavily muscled arms back and forth, fists clenched, like pistons. His strong bass voice joined the choir from time to time, then he would lift it in ex.hortatiofl:

            "Up off your behinds! What are you waiting for? Gonna let the Devil catch you napping'?"

            The aisles were very wide and a snake dance was moving down the right aisle, across in front of the altar, and weaving back up the center aisle, feet stomping in time with the priest's piston-like jabs and with the syncopated chant of the choir. Clumps clump, moan! . . . clump, clump, moan! Jill felt the beat of it and realized sheepishly that it would be fun to get into that snake dance-as more and more people were doing under the brawny young priest's taunts.

            "That boy's a corner," Boone said approvinglY. "I've team.pteached with him a few times and I can testify that he turns the crowd over to you already sizzlin'. The Reverend 'Jug' Jackerman-used to play left tackle for the Rams. You've seen him play."

            "I'm afraid not," Jubal admitted. "I don't follow football."

            "Really? You don't know what you're missing. Why, during the season most of the faithful stay after services, eat their lunches in their pews, and watch the game. The whole back wall behind the altar slides away and you're looking right into the biggest stereo tank ever built~ Puts the plays right in your lap. Better reception than you get at home-and it's more of a thrill to watch with a crowd around you." He stopped and whistled. "Hey, Cherub! Over here!"

            An usher hurried over. "Yes, Bishop?"

            "Son, you ran away so fast when you seated us, I didn't have time to put in my order."

            "I'm sorry, Bishop."

            "Being sorry won't get you into Heaven. Get happy, son. Get that old spring into your step and stay on your toes. Same thing all around, folks? Fine!" He gave the order and added, "and bring me back a handful of my cigars -- just ask the chief barkeep."

            "Right away, Bishop."

            "Bless you, son. Hold it-" The head of the snake dance was just about to pass under them; Boone leaned over the rail, made a megaphone of his hands and cut through the high noise level. "Dawn! Hey, Dawn!" A woman looked up; he caught her eye, motioned her to come up. She smiled. "Add a whiskey sour to that order. Fly."

            The woman showed up quickly, as did the drinks. Boone swung a seat out of the box's back row and put it cornerwise in front of him so that she could visit more easily. "Folks, meet Miss Dawn Ardent. M'dear, that's Miss Boardnlan, the little lady down in the corner-and this is the famous Doctor Jubal Harshaw here by me-"

            "Really? Doctor, I think your stories are simply divine~"

            "Thank you."

            "Oh, I really do. I put one of your tapes on my player and let it lull me to sleep almost every night."

            "Higher praise a writer cannot expect," Jubal said with a straight face.

            "That's enough, Dawn," put in Boone. "The young man sitting between them is . . . Mr. Valentine Smith the Man from Mars."

            He eyes came open wider as her mouth opened. "Oh, my goodness!"

            Boone roared. "Bless you, child! I guess I really snuck up on you that time."

            She said, "Are you really the Man from Mars?"

            "Yes, Miss Dawn Ardent."

            "Just call me 'Dawn.' Oh, goodness!"

            Boone patted her hand. "Don't you know it's a sin to doubt the word of a Bishop? M'dear, how would you like to help lead the Man from Mars ta the light?"

            "Oh, I'd love it!"

            (You certainly would, you sleek bitch! Jill said to herself~ She had been growing increasingly angry ever since Miss Ardent had joined them. The dress the woman was wearing was long sleeved, high necked, and opaque-and covered nothing. It was a knit fabric almost exactly the shade of her tanned skin and Jill was certain that skin was all there was under it-other than Miss Ardent, which was really quite a lot, in all departments. The dress was ostentatiously modest compared with the extreme styles worn by many of the female half of the congregation, some of whom, in the snake dance, seemed about to jounce out of their clothes.

            Jill thought that, despite being dressed, Miss Ardent looked as if she had just wiggled out of bed and was anxious to crawl back in. With Mike. Quit squirming your carcass at him, you cheap hussy!

            Boone said, "I'll speak to the Supreme Bishop about it, m'dear. Now you'd better get back downstairs and lead that parade. Jug needs your help."

            She stood up obediently. "Yes, Bishop. Pleased to meet you, Doctor, and Miss Broad. I hope I'll see you again, Mr. Smith. I'll pray for you." She undulated away.

            "A fine girl, that," Boone said happily. "Ever catch her act, Doctor?"

            "I think not. What does she do?"

            Boone seemed unable to believe his ears. "You don't know?" 

            "Didn't you hear her name? That's Dawn Ardent-she's simply the highest paid peeler in all Baja California, that's who she is. Men have committed suicide over her-very sad. Works under an irised spotlight and by the time she's down to her shoes, the light is just on her face and you really can't see anything else. Very effective. Highly spiritual. Would you believe it, looking at that sweet face now, that she used to be a most immoral woman?"

            "I can't believe it."

            "Well, she was. Ask her. She'll tell you. Better yet, come to a cleansing for seekers-I'll let you know when she's going to be on. When she confesses, it gives other women courage to stand up and tell about their sins. She doesn't hold anything back-and, of course, it does her good, too, to know that she's helping other people. Very dedicated woman now-flies her own car up here every Saturday night right after her last show, so as to be here in time to teach Sunday School. She teaches the Young Men's Happiness Class and attendance has more than tripled since she took over."

            "I can believe that," Jubal agreed. "How old are these lucky 'Young Men'?"

            Boone looked at him and laughed. "You're not fooling me, you old devil-somebody told you the motto of Dawn's class: 'Never too old to be young.'"

            "No, truly."

            "In any case you can't attend her class until you've seen the light and gone through cleansing and been accepted. Sorry. This is the One True Church, Pilgrim, nothing at all like those traps of Satan, those foul pits of iniquity that call themselves 'churches' in order to lead the unwary into idolatry and other abominations. You can't just walk in here because you want to kill a couple hours out of the rain-you gotta be saved first. In fact- Oh, oh, camera warning." Red lights were blinking in each corner of the great hail. "And Jug's got 'em done to a turn. Now you'll see some action."

            The snake dance picked up more volunteers and the few left seated were clapping the cadence and bouncing up and down. Pairs of ushers were hurrying to pick up the fallen, some of whom were quiet but others, mostly women, were writhing and foaming at the mouth. These were dumped hastily in front of the altar and left to flop like freshly caught fish. Boone pointed his cigar at a gaunt redhead, a woman apparently about forty whose dress was badly torn by her exertions. "See that woman? It has been at least a year since she has gone all through a service without being possessed by the Spirit. Sometimes Archangel Foster uses her mouth to talk to us . . . and when that happens it takes four husky acolytes to hold her down. She could go to heaven any time, she's ready. But she's needed here. Anybody need a refill? Bar service is likely to be a little slow once the cameras are switched on and things get lively."

            Almost absently Mike let his glass be replenished. He shared none of Jill's disgust with the scene. He had been deeply troubled when he had discovered that the "Old One" had been no Old One at all but mere spoiled food, with no Old One anywhere near. But he had tabled that matter and was drinking deep of the events around him.

            The frenzy going on below him was so Martian in its flavor that he felt both homesick and warmly at home. No detail of the scene was Martian, all was wildly different, yet he grokked correctly that this was a growing-closer as real as water ceremony, and in numbers and intensity that he had never met before outside his own nest. He wished forlornly that someone would invite him to join that jumping up and down. His feet tingled with an urge to merge himself with them.

            He spotted Miss Dawn Ardent again in its van and tried to catch her eye-perhaps she would invite him. He did not have to recognize her-by size and proportions even though he had noted when he had first seen her that she was exactly as tall as his brother Jill with very nearly the same shapings and masses throughout. But Miss Dawn Ardent had her own face, with her pains and sorrows and growings graved on it under her warm smile. He wondered if Miss Dawn Ardent might some day be willing to share water with him and grow closer. Senator Bishop Boone had made him feel wary and he was glad that Jubal had not permitted them to sit side by side. But Mike was sony when Miss Dawn Ardent had been sent away.

            Miss Dawn Ardent did not feel him looking at her. The snake dance carried her away.

            The man on the platform had both his arms raised; the great cave became quieter. Suddenly he brought them down. "Who's happy?"

            "WE'RE HAPPY!"

            "Why?"

            "GOD... LOVES US!"

            "How d'you know?"

            "FOSTER TOLD US!"

            He dropped to his knees, raised one clenched fist. "Let's hear that Lion ROAR!"

            The congregation roared and shrieked and screamed while he controlled the din using his fist as a baton, raising the volume, lowering it, squeezing it down to a subvocal growl, then suddenly driving it to crescendo that shook the balcony. Mike felt it beat on him and he wallowed in it, with ecstasy so painful that he feared that he would be forced to withdraw. But Jill had told him that he must not ever do so again, except in the privacy of his own room; he controlled it and let the waves wash over him.

            The man stood up. "Our first hymn," he said briskly, "is sponsored by Manna Bakeries, makers of Angel Bread, the loaf of love with our Supreme Bishop's smiling face on every wrapper and containing a valuable premium coupon redeemable at your nearest neighborhood Church of the New Revelation, Brothers and Sisters, tomorrow Manna Bakeries with branches throughout the land start a giant, price-slashing sale of pre-equinox goodies. Send your child to school tomorrow with a bulging box of Archangel Foster cookies, each one blessed and wrapped in an appropriate text-and pray that each goodie he gives away may lead a child of sinners nearer to the light.

            "And now let's really live it up with the holy words of that old favorite: 'Forward, Foster's Children!' All together-"

            "Forward, Foster's Chil-dren! Smash apart your foes

            Faith our Shield and Ar-mar! Strike them down by rows-!" 

            "Second verse!"

            "Make no peace with sin-nen! God is on our side!"

            Mike was so joyed by it all that he did not stop then to translate and weigh and try to grok the words. He grokked that the words were not of essence; it was a growing-closer. The snake dance started moving again, the marchers chanting the potent sounds along with the choir and those too feeble to march.

            After the hymn they caught their breaths while there were announcements, Heavenly messages, another commercial, and the awarding of door prizes. Then a second hymn, "Happy Faces Uplifted," was sponsored by Dattelbaum's Department Stores where the Saved Shop in Safety since no merchandise is offered which competes with a sponsored brand-a children's Happy Room in each branch supervised by a Saved sister. The young priest moved out to the very front of the platform and cupped his ear, listening- "We ... want . . . .Digby!" 

            "Who?"

            "We-Want--DIG-BY!"

            "Louder! Make him hear you!"

            "WE-WANT-DIG-BY!" Clap, clap, stomp, stomp. 

            "WE- WANT-DIG-BY!" Clap, clap, stomp, stomp- It went on and on, getting louder as the building rocked with it. Jubal leaned to Boone and said, "Much of that and you'll do what Samson did." "Never fear," Boone told him, around his cigar. "Reinforced, fireproof, and sustained by faith. Besides, it's built to shake; it was designed that way. Helps."

            The lights went down, curtains behind the altar parted, and a blinding radiance from no visible source picked out the Supreme Bishop, waving his clasped hands over his head and smiling at them.

            They answered with the lion's roar and he threw them kisses. On his way to the pulpit he stopped, half raised one of the possessed women still writhing slowly near the altar, kissed her on the forehead, lowered her gently, started on-stopped again and knelt by the bony redhead. The Supreme Bishop reached behind him and a portable microphone was instantly placed in his hand.

            He put his other arm around the woman's shoulders, placed the pickup near her lips.

            Mike could not understand her words. Whatever they were, he was reasonably sure that they were not English.

            But the Supreme Bishop was translating, interjecting his words quickly at each pause in the foaming spate. "Archangel Foster is with us today- "He is especially pleased with you. Kiss the sister on your right- "Archangel Foster loves you all. Kiss the sister on your left-

            "He has a special message for one of us here today."

            The woman spoke again; Digby seemed to hesitate. "What was that? Louder, I pray you." She muttered and screamed at length.

            Digby looked up and smiled. "His message is for a pilgrim from another planet-Valentine Michael Smith the Man from Mars! Where are you, Valentine Michael! Stand up, stand up!"

            Jill tried to stop him but Jubal growled, "Easier to do it than to fight it. Let him stand up, Jill. Wave, Mike. Now you can sit down." Mike did so, amazed to find that they were now chanting: "Man from Mars! Man from Mars!"

            The sermon that followed seemed to be directed at him, too, but try as he would, he could not understand it. The words were English, or most of them were, but they seemed to be put together wrongly and there was so much noise, so much clapping, and so many shouts of "Hallelujah!" and "Happy Day!" that he grew quite confused. He was glad when it was over.

            As soon as the sermon was finished, Digby turned the service back to the young priest and left; Boone stood up. "Come on, folks. We pull a sneak now-ahead of the crowd."

            Mike followed along, Jill's hand in his. Presently they were going through an elaborately arched tunnel with the noise of the crowd left behind them. Jubal said, "Does this way lead to the parking lot? I told my driver to wait."

            "Eh?" Boone answered. "It does if you go straight ahead. But we're going to see the Supreme Bishop first."

            "What?" Jubal replied. "No, I don't think we can. It's time for us to get on home."

            Boone stared. "Doctor, you don't mean that. The Supreme Bishop is waiting for us right now. You can't just walk out on him-you must pay your respects. You're his guests."

            Jubal hesitated, then gave in. "Well- There won't be a lot of other people? This boy has had enough excitement for one day."

            "Just the Supreme Bishop. He wants to see you privately." Boone ushered them into a small elevator concealed in the decorations of the tunnel; moments later they were waiting in a parlor of Digby's private apartments.

            A door opened, Digby hurried in. He had removed his vestments and was dressed in flowing robes. He smiled at them. "Sorry to keep you waiting, folks-I just have to have a shower as soon as I come off. You've no notion how it makes you sweat to punch Satan and keep on slugging. So this is the Man from Mars? God bless you, son. Welcome to the Lord's House. Archangel Foster wants you to feel at home here. He's watching over you."

            Mike did not answer. Jubal was surprised to see how short the Supreme Bishop was. Lifts in his shoes when he was on stage? Or the way the lighting was arranged? Aside from the goatee he wore in evident imitation of the departed Foster, the man reminded him of a used-car salesman-the same ready smile and warm sincere manner. But he reminded Jubal of some one else, too . . . somebody- Got it! "Professor" Simon Magus, Becky Vesey's long-dead husband. Jubal relaxed a little and felt friendlier toward the clergyman. Simon had been as likable a scoundrel as he had ever known- Digby had turned his charm on Jill, "Don't kneel, daughter; we're just friends in private here." He spoke a few words to her, startling Jill with a surprising knowledge of her background and adding earnestly, "I have deep respect for your calling, daughter. In the blessed words of Archangel Foster, God commands us first to minister to the body in order that the soul may seek the light untroubled by ills of the flesh. I know that you are not yet one of us . . . but your service is blessed by the Lord. We are fellow travelers on the road to Heaven."

            He turned to Jubal. "You, too, Doctor. Archangel Foster has told us that the Lord commands us to be happy - . - and many is the time I have put down my crook, weary unto death with the cares and woes of my flock, and enjoyed an innocent, happy hour over one of your stories - and have stood up refreshed, ready to fight again."

            "Uh, thank you, Bishop."

            "I mean it deeply. I've had your record searched in Heaven-now, now, never mind; I know that you are an unbeliever but let me speak. Even Satan has a purpose in God's Great Plan. It is not yet time for you to believe. Out of your sorrow and heartache and pain you spin happiness for other people. This is all credited on your page of the Great Ledger. Now please! I did not bring you here to argue technology. We never argue with anyone, we wait until they see the light and then we welcome them. But today we shall just enjoy a happy hour together."

            Digby then proceeded to act as if he meant it. Jubal was forced to admit that the glib fraud was a charming host, and his coffee and liquor and food were all excellent. Jubal noticed that Mike seemed decidedly jumpy, especially when Digby deftly cut him out of the herd and spoke with him alone-but, confound it, the boy was simply going to have to get used to meeting people and talking to them on his own, without Jubal or Jill or somebody to feed him his lines.

            Boone was showing Jill some relics of Foster in a glass case on the other side of the room; Jubal covertly watched her evident reluctance with mild amusement while he spread pate de fois gras on toast. He heard a door click and looked around; Digby and Mike were missing. "Where did they go, Senator?"

            "Eh? What was that, Doctor?"

            "Bishop Digby and Mr. Smith. Where are they?"

            Boone looked around, seemed to notice the closed door. "Oh, they've just stepped in there for a moment. That's a little retiring room used for private audiences. You were in it, weren't you? When the Supreme Bishop was showing you around."

            "Um, yes." It was a small room with nothing in it but a chair on a dais-a "throne," Jubal corrected himself with a private grin-and a kneeler with an ann rest. Jubal wondered which one would use the throne and which one would be left with the kneeler-if this tinsel bishop tried to argue religion with Mike he was in for some shocks. "I hope they don't stay in there too long. We really do have to be getting back."

            "I doubt if they'll stay long. Probably Mr. Smith wanted a word in private. People often do - . - and the Supreme Bishop is very generous that way. Look, I'll call the parking lot and have your cab waiting right at the end of that passageway where we took the elevator-that's the Supreme Bishop's private entrance. Save you a good ten minutes."

            "That's very kind of you."

            "So if Mr. Smith has something on his soul he wants to confess, we won't have to hurry him. I'll step outside and phone." Boone left.

            Jill came over and said worriedly, "Jubal, I don't like this. I think we were deliberately maneuvered so that Digby could get Mike alone and work on him."

            "I'm sure of it."

            "Well? They haven't any business doing that. I'm going to bust right in on them and tell Mike it's time to leave."

            "Suit yourself," Jubal answered, "but I think you're acting like a broody hen. This isn't like having the S.S. on our tails, Jill; this swindle is much smoother. There won't be any strong-arm stuff." He smiled. "It's my opinion that if Digby tries to convert Mike, they'll wind up with Mike converting him. Mike's ideas are pretty hard to shake."

            "I still don't like it."

            "Relax. Help yourself to the free chow."

            "I'm not hungry."

            "Well, I am .. and if I ever tuned down a free feed, they'd toss me out of the Authors' Guild." He piled paper-thin Virginia ham on buttered bread, added to it other items, none of them syntho, until he had an unsteady ziggurat, munched it and licked mayonnaise from his fingers.

            Ten minutes later Boone had not returned. Jill said sharply, "Jubal, I'm not going to remain polite any longer. I'm going to get Mike out of there."

            "Go right ahead."

            She strode to the door. "Jubal, it's locked."

            "Thought it might be."

            "Well? What do we do? Break it down?"

            "Only as a last resort." Jubal went to the inner door, looked it over carefully. "Mmm, with a battering ram and twenty stout men I might try it. But I wouldn't count on it. Jill, that door would do credit to a bank vault-it's just been prettied up to match the room. I've got one much like it for the fireproof off my study."

            "What do We do?"

            "Beat on it, if you want to. You'll just bruise your hands. I'm going to see what's keeping friend Boone-"

            But when Jubal looked out into the hallway he saw Boone just returning. "Sorry," Boone said. "Had to have the Cherubim hunt up your driver. He was in the Happiness Room, having a bite of lunch. But your cab is waiting for you, just where I said."

            "Senator," Jubal said, "we've got to leave now. Will you be so kind as to tell Bishop Digby?"

            Boone looked perturbed. "I could phone him, if you insist. But I hesitate to do so-and I simply cannot walk in on a private audience."

            "Then phone him. We do insist."

            But Boone was saved the embarrassment as, just then, the inner door opened and Mike walked out. Jill took one look at his face and shrilled, "Mike! Are you all right?"

            "Yes, Jill."

            "I'll tell the Supreme Bishop you're leaving," said Boone and went past Mike into the smaller room. He reappeared at once. "He's left," he announced. "There's a back way into his study." Boone smiled. "Like cats and cooks, the Supreme Bishop goes without saying. That's a joke. He says that 'good-by's' add nothing to happiness in this world, so he never says good-by. Don't be offended."

            "We aren't. But we'll say good-by now-and thank you for a most interesting experience. No, don't bother to come down; I'm sure we can find our way out."

XXIV

            ONCE THEY WERE IN THE AIR Jubal said, "Well, Mike, what did you think of it?"

            Mike frowned. "I do not grok."

            "You aren't alone, son. What did the Bishop have to say?"

            Mike hesitated a long time, finally said, "My brother Jubal, I need to ponder until grokking is."

            "Ponder right ahead, son. Take a nap. That's what I'm going to do."

            Jill said suddenly, "Jubal? How do they get away with it?"

            "Get away with what?"

            "Everything. That's not a church-it's a madhouse."

            It was Jubal's turn to ponder before answering. "No, Jill, you're mistaken. It is a church - . . and the logical eclecticism of our times."

            "Huh?"

            "The New Revelation and all doctrines and practices under it are all old stuff, very old. All you can say about it is that neither Foster nor Digby ever had an original thought in his life. But they knew what would sell, in this day and age. So they pieced together a hundred timeworn tricks, gave them a new paint job, and they were in business. A booming business, too. The only thing that scares me is that I might live to see it sell too well- until it was compulsory for everybody."

            "Oh, no!"

            "Oh, yes. Hitler started with less and all he had to peddle was hate. Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise. Believe me, I know; I'm in the same grift myself. As Digby reminded me." Jubal grimaced. "I should have punched him, Instead, he made me like it. That's why I'm afraid of him. He's good at it, he's clever. He knows what people want. Happiness. The world has suffered a long, bleak century of guilt and fear-now Digby tells them that they have nothing to fear, in this life or hereafter, and that God commands them to love and be happy. Day in, day out, he keeps pushing it: Don't be afraid, be happy"

            "Well, that part's all right," Jill admitted, "and I concede that he works hard at it. But-"

            "Piffle! He plays hard."

            "No, he gave me the impression that he really is devoted to his work, that he had sacrificed everything else to-"

            "'Piffle!' I said. For Digby it's play. Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice-if the choice turns out to look like a 'noble sacrifice'-you can be sure that it is in no wise nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness . . . the unpleasant necessity of having to decide between two things both of which you would like to do when you can't do both. The ordinary bloke suffers that discomfort every day, every time he makes a choice between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up when he's tired or spending the day in his warm bed and losing his job. No matter which he does he always chooses what seems to hurt least or pleasures most. The average chump spends his life harried by these small decisions. But the utter scoundrel and the perfect saint merely make the same choices on a larger scale. They still pick what pleases them. As Digby has done. Saint or scoundrel, he's not one of the harried little chumps."

            "Which do you think he is, Jubal?"

            "You mean there's a difference?"

            "Oh, Jubal, your cynicism is just a pose and you know it! Of course there's a difference."

            "Mmm, yes, you're right, there is. I hope he's just a scoundrel-because a saint can stir up ten times as much mischief as a scoundrel. Strike that from the record; you would just tag it as 'cynicism'-as if tagging it proved it wrong. Jill, what troubled you about those church services?"

            "Well ... everything. You can't tell me that that is worship."

            "Meaning they didn't do things that way in the Little Brown Church in the Vale you attended as a kid? Brace yourself, Jill-they don't do it your way in St. Peter's either. Nor in Mecca."

            "Yes, but- Well, none of them do it that way! Snake dances, slot machines . . - even a bar right in church! That's not reverence, it's not even dignified! Just disgusting."

            "I don't suppose that temple prostitution was very dignified, either."

            "Huh?"

            "I rather imagine that the two-backed beast is just as sweaty and comical when the act is performed in the service of a god as it is under any other circumstances. As for those snake dances, have you ever seen a Shaker service? No, of course not and neither have I; any church that is agin sexual intercourse (as they were) doesn't last long. But dancing to the glory of God has a long and respected history. It doesn't have to be good dancing-according to eye-witness reports the Shakers could never have made the Bolshoi Ballet-it merely has to be enthusiastic. Do you consider the Rain Dances of our Southwest Indians irreverent?"

            "No. But that's different."

            "Everything always is-and the more it changes, the more it is the same. Now about those slot machines- Ever see a Bingo game in church?"

            "Well ... yes. Our parish used to hold them when we were trying to raise the mortgage. But we held them on Friday nights; we certainly didn't do such things during church services."

            "So? Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away."

            "Why, Jubal, the two cases aren't even slightly alike!"

            "Probably not. Analogy is even slipperier than logic. But, 'little lady'-"

            "Smile when you call me that!"

            "'It's a joke.' Why didn't you spit in his face? He had to stay on his good behavior no matter what we did; Digby wanted him to. But, Jill, if a thing is sinful on Sunday, it is sinful on Friday-at least it groks that way to an outsider, myself . . . or perhaps to a man from Mars. The only difference I can see is that the Fosterites give away, absolutely free, a scriptural text even if you lose. Could your Bingo games make the same claim?"

            "Fake scripture, you mean. A text from the New Revelation. Boss, have you read the thing?"

            "I've read it."

            "Then you know. It's just dressed up in Biblical language. Part of it is just icky-sweet with no substance, like a saccharine tablet, more of it is sheer nonsense . . . and some of it is just hateful. None of it makes sense, it isn't even good morals."

            Jubal was silent so long that Jill thought he had gone to sleep. At last he said, "Jill, are you familiar with Hindu sacred writings?"

            "Mmm, I'm afraid not."

            "The Koran? Or any other major scripture? I could illustrate my point from the Bible but I would not wish to hurt your feelings."

            "Uh, I'm afraid I'm not much of a scholar, Jubal. Go ahead, you won't hurt my feelings."

            "Well, I'll stick to the Old Testament, picking it to pieces usually doesn't upset people quite so much. You know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? And how Lot was saved from these wicked cities when Yahweh smote 'em with a couple of heavenly A-bombs?"

            "Oh, yes, of course. His wife was turned into a pillar of salt."

            "Caught by the fallout, perhaps. She tarried and looked back. Always seemed to me to be too stiff a punishment for the peccadillo of female curiosity. But we were speaking of Lot. Saint Peter describes him as a just, Godly, and righteous man, vexed by the filthy conversation of the wicked. I think we must stipulate Saint Peter to be an authority on virtue, since to him was given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. But if you search the only records concerning Lot, in the Old Testament, it becomes hard to determine exactly what Lot did or did not do that established him as such a paragon. He divided up a cattle range at his brother's suggestion. He got captured in a battle. When he was tipped off, he lammed out of town in time to save his skin. He fed and sheltered two strangers overnight but his conduct shows that he knew them to be V.I.P.s whether or not he knew they were angels-and by the Koran and by my own lights, his hospitality would have counted for more if he had thought they were just a couple of unworthy poor in need of a pad and a handout. Aside from these insignificant items and Saint Peter's character reference, there is just one thing that Lot did mentioned anywhere in the Bible on which we can judge his virtue-virtue so great, mind you, that heavenly intercession saved his life. See chapter nineteen of Genesis, verse eight."

            "And what does it say?"

            "Look it up when we get home. I don't expect you to believe me."

            "Jubal! You're the most infuriating man I've ever met."

            "And you're a very pretty girl and a fair cook, so I don't mind your ignorance. All right, I'll tell you-then you look it up anyhow. Some of Lot's neighbors came and beat on his door and wanted to meet these two blokes from out of town. Lot didn't fight with them; he offered 'em a deal instead. He had two young daughters, virgins-at least, such was his opinion-and he told this crowd of men that he would give them these two little girls and they could use them any way they liked-a gang shagging, a midnight revue, he pleaded with them to do any damn thing they pleased to his daughters . . - only please go 'way and quit beating on his door."

            "Jubal ... does it really say that?"

            "Look it up yourself. I've modernized the language but the meaning is as unmistakable as a whore's wink. Lot offered to let a gang of men- 'young and old,' the Bible say&-abuse two young virgins under his protection if only they wouldn't break down his door. Say!" Jubal leaned forward and beamed. "Maybe I should have tried that when the S.S. was breaking my door down! Maybe it would have got me into heaven-and Saint Peter knows my chances aren't too good otherwise." Then he frowned and looked worried. "No, it wouldn't have worked. The recipe plainly calls for 'virgins intactae'-and I wouldn't have known which two of you gals to offer those troopers."

            "Hmmph/ You won't find out from me."

            "Possibly I couldn't find out from any of you. Even Lot might have been mistaken. But that's what he promised 'em-his virgin daughters, young and tender and scared-urged this street gang to rape them as much as they wished in any way they liked - . . if only they would leave him in peace?" Jubal snorted in disgust. "And the Bible cites this sort of scum as being a righteous man."

            Jill said slowly, "I don't think that's quite the way we were taught it in Sunday School."

            "Damn it, look it up! They probably gave you a Bowdlerized version. That's not the only shock in store for anybody who actually reads the Bible. Consider Elisha. It says here that Elisha was so all-fired holy that merely touching his bones restored a dead man to life. But he was a baldheaded old coot, like myself. So one day some children marie fun of his baldness, just as you girls do. So God personally interceded and sent two bears to tear forty-two small children into bloody bits. That's what it says -second chapter of Second Kings."

            "Boss, I never make fun of your bald head."

            "Who was it sent my name to those hair-restorer quacks? Dorcas, maybe? Whoever it was, God knows-and she had better keep a sharp eye out for bears. I might turn pious in my dotage and start enjoying divine protection. But I shan't give you any more samples. The Bible is loaded with such stuff; read it and find out. Crimes that would turn your stomach are asserted to be either divinely ordered or divinely condoned . . . along with, I must add, a lot of hard common sense and some pretty workable rules for social behavior. I am not running down the Bible; it stacks up pretty well as sacred writings go. It isn't a patch on the sadistic, pornographic trash that goes by the name of sacred writings among the Hindus. Or a dozen other religions. But I'm not singling out any of them for condemnation, either; it is entirely conceivable that some one of these mutually contradictory mythologies is the literal word of God . . . that God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here. My point is that Foster's New Revelation that you're so contemptuous of is pure sweetness-andlight as scripture goes. Bishop Digby's Patron is a pretty good Joe; He wants people to be happy-happy here on Earth plus guaranteed eternal bliss in Heaven. He doesn't expect you to chastise the flesh here and now in order to reap rewards after you're dead. Oh no! this is the modern gianteconomy package. If you like to drink and gamble and dance and wench- and most people do-come to church and do it under holy auspices. Do it with your conscience free of any trace of guilt. Really have fun at it. Live it up! Get happy!"

            Jubal failed to look happy himself. He went on, "Of course there's a slight charge; Digby's God expects to be acknowledged as such-but that has been a foible of gods always. Anyone who is stupid enough to refuse to get happy on His terms is a sinner . . . and a sinner deserves anything that happens to him. But this is one rule common to all gods and goddesses throughout history; don't blame Foster and Digby, they didn't invent it. Their brand of snake oil is utterly orthodox in all respects."

            "Boss, you sound as if you were halfway converted."

            "Not me! I don't enjoy snake dances, I despise crowds, and I do not propose to let my social and mental inferiors tell me where I have to go on Sundays-and I wouldn't enjoy Heaven if that crowd is going to be there. I simply object to your criticizing them for the wrong things. As literature, the New Revelation stacks up about average-it should; it was composed by plagiarizing other scriptures. As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have-but even on these grounds the New Revelation must be rated superior; it hardly ever bites its own tail. Try reconciling the Old Testament with the New Testament sometime, or Buddhist doctrine with Buddhist apocrypha. As morals, Fosterism is merely the Freudian ethic sugar-coated for people who can't take their psychology straight, although I doubt if the old lecher who wrote it-pardon me, 'was inspired to write it'-was aware of this. He was no scholar. But he was in tune with his times, he tapped the Zeitgeist. Fear and guilt and a loss of faith- How could he miss? Now pipe down, I'm going to nap."

            "Who's been talking?"

            "'The woman tempted me.'" Jubal closed his eyes.

            On reaching home they found that Caxton and Mahmoud had flown in together for the day. Ben had been disappointed to find Jill not at home on his arrival but he had managed to bear up without tears through the company of Anne, Miriam, and Dorcas. Mahinoud always visited for the avowed purpose of seeing his protégé, Mike, and Dr. Harshaw; however, he too had shown fortitude at having only Jubal's food, liquor, garden- and odalisques-to entertain him during his host's absence. He was lying face down with Miriam rubbing his back while Dorcas rubbed his head.

            Jubal looked at him. "Don't get up."

            "I can't, she's sitting on me. A little higher up, Miriam. Hi, Mike."

            "Hi, my brother Stinky Dr. Mahmoud." Mike then gravely greeted Ben, and asked to be excused.

            "Run along, son," Jubal told him. 

            Anne said, "Wait a minute, Mike. Have you had lunch?"

            He said solemnly, "Anne, I am not hungry. Thank you," turned and went into the house.

            Mahmoud twisted, almost unseating Miriam. "Jubal? What's troubling our son?"

            "Yeah," said Ben. "He looks seasick."

            "Let him alone and he'll get well. An overdose of religion. Digby has been working on him." Jubal sketched the morning's events.

            Mahmoud frowned. "But was it necessary to leave him alone with Digby? This seems to me -- pardon me, my brotber! -- unwise."

            "He's not hurt. Stinky, he's got to learn to take such things in his stride. You've preached your brand of theology to him-I knoW you have; he's told me about it. Can you name me one good reason 'why Digby shouldn't have his innings? Answer me ~s a scientist, not as a Muslim."

            "I am unable to answer anything other than as a Muslim," Dr. Mahmoud said quietly.

            "Sorry. I recognize the correctnesS of your answer, even though I don't agree with it."

            "But, Jubal, I used the word 'Muslim' in its exact, technical sense, not as a sectarian which Maryam incorrectlY terms 'Mohammedan.'"

            "And which I'm going to go right on calling you until you learn to pronounce 'Miriam' correctly! Quit squirming. I'm not hurting you."

            "Yes, Maryant. Ouch! Women should not be so muscular. Jubal, as a scientiSt, I find Michael the greatest prize of my career. As a Muslim, I find in him a willingness to submit to the will of God . . - and this makes me happy for his sake, although I readily admit that there are great semantic difficulties and as yet he does not seem to grok what the English word 'God' means." He shrugged. "Nor the Arabic word 'Allah' But as a man -and always a Slave of God-I love this young man, our foster son and water brother, and I would not have him come under bad influences. Quite aside from his creed, this Digby strikes me as a bad influence. What do you think?"

            "Ok!" Ben applauded. "He's a slimy bastard-and the only reason I haven't been taking his racket apart in my column is that the Syndicate is afraid to print it. Stinky, keep talking that well and you'll have me studying Arabic and buying a rug."

            "I hope so. But the rug is not necessary."

            Jubal sighed. "I agree with both of you. I'd rather see Mike smoking marijuana than be converted by Digby. But I don't think there is the slightest chance of Mike's being taken in by that syncretiC hodgepodge Digby peddles...and he's got to learn to stand up to bad influences. I consider you a good influence-but I don't really think you stand much more chance than Digby has-the boy has an amazinglY strong mind of his own. Muhammad may have to make way for a new prophet."

            "If God so wills it," Mahmoud answered calmly.

            "That leaves no room for argument," Jubal agreed.

            "We were discussing religion before you got home," Dorcas said softly "Boss, did you know that women have souls?"

            "They do?"

            "So Stinky says."

            "Maryam," Mahmoud explained, "wanted to know why we 'Moharnmedans' thought only men had souls. So I cited the Writings."

            "Miriam, I'm surprised at you. That's as vulgar a misconception as the notion that Jews sacrifice Christian babies in secret, obscene rites. The Koran is explicit in half a dozen places that entire families enter into Paradise, men and Women together. For example, see 'Ornaments of Gold' -verse seventy, isn't it, Stinky?"

            "'Enter the Garden, ye and your wives, to be made glad.' That's as well as it can be put, in English," agreed Mahmoud.

            "Well," said Miriam, "I had heard about the beautiful bouris that Mohammedan men have for playthingS when they go to heaven and that didn't seem to leave much room for wives."

            "Houris aren't women," said Jubal. "They are separate creations, like djinni and angels. They don't need human souls, they are spirits to start with, eternal and unchanging and beautiful. There are male houris, too, or the male equivalent of houris. Houris don't have to earn their way into Paradise; they're on the staif. They serve endless delicious foods and pass around drinks that never give hangovers and entertain in other ways as requested. But the souls of human wives don't have to do any housework, any more than the men. Correct, Stinky?"