Stranger in a Strange Land, Page 38

  She tossed one to a monk; before he could eat it a larger male not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he pounded his knucks against the floor and chattered helpless rage. Mike watched solemnly.

  Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed across the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a dubbing worse than the one he had suffered. The third monk crawled away, whimpering. The other monkeys paid no attention.

  Mike threw back his head and laughed—and went on laughing, uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, started to tremble and sink to the floor, still laughing.

  “Stop it, Mike!”

  He did cease folding up but his guffaws went on. An attendant hurried over. “Lady, do you need help?”

  “Can you call us a cab? Ground, air, anything—I’ve got to get him out of here.” She added, “He’s not well.”

  “Ambulance? Looks like he’s having a fit.”

  “Anything!” A few minutes later she led Mike into a piloted air cab. She gave their address, then said urgently “Mike, listen to me! Quiet down.”

  He became somewhat quiet but continued to chuckle, laugh aloud, chuckle again, while she wiped his eyes, all the minutes it took to get home. She got him inside, got his clothes off, made him lie down. “All right, dear. Withdraw if you need to.”

  “I’m all right. At last I’m all right.”

  “I hope so.” She sighed. “You scared me, Mike.”

  “I’m sorry, Little Brother. I was scared, too, the first time I heard laughing.”

  “Mike, what happened?”

  “Jill . . . I grok people!”

  “Huh?” (“????”)

  (“I speak rightly, Little Brother. I grok.”) “I grok people now, Jill . . . Little Brother . . . precious darling . . . little imp with lively legs and lovely lewd lascivious lecherous licentious libido . . . beautiful bumps and pert posterior . . . soft voice and gentle hands. My baby darling.”

  “Why, Michael!”

  “Oh, I knew the words; I simply didn’t know when or why say them . . . nor why you wanted me to. I love you, sweetheart—I grok ‘love’ now, too.”

  “You always have. And I love you . . . you smooth ape. My darling.”

  “ ‘Ape,’ yes. Come here, she ape, put your head on my shoulder and tell me a joke.”

  “Just tell you a joke?”

  “Well, nothing more than snuggling. Tell me a joke I’ve never heard and see if I laugh at the right place. I will, I’m sure of it—and I’ll tell you why it’s funny. Jill . . . I grok people!”

  “But how, darling? Can you tell me? Does it need Martian? Or mind-talk?”

  “No, that’s the point. I grok people. I am people . . . so now I can say it in people talk. I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts . . . because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”

  Jill looked puzzled. “Maybe I’m the one who isn’t people. I don’t understand.”

  “Ah, but you are people, little she ape. You grok it so automatically that you don’t have to think about it. Because you grew up with people. But I didn’t. I’ve been like a puppy raised apart from dogs—who couldn’t be like his masters and had never learned how to be a dog. So I had to be taught. Brother Mahmoud taught me, Jubal taught me, lots of people taught me . . . and you taught me most of all. Today I got my diploma—and I laughed. That poor little monk.”

  “Which one, dear? I thought that big one was just mean . . . and the one I flipped the peanut to turned out to be just as mean. There certainly wasn’t anything funny.”

  “Jill, Jill my darling! Too much Martian has rubbed off on you. Of course it wasn’t funny; it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people—and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.”

  “But—Mike dear, laughing is what you do when something is nice . . . not when it’s horrid.”

  “Is it? Think back to Las Vegas—When you girls came out on stage, did people laugh?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “But you girls were the nicest part of the show. I grok now, that if they had laughed, you would have been hurt. No, they laughed when a comic tripped over his feet and fell down . . . or something else that is not a goodness.”

  “But that’s not all people laugh at.”

  “Isn’t it? Perhaps I don’t grok its fullness yet. But find me something that makes you laugh, sweetheart . . . a joke, anything—but something that gave you a belly laugh, not a smile. Then we’ll see if there isn’t a wrongness somewhere and whether you would laugh if the wrongness wasn’t there.” He thought. “I grok when apes learn to laugh, they’ll be people.”

  “Maybe.” Doubtfully but earnestly Jill started digging into her memory for jokes that had struck her as irresistably funny, ones which had jerked a laugh out of her:

  “—her entire bridge club.” . . . “Should I bow?” . . . “Neither one, you idiot—instead!” . . . “—the Chinaman objects.” . . . “—broke her leg.” . . . “—make trouble for me!” . . . “—but it’ll spoil the ride for me.” . . . “—and his mother-in-law fainted.” . . . “Stop you? I bet three to one you could do it!” . . . “—something has happened to Ole.” . . . “—and so are you, you clumsy ox!”

  She gave up on “funny” stories, pointing out that such were just fantasies, and tried to recall real incidents. Practical jokes? All practical jokes supported Mike’s thesis, even ones as mild as a dribble glass—and when it came to an interne’s notion of a joke—internes should be kept in cages. What else? The time Elsa Mae lost her panties? It hadn’t been funny to Elsa Mae. Or the—

  She said grimly, “Apparently the pratt fall is the peak of all humor. It’s not a pretty picture of the human race, Mike.”

  “Oh, but it is!”

  “Huh?”

  “I had thought—I had been told—that a ‘funny’ thing is a thing of goodness. It isn’t. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing. I grok it is a bravery . . . and a sharing . . . against pain and sorrow and defeat.”

  “But—Mike, it is not a goodness to laugh at people.”

  “No. But I was not laughing at the little monkey. I was laughing at us. People. And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.” He paused. “This is hard to explain, because you have never lived as a Martian, for all that I’ve told you about it. On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones—or the things that do happen on Mars which we laugh at here on Earth aren’t funny because there is no wrongness about them. Death, for example.”

  “Death isn’t funny.”

  “Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us—us humans—death is so sad that we must laugh at it. All those religions—they contradict each other on every other point but each one is filled with ways to help people be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying.” He stopped and Jill could feel that he had almost gone into trance. “Jill? Is it possible that I was searching them the wrong way? Could it be that every one of all religions is true?”

  “Huh? How could that be? Mike, if one is true, then the others are wrong.”

  “So? Point to the shortest direction around the universe. It doesn’t matter where you point, it’s the shortest . . . and you’re pointing back at yourself.”

  “Well, what does that prove? You taught me the true answer, Mike. ‘Thou art God.’ ”

  “And Thou art God, my lovely. But that prime fact which doesn’t depend on faith may mean that all faiths are true.”

  “Well . . . if they’re a
ll true, then right now I want to worship Siva.” Jill changed the subject with emphatic action.

  “Little pagan,” he said softly. “They’ll run you out of San Francisco.”

  “But we’re going to Los Angeles . . . where it won’t be noticed. Oh! Thou are Siva!”

  “Dance, Kali, dance!”

  During the night she woke and saw him standing at the window, looking out over the city (“Trouble, my brother?”)

  He turned. “There’s no need for them to be so unhappy.”

  “Darling, darling! I had better take you home. The city is not good for you.”

  “But I would still know it. Pain and sickness and hunger and fighting—there’s no need for any of it. It’s as foolish as those little monkeys.”

  “Yes, darling. But it’s not your fault—”

  “Ah, but it is!”

  “Well . . . that way—yes. But it’s not just this one city; it’s five billion people and more. You can’t help five billion people.”

  “I wonder.”

  He came over and sat by her. “I grok them now, I can talk to them. Jill, I could set up our act and make the marks laugh every minute. I am certain.”

  “Then why not do it? Patty would be pleased—and so would I. I liked being ‘with it’—and now that we’ve shared water with Patty, it would be like being home.”

  He didn’t answer. Jill felt his mind and knew that he was contemplating, trying to grok. She waited.

  “Jill? What do I have to do to be ordained?”

  Part Four

  HIS SCANDALOUS CAREER

  XXX.

  THE FIRST MIXED LOAD of colonists reached Mars; six of seventeen survivors of twenty-three originals returned to Earth. Prospective colonists trained in Peru at sixteen thousand feet. The President of Argentina moved one night to Montevideo, taking two suitcases; the new Presidente started an extradition process before the High Court to yank him back, or at least the suitcases. Last rites for Alice Douglas were held privately in the National Cathedral with two thousand attending; commentators praised the fortitude with which the Secretary General took his bereavement. A three-year-old named Inflation, carrying 126 pounds, won the Kentucky Derby paying fifty-four for one; two guests of the Colony Airotel, Louisville, discorporated, one voluntarily, one by heart failure.

  A bootleg edition of the unauthorized biography The Devil and Reverend Foster appeared throughout the United States; by nightfall every copy was burned and plates destroyed, along with damage to chattels and real estate, plus mayhem, maiming, and simple assault. The British Museum was rumored to possess a copy of the first edition (untrue), and also the Vatican Library (true, but available only to church scholars).

  In the Tennessee legislature a bill was introduced to make pi equal to three; it was reported out by the committee on public education and morals, passed without objection by the lower house and died in the upper house. An interchurch fundamentalist group opened offices in Van Buren, Arkansas, to solicit funds to send missionaries to the Martians; Dr. Jubal Harshaw made a donation but sent it in the name (and with the address) of the editor of the New Humanist, rabid atheist and his close friend.

  Otherwise Jubal had little to cheer him—too much news about Mike. He treasured the visits home of Jill and Mike and was most interested in Mike’s progress, especially after Mike developed a sense of humor. But they seldom came home now and Jubal did not relish the latest developments.

  It had not troubled Jubal when Mike was run out of Union Theological Seminary, pursued by a pack of enraged theologians, some of whom were angry because they believed in God and others because they did not—but unanimous in detesting the Man from Mars. Jubal reckoned anything that happened to a theologian short of breaking him on the wheel as no more than meet—and the experience was good for the boy; he’d know better next time.

  Nor had he been troubled when Mike (with the help of Douglas) enlisted under an assumed name in the Federation armed forces. He had been sure that no sergeant could cause Mike permanent distress, and Jubal was not troubled by what might happen to Federation troops—an unreconciled old reactionary, Jubal had burned his honorable discharge and all that went with it the day the United States ceased having its own forces.

  Jubal was surprised at how little shambles Mike created as “Private Jones” and how long he lasted—almost three weeks. Mike crowned his military career by grabbing the question period following a lecture to preach the uselessness of force (with comments on the desirability of reducing surplus population through cannibalism), then offered himself as a test animal for any weapon of any nature to prove that force was not only unnecessary but impossible when attempted against a self-disciplined person.

  They did not take his offer; they kicked him out.

  Douglas allowed Jubal to see a super-secret eyes-only numbered-one-of-three report after cautioning Jubal that no one, not even the Supreme Chief of Staff, knew that “Private Jones” was the Man from Mars. Jubal scanned the exhibits, mostly conflicting reports as to what happened when “Jones” had been “trained” in the uses of weapons; the surprising thing to Jubal was that some witnesses had the courage to state under oath that they had seen weapons disappear.

  The last paragraph Jubal read carefully; “Conclusion: Subject man is a natural hypnotist and could conceivably be useful in intelligence, but he is unfitted for any combat branch. However, his low intelligence quotient (moron), his extremely low general classification score, and his paranoid tendencies (delusions of grandeur) make it inadvisable to exploit his idiot-savant talent. Recommendation: Discharge, Inaptitude—no pension credit, no benefits.”

  Mike had managed to have fun. At parade on his last day while Mike’s platoon was passing in review, the commanding general and his staff were buried hip deep in a bucolic end-product symbolic to all soldiers but no longer common on parade grounds. This deposit vanished, leaving nothing but an odor and a belief in mass hypnosis. Jubal decided that Mike had atrocious taste in practical jokes. Then he recalled an incident in medical school involving a cadaver and the Dean—Jubal had worn rubber gloves and a good thing, too!

  Jubal enjoyed Mike’s inglorious military career because Jill spent the time at home. When Mike came home after it was over, he hadn’t seemed hurt by it—he boasted to Jubal that he had obeyed Jill’s wishes and hadn’t disappeared anybody, merely a few dead things . . . although, as Mike grokked it, there had been times when Earth could have been made a better place if Jill didn’t have this weakness. Jubal didn’t argue; he had a lengthy “Better Dead” list himself.

  Mike’s unique ways of growing up were all right; Mike was unique. But this last thing—“The Reverend Doctor Valentine M. Smith, A.B., D.D., Ph.D., Founder and Pastor of the Church of All Worlds, Inc.”—gad! It was bad enough that the boy had decided to be a Holy Joe instead of leaving other people’s souls alone as a gentleman should. But those diploma-mill degrees—Jubal wanted to throw up.

  The worst was that Mike claimed that he had hatched the idea from something Jubal had said, about what a church was and what it could do. Jubal admitted that it was something he could have said, although he did not recall it.

  Mike had been cagey about the operation—some months of residence at a very small, very poor sectarian college, a bachelor’s degree awarded by examination, a “call” to their ministry followed by ordination in this recognized though flat-headed sect, a doctor’s dissertation on comparative religion which was a marvel of scholarship while ducking any conclusions, the award of the “earned” doctorate coinciding with an endowment (anonymous) to this very hungry school, the second doctorate (honorary) for “contributions to interplanetary knowledge” from a university that should have known better, when Mike let it be known that such was his price for appearing at a conference on solar system studies. The Man from Mars had turned down everybody from Cal-Tech to Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the past; Harvard could not resist the bait.

  Well, they were as crimson as their banner now, Juba
l thought cynically. Mike put in a few weeks as assistant chaplain at his churchmouse alma mater—then broke with the sect in a schism and founded his own church. Completely kosher, legally airtight, as venerable in precedent as Martin Luther—and as nauseating as last week’s garbage.

  Jubal was called out of his sour daydream by Miriam. “Boss! Company!”

  Jubal looked up to see a car about to land. “Larry, fetch my shotgun—I swore I would shoot the next dolt who landed on the rose bushes.”

  “He’s landing on the grass, Boss.”

  “Tell him to try again. We’ll get him on the next pass.”

  “Looks like Ben Caxton.”

  “So it is. Hi, Ben! What’ll you drink?”

  “Nothing, you professional bad influence. Need to talk to you, Jubal.”

  “You’re doing it. Dorcas, fetch Ben a glass of warm milk; he’s sick.”

  “Without much soda,” amended Ben, “and milk the bottle with the three dimples. Private talk, Jubal.”

  “All right, up to my study—although if you can keep anything from the kids around here, let me in on your method.” After Ben finished greeting properly (and unsanitarily, in three cases) members of the family, they moseyed upstairs.

  Ben said, “What the deuce? Am I lost?”

  “Oh. You haven’t seen the new wing. Two bedrooms and another bath downstairs—and up here, my gallery.”

  “Enough statues to fill a graveyard!”

  “Please, Ben. ‘Statues’ are dead politicians. This is ‘sculpture.’ Please speak in a reverent tone lest I become violent. Here are replicas of some of the greatest sculpture this naughty globe has produced.”

  “Well, that hideous thing I’ve seen before . . . but when did you acquire the rest of this ballast?”

  Jubal spoke to the replica La Belle Heaulmière. “Do not listen, ma petite chère—he is a barbarian and knows no better.” He put his hand to her beautiful ravaged cheek, then gently touched one empty, shrunken dug. “I know how you feel . . . it can’t be much longer. Patience, my lovely.”