help him, by the multiple paps of Venus Genetrix he had picked up two at once … no, three, if he counted Caxton.
That he had broken his oath more times than there were years intervening did not trouble him; he was not hobbled by consistency. Nor did two more pensioners under his roof bother him; pinching pennies was not in him. In most of a century of gusty living he had been broke many times, had often been wealthier than he now was; he regarded both as shifts in the weather and never counted his change.
But the foofooraw that was bound to ensue when the busies caught up with these children disgruntled him. He considered it certain that catch up they would; that naive Gillian infant would leave a trail like a club-footed cow!
Whereupon people would barge into his sanctuary, asking questions, making demands … and he would have to make decisions and take action. He was convinced that all action was futile, the prospect irritated him.
He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; most people were candidates for protective restraint. He simply wished they would leave him alone! — all but the few he chose for playmates. He was convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana … dived into his belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man
Around midnight he put out his twenty-seventh cigarette and sat up; lights came on. «Front!» he shouted at a microphone.
Dorcas came in, dressed in robe and slippers. She yawned and said, «Yes, Boss?»
«Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.»
She yawned again. «Everybody knows that.»
«Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible — a time to stand up and be counted — strike a blow for liberty — smite the wicked.»
«Ummm …
«So quit yawning, the time has come.»
She glanced down. «Maybe I had better get dressed.»
«Yes. Get the other girls up, too; we're going to be busy. Throw a bucket of water over Duke and tell him to dust off the babble machine and hook it up in the study. I want the news.»
Dorcas looked startled. «You want
«You heard me. Tell Duke, if it's out of order, to pick a direction and start walking. Now git; we've got a busy night.»
«All right,» Dorcas agreed doubtfully, «but I ought to take your temperature first.»
«Peace, woman!»
Duke had Harshaw's receiver hooked up in time to let Jubal see a rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the «Man from Mars.» The commentary included a rumor about moving Smith to the Andes. Jubal put two and two together, after which he was calling people until morning. At dawn Dorcas brought him breakfast, six eggs beaten into brandy. He slurped them while reflecting that one advantage of a long life was that eventually a man knew almost everybody of importance — and could call on them in a pinch.
Harshaw had prepared a bomb but did not intend to trigger it until the powers-that-be forced him. He realized that the government could haul Smith back into captivity on grounds that he was incompetent. His snap opinion was that Smith was legally insane and medically psychopathic by normal standards, the victim of a double-barreled situational psychosis of unique and monumental extent, first from being raised by non-humans and second from being pitched into another alien society.
But he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as irrelevant. This human animal had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to a non-human society — but as a malleable infant. Could he, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical and much more difficult for an adult? Dr. Harshaw intended to find out; it was the first time in decades he had taken real interest in the practice of medicine.
Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government filled him with sharper zest than he had felt in a generation.
XI
AROUND A minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.
On the fourth pebble the ancient Martians were not disturbed by contact with Earth. Nymphs bounced joyously around the surface, learning to live and eight out of nine dying in the process. Adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from nymphs, huddled in faerie, graceful cities and were as quiet as nymphs were boisterous — yet were even busier and led a rich life of the mind.
Adults were not free of work in the human sense; they had a planet to supervise; plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized; the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and metamorphosed into adults. All these must be done — but they were no more the «life» of Mars than is walking the dog twice a day the «life» of a man who bosses a planet-wide corporation between those walks — even though to a being from Arcturus III those walks might seem to be the tycoon's most significant activity — as a slave to the dog.
Martians and humans were both self-aware life forms but they had gone in vastly different directions. All human behavior, all human motivations, all man's hopes and fears, were colored and controlled by mankind's tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. The same was true of Mars, but in mirror corollary. Mars had the efficient bipolar pattern so common in that galaxy, but Martians had it in form so different from Terran form that it would be «sex» only to a biologist and emphatically not have been «sex» to a human psychiatrist. Martian nymphs were female, all adults were male.
But in each in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polarity which controlled human lives could not exist on Mars. There was no possibility of «marriage.» Adults were huge, reminding the first humans to see them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentally active. Nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindless energy. There was no parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
Mars, geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the
On Mars the currently important event was a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mind edly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters. Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his
