reason.'
'What about your stomach?'
'Mine is as stupid as yours - but I don't let it rule my brain. I can at least see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal human ethic and applaud his recognition that such a code must be founded on ideal sexual behavior, even though it calls for changes in sexual mores so radical as to frighten most people - including you. For that I admire him - I should nominate him for the Philosophical Society. Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy that troubled you so, restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, et cetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an 'obscene' sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than failure to abide by the code.
'Now comes the Man from Mars, looks at this sacrosanct code - and rejects it in toto. I do not grasp exactly what Mike's sexual code is, but it is clear from what little you told me that it violates the laws of every major nation on Earth and would outrage 'right-thinking' people of every major faith - and most agnostics and atheists, too. And yet this poor boy-'
'Jubal, I repeat - he's not a boy, he's a man'
'Is he a 'man?' I wonder. This poor ersatz Martian is saying, by your own report, that sex is a way to be happy together. I go along with Mike this far: sex should be a means of happiness. The worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or, at the very least, pleasure. There is no good reason why it should ever be anything less.
'The code says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife' - and the result? Reluctant chastity, adultery, jealousy, bitter family fights, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children? and furtive, dirty little passes at country club dances and the like, degrading to both man and woman whether consummated or not, Is this injunction ever obeyed? The Commandment not to 'covet' I mean; I'm not referring to any physical act. I wonder. If a man swore to me on a stack of his own Bibles that he had refrained from coveting another man's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a child is almost certainly so virile that he has coveted many, many women - whether he takes action in the matter or not.
'Now comes Mike and says: 'There's no need for you to covet my wife? love her! There's no limit to her love, we all have everything to gain - and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.' The proposition is so naive that it's incredible. So far as I recall only precivilization Eskimos were ever this naive - and they were so remote from the rest of us that they almost qualified as 'Men from Mars' themselves. However, we soon gave them our virtues and instead of happy sharing they now have chastity and adultery just like the rest of us - those who survived the transition. I wonder if they gained by it? What do you think,
'I wouldn't care to be an Eskimo. thank you.'
'Neither would I. Spoiled raw fish makes me bilious.'
'Well, yes - but, Jubal, I had in mind hot water and soap. I guess I'm effete.'
'I'm decadent in that respect, too, Ben; I was born in a house with no more plumbing than an igloo - and I've no wish to repeat my childhood. But I assume that noses hardened to the stink of rotting blubber would not be upset by unwashed human bodies. But nevertheless, despite curious cuisine and pitiful possessions, the Eskimos were invariably reported to have been the happiest people on Earth. We can never be sure why they were happy, but we can be utterly certain that any unhappiness they did suffer was not caused by sexual jealousy. They borrowed and lent spouses, both ways, both for convenience and purely for fun - and it did not make them unhappy.
'One is tempted to ask: Who's looney? Mike and the Eskimos? Or the rest of us? We can't judge by the fact that you and I have no stomach for such group sports - our canalized tastes are irrelevant. But take a look at this glum world around you - then tell me this: Did Mike's disciples seem happier, or unhappier, than other people?'
'I talked to only about a third of them, Jubal? but - yes, they're happy. So happy they seem slap-happy to me. I don't trust it. There's some catch in it.'
'Mmm? maybe you yourself were the catch in it.'
'How?'
'I was thinking that it was regrettable that your tastes have grown canalized so young. There it was, raining soup - and you were caught without a spoon. Even three days of what you were offered - urged on you! - would have been something to treasure when you reach my age. And you, you young idiot, let jealousy chase you away! Believe me, at your age I would have gone Eskimo in a big way, thankful that I had been given a free pass instead of having to attend church and study Martian to qualify. I'm so vicariously vexed that my only consolation is the sour one that I know you will live to regret it. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective? and the saddest perspective of all is to see far, far behind you, the temptations you've passed up. I have such regrets myself but all of them are as nothing to the whopper of a regret I am happily certain you will suffer.'
'Oh, for Pete's sake, quit rubbing it in!'
'Heavens, man! - or are you a mouse? I'm not rubbing it in, I am trying to goad you into the obvious. Why are you sitting here moaning to an old man? - when you should be heading for the Nest like a homing pigeon? Before the cops raid the joint! Hell, if I were even twenty years younger, I'd join Mike's church myself.'
'Let up on me, Jubal. What do you really think of Mike's church?'
'You told me it wasn't a church - just a discipline.'
'Well? yes and no, It is supposed to be based on the 'Truth' with a capital 'T' as Mike got it from the Martian 'Old Ones.''
'The 'Old Ones,' eli? To me, they're still hogwash.'
'Mike certainly believes in them.'
'Ben, I once knew a manufacturer who believed that he consulted the ghost of Alexander Hamilton on all his business decisions. All that proves is that he believed it. However - Damn it, why must I always be the Devil's advocate?'
'What's biting you now?'
'Ben, the foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket of religion. But we must give the Devil his due. Mike does believe in those 'Old Ones' and he is not pulling a racket. He's teaching the truth as he sees it even though he has seen fit to borrow from other religions to illustrate his meaning. That 'All Mother' rite - little as I like it, he seems merely to have been illustrating the versatility of the Female Principle, regardless of name and form. Fair enough. As for his 'Old Ones,' of course I don't know that they don't exist - I simply find hard to swallow the idea that any planet is ruled by a hierarchy of ghosts. As for his Thou-art-God creed, to me it is neither more nor less credible than any other. Come Judgment Day, if they hold it, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.
'All the names are still in the hat, Ben. Self-aware man is so built that he cannot believe in his own extinction? and this automatically leads to endless invention of religions. While this involuntary conviction of immortality by no means proves immortality to be a fact, the questions generated by this conviction are overwhelmingly important? whether we can answer them or not, or prove what answers we suspect. The nature of life, how the ego hooks into the physical body, the problem of the ego itself and why each ego seems to be the center of the universe, the purpose of life, the purpose of the universe - these are paramount questions Ben; they can never be trivial. Science can't, or hasn't, coped with any of them - and who am I to sneer at religions for trying to answer them, no matter how unconvincingly to me? Old Mumbo Jumbo may eat me yet; I can't rule Him out because He owns no fancy cathedrals. Nor can I rule out one godstruck boy leading a sex cult in an upholstered attic; he might be the Messiah. The only religious opinion that I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!'
'Whew! Jubal, you should have been a preacher.'
'Missed it by only a razor's edge, my boy - and I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. One more word in Mike's defense and I'll throw note 3 on the mercy of the court. If be can show us a better way to run this fouled-up planet, his sex life is vindicated thereby, regardless of your taste or mine. Geniuses are notoriously indifferent to the sexual customs of the culture in which they find themselves, they make their own rules; this is not opinion, it was proved by Armattoe 'way back in 1945. And Mike is a genius; he's
