alone?
Around midnight he wearily put out his twenty-seventh cigarette and sat up; the lights came on. 'Front!' he shouted at the microphone beside his bed.
Shortly Dorcas came in, dressed in robe and slippers. She yawned widely and said, 'Yes, Boss?'
'Dorcas, for the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, useless, no-good parasite.'
She nodded and 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 at herself. 'Maybe I had better get dressed.'
'Yes. Get the other girls up, too; we're going to be busy. Throw a bucket of cold water over the Duke and tell him I said to dust off the babble machine and hook it up in my study. I want the news, all of it.'
Dorcas looked startled and all over being sleepy. 'You want Duke to hook up stereovision?'
'You heard me. Tell him I said that if it's out of order, he should pick a direction and start walking. Now get along with you; we've got a busy night ahead.'
'All right,' Dorcas agreed doubtfully, 'but I think I ought to take your temperature first.'
'Peace, woman!'
Duke had Jubal Harshaw's stereo receiver hooked up in time to let Jubal see a late rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the 'Man from Mars.' The commentary included the rumor about moving Smith to the Andes. Jubal put two and two together and got twenty-two, after which he was busy calling people until morning. At dawn Dorcas brought him his breakfast, six raw eggs beaten into brandy. He slurped them down while reflecting that one of the advantages of a long and busy life was that eventually a man got to know pretty near everybody of real importance - and could call on them in a pinch.
Harshaw had prepared a time bomb but did not propose to trigger it until the powers-that-be forced him to do so. He had realized at once that the government could haul Smith back into captivity on the grounds that he was incompetent to look out for himself? an opinion with which Harshaw agreed. His snap opinion was that Smith was both legally insane and medically psychopathic by all 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 having been translated suddenly into a society which was completely alien to him.
Nevertheless he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as being irrelevant to this case. Here was a human animal who had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to an alien society? but as a malleable infant. Could the same subject, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical, and much more difficult for an adult to make than for an infant? 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 political birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government fined him with sharper zest for living than he had felt in a generation.
XI
AROUND A MINOR G-TYPE STAR fairly far out toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy the planets of that star swung as usual, just as they had for billions of years, under the influence of a slightly modified inverse square law that shaped the space around them. Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; in the cases of the third and fourth planets their 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 out the ancient Martians were not in any important sense disturbed by the contact with Earth. The nymphs of the race still bounced joyously around the surface of Mars, learning to live, and eight out of nine of them dying in the process. The adult Martians, enormously different in body and mind from the nymphs, still huddled in or under the faerie, graceful cities, and were as quiet in their behavior as the nymphs were boisterous - yet were even busier than the nymphs, busy with a complex and rich life of the mind.
The lives of the adults were not entirely free of work in the human sense; they had still a planet to take care of and supervise, plants must be told when and where to grow, nymphs who had passed their 'prenticeships by surviving must be gathered in, cherished, fertilized, the resultant eggs must be cherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, the fulfilled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and then metamorphosed into adults. All these things 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 controls a planet-wide corporation in the hours between those pleasant walks? even though to a being from Arcturus III those daily walks might seem to be the tycoon's most significant activity - no doubt 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 heavily colored and largely 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 the Martians had it in a form so different from the Terran form that it would have been termed 'sex' only by a biologist, and it emphatically would not have been 'sex' to a human psychiatrist. Martian nymphs were female, all the adults were male.
But in each case in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polarity which controlled all human lives could not exist on Mars. There was no possibility of 'marriage.' The adults were huge, reminding the first humans to see them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentally active. The nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindless energy. There was no possible parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
Mars, being geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the Envoy and the Champion. The two events had happened too recently to be of significance - if Martians had used newspapers, one edition a Terran century would have been ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to Martians; it had happened before, would happen again. When the new other race had been thoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium or so) would be time for action, if needed.
On Mars the currently important event was of a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly 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 engaged in composing a work of art. It could have been called with equal truth a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could have been experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth could have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter much to which category of human creativity it might be assigned. The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.
Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking place at the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; by the time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himself had not noticed his own discorporation and had gone right on composing his sequence.
Martian art was divided sharply into two categories, that sort created by living adults, which was vigorous, often quite radical, and primitive, and that of the Old Ones, which was usually conservative, extremely complex, and was expected to show much higher standards of technique; the two sorts were judged separately.
By what standards should this opus be judged? It bridged from the corporate to the discorporate; its final form had been set throughout by an Old One - yet on the other hand the artist, with the detachment of all artists everywhere, had not even noticed the change in his status and had continued to work as if he were corporate. Was
