Stranger in a Strange Land

“Huh? Douglas. Or, rather, one of his stooges.”

“Are you certain, Ben? Consider the present makeup of the High Court. Might not the appointed guardian be named Savvonavong? Or Nadi? Or Kee?”

“Uh… you could be right.”

“In which case the lad might not live very long. Or he might live to a ripe old age in some pleasantly gardened prison—one a great deal more difficult to escape from than Bethesda Hospital.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“The power the boy nominally owns is far too dangerous and cumbersome for him to handle. So we throw it away.”

“How the hell do you go about giving away that much money?”

“You don’t. You can’t. It’s impossible. The very act of giving it away would be an exercise of its latent power, it would change the balance of power—and any attempt to do so would cause the boy to be examined on his competence to manage in jig time. So, instead, we let the tiger run like hell while hanging onto its ears for dear life. Ben, let me outline the fait accompli I intend to hand to Douglas… then you do your damnedest to pick holes in it. Not the legality of it, as Douglas’ legal staff will write the double-talk and I’ll check it for boobytraps—don’t worry about that; the idea is to give Douglas a plan be won’t want to booby-trap because he’ll like it. I want you to sniff it for its political feasibility, whether or not we can put it over. Now here’s what we are going to do—”

XIX

THE MARTIAN DIPLOMATIC DELEGATION & Inside Straight Sodality, Unlimited, as organized by Jubal Harshaw, landed on the flat of the Executive Palace shortly before ten o’clock the next morning. The unpretentious pretender to the Martian throne, Mike Smith, had not worried about the purpose of the trip; he had simply enjoyed every minute of the short flight south, with utter and innocent delight.

The trip was made in a chartered Flying Greyhound, and Mike sat up in the astrodome above the driver, with Jill on one side and Dorcas on his other, and stared and stared in awed wonderment as the girls pointed out sights to him and chattered in his ears. The seat, being intended for two people, was very crowded, but Mike did not mind, as a warming degree of growing closer necessarily resulted. He sat with an arm around each, and looked and listened and tried to grok and could not have been happier if he had been ten feet under water.

It was, in fact, his first view of Terran civilization. He had seen nothing at all in being removed from the Champion to suite K-12 at Bethesda Center; he had indeed spent a few minutes in a taxi ten days earlier going from the hospital to Ben’s apartment but at the time he had grokked none of it. Since that time his world had been bounded by a house and a swimming pool, plus surrounding garden and grass and trees—he had not been as far as Jubal’s gate.

But now he was enormously more sophisticated than he had been ten days ago. He understood windows, realized that the bubble surrounding him was a window and meant for looking out of and that the changing sights he saw were indeed the cities of these people. He understood maps and could pick out, with the help of the girls, where they were and what they were seeing on the map flowing across the lap board in front of them. But of course he had always known about maps; he simply had not known until recently that humans knew about maps. It had given him a twinge of happy homesickness the first time he had grokked a human map. Sure, it was static and dead compared with the maps used by his people—but it was a map. Mike was not disposed by nature and certainly not by training to invidious comparisons even human maps were very Martian in essence—he liked them.

Now he saw almost two hundred miles of countryside, much of it sprawling world metropolis, and savored every inch of it, tried to grok it. He was startled by the enormous size of human cities and by their bustling activity visible even from the air, so very different from the slow motion, monestary-garden pace of cities of his own people. It seemed to him that a human city must wear out almost at once, becoming so choked with living experience that only the strongest of the Old Ones could bear to visit its deserted streets and grok in contemplation the events and emotions piled layer on endless Layer in it. He himself had visited abandoned cities at home only on a few wonderful and dreadful occasions, and then his teachers had stopped having him do so, grokking that he was not strong enough for such experience.

Careful questions to Jill and Dorcas, the answers of which he then related to what he had read, enabled him to grok in part enough to relieve his mind somewhat the city was very young; it had been founded only a little over two Earth centuries ago. Since Earth time units had no real flavor for him, he converted to Martian years and Martian numbers years (34 + 33 = 108 Martian years).