AROUND A MINOR G-TYPE STAR fairly far out toward one edge of amedium-sized galaxy the planets of that star swung as usual, just as theyhad for billions of years, under the influence of a slightly modified inversesquare law that shaped the space around them. Three of them were bigenough, 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 reachesof space. All of them, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity ofdistorted entropy called life~, in the cases of the third and fourth planets theirsurface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogenmonoxide-in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough topermit a degree of social contact.
On the fourth pebble out the ancient Martians were not in any importantsense disturbed by the contact with Earth. The nymphs of the race stillbounced joyously around the surface of Mars, learning to live, and eight outof nine of them dying in the process. The adult Martians, enormously differentin 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 wereboisterous-yet were even busier than the nymphs, busy with a complex andrich 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 whenand where to grow, nymphs who had passed their .prenticeships by survivingmust be gathered in, cherished, fertilized, the resultant eggs must becherished and contemplated to encourage them to ripen properly, thefull3.lled nymphs must be persuaded to give up childish things and thenmetamorphosed into adults. All these things must be done-but they were nomore the .life“ of Mars than is walking the dog twice a day the .life“ of a manwho controls a planet-wide corporation in the hours between those pleasantwalks . . . even though to a being from Arcturus III those daily walks mightseem to be the tycoon’s most significant activity-no doubt as a slave to thedog.
Martians and humans were both self-aware life forms but they had gone invastly different directions. All human behavior, all human motivations, allman’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled bymankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction. The same wastrue of Mars, but in mirror corollary. Mars had the efficient bipolar pattern socommon in that galaxy, but the Martians had it in a form so different from theTerran form that it would have been termed .sex“ only by a biologist, and itemphatically would not have been .sex“ to a human psychiatrist. Martiannymphs were female, all the adults were male.
But in each case in function only, not in psychology. The man-woman polaritywhich controlled all human lives could not exist on Mars. There was nopossibility of .marriage.“ The adults were huge, reminding the first humans tosee them of ice boats under sail; they were physically passive, mentallyactive. The nymphs were fat, furry spheres, full of bounce and mindlessenergy. There was no possible parallel between human and Martianpsychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both the binding force andthe driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations.
If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let itsearch Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations ofeunuchs.
Mars, being geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the Envoy and theChampion. The two events had happened too recently to be of significance-ifMartians had used newspapers, one edition a Terran century would havebeen ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to Martians; it hadhappened before, would happen again. When the new other race had beenthoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium or so) would be time foraction, if needed.
On Mars the currently important event was of a different sort. ThediscorpOrate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to send thenestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turnedattention back to serious matters. Shortly before, around the time of theTerran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been engaged in composing awork of art. It could have been called with equal truth a poem, a musicalopus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged intragic, logical necessity. Since it could have been experienced by a humanonly in the sense in which a man blind from birth could have a sunsetexplained to him, it does not matter much to which category of humancreativity it might be assigned. The important point was that the artist hadaccidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.
Unexpected discorporation was always rare on Mars; Martian taste in suchmatters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death taking placeat the appropriate and selected instant. This artist, however, had become sopreoccupied with his work that he had forgotten to come in out of the cold; bythe time his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He himselfhad not noticed his own discorporation and had gone nght on composing hissequence.
Martian art was divided sharply into two categories, that sort created by livingadults, which was vigorous, often quite radical, and primitive, and that of theOld Ones, which was usually conservative, extremely complex, and wasexpected to show much higher standards of technique; the two sorts werejudged separately.
By what standards should this opus be judged? It bridged from the corporateto the discorporate; its final form had been set throughout by an Old One-yeton 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 asif he were corporate. Was it possibly a new sort of art? Could more suchpieces be produced by surprise discorporation of artists while they wereworking? The Old Ones had been discussing the exciting possibilities inruminative rapport for centuries and all corporate Martians were eagerlyawaiting their verdict.
The question was of greater interest because it had not been abstract art, butreligious (in the Terran sense) and strongly emotional~ it described thecontact between the Martian Race and the people of the fifth planet, an eventthat had happened long ago but which was alive and important to Martians inthe sense in which one death by crucifixion remained alive and important tohumans after two Terran millennia. The Martian Race had encountered thepeople of the fifth planet, grokked them completelY, and in due course hadtaken action; the asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martianscontinued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed. This newwork of art was one of many attempts to grok all parts of the whole beautifulexperience in all its complexity in one opus. But before it could be judged itwas necessary to grok how to judge it.
It was a very pretty problem.
On the third planet Valentine Michael Smith was not concerned with theburning issue on Mars; he had never heard of it. Ills Martian keeper and hiskeeper’s water brothers had not mocked him with things he could not grasp.
Smith knew of the destruction of the fifth planet and its etnotionalimportance~ just as any human school boy learns of Troy and PlymouthRock, but he had not been exposed to art that he could not grok. Hiseducation had been unique, enormOuSlY greater than that of his nestlings,enormOuslY less than that of an adult; his keeper and his keeper’s advisersamong the Old Ones had taken a large passing interest in seeing just howmuch and of what sort this nestling alien could learn. The results had taughtthem more about the potentialities of the human race than that race had yetlearned about itself, for Smith had grokked very readily things that no otherhuman being had ever learned.
But just at present Smith W95 simply enjoying himself with alightheartedness he had not experienced in many years. He had won a newwater brother in JubaL he had acquired many new friends, he was enjoyingdelightful new experiences in such kaleidoscopic quantity that he had no timeto grok them; he could only file them away to be relived at leisure.
His brother Jubal had assured him that be would grok this strange andbeautiful place more quickly if he would learn to read, so he had taken a fullday off to learn to read really well and quickly, with Jill pointing to words andpronouncing them for him. It had meant staying out of the swimming pool allthat day, which had been a great sacrifice, as swimming (once he got itthrough his head that it was actually permitted) was not merely an exuberant,sensuous delight but almost unbearable religious ecstasy. If Jill and Jubalhad not told him to do otherwise, he would never have come out of the poolat all.
Since he was not permitted to swim at night he read all night long. He waszipping through the Encyclopedia Britannica and was sampling Jubal’smedicine and law libraries as dessert. His brother Jubal had seen him leafingrapidly through one of the books, had stopped him and questioned him aboutwhat he had read. Smith had answered carefully, as it reminded him of thetests the Old Ones had occasionally given him. His brother had seemed a bitupset at his answers and Smith had found it necessary to go into an hour’scontemplation on that account, for he bad been quite sure that he hadanswered with the words written in the book even though he did not grokthem all.
But he preferred the pool to the books, especially when Jill and Miriam andLarry and Anne and the rest were all splashing each other. He had notlearned at once to swim as they did, but had discovered the first time that hecould do 5~mething they could not. He had simply gone down to the bottomand lain there, immersed in quiet bliss~_~wbereUP0~~ they had hauled himout with such excitement that he had almost been forced to withdraw himself,had it not been evident that they were concerned for his welfare.
Later that day he had demonstrated the matter to Jubal, remaining on thebottom for a delicious time, and he had tried to teach it to his brother Jill . . .
but she had become disturbed and he had desisted. It was his first clearrealization that there were things that he could do that these new friendscould not. He thought about it a long time, trying to grok its fullness.
Smith was happy; Harshaw was not. He continued his usual routine ofaimless loafing, varied only by casual and unplanned observation of hislaboratory animal, the Man from Mars. He arranged no schedule for Smith,no programme of study, no regular physical examinations, but simply allowedSmith to do as he pleased, run wild, like a puppy growing up on a ranch.
What supervision Smith received came from Jill: more than enough, inJubal’s grumpy opinions as he took a dim view of males being reared byfemales.
However, Gillian Boardman did little more than coach Valentine Smith in therudiments of human social behavior-and he needed very little coaching. Heate at the table with the others now, dressed himself (at least Jubal thoughthe did; he made a mental note to ask Jill if she still had to assist him); heconformed acceptably to the household’s very informal customs andappeared able to cope with most new experiences on a.monkey~see~monkeYd0“ basis. Smith started his first meal at the tableusing only a spoon and Jill had cut up his meat for hint By the end of themeal he was attempting to eat as the others ate. At the next meal his tablemanners were a precise imitation of Jill’s, including superfluous mannerisms.
Even the twin discovery that Smith had taught himself to read with the speedof electronic scanning and appeared to have total recall of all that he read didnot tempt Jubat HarshaW to make a .project“ of Smith, one with controls,measurements, and curves of progress. Harshaw had the arrogant humility ofthe man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance andhe saw no point in .measurements“ when he did not know what he wasmeasuring. Instead he limited himself to notes made privately, without evenany intention of publishing his observations.
But, while Harshaw enjoyed watching this unique animal develop into amimicry copy of a human being, his pleasure afforded him no happiness.
Like Secretary General Douglas, Harshaw was waiting for the other shoeto drop.
Waiting with increasing tenseness- Having found himself coerced into actionby the expectation of action against him on the part of the government, itannoyed and exasperated him that nothing as yet had happened. Damn it,were the Federation cops so stupid that they couldn’t track anunsophisticated girl dragging an unconscious man all across thecountryside? Or (as seemed more likely) had they been on her heels thewhole way?-and even now were keeping a stake-out on his place? The latterthought was infuriating; to Harshaw the notion that the government might bespying on his home, his castle, with anything from binoculars to radar, was asrepulsive as the idea of having his mail opened.
And they might be doing that, toOt he reminded himself morosely.
Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling -oh,he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government,any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to hisbowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil wasinescapable was no reason to term it a .good.“ He wished that governmentwould wander off and get lost?
But it was certainly possible, or even probable, that the administration knewexactly where the Man from Mars was hiding . . . and for reasons of their ownpreferred to leave it that way, while they prepared- what?
If so, how long would it go on? And how long could he keep his defensive.time bomb“ armed and ready?
And where the devil was that reckless young idiot Ben Caxton?
Jill Boardman forced him out of his spiritual thumb-twiddling. .Jubal?“.Eh? Oh, it’s you, bright eyes. Sorry, I was preoccupied. Sit down. Havea drink?“.Uh, no, thank you. Jubal, I’m worried.“.Normal. Who isn’t? That was a mighty pretty swan dive you did. Let’s seeanother one just like it.“Jill bit her lip and looked about twelve years old. .Jubal? Please listen! I’mterribly worried.“He sighed. .In that case, dry yourself off. The breeze is getting chilly.“.I’m warm enough. Uh, Jubal? Would it be all right if I left Mike here? Wouldyou take care of him?“Harshaw blinked. .Of course he can stay here. You know that. The girls willlook out for him-and I’ll keep an eye on him from time to time. He’s notrouble. I take it you’re leaving?“She didn’t meet his eye. .Yes.“.Mmmm ... you’re welcome here. But you’re welcome to leave, too, if that’swhat you want.“.Huh? But, Jubal-I don’t want to leave!“.Then don’t.“.But I must!“.Better play that back. I didn’t scan it.“.Don’t you see, Jubal? I like it here-you’ve been wonderful to us! But I can’tstay any longer. Not with Ben missing. I’ve got to go look for him.“Harshaw said one word, emotive, earthy, and vulgar, then added, .How doyou propose to look for him?“She frowned. .I don’t know. But I can’t just lie around here any longer, loafingand swimming-with Ben missing.“.Gillian, as I pointed out to you before, Ben is a big boy now. You’re not hismother-and you’re not his wife. And I’m not his keeper. Neither of us isresponsible for him . . . and you haven’t any call to go looking for him. Haveyou?“Jill looked down and twisted one toe in the grass. .No,“ she admitted. .Ihaven’t any claim on Ben. I just know ... that if I turned up missing Ben wouldlook for me-until he found me. So I’ve got to look for him!“Jubal breathed a silent malediction against all elder gods in any way involvedin contriving the follies of the human race, then said aloud, .All right, all right,if you must, then let’s try to get some logic into it. Do you plan to hireprofessionals? Say a private detective firm that specializes in missingpersons?“She looked unhappy. .I suppose that’s the way to go about it. Uh, I’ve neverhired a detective. Are they expensive?“.Quite.“Jill gulped. .Do you suppose they would let me arrange to pay, uh, in monthlyinstallments? Or something?“.Cash at the stairs is their usual way. Quit looking so grim, child; I broughtthat up to dispose of it. I’ve already hired the best in the business to try to findBen-so there is no need for you to hock your future to hire the second best.“.You didn’t tell me!“.No need to tell you.“.But- Jubal, what did they find out?“.Nothing,“ he said shortly. .Nothing worth reporting, so there was no need toput you any further down in the dumps by telling you.“ Jubal scowled. .Whenyou showed up here, I thought you were unnecessarily nervy about Ben-Ifigured the same as his assistant, that fellow Kilgallen, that Ben had goneyipping off on some new trail . . . and would check in when he had the storywrapped up. Ben does that sort of stunt-it’s his profession.“ He sighed. .Butnow I don’t think so. That knothead Kilgallen-he really does have a statprintmessage on file, apparently from Ben, telling Kilgallen that Ben would beaway a few days; my man not only saw it but sneaked a photograph andchecked. No fake-the message was sent.“Jill looked puzzled. .I wonder why Ben didn’t send me a statprint at the sametime? It isn’t like him-Ben’s very thoughtful.“Jubal repressed a groan. .Use your head, Gillian. Just because a packagesays .Cigarettes’ on the outside does not prove that the package containscigarettes. You got here last Friday; the code groups on that statprintmessage show that it was filed from Philadelphia-Paoli Station Landing Flat,to be exact-just after ten thirty the morning before-lO.34 AM. Thursday. It wastransmitted a couple of minutes after it was filed and was received at once,because Ben’s office has its own statprinter. All right, now you tell me whyBen sent a printed message to his own office-during working hours-instead oftelephoning?“.Why, I don’t think he would, ordinarily. At least I wouldn’t. The telephone isthe normal-.
.But you aren’t Ben. I can think of half a dozen reasons, for a man in Ben’sbusiness. To avoid garbles. To insure a printed record in the files of I.T.&T.
for legal purposes. To send a delayed message. All sorts of reasons.
Kilgallen saw nothing odd about it-and the simple fact that Ben, or thesyndicate he sells to, goes to the expense of maintaining a private statprinterin his office shows that Ben uses it regularly.
.However,“ Jubal went on, .the snoops I hired are a suspicious lot; thatmessage placed Ben at Paoli flat at ten thirty-four on Thursday-so one ofthem went there. Jill, that message was not sent from there.“.But-.
.One moment. The message was filed from there but did not originate there.
Messages are either handed over the counter or telephoned. If one is handedover the counter, the customer can have it typed or he can ask for facsimiletransmission of his handwriting and signature . . . but if it is filed bytelephone, it has to be typed by the filing office before it can bephotographed.“.Yes, of course.“.Does............