Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Jubal frowned. Caxton said impatiently, “Teleportation, of course. What’s so hard to grok about it, Jubal? You yourself told me to come down here and open my eyes and know a miracle when I saw one. So I did and they were. Only they aren’t miracles, any more than radio is a miracle. Do you grok radio? Or stereovision? Or electronic computers?”

“Me? No.”

“Nor do I, I’ve never studied electronics. But I’m sure I could if I took the time and the hard sweat to learn the language of electronics. I don’t think it’s miraculous—just complex. Teleportation is quite simple, once you learn the language—it’s the language that is so difficult.”

“Ben, you can teleport things?”

“Me? Oh, no, they don’t teach that in kindergarten. Oh, I’m a deacon by courtesy, simply because I’m ‘First Called’ and Ninth Circle—but my actual progress is about Fourth Circle, bucking for Fifth. Why, I’m just beginning to get control of my own body. Patty is the only one of us who uses teleportation herself with any regularity… and I’m not sure she ever does it without Mike’s support. Oh, Mike says she’s quite capable of it, but Patty is such a curiously naive and humble person for the genius she is that she is quite dependent on Mike. Which she needn’t be. Jubal, I grok this: we don’t actually need Mike—Oh, I’m not running him down; don’t get me wrong. But you could have been the Man from Mars. Or even me. It’s like the first man to discover fire. Fire was there all along—and after he showed that it could be used, anybody could use it… anybody with sense and savvy enough not to get burned with it. Follow me?”

“I grok, somewhat at least.”

“Mike is our Prometheus—but remember, Prometheus was not God. Mike keeps emphasizing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God that groks. Mike is a man along with the rest of us… even though he knows more. A very superior man, admittedly—a lesser man, taught the things the Martians know, probably would have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that’s all.”

Jubal said slowly, “As I recall, Prometheus paid a high price for bringing fire to mankind.”

“And don’t think that Mike doesn’t! He pays with twenty-four hours of work every day, seven days a week, trying to teach a few of us how to play with matches without getting burned. Jill and Patty lowered the boom on him, started making him take one night a week off, long before I joined up.” Caxton smiled. “But you can’t stop Mike. This burg is loaded with gambling joints, no doubt you know, and most of them crooked since it’s against the law here. Mike usually spends his night off bucking crooked games—and winning. Picks up ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a night. They tried to mug him, they tried to kill him, they tried knock-out drops and muscle boys—nothing worked; he simply ran up a reputation as the luckiest man in town… which brought more people into the Temple; they wanted to see this man who always won. So they tried to shut him out of the games—which was a mistake. Their cold decks froze solid, their wheels wouldn’t spin, their dice would roll nothing but box cars. At last they started putting up with him… and requesting him politely to please move along after he had won a few grand. Mike would always do so, if asked politely.”

Caxton added, “Of course that’s one more power bloc we’ve got against us. Not just the Fosterites and some of the other churches—but the gambling syndicate and the city political machine. I rather suppose that job done on the Temple was by professionals brought in from out of town—I doubt if the Fosterite goon squads touched it. Too professional.”

While they talked, people came in, went out again, formed groups themselves or joined Jubal and Ben. Jubal found in them a most unusual feeling, an unhurried relaxation that at the same time was a dynamic tension. No one seemed excited, never in a hurry… yet everything they did seemed purposeful, even gestures as apparently accidental and unpremeditated as encountering one another and marking it with a kiss or a greeting—or sometimes not. It felt to Jubal as if each move had been planned by a master choreographer… yet obviously was not.

The quiet and the increasing tension—or rather “expectancy,” he decided; these people were not tense in any morbid fashion—reminded Jubal of something he had known in the past. Surgery? With a master at work, no noise, no lost motions? A little.

Then he recalled it. Once, many years earlier when gigantic chemically powered rockets were used for the earliest probing of space from the third planet, he had watched a count-down in a block house… and he recalled now the same low voices, the same relaxed, very diverse but coordinated actions, the same rising exultant expectancy as the count grew ever smaller. They were “waiting for fullness,” that was certain. But for what? Why were they so happy? Their Temple and all they had built had just been destroyed… yet they seemed like kids on the night before Christmas.

Jubal had noted in passing, when he arrived, that the nudity Ben had been so disturbed by on his abortive first visit to the Nest did not seem to be the practice in this surrogate Nest, although private enough in location. Then Jubal realized later that he had failed to notice such cases when they did appear; he had himself become so much in the unique close-family mood of the place that being dressed or not had become an unnoticeable irrelevancy.

When he did notice, it was not skin but the thickest, most beautiful cascade of black hair he had ever seen, gracing a young woman who came in, spoke to someone, threw Ben a kiss, glanced gravely at Jubal, and left. Jubal followed her with his eyes, appreciating that flowing mass of midnight plumage. Only after she left did he realize that she had not been dressed other than in her queenly crowning glory… and then realized, too, that she was not the first of his brothers in that fashion.

Ben noticed his glance. “That’s Ruth,” he said. “New high priestess. She and her husband have been away, clear on the other coast—their mission was to prepare a branch temple, I think. I’m glad they’re back. It’s beginning to look as if the whole family will be home at once—like an oldfashioned Christmas dinner.”

“Beautiful head of hair. I wish she had tarried.”

“Then why didn’t you call her over?”

“Eh?”

“Ruth almost certainly found an excuse to come in here just to catch a glimpse of you—I suppose they must have just arrived. But haven’t you noticed that we have been left pretty much alone, except for a few who sat down with us, didn’t say much, then left?”

“Well… yes.” Jubal had noticed and had been a touch disappointed, as he had been braced, by all that he had heard, to ward off undue intimacy—and had found that he had stepped on a top step that wasn’t there. He had been treated with hospitality and politeness, but it was more like the politeness of a cat than that of an over-friendly dog.

“They are all terribly interested in the fact that you are here and are very anxious to see you… but they are a little bit afraid of you, too.”

“Me?”

“Oh, I told you this last summer. You’re a venerable tradition of the church, not quite real and a bit more than life size. Mike has told them that you are the only human being he knows of who can ‘grok in fullness’ without needing to learn Martian first. Most of them suspect that you can read minds as perfectly as Mike does.”

“Oh, what poppycock! I hope you disabused them?”

“Who am I to destroy a myth? Perhaps you do read minds—I’m sure you wouldn’t tell me. They are just a touch afraid of you—YOU eat babies for breakfast and when you roar the ground trembles. Any of them would be delighted to have you call them over… but they won’t force themselves on you. They know that even Mike stands at attention and says ‘sir’ when you speak.”