Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land

“I’ve been forced to believe it.”

“We do. By the way, this conversation is completely private—and besides that, no one of us would ever attempt to read you; I’m not sure we could. Even last night the link was through Dawn’s mind, not yours.”

“Well, that is some slight comfort.”

“Uh, I want to get to that later. I am ‘only an egg’ in this art; the Old Ones are past masters. They stayed linked with me but left me on my own, ignored me—then they triggered me and all that I had seen and heard and done and felt and grokked poured out of me and became part of their permanent records. I don’t mean that they wiped my mind of my experiences; they simply played the tape, so to speak, made a copy. But the triggering I was aware of—and it was over before I could possibly do anything to stop it. Then they dropped me, cut off the linkage; I couldn’t even protest.”

“Well… it seems to me that they used you pretty shabbily—”

“Not by their standards. Nor would I have objected—I would have been happy to volunteer—had I known about it before I left Mars. But they didn’t want me to know; they wanted me to see and grok without interference.”

“I was going to add,” Jubal said, “that if you are free of this damnable invasion of your privacy now, then what harm has been done? It seems to me that you could have had a Martian at your elbow all these past two and a half years, with no harm other than attracting stares.”

Mike looked very sober. “Jubal, listen to a story. Listen all the way through.” Mike told him of the destruction of the missing Fifth Planet of Sol, whose ruins are the asteroids. “Well, Jubal?”

“It reminds me a little of the myths about the Flood.”

“No, Jubal. The Flood you aren’t sure about. Are you sure about the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum?”

“Oh, yes. Those are established historical facts.”

“Jubal, the destruction of the Fifth Planet by the Old Ones is as historically certain as that eruption of Vesuvius—and it is recorded in much greater detail. No myth. Fact.”

“Uh, stipulate it as such. Do I understand that you fear that the Old Ones of Mars will decide to give this planet the same treatment? Will you forgive me if I say that is a bit hard for me to swallow?”

“Why, Jubal, it wouldn’t take the Old Ones to do it. It merely takes a certain fundamental knowledge of physics, how matter is put together—and the same sort of control that you have seen me use time and again. Simply necessary first to grok what you want to manipulate. I can do it unassisted, right now. Say a piece near the core of the planet about a hundred miles in diameter—much bigger than necessary but we want to make this fast and painless, if only to please Jill. Feel out its size and place, then grok carefully how it is put together—” His face lost all expression as he talked and his eyeballs started to turn up.

“Hey!” broke in Harshaw. “Cut it out! I don’t know whether you can or you can’t but I’m certain I don’t want you to try!”

The face of the Man from Mars became normal. “Why, I would never do it. For me, it would be a wrongness—I am human.”

“But not for them?”

“Oh, no. The Old Ones might grok it as beauty. I don’t know. Oh, I have the discipline to do it… but not the volition. Jill could do it—that is, she could contemplate the exact method. But she could never will to do it; she is human too; this is her planet. The essence of the discipline is, first, self-awareness, and then, self-control. By the time a human is physically able to destroy this planet by this method—instead of by clumsy things like cobalt bombs—it is not possible, I grok fully, for him to entertain such a volition. He would discorporate. And that would end any threat; our Old Ones don’t hang around the way they do on Mars.”

“Mmmm… son, as long as we are checking you for bats in your belfry, clear up something else. You’ve always spoken of these ‘Old Ones’ as casually as I speak of the neighbor’s dog—but I find ghosts hard to swallow. What does an ‘Old One’ look like?”

“Why, just like any other Martian… except that there is more variety in the appearance of adult Martians than there is in us.”

“Then how do you know it’s not just an adult Martian? Doesn’t he walk through walls, or some such?”

“Any Martian can do that. I did, just yesterday.”

“Uh… shimmers? Or anything?”

“No. You see, hear, feel them—everything. It’s like an image in a stereo tank, only perfect and put right into your mind. But—Look, Jubal, the whole thing would be a silly question on Mars, but I realize it isn’t, here. But if you had been present at the discorporation—death—of a friend, then you helped eat his body… and then you saw his ghost, talked with it, touched it, anything—would you then believe in ghosts?”

“Well, either ghosts, or I myself had slipped my leash.”

“All right. Here it would be an hallucination… if I grok correctly that we don’t stay here when we discorporate. But in the case of Mars, there is either an entire planet with a very rich and complex civilization all run by mass hallucination—or the straightforward explanation is correct the one I was taught and the one all my experience led me to believe. Because on Mars the ‘ghosts’ are by far the most important and most powerful and much the most numerous part of the population. The ones still alive, the corporate ones, are the hewers of wood and drawers of water, servants to the Old Ones.”

Jubal nodded. “Okay. I’ll never boggle at slicing with Occam’s razor. While it runs contrary to my own experience, my experience is limited to this planet—provincial. All right, son, you’re scared that they might destroy us?”

Mike shook his head. “Not especially. I think—this is not a grokking but a mere guess—that they might do one of two things: either destroy us or attempt to conquer us culturally, make us over into their own image.”

“But you’re not fretted that they might blow us up? That’s a pretty detached viewpoint, even for me.”

“No. Oh, I think they might reach that decision. You see, by their standards, we are a diseased and crippled people—the things that we do to each other, the way we fail to understand each other, our almost complete failure to grok with one another, our wars and diseases and famines and cruelties—these will be complete idiocy to them. I know. So I think they may very probably decide on a mercy killing. But that’s a guess, I’m not an Old One. But, Jubal, if they decide to do this, it will be—” Mike stopped and thought for quite a long time. “—an utter minimum of five hundred years, more likely five thousand, before anything would be done.”

“That’s a long time for a jury to be out.”

“Jubal, the most different thing about the two races is that Martians never hurry—and humans always do. They would much rather think about it an extra century or half a dozen, just to be sure that they have grokked all the fullness.”

“In that case, son, I suggest that you not worry about it. If, in another five hundred or a thousand years, the human race can’t handle its neighbors, you and I can’t help it. However, I suspect that they will be able to.”

“So I grok, but not in fullness. But I said I wasn’t worried about that. The other possibility troubled me more, that they might move in and try to make us over. Jubal, they can’t do it. An attempt to make us behave like Martians would kill us just as certainly but much less painlessly. It would all be a great wrongness.”

Jubal took time to answer. “But, son, isn’t that exactly what you have been trying to do?”