Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

But where could she go? The obvious solution popped into her mind. If Ben was missing—and the authorities had a hand in it—the last place they would be likely to look for Valentine Smith would be Ben’s apartment. Unless, she corrected, they connected her with Ben, which she did not think that they did.

They could dig a bite to eat out of Ben’s buttery—she wouldn’t risk ordering anything from the basement; they might know he was away. And she could borrow some of Ben’s clothes for her idiot child. The last point settled it; she set the combination for Ben’s apartment house. The cab picked out the new lane and dropped into it.

Once outside the door to Ben’s flat Jill put her face to the hush box by the door and said emphatically, “Karthago delenda est!”

Nothing happened. Oh damn him! she said frantically to herself; he’s changed the combo. She stood there for a moment, knees weak, and kept her face away from Smith. Then she again spoke into the hush box. It was a Raytheon lock, the same voice circuit actuated the door or announced callers. She announced herself on the forlorn chance that Ben might have returned. “Ben, this is Jill.”

The door slid open.

They went inside and the door closed. Jill thought for an instant that Ben had let them in, then she realized that she had accidentally hit on his new door combination… intended, she guessed, as a gracious compliment combined with a wolf tactic. She felt that she could have dispensed with the compliment to have avoided the awful panic she had felt when the door had refused to open.

Smith stood quietly at the edge of the thick green lawn and looked at the room. It again was a place so new to him as not to be grokked at once, but he felt immediately pleased with it. It was less exciting than the moving place they had just been in, but in many ways more suited for enfolding together the self. He looked with interest at the view window at one end but did not recognize it as a window, mistaking it for a living picture like those he had been used to at home—the suite he had been in at Bethesda contained no windows, it being in one of the newer wings, and thus far he had never acquired the idea of “window.”

He noticed with approval that the simulation of depth and movement in the “picture” was perfect—some very great artist among these people must have created it. Up until this time he had seen nothing to cause him to think that these people possessed art; his grokking of them was increased by this new experience and he felt warmed.

A movement caught his eye; he turned to find his brother removing the false skins as well as the slippers from its legs.

Jill sighed and wiggled her toes in the grass. “Gosh, how my feet do hurt!” She glanced up and saw Smith watching her with that curiously disturbing baby-faced stare. “Do it yourself if you want to. You’ll love it.”

He blinked. “How do?”

“I keep forgetting. Come here, I’ll help you.” She got his shoes off, untaped the stockings and peeled them off. “There, doesn’t that feel good?”

Smith wiggled his toes in the cool grass, then said timidly, “But these live?”

“Sure, they’re alive. It’s real live grass. Ben paid a lot to have it that way. Why, the special lighting circuits alone cost more than I make in a month. So walk around and let your feet enjoy it.”

Smith missed much of the speech but he did understand that the grass was made up of living beings and that he was being invited to walk on them. “Walk on living things?” he asked with incredulous horror.

“Huh? Why not? It doesn’t hurt this grass; it was specially developed for house rugs.”

Smith was forced to remind himself that a water brother could not lead him into wrongful action. Apprehensively he let himself be encouraged to walk around—and found that he did enjoy it and that the living creatures did not protest. He set his sensitivity for such things as high as possible; his brother was right, this was their proper being—to be walked on. He resolved to enfold it and praise it; the effort was much like that of a human trying to appreciate the merits of cannibalism—a custom which Smith found perfectly proper.

Jill let out a sigh. “Well, I had better stop playing. I don’t know how long we will be safe here.”

“Safe?”

“We can’t stay here, not very long. They may be checking on every conveyance that left the Center this very minute.” She frowned and thought. Her place would not do, this place would not do—and Ben had intended to take him to Jubal Harshaw. But she did not know Harshaw; she was not even sure where he lived—somewhere in the Poconos, Ben had said. Well, she would just have to try to find out where he lived and call him. It was Hobson’s choice; she had nowhere else to turn.

“Why are you not happy, my brother?”

Jill snapped out of her mood and looked at Smith. Why, the poor infant didn’t even know anything was wrong! She made a real effort to look at it from his point of view. She failed, but she did grasp that he had no notion that they were running away from—from what? The cops? The hospital authorities? She was not sure quite what she had done, or what laws she had broken; she simply knew that she had pitted her own puny self against the combined will of the Big People, the Bosses, the ones who made decisions.

But how could she tell the Man from Mars what they were up against when she did not understand it herself? Did they have policemen on Mars? Half the time she found talking to him like shouting down a rain barrel.

Heavens, did they even have rain barrels on Mars? Or rain?

“Never you mind,” she said soberly. “You just do what I tell you to do.”

“Yes.”

It was an unmodified, unlimited acceptance, an eternal yea. Jill suddenly had the feeling that Smith would unhesitatingly jump out the window if she told him to—in which belief she was correct; he would have jumped, enjoyed every scant second of the twenty storey drop, and accepted without surprise or resentment the discorporation on impact. Nor would he have been unaware that such a fall would kill him; fear of death was an idea utterly beyond him. If a water brother selected for him such a strange discorporation, he would cherish it and try to grok.

“Well, we can’t stand here pampering our feet. I’ve got to feed us, I’ve got to get you into different clothes, and we’ve got to leave. Take those off.” She left to check Ben’s wardrobe.

She selected for him an inconspicuous travel suit, a beret, shirt, underclothes, and shoes, then returned. Smith was as snarled as a kitten in knitting; he had tried to obey but now had one arm prisoned by the nurse’s uniform and his face wrapped in the skirt. He had not even removed the cape before trying to take off the dress.

Jill said, “Oh, dear!” and ran to help him.

She got him loose from the clothes, looked at them, then decided to stuff them down the oubliette… she could pay Etta Schere for the loss of them later and she did not want cops finding them here—just in case. “But you are going to have to have a bath, my good man, before I dress you in Ben’s clean clothes. They’ve been neglecting you. Come along.” Being a nurse, she was inured to bad odors, but (being a nurse) she was fanatic about soap and water… and it seemed to her that no one had bothered to bathe this patient recently. While Smith did not exactly stink, he did remind her of a horse on a hot day. Soap suds were indicated.

He watched her fill the tub with delight. There had been a tub in the bathroom of the suite he had been in but Smith had not known it was used to hold water; bed baths were all that he had had and not many of those; his trancelike withdrawals had interfered.

Jill tested the water’s temperature. “All right, climb in.”