Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Ben had had to chase down, in the crannies of his soul, one uneasy feeling before he was able to do this. He at last decided that it was simple jealousy, and, being such, had to be cauterized. He had discovered that he felt irked at the closeness between Mike and Jill. His own bachelor persona, he learned, had been changed by a week of undead oblivion; he found that he wanted to be married, and to Jill. He proposed to her again, without a trace of joking about it, as soon as he got her alone.

Jill had looked away. “Please, Ben.”

“Why not? I’m solvent, I’ve got a fairly good job, I’m in good health—or I will be, as soon as I get their condemned ‘truth’ drugs washed out of my system… and since I haven’t, quite, I feel an overpowering compulsion to tell the truth right now. I love you. I want you to marry me and let me rub your poor tired feet. So why not? I don’t have any vices that you don’t share with me and we get along together better than most married couples. Am I too old for you? I’m not that old! Or are you planning to marry somebody else?”

“No, neither one! Dear Ben… Ben, I love you. But don’t ask me to marry you now. I have… responsibilities.”

He could not shake her firmness. Admittedly, Mike was more nearly Jill’s age—almost exactly her age, in fact, which made Ben slightly more than ten years older than they were. But he believed Jill when she denied that age was a factor; the age difference wasn’t too great and it helped, all things considered, for a husband to be older than his wife.

But he finally realized that the Man from Mars couldn’t be a rival—he was simply Jill’s patient. And at that point Ben accepted that a man who marries a nurse must live with the fact that nurses feel maternal toward their charges—live with it and like it, he added, for if Gillian had not had the character that made her a nurse, he would not love her. It was not the delightful figure-eight in which her pert fanny waggled when she walked, nor even the still pleasanter and very mammalian view from the other direction—he was not, thank God, the permanently infantile type, interested solely in the size of the mammary glands! No, it was Jill herself he loved.

Since what she was would make it necessary for him to take second place from time to time to patients who needed her (unless she retired, of course, and he could not be sure it would stop completely even then, Jill being Jill), then he was bloody-be-damned not going to start by being jealous of the patient she had now! Mike was a nice kid—just as innocent and guileless as Jill had described him to be.

And besides, he wasn’t offering Jill any bed of roses; the wife of a working newspaperman had things to put up with, too. He might be—he would be—gone for weeks at times and his hours were always irregular. He wouldn’t like it if Jill bitched about it. But Jill wouldn’t. Not Jill.

Having reached this summing up, Ben accepted the water ceremony from Mike whole-heartedly.

Jubal needed the extra day to plan tactics. “Ben, when you dumped this hot potato in my lap I told Gililan that I would not lift a finger to get this boy his so-called ‘rights.’ But I’ve changed my mind. We’re not going to let the government have the swag.”

“Certainly not this administration!”

“Nor any other administration, as the next one will probably be worse. Ben, you undervalue Joe Douglas.”

“He’s a cheap, courthouse politician, with morals to match!”

“Yes. And besides that, he’s ignorant to six decimal places. But he is also a fairly able and usually conscientious world chief executive—better than we could expect and probably better than we deserve. I would enjoy a session of poker with him… for he wouldn’t cheat and he wouldn’t welch and he would pay up with a smile. Oh, he’s an S.O.B.—but you can read that as ‘Swell Old Boy,’ too. He’s middlin’ decent.”

“Jubal, I’m damned if I understand you. You told me yesterday that you had been fairly certain that Douglas had had me killed… and, believe me, it wasn’t far from it!… and that you had juggled eggs to get me out alive if by any chance I still was alive… and you did get me out and God knows I’m grateful to you! But do you expect me to forget that Douglas was behind it all? It’s none of his doing that I’m alive—he would rather see me dead.”

“I suppose he would. But, yup, just that—forget it.”

“I’m damned if I will!”

“You’ll be silly if you don’t. In the first place, you can’t prove anything. In the second place, there’s no call for you to be grateful to me and I won’t let you lay this burden on me. I didn’t do it for you.”

“Huh?”

“I did it for a little girl who was about to go charging out and maybe get herself killed much the same way—if I didn’t do something. I did it because she was my guest and I temporarily stood in loco parentis to her. I did it because she was all guts and gallantry but too ignorant to be allowed to monkey with such a buzz saw; she’d get hurt. But you, my cynical and sin-stained chum, know all about those buzz saws. If your own asinine carelessness caused you to back into one, who am I to tamper with your karma? You picked it.”

“Mmm… I see your point. Okay, Jubal, you can go to hell—for monkeying with my karma. If I have one.”

“A moot point. The predestinationers and the free-willers were still tied in the fourth quarter, last I heard. Either way, I have no wish to disturb a man sleeping in a gutter; I assume until proved otherwise that he belongs there. Most do-gooding reminds me of treating hemophilia—the only real cure for hemophilia is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death before they breed more hemophiliacs.”

“You could sterilize them.”

“You would have me play God? But we’re veering off the subject. Douglas didn’t try to have you assassinated.”

“Says who?”

“Says the infallible Jubal Harshaw, speaking ex cathedra from his belly button. See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it’s sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn’t order it, didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.”

“I’d like to show you the backgrounds of quite a number of deaths I’ve looked into.”

Jubal waved it aside. “I said it wasn’t a policy. We’ve always had political assassination—from prominent ones like Huey Long to men beaten to death on their own front steps with hardly a page eight story in passing. But it’s never been a policy here and the reason you are sitting in the sunshine right now is that it is not Joe Douglas’ policy. Consider. They snatched you clean, no fuss, no inquiries. They squeezed you dry—then they had no more use for you… and they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”

Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions… Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office (we can, you know, tomorrow—just by double-crossing him on the deal I’ve led him to expect—toss him out and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben—tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”