A Stranger in a Strange Land

XVIII

THE CONFERENCE WAS POSTPONED to the afternoon, then quickly re-postponed to the following morning, which gave Caxton an extra twenty-four hours of badly needed recuperation, a chance to hear in detail about his missing week, a chance to "grow closer" with the Man from Mars - for Mike grokked at once that Jill and Ben were "water brothers," consulted Jill about it, and solemnly offered water to Ben.

Ben had been adequately briefed by Jill. He accepted it just as solemnly and without mental reservations� after soul searching in which he decided that his own destiny was, in truth, interwoven with that of the Man from Mars - through his own initiative before he ever met Mike.

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?"

Caxton didn't answer.

"As I said, the S.S. is just a tool. Men are always for hire who like dirty work. How dirty will that work become if you nudge Douglas out of his majority?"

"Jubal, are you telling me that I ought not to criticize the administration? When they're wrong? When I know they're wrong?"

"Nope. Gadflies such as yourself are utterly necessary. Nor am I opposed to 'turning the rascals out' - it's usually the soundest rule of politics. But it's well to take a look at what new rascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascals out. Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst faults is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect? So take a look at Douglas and ponder that, in his ignorance, stupidity, and self-seeking, he much resembles his fellow Americans, including you and me� and that in fact he is a notch or two above the average. Then take a look at the man who will replace him if his government topples."

"There's precious little choice."

"There's always a choice! This one is a choice between 'bad' and 'worse' - which is a difference much more poignant than that between 'good' and 'better.'"

"Well, Jubal? What do you expect me to do?"

"Nothing," Harshaw answered. "Because I intend to run this show myself. Or almost nothing. I expect you to refrain from chewing out Joe Douglas over this coming settlement in that daily poop you write - maybe even praise him a little for 'statesmanlike restraint-'"

"You're making me vomit!"

"Not in the grass, please. Use your hat. -because I'm going to tell you ahead of time what I'm going to do, and why, and why Joe Douglas is going to agree to it. The first principle in riding a tiger is to hang on tight to its ears."

"Quit being pompous. What's the deal?"

"Quit being obtuse and listen. If this boy were a penniless nobody, there would be no problem. But he has the misfortune to be indisputably the heir to more wealth than Croesus ever dreamed of� plus a highly disputable claim to political power even greater through a politico-judicial precedent unparalleled in pure jug-headedness since the time Secretary Fall was convicted of receiving a bribe that Doheny was acquitted of having given him."

"Yes, but-"

"I have the floor. As I told Jill, I have no slightest interest in 'True Prince' nonsense. Nor do I regard all that wealth as 'his'; he didn't produce a shilling of it. Even if he had earned it himself - impossible at his age - 'property' is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is."

"Come again?"

"Ownership, of anything, is an extremely sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship, truly. God knows our legal theorists make this mystery complicated enough - but I didn't begin to see how subtle it was until I got the Martian slant on it. Martians don't have property. They don't own anything� not even their own bodies."

"Wait a minute, Jubal. Even animals have property. And the Martians aren't animals; they're a highly developed civilization, with great cities and all sorts of things."

"Yes. 'Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests.' And nobody understands a property line and the 'meus-et-tuus' involved better than a watch dog. But not Martians. Unless you regard an undistributed joint ownership of everything by a few millions or billions of senior citizens - 'ghosts' to you, my friend - as being 'property.'"

"Say, Jubal, how about these 'Old Ones' Mike talks about?"

"Do you want the official version? Or my private opinion?"

"Huh? Your private opinion. What you really think."

"Then keep it to yourself. I think it is a lot of pious poppycock, suitable for enriching lawns. I think it is a superstition burned into the boy's brain at so early an age that he stands no chance of ever breaking loose from it."

"Jill talks as if she believed it."

"At all other times you will hear me talk as if I believed it, too. Ordinary politeness. One of my most valued friends believes in astrology; I would never offend her by telling her what I think of it. The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their own children - has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it - especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible. Mike's faith in his 'Old Ones' is surely no more irrational than a conviction that the dynamics of the universe can be set aside through prayers for rain. Furthermore, he has the weight of evidence on his side; he has been there. I haven't."

"Mmm, Jubal, I'll confess to a sneaking suspicion that immortality is a fact - but I'm glad that my grandfather's ghost doesn't continue to exercise any control over me. He was a cranky old devil."

"And so was mine. And so am I. But is there any really good reason why a citizen's franchise should be voided simply because he happens to be dead? Come to think of it, the precinct I was raised in had a very large graveyard vote - almost Martian. Yet the town was a pleasant one to live in. As may be, our lad Mike can't own anything because the 'Old Ones' already own everything. So you see why I have had trouble explaining to him that he owns over a million shares of Lunar Enterprises, plus the Lyle Drive, plus assorted chattels and securities? It doesn't help that the original owners are dead; that makes it worse, they are 'Old Ones' - and Mike wouldn't dream of sticking his nose into the business of 'Old Ones.'"

"Uh� damn it, he's obviously legally incompetent."

"Of course he is. He can't manage property because he doesn't believe in its mystique - any more than I believe in his ghosts. Ben, all that Mike owns at the present time is a toothbrush I gave him - and he doesn't know he owns that. If you took it away from him, he wouldn't object, he wouldn't even mention it to me - he would simply assume conclusively that the 'Old Ones' had authorized the change."

Jubal sighed. "So he is incompetent� even though he can recite the law of property verbatim. Such being the case I shan't allow his competency to be tried� nor even mentioned - for what guardian would be appointed?"

"Huh? Douglas. Or, rather, one of his stooges."

"Are you certain, Ben? Consider the present makeup of the High Court. Might not the appointed guardian be named Savvonavong? Or Nadi? Or Kee?"

"Uh� you could be right."

"In which case the lad might not live very long. Or he might live to a ripe old age in some pleasantly gardened prison - one a great deal more difficult to escape from than Bethesda Hospital."

"What do you plan to do?"

"The power the boy nominally owns is far too dangerous and cumbersome for him to handle. So we throw it away."

"How the hell do you go about giving away that much money?"

"You don't. You can't. It's impossible. The very act of giving it away would be an exercise of its latent power, it would change the balance of power - and any attempt to do so would cause the boy to be examined on his competence to manage in jig time. So, instead, we let the tiger run like hell while hanging onto its ears for dear life. Ben, let me outline the fait accompli I intend to hand to Douglas� then you do your damnedest to pick holes in it. Not the legality of it, as Douglas' legal staff will write the double-talk and I'll check it for boobytraps - don't worry about that; the idea is to give Douglas a plan be won't want to booby-trap because he'll like it. I want you to sniff it for its political feasibility, whether or not we can put it over. Now here's what we are going to do-"