Stranger in a Strange Land (20 page)

Duke said slowly, “Boss, you've come unzipped. Mike wouldn't hurt anybody—shucks, this cannibalism talk makes me want to throw up but don't get me wrong; he's a savage, he doesn't know any better. But he's gentle as a lamb—he would never hurt anybody.”

“You think so?”

“I'm certain.”

“So. You've got guns in your room. I say he's dangerous. It's open season on Martians; pick a gun, go down to the pool and kill him. Don't worry about the law; I guarantee you'll never be indicted. Go ahead, do it!”

“Jubal . . . you don't mean that.”

“No. Not really. Because you
can't.
If you tried, your gun would go where my pistol went—and if you hurried him you'd go with it. Duke, you don't know what you are fiddling with. Mike is
not
‘gentle as a lamb' and he is
not
a savage. I suspect we are savages. Ever raise snakes?”

“Uh . . . no.”

“I did, when I was a kid. One winter down in Florida I caught what I thought was a scarlet snake. Know what they look like?”

“I don't like snakes.”

“Prejudice again. Most snakes are harmless, useful, and fun to raise. The scarlet snake is a beauty—red, black, and yellow—docile and makes a fine pet. I think this little fellow was fond of me. I knew how to handle snakes, how not to alarm them and not give them a chance to bite—even the bite of a non-poisonous snake is a nuisance. This baby was my prize. I used to take him out and show him to people, holding him back of his head and letting him wrap himself around my wrist.

“I got a chance to show my collection to the herpetologist of the Tampa zoo—I showed him my prize first. He almost had hysterics. My pet was not a scarlet snake—it was a young coral snake. The most deadly snake in North America. Duke, do you see my point?”

“That raising snakes is dangerous? I could have told you.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake! I had rattlesnakes and water moccasins, too. A poisonous snake is
not
dangerous, no more than a loaded gun is dangerous—in each case, you must handle if properly. The thing that made that snake dangerous was that I hadn't known what it could do. If, in my ignorance, I had handled it carelessly, it would have killed me as casually and innocently as a kitten scratches. That's what I'm trying to tell you about Mike. He seems like an ordinary young male human, rather underdeveloped, clumsy, abysmally ignorant but bright and docil and eager to learn. But, like my snake, Mike is more than he appears to be. If Mike does not trust you, he can be much more deadly than that coral snake. Especially if he thinks you are. harming one of his water brothers, such as Jill—or me.”

Harshaw shook his head. “Duke, if you had given way to your impulse to take a poke at me and if Mike had been standing in that doorway, you would have been dead before you knew it, much too quickly for me to stop him. Mike would then have been apologetic over having ‘wasted food'—namely your beefy carcass. But he wouldn't feel guilty about killing you; that would be a necessity you forced on him . . . and not important, even to you. You see, Mike believes that your soul is immortal.”

“Huh? Well, hell, so do I. But—”

“Do you?” Jubal said bleakly. “I wonder.”

“Why, certainly I do! Oh, I don't go to church much, but I was brought up right. I've got faith.”

“Good. Though I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. However, since you believe in immortality, we need not trouble over the probability that your prejudices will cause your demise. Do you want to be cremated or buried?”

“Oh, for cripe's sake, Jubal, quit trying to get my goat.”

“Not at all. I can't guarantee your safety since you persist in thinking that a coral snake is a harmless scarlet snake—any blunder may be your last. But I promise I won't let Mike eat you.”

Duke's chin dropped. Then he answered, explosively, profanely, incoherently. Harshaw listened, then said testily, “All right, pipe down. Make any arrangements with Mike you like.” Harshaw bent over the projector. “I want to see these pictures. Damn!” he added. “The pesky thing savaged me.”

“You tried to force it. Here—” Duke completed the adjustment Harshaw had muffed, then inserted a spool. Neither reopened the question of whether Duke was, or was not, working for Jubal. The projector was a tabletop tank, with adapter to receive solid-sight-sound 4 mm. film. Shortly they were watching events leading up to the disappearance of the empty brandy case.

Jubal saw the box hurtle toward his head, saw it wink out in mid-air. “Anne will be pleased to know that the cameras back her up. Duke, let's repeat that in slow motion.”

“Okay.” Duke spooled back, then announced, “This is ten-to-one.”

The scene was the same but slowed-down sound was useless; Duke switched it off. The box floated from Jill's hands toward Jubal's head, then ceased to be. But under slow-motion it could be seen shrinking, smaller and smaller until it was no longer there.

“Duke, can you slow it still more?”

“Just a sec. Something has fouled the stereo.”

“What?”

“Darned if I know. It looked all right on the fast run. But when I slowed it, the depth effect was reversed. That box went away from us, mighty fast—but it always looked closer than the wall. Swapped parallax, of course. But I never took that cartridge off the spindle.”

“Oh. Hold it, Duke. Run the film from the other camera.”

“Unh . . . I see. That'll give us a ninety-degree cross and we'll see properly even if I did jimmy this film.” Duke changed cartridges. “Zip through the first part. Then undercranked on the last part?”

“Go ahead.”

The scene was unchanged save for angle. When the image of Jill grabbed the box, Duke slowed action and again they watched the box go away.

Duke cursed. “Something fouled the second camera, too.”

“So?”

“It was shooting from the side so the box should have gone out of frame to one side. Instead it went straight away from us again. You saw it.”

“Yes,” agreed Jubal. “ ‘Straight away from us.' ”

“But it
can't
—not from both angles.”

“What do you mean, ‘it can't'? It
did.”
Harshaw added, “If we had used doppler-radar in place of cameras, I wonder what it would have shown?”

“How should I know? I'm going to take these cameras apart.”

“Don't bother.”

“But—”

“Duke, the cameras are okay. What is ninety degrees from everything else?”

“I'm no good at riddles.”

“It's not a riddle. I could refer you to Mr. A. Square from Flatland, but I'll answer it. What is perpendicular to everything else? Answer: two bodies, one pistol, and an empty case.”

“What the deuce do you mean, Boss?”

“I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected. Let's see the other films.”

They added nothing to what Harshaw already knew. The ash tray when near the ceiling had been out of camera, but its leisurely descent had been recorded. The pistol's image in the tank was small but, so far as could be seen, the pistol had shrunk away into the distance without moving. Since Harshaw had been gripping it tightly when it had left his hand, he was satisfied—if “satisfied” was the word.

“Duke, I want duplicate prints of all those.”

Duke hesitated. “I'm still working here?”

“What? Oh, damn it! You can't eat in the kitchen, that's flat. Duke, try to forget your prejudices and listen.”

“I'll listen.”

“When Mike asked for the privilege of eating my stringy old carcass, he was doing me the greatest honor he knows of—by the only rules he knows. What he ‘learned at his mother's knee,' so to speak. He was paying me his highest compliment—and asking a boon. Never mind what they think in Kansas; Mike uses values taught him on Mars.”

“I'll take Kansas.”

“Well,” admitted Jubal, “so will I. But it is not free choice for me, nor you—nor Mike. It is almost impossible to shake off one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that if
you
had been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten that Mike has?”

Duke shook his head. “I won't buy it, Jubal. Sure, about most things it's just Mike's hard luck that he wasn't brought up civilized. But this is different, this is an instinct.”

“ ‘Instinct,'
Dreck!”

“But it is. I didn't get ‘training at my mother's knee' not to be a cannibal. Hell, I've always known it was a sin—a nasty one. Why, the thought turns my stomach. It's a basic instinct.”

Jubal groaned. “Duke, how could you learn so much about machinery and never learn anything about how you yourself tick? Your mother didn't have to say, ‘Mustn't eat your playmates, dear; that's not nice,' because you soaked it up from our culture—and so did I. Jokes about cannibals and missionaries, cartoons, fairy tales, horror stories, endless things. Shucks, son, it couldn't be instinct; cannibalism is historically a most widespread custom in every branch of the human race. Your ancestors, my ancestors, everybody.”

“Your
ancestors, maybe.”

“Um. Duke, didn't you tell me you had some Indian blood?”

“Huh? Yeah, an eighth. What of it?”

“Then, while both of us have cannibals in our family trees, chances are that yours are many generations closer because—”

“Why, you bald-headed old—”

“Simmer down! Ritual cannibalism was common among aboriginal American cultures—look it up. Besides that, as North Americans, we stand a better than even chance of having a touch of Congo without knowing it . . . and there you are again. But even if we were Simon-pure North European stock (a silly notion, casual bastardy is far in excess of that ever admitted)—but if we were, such ancestry would merely tell us
which
cannibals we are descended from . . . because
every
branch of the human race has cannibalism. Duke, it's silly to talk about a practice being ‘against instinct' when hundreds of millions have followed it.”

“But—All right, I should know better than to argue with you, Jubal; you twist things. But suppose we did come from savages who didn't know any better—What of it? We're civilized now. Or at least
I
am.”

Jubal grinned. “Implying that I am not. Son, aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of—well, you, for example—aside from that trained-in prejudice, I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are
not
civilized.”

“Huh?”

“If we didn't have a taboo so strong that you believed it was instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh?”

Duke grudged a grin. “I wouldn't take a chance on my ex-mother-in-law.”

“Or how about our charming neighbor on the south, who is so casual about other people's live stock during hunting season? Want to bet that you and I wouldn't wind up in his freezer? But Mike I trust—because Mike is civilized.”

“Huh?”

“Mike is utterly civilized, Martian style. Duke, I've talked enough with Mike to know that Martian practice isn't dog-eat-dog . . . or Martian-eat-Martian. They eat their dead, instead of burying them, or burning them, or exposing them to vultures; but the custom is formalized and deeply religious. A Martian is never butchered against his will. In fact, murder doesn't seem to be a Martian concept. A Martian dies when he decides to, having discussed it with friends and received consent of his ancestors' ghosts to join them. Having decided to die, he does so, as easily as you close your eyes—no violence, no illness, not even an overdose of sleeping pills. One second he is alive and well, the next second he's a ghost. Then his friends eat what he no longer has any use for, ‘grokking' him, as Mike would say, and praising his virtues as they spread the mustard. The ghost attends the feast; it is a bar mitzvah or confirmation service by which the ghost attains the status of ‘Old One'—an elder statesman, as I understand it.”

Duke made a face. “God, what superstitious junk!”

“To Mike it's a solemn—but joyful—religious ceremony.”

Duke snorted. “Jubal, you don't believe that stuff about ghosts. It's just cannibalism combined with rank superstition.”

“Well, I wouldn't go that far. I find these ‘Old Ones' hard to swallow—but Mike speaks of them the way we talk about last Wednesday. As for the rest—Duke, what church were you brought up in?” Duke told him; Jubal went on: “I thought so; in Kansas most people belong to yours or to one enough like it that you have to look at the sign to tell the difference. Tell me—how did you feel when you took part in the symbolic cannibalism that plays so paramount a part in your church's rituals?”

Duke stared. “What the devil do you mean?”

Jubal blinked solemnly back. “Were you a member? Or simply went to Sunday School?”

“Huh? Why, certainly I was a member, I still am—though I don't go much.”

“I thought perhaps you weren't entitled to receive it. Well, you know what I'm talking about if you stop to think.” Jubal stood up. “I shan't argue differences between one form of ritual cannibalism and another. Duke, I can't spend more time trying to shake you loose from prejudice. Are you leaving? If you are, I had better escort you off the place. Or do you want to stay? Stay and eat with the rest of us cannibals?”