Stranger in a Strange Land

wife in her show. But when she dressed and returned to their hotel room, she felt him inside before she reached the room.
                The door opened for her, she stepped inside, it closed behind her. "Hello, darling!" she called out. "How nice you came home!"
                He smiled gently. "I now grok naughty pictures." Her clothes vanished. "Make naughty pictures."
                "Huh? Yes, dear, of course." She ran through much the same poses she had earlier in the day. With each one, as soon as she was in it, Mike let her use his eyes to see herself. She looked at herself and felt his emotions and felt her own swell in response in a closed and mutually amplified re-echoing. At last she placed herself in a pose as randily carefree as her imagination could devise.
                "Naughty pictures are a great goodness," Mike said gravely.
                "Yes! And now I grok them, too! What are you waiting for?"
                They quit their jobs and for the next several days saw as many of the revues as possible, during which period Jill made still another discovery: she "grokked naughty pictures" only through a man's eyes. If Mike watched, she caught and shared his mood, from quiet sensuous pleasure in a beautiful woman to fully aroused excitement at times-but if Mike's attention was elsewhere, the model, dancer, or peeler was just another woman to Jill, possibly pleasant to look at but in no wise exciting. She was likely to get bored and wish mildly that Mike would take her home. But only mildly for she was now nearly as patient as he was.
                She pondered this new fact from all sides and decided that she preferred not to be excited by women other than through his eyes. One man gave her all the problems she could handle and more-to have discovered in herself unsuspected latent Lesbian tendencies would have been entirely too much.
                But it certainly was a lot of fun-"a great goodness"-~to see those girls through his eyes as he had now learned to see them-and a still greater, ecstatic goodness to know that, at last, he looked at her herself in the same way . . . only more so.
                They stopped in Palo Alto long enough for Mike to try (and fail to) swallow all the Hoover Library in mammoth gulps. The task was mechanically impossible; the scanners could not spin that fast, nor could Mike turn pages of bound books fast enough to read them all. He gave up and admitted that he was taking in raw data much faster than he could grok it, even by spending all hours the library was closed in solitary contemplation. With relief Jill moved them to San Francisco and he embarked on a more systematic search.
                She came back to their flat one day to find him sitting, not in trance but doing nothing, and surrounded by books-many books: The Talmud, the Kama-Sutra, Bibles in various versions, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Mormon, Patty's precious copy of the New Revelation, Apocrypha of various sorts, the Koran, the unabridged Golden Bough, The Way, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the sacred writings of a dozen other religions major and minor-even such deviant oddities as Crowley's Book of the Law.
                "Trouble, dear?"
                "Jill, I don't grok." He waved his hand at the books. ("Waiting, Michael Waiting for fullness is~ ")
                "I don't think waiting will ever fill it. Oh, I know what's wrong; I'm not really a man, I'm a Martian-a Martian in a body of the wrong shape."
                "You're plenty of man for me, dear-and I love the way your body is shaped."
                "Oh, you grok what I'm talking about. I don't grok people. I don't understand this multiplicity of religions. Now among my people-"
                "Your people, Mike?"
                "Sorry. I should have said that, among the Martians, there is only one religion-and that one is not a faith, it's a certainty. You grok it. 'Thou art God!"
                "Yes," she agreed. "I do grok ... in Martian. But you know, dearest, that it doesn't say the same thing in English . . . or any other human speech. I don't know why."
                "Mmmm ... on Mars, when we needed to know anything-anything at all-we could consult the Old Ones and the answer was never wrong. Jill, is it possible that we humans don't