Stranger in a Strange Land

this miracle with anyone I did not already love and trust-Jubal, I am physically unable even to attempt love with a female who has not already shared water with me. And this same thing runs all through the Nest. Psychic impotence unless our spirits blend as our flesh blends."
                Jubal had been listening and thinking mournfully that it was a fine system-for angels-when a sky car landed on the private landing flat diagonally in front of him. He turned his head to see and, as its skids touched, it disappeared, vanished.
                "Trouble?" he said.
                "No trouble," Mike denied. "It's just that they are beginning to suspect that we are here-that I am here, rather. They think the rest are dead. The Innermost Temple, I mean. The other circles aren't being bothered especially . . . and many of them have left town until it blows over." He grinned. "We could get a good price for these hotel rooms; the city is filling up 'way past capacity with Bishop Short's shock troops."
                "Well? Isn't it about time to get the family elsewhere?"
                "Jubal, don't worry about it. That car never had a chance to report, even by radio. I'm keeping a close watch. It's no trouble, now that Jill is over her misconceptions about 'wrongness' in discorporating persons who have wrongness in them. I used to have to go to all sorts of complicated expedients to protect us. But now Jill knows that I do it only as fullness is grokked." The Man from Mars grinned boyishly. "Last night she helped me with a hatchet job . . . nor was it the first time she has done so."
                "What sort of a job?"
                "Oh, just a follow-up on the jail break. Some few of those in jail or prison I couldn't release; they were vicious. So I got rid of them before I got rid of the bars and doors. But I have been slowly grokking this whole city for many months now . . . and quite a few of the worst were not in jail. Some of them were even in public office. I have been waiting, making a list, making sure of fullness in each case. So, now that we are leaving this city-they don't live here anymore. Missing. They needed to be discorporated and sent back to the foot of the line to try again. Incidentally, that was the grokking that changed Jill's attitude from squeamishness to hearty approval: when she finally grokked in fullness that it is utterly impossible to kill a man-that all we were doing was much like a referee removing a man from a game for 'unnecessary roughness.'"
                "Aren't you afraid of playing God, lad?"
                Mike grinned with unashamed cheerfulness. "I am God. Thou art God . . . and any jerk I remove is God, too. Jubal, it is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God's thoughts."
                Another sky car started to land and vanished just before touching; Jubal hardly thought it worth comment. "How many did you find worthy of being tossed out of the game last night?"
                "Oh, quite a number. About a hundred and fifty. I guess-I didn't count. This is a large city, you know. But for a while it is going to be an unusually decent one. No cure, of course-there is no cure, short of acquiring a hard discipline." Mike looked unhappy. "And that is what I must ask you about, Father. I'm afraid I have misled the people who have followed me. All our brothers."
                "How, Mike?"
                "They're too optimistic. They have seen how well it has worked for us, they all know how happy they are, how strong and healthy and aware-how deeply they love each other. And now they think they grok that it is just a matter of time until the whole human race will reach the same beatitude. Oh, not tomorrow-some of them grok that two thousand years is but a moment for such an experiment. But eventually.
                "And I thought so, too, at first. I led them to think so. But, Jubal, I had missed a key point: Humans are not Martians. I made this mistake again and again-corrected myself ... and still made it. What works perfectly for Martians does not necessarily work for humans. Oh, the conceptual logic which can be stated only