Stranger in a Strange Land

never acquired the idea of "window."
                He noticed with approval that the simulation of depth and movement in the "picture" was perfect-some very great artist among these people must have created it. Up until this time he had seen nothing to cause him to think that these people possessed art; his grokldng of them was increased by this new experience and he felt warmed.
                A movement caught his eye; he turned to find his brother removing the false skins as well as the slippers from its legs.
                Jill sighed and wiggled her toes in the grass. "Gosh, how my feet do hurt!" She glanced up and saw Smith watching her with that curiously disturbing baby-faced stare. "Do it yourself if you want to. You'll love it."
                He blinked. "How do?"
                "I keep forgetting. Come here, I'll help you." She got his shoes off, untaped the stockings and peeled them off. "There, doesn't that feel good?"
                Smith wiggled his toes in the cool grass, then said timidly, "But these live?"
                "Sure, they're alive. It's real live grass. Ben paid a lot to have it that way. Why, the special lighting circuits alone cost more than I make in a month. So walk around and let your feet enjoy it."
                Smith missed much of the speech but he did understand that the grass was made up of living beings and that he was being invited to walk on them. "Walk on living things?" he asked with incredulous horror.
                "Huh? Why not? It doesn't hurt this grass; it was specially developed for house rugs."
                Smith was forced to remind himself that a water brother could not lead him into wrongful action. Apprehensively he let himself be encouraged to walk around-and found that he did enjoy it and that the living creatures did not protest. He set his sensitivity for such things as high as possible; his brother was right, this was their proper being-to be walked on. He resolved to enfold it and praise it; the effort was much like that of a human trying to appreciate the merits of cannibalism-a custom which Smith found perfectly proper.
                Jill let out a sigh. "Well, I had better stop playing. I don't know how long we will be safe here."
                "Safe?"
                "We can't stay here, not very long. They may be checking on every conveyance that left the Center this very minute." She frowned and thought. Her place would not do, this place would not do-and Ben had intended to take him to Jubal Harshaw. But she did not know Harshaw; she was not even sure where he lived-somewhere in the Poconos, Ben had said. Well, she would just have to try to find out where he lived and call him. It was Hobson's choice; she had nowhere else to turn.
                "Why are you not happy, my brother?"
                Jill snapped out of her mood and looked at Smith. Why, the poor infant didn't even know anything was wrong! She made a real effort to look at it from his point of view. She failed, but she did grasp that he had no notion that they were running away from . . - from what? The cops? The hospital authorities? She was not sure quite what she had done, or what laws she had broken; she simply knew that she had pitted her own puny self against the combined will of the Big People, the Bosses, the ones who made decisions.
                But how could she tell the Man from Mars what they were up against when she did not understand it herself? Did they have policemen on Mars? Half the time she found talking to him like shouting down a rain barrel.
                Heavens, did they even have rain barrels on Mars? Or rain?
                "Never you mind," she said soberly. "You just do what I tell you to do."
                "Yes."
                It was an unmodified, unlimited acceptance, an eternal yea. Jill suddenly had the feeling that Smith would unhesitatingly jump out the window if she told him to-in which belief she was correct; he would have jumped, enjoyed every scant second of the twenty-storey drop, and accepted without surprise or resentment the discorporation on impact. Nor would he have been unaware that such a fall would kill him; fear of death was an idea utterly beyond him. If a water brother selected for him such a strange discorporation, he would cherish it and try to