Stranger in a Strange Land

playmates. He was firmly convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his own belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man alone?
                Around midnight he wearily put out his twenty-seventh cigarette and sat up; the lights came on. "Front!" he shouted at the microphone beside his bed.
                Shortly Dorcas came in, dressed in robe and slippers. She yawned widely and said, "Yes, Boss?"
                "Dorcas, for the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, useless, no-good parasite."
                She nodded and yawned again. "Everybody knows that."
                "Never mind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible-a time to stand up and be counted- strike a blow for liberty-smite the wicked."
                "Ummm..."
                "SO quit yawning, the time has come."
                She glanced down at herself. "Maybe I had better get dressed."
                "Yes. Get the other girls up, too; we're going to be busy. Throw a bucket of cold water over the Duke and tell him I said to dust off the babble machine and hook it up in my study. I want the news, all of it."
                Dorcas looked startled and all over being sleepy. "You want Duke to hook up stereovision?"
                "You heard me. Tell him I said that if it's out of order, he should pick a direction and start walking. Now get along with you; we've got a busy night ahead."
                "All right," Dorcas agreed doubtfully, "but I think I ought to take your temperature first."
                "Peace, woman!"
                Duke had Jubal Harshaw's stereo receiver hooked up in time to let Jubal see a late rebroadcast of the second phony interview with the "Man from Mars." The commentary included the rumor about moving Smith to the Andes. Jubal put two and two together and got twenty-two, after which he was busy calling people until morning. At dawn Dorcas brought him his breakfast, six raw eggs beaten into brandy. He slurped them down while reflecting that one of the advantages of a long and busy life was that eventually a man got to know pretty near everybody of real importance- and could call on them in a pinch.
                Harshaw had prepared a time bomb but did not propose to trigger it until the powers-that-be forced him to do so. He had realized at once that the government could haul Smith back into captivity on the grounds that he was incompetent to look out for himself . . . an opinion with which Harshaw agreed. His snap opinion was that Smith was both legally insane and medically psychopathic by all normal standards, the victim of a double-barreled situational psychosis of unique and monumental extent, first from being raised by non-humans and second from having been translated suddenly into a society which was completely alien to him.
                Nevertheless he regarded both the legal notion of sanity and the medical notion of psychosis as being irrelevant to this case. Here was a human animal who had made a profound and apparently successful adjustment to an alien society . . . but as a malleable infant. Could the same subject, as an adult with formed habits and canalized thinking, make another adjustment just as radical, and much more difficult for an adult to make than for an infant? Dr. Harshaw intended to find out; it was the first time in decades he had taken real interest in the practice of medicine.
                Besides that, he was tickled at the notion of balking the powers-that-be. He had more than his share of that streak of anarchy which was the political birthright of every American; pitting himself against the planetary government fined him with sharper zest for living than he had felt in a generation.

    XI

                AROUND A MINOR G-TYPE STAR fairly far out toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy the planets of that star swung as usual, just as they had for billions of years, under the influence of a slightly modified inverse square law that shaped the space around them. Three of them were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were mere pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black outer reaches of space. All of them, as is always