Stranger in a Strange Land

beauty."
                "Eh?" Jubal turned to Jill. 'When did this happen?"
                "Yesterday afternoon while you were napping, Jubal. It's all right- Duke was very careful not to let him get hurt."
                "Umm ... well, obviously he did not get hurt. Mike, have you been reading?"
                "Yes, Jubal."
                "What?"
                "I have read," Mike recited carefully, "three more volumes of the Encyclopedia, Maryb to Mushe, Mushr to Ozon, P to Planti. You have told me not to read too much of the Encyclopedia at one reading, so I then stopped. I then read the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by Master William Shakespeare of London. I then read the Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Sein gait as translated into English by Arthur Machen. I then read The Art of Cross-Exam mat ion by Francis Weilman. I then tried to grok what I had read until Jill told me that I must come to breakfast."
                "And did you grok it?"
                Smith looked troubled. "Jubal, I do not know."
                "Is anything bothering you, Mike?"
                "I do not grok all fullness of what I read. In the history written by Master William Shakespeare I found myself full of happiness at the death of Romeo. Then I read on and learned that he had discorporated too soon-or so I thought I grokked. Why?"
                "He was a blithering young idiot."
                "Beg pardon?"
                "I don't know, Mike."
                Smith considered this. Then he muttered something in Martian and added, "I am only an egg."
                "Eh? You usually say that when you want to ask a favor, Mike. What is it this time? Speak up."
                Smith hesitated. Then he blurted out, "Jubal my brother, would please you ask Romeo why he discorporated? I cannot ask him; I am only an egg. But you can-and then you could teach me the grokking of it."
                For the next several minutes the conversation became very tangled. Jubal saw at once that Mike believed that Romeo of Montague had been a living, breathing person, and Jubal managed with no special shock to his own concepts to realize that Mike expected him to be able, somehow, to conjure up Romeo's ghost and demand of him explanations for his conduct when in the flesh.
                But to get over to Mike the idea that none of the Capulets and Montagues had ever had any sort of corporate existence was another matter. The concept of fiction was nowhere in Mike's experience; there was nothing on which it could rest, and Jubal's attempts to explain the idea were so emotionally upsetting to Mike that Jill was afraid that he was about to roll up into a ball and withdraw himself.
                But Mike himself saw how perilously close he was coming to that necessity and he had already learned that he must not resort to this refuge in the presence of his friends, because (with the exception of his brother Doctor Nelson) it always caused them emotional disturbance. So he made a mighty effort, slowed down his heart, calmed his emotions, and smiled. "I will waiting till a grokking comes of itself."
                "That's better," agreed Jubal. "But hereafter, before you read anything, ask me or ask Jill, or somebody, whether or not it is fiction. I don't want you to get mixed up."
                "I will ask, Jubal." Mike decided that, when he did grok this strange idea, that he must report the fullness to the Old Ones . . . and suddenly found himself wondering if the Old Ones knew about "fiction." The completely incredible idea that there might be something which was as strange to the Old Ones as it was to himself was so much more revolutionary (indeed heretically so) than the sufficiently weird concept of fiction that he hastily put it aside to cool, saved it for future deep contemplation.
                "-but I didn't," his brother Jubal was saying, "call you in here to discuss literary forms. Mike, you remember the day that Jill took you away from the hospital?"
                "'Hospital'?" Mike repeated.
                "I'm not sure, Jubal," Jill interrupted, "that Mike ever knew that it was a hospital-at least I never told him it was one. Let me try it."
                "Go ahead."
                "Mike, you remember the place