Stranger in a Strange Land

wrong.
                But, he reminded himself savagely, two things remained to him~ his own taste and his own pride. If indeed the Fosterites held a monopoly on Truth (as they claimed), if Heaven were open only to Fosterites, then he, Jubal Harshaw, gentleman and free citizen, preferred that eternity of pain. filled damnation promised to all "sinners" who refused the New Revela..1 tion. He might not be able to see the naked Face of God . . but his ~ eyesight was good enough to pick out his social equals-and those Foster~ ites, by damn, did not measure up!
                But he could see how Mike had been misled; the Fosterite "going to Heaven" at a pre-selected time and place did sound like the voluntary and planned "discorporation" which, Jubal did not doubt, was the accepted~ practice on Mars. Jubal himself held a dark suspicion that a better term for.~ the Fosterite practice was "murder"-but such had never been proved and~ had rarely been publicly hinted, much less charged, even when the cult was young and relatively small. Foster himself had been the first to "go to Heaven" on schedule, dying publicly at a self-prophesied instant. Since that first example, it had been a Fosterite mark of special grace . . . and it had been years since any coroner or district attorney had had the temerity to pry into such deaths.
                Not that Jubal cared whether they were spontaneous or induced. In his opinion a good Fosterite was a dead Fosterite. Let them be!
                But it was going to be hard to explain to Mike.
                No use stalling, another cup of coffee wouldn't make it any easier-~ "Mike, who made the world?"
                "Beg pardon?"
                "Look around you. All this. Mars, too. The stars. Everything. Yo~ and me and everybody. Did the Old Ones tell you who made it?"
                Mike looked puzzled. "No, Jubal."
                "Well, you have wondered about it, haven't you? Where did the Silt come from? Who put the stars in the sky? Who started it all? All of it, everything, the whole world, the Universe . - . so that you and I are I talking." Jubal paused, surprised at himself. He had intended to make thc~ usual agnostic approach . . . and found himself compulsively followin~ his legal training, being an honest advocate in spite of himself, attempti~ to support a religious belief he did not hold but which was believed most human beings. He found that, willy-nilly, he was attorney for the orthodoxies of his own race against-he wasn't sure what. An unhuman viewpoint. "How do your Old Ones answer such questions?"
                "Jubal, I do not grok ... that these are questions. I am sorry."
                "Eh? I don't grok your answer."
                Mike hesitated a long time. "I will try. But words are ... are not rightly. Not 'putting.' Not 'mading.' A nowing. World is. World was. World shall be. Now."
                "'As it was in the beginning, so it now and ever shall be, World without end-'"
                Mike smiled happily. "You grok it!"
                "I don't grok it," Jubal answered gruffly, "I was quoting something, uh, an 'Old One' said." He decided to back off and try a new approach; apparently God the Creator was not the easiest aspect of Deity to try to explain to Mike as an opening . . . since Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either-he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days-since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other-with, of course, a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery. Having thus tabled an unanswerable question he had given no thought to it for more than a generation.
                Jubal decided to try to explain the whole idea of religion in its broadest sense and then tackle the notion of Deity and Its aspects later.
                Mike readily agreed that learnings came in various sizes, from little learnings that even a nestling could grok on up to great learnings which only an Old One could grok in perfect fullness. But Jubal's attempt to draw a line between small learnings and great learnings so that "great learnings" would have the human meaning of