“Yes! And now I grok them, too! What are You waiting for?”

They quit their jobs and for the next several days saw as many of the revues as possible, during which period Jill made still another discovery: she “grokked naughty pictures” only through a man’s eyes. If Mike watched, she caught and shared his mood, from quiet sensuous pleasure in a beautiful woman to fully aroused excitement at times—but if Mike’s attention was elsewhere, the model, dancer, or peeler was just another woman to Jill, possibly pleasant to look at but in no wise exciting. She was likely to get bored and wish mildly that Mike would take her home. But only mildly for she was now nearly as patient as he was.

She pondered this new fact from all sides and decided that she preferred not to be excited by women other than through his eyes. One man gave her all the problems she could handle and more—to have discovered in herself unsuspected latent Lesbian tendencies would have been entirely too much.

But it certainly was a lot of fun—“a great goodness”—to see those girls through his eyes as he had now learned to see them—and a still greater, ecstatic goodness to know that, at last, he looked at her herself in the same way . . . only more so.

They stopped in Palo Alto long enough for Mike to try (and fail to) swallow all the Hoover Library in mammoth gulps. The task was mechanically impossible; the scanners could not spin that fast, nor could Mike turn pages of bound books fast enough to read them all. He gave up and admitted that he was taking in raw data much faster than he could grok it, even by spending all hours the library was closed in solitary contemplation. With relief Jill moved them to San Francisco and he embarked on a more systematic search.

She came back to their flat one day to find him sitting, not in trance but doing nothing, and surrounded by books—many books: The Talmud, the Kama-Sutra, Bibles in various versions, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Mormon, Patty’s precious copy of the New Revelation, Apocrypha of various sorts, the Koran, the unabridged Golden Bough, The Way, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the sacred writings of a dozen other religions major and minor—even such deviant oddities as Crowley’s Book of the Law.

“Trouble, dear?”

“Jill, I don’t grok.” He waved his hand at the books. (“Waiting, Michael. Waiting for fullness is.”)

“I don’t think waiting will ever fill it. Oh, I know what’s wrong; I’m not really a man, I’m a Martian—a Martian in a body of the wrong shape.”

“You’re plenty of man for me, dear—and I love the way your body is shaped.”

“Oh, you grok what I’m talking about. I don’t grok people. I don’t understand this multiplicity of religions. Now among my people—”

“Your people, Mike?”

“Sorry. I should have said that, among the Martians, there is only one religion—and that one is not a faith, it’s a certainty. You grok it. ‘Thou art God!’”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I do grok . . . in Martian. But you know, dearest, that it doesn’t say the same thing in English . . . or any other human speech. I don’t know why.”

“Mmmm . . . on Mars, when we needed to know anything—anything at all—we could consult the Old Ones and the answer was never wrong. Jill, is it possible that we humans don’t have any ‘Old Ones?’ No souls, that has to mean. When we discorporate—die!—do we die dead . . . die all over and nothing left? Do we live in ignorance because it doesn’t matter? Because we are gone and not a rack behind in a time so short that a Martian would use it for one long contemplation? Tell me, Jill. You’re human.”

She smiled with sober serenity. “You yourself have told me. You have taught me to know eternity and you can’t take it away from me, ever. You can’t die, Mike—you can only discorporate.” She gestured down at herself with both hands. “This body that you have taught me to see through your eyes . . . and that you have loved so well, someday it will be gone. But I shall not be gone . . . I am that I am! Thou art God and I am God and we are God, eternally. I am not sure where I will be, or whether I will remember that I was once Jill Boardman who was happy trotting bedpans and equally happy strutting her stuff in her buff under bright lights. I have liked this body—”

With a most uncustomary gesture of impatience Mike threw away her clothes.

“Thank you, dear,” she said quietly, not stirring from where she was seated. “It has been a nice body to me—and to you—to both of us who thought of it. But I don’t expect to miss it when I am through with it. I hope that you will eat it when I discorporate.”