“Yes, Becky. But we call her ‘Allie’ because we’ve got another Becky. But you’ll have to wait. And don’t scoff at her horoscopes, Jubal; she has the Sight.”

“Oh, balderdash, Stinky. Astrology is nonsense and you know it.”

“Oh, certainly. Even Allie knows it. And a percentage of astrologers are clumsy frauds. Nevertheless Allie practices it even more assiduously than she used to, when she did it for the public—using Martian arithmetic now and Martian astronomy—much fuller than ours. But it’s her device for grokking. It could be gazing into a pool of water, or a crystal ball, or examining the entrails of a chicken. The means she uses to get into the mood do not matter and Mike has advised her to go on using the symbols she is used to. The point is: she has the Sight.”

“What the hell do you mean by ‘the Sight,’ Stinky?”

“The ability to grok more of the universe than that little piece you happen to be sitting on at the moment. Mike has it from years of Martian discipline; Allie was an untrained semi-adept. The fact that she used as meaningless a symbol as astrology is beside the point. A rosary is meaningless, too—I speak of a Muslim rosary, of course; I’m not criticizing our competitors across the street.” Mahmoud reached into his pocket, got out one, started fingering it. “If it helps to turn your hat around during a poker game—then it helps. It is irrelevant that the hat has no magic powers and cannot grok.”

Jubal looked at the Islamic device for meditation and ventured a question he had hesitated to put before. “Then I take it you are still one of the Faithful? I had thought perhaps that you had joined Mike’s church all the way.”

Mahmoud put away the beads. “I have done both.”

“Huh? Stinky, they’re incompatible. Or else I don’t grok either one.”

Mahmoud shook his head. “Only on the surface. You could say, I suppose, that Maryam took my religion and I took hers; we consolidated. But, Jubal my beloved brother, I am still God’s slave, submissive to His will . . . and nevertheless can say: ‘Thou art God, I am God, all that groks is God.’ The Prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say—only fanatics after his lifetime insisted on those two very misleading fallacies. Submission to God’s will is not to become a blind robot, incapable of free decision and thus of sin—and the Koran does not say that. Submission can include—and does include—utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden . . . or to rend and destroy.” He smiled. “‘With God all things are possible,’ if I may borrow for a moment—except one thing . . . the one Impossible. God cannot escape Himself, He cannot abdicate His own total responsibility—He forever must remain submissive to His own will. Islam remains—He cannot pass the buck. It is His—mine . . . yours . . . Mike’s.”

Jubal heaved a sigh. “Stinky, theology always gives me the pip. Where’s Becky? Can’t she knock off this dictionary work and say hello to an old friend? I’ve seen her only once in the last twenty-odd years; that’s too long.”

“You’ll see her. But she can’t stop now, she’s dictating. Let me explain the technique, so that you won’t insist. Up to now, I’ve been spending part of each day in rapport with Mike—just a few moments although it feels like an eight-hour day. Then I would immediately dictate all that he had poured into me onto tape. From those tapes several other people, trained in Martian phonetics but not necessarily advanced students, would make long-hand phonetic transcriptions. Then Maryam would type them out, using a special typer—and this master copy Mike or I—Mike by choice, but his time is choked—would correct by hand.

“But our schedule has been disturbed now, and Mike groks that he is going to send Maryam and me away to some Shangri-La to finish the job—or, more correctly, he has grokked that we will grok such a necessity. So Mike is getting months and years of tape completed in order that I can take it away and unhurriedly break it into a phonetic script that humans can learn to read. Besides that, we have stacks of tapes of Mike’s lectures—in Martian—that need to be transcribed into print when the dictionary is finished . . . lectures that we understood at the time with his help but later will need to be printed, with the dictionary.

“Now I am forced to assume that Maryam and I will be leaving quite soon, because, busy as Mike is with a hundred other things, he’s changed the method. There are eight bedrooms here equipped with tape recorders. Those of us who can do it best—Patty, Jill, myself, Maryam, your friend Allie, some others—take turns in those rooms. Mike puts us into a short trance, pours language—definitions, idioms, concepts—into us for a few moments that feel like hours . . . then we dictate at once just what he has poured into us, exactly, while it’s still fresh. But it can’t be just anybody, even of the Innermost Temple. It requires a sharp accent and the ability to join the trance rapport and then spill out the results. Sam, for example, has everything but the clear accent—he manages, God knows how, to speak Martian with a Bronx accent. Can’t use him, it would cause endless errata in the dictionary. And that is what Allie is doing now—dictating. She’s still in the semi-trance needed for total recall and, if you interrupt her, she’ll lose what she still hasn’t recorded.”