“Mmmm . . . son, as long as we are checking you for bats in your belfry, clear up something else. You’ve always spoken of these ‘Old Ones’ as casually as I speak of the neighbor’s dog—but I find ghosts hard to swallow. What does an ‘Old One’ look like?”

“Why, just like any other Martian . . . except that there is more variety in the appearance of adult Martians than there is in us.”

“Then how do you know it’s not just an adult Martian? Doesn’t he walk through walls, or some such?”

“Any Martian can do that. I did, just yesterday.”

“Uh . . . shimmers? Or anything?”

“No. You see, hear, feel them—everything. It’s like an image in a stereo tank, only perfect and put right into your mind. But—Look, Jubal, the whole thing would be a silly question on Mars, but I realize it isn’t, here. But if you had been present at the discorporation—death—of a friend, then you helped eat his body . . . and then you saw his ghost, talked with it, touched it, anything—would you then believe in ghosts?”

“Well, either ghosts, or I myself had slipped my leash.”

“All right. Here it would be an hallucination . . . if I grok correctly that we don’t stay here when we discorporate. But in the case of Mars, there is either an entire planet with a very rich and complex civilization all run by mass hallucination—or the straightforward explanation is correct . . . the one I was taught and the one all my experience led me to believe. Because on Mars the ‘ghosts’ are by far the most important and most powerful and much the most numerous part of the population. The ones still alive, the corporate ones, are the hewers of wood and drawers of water, servants to the Old Ones.”

Jubal nodded. “Okay. I’ll never boggle at slicing with Occam’s razor. While it runs contrary to my own experience, my experience is limited to this planet—provincial. All right, son, you’re scared that they might destroy us?”

Mike shook his head. “Not especially. I think—this is not a grokking but a mere guess—that they might do one of two things: either destroy us . . . or attempt to conquer us culturally, make us over into their own image.”

“But you’re not fretted that they might blow us up? That’s a pretty detached viewpoint, even for me.’

“No. Oh, I think they might reach that decision. You see, by their standards, we are a diseased and crippled people—the things that we do to each other, the way we fail to understand each other, our almost complete failure to grok with one another, our wars and diseases and famines and cruelties—these will be complete idiocy to them. I know. So I think they may very probably decide on a mercy killing. But that’s a guess, I’m not an Old One. But, Jubal, if they decide to do this, it will be—” Mike stopped and thought for quite a long time. “—an utter minimum of five hundred years, more likely five thousand, before anything would be done.”

“That’s a long time for a jury to be out.”

“Jubal, the most different thing about the two races is that Martians never hurry—and humans always do. They would much rather think about it an extra century or half a dozen, just to be sure that they have grokked all the fullness.”

“In that case, son, I suggest that you not worry about it. If, in another five hundred or thousand years, the human race can’t handle its neighbors, you and I can’t help it. However, I suspect that they will be able to.”

“So I grok, but not in fullness. But I said I wasn’t worried about that. The other possibility troubled me more, that they might move in and try to make us over. Jubal, they can’t do it. An attempt to make us behave like Martians would kill us just as certainly but much less painlessly. It would all be a great wrongness.”

Jubal took time to answer. “But, son, isn’t that exactly what you have been trying to do?”

Mike looked unhappy. “Yes and no. It was what I started out to do. It is not what I am trying to do now. Father, I know that you were disappointed in me when I started this.”

“Your business, son.”

“Yes. Self. I must grok and decide at each cusp myself alone. And so must you . . . and so must each self. Thou art God.”

“I don’t accept the nomination.”

“You can’t refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok. Father, I saw the horrible shape this planet is in and I grokked, though not in fullness, that I could change it. What I had to teach couldn’t be taught in schools or colleges; I was forced to smuggle it into town dressed up as a religion—which it is not—and con the marks into tasting it by appealing to their curiosity and their desire to be entertained. In part it worked exactly as I knew it would; the discipline and the knowledge was just as available to others as it was to me, who was raised in a Martian nest. Our brothers get along together—you’ve seen us, you’ve shared—live in peace and happiness with no bitterness, no jealousy.