“Oh, just a follow-up on the jail break. Some few of those in jail or prison I couldn’t release; they were vicious. So I got rid of them before I got rid of the bars and doors. But I have been slowly grokking this whole city for many months now . . . and quite a few of the worst were not in jail. Some of them were even in public office. I have been waiting, making a list, making sure of fullness in each case. So, now that we are leaving this city—they don’t live here anymore. Missing. They needed to be discorporated and sent back to the foot of the line to try again. Incidentally, that was the grokking that changed Jill’s attitude from squeamishness to hearty approval: when she finally grokked in fullness that it is utterly impossible to kill a man—that all we were doing was much like a referee removing a man from a game for ‘unnecessary roughness.’”

“Aren’t you afraid of playing God, lad?”

Mike grinned with unashamed cheerfulness. “I am God. Thou art God . . . and any jerk I remove is God, too. Jubal, it is said that God notes each sparrow that falls. And so He does. But the proper closest statement of it that can be made in English is that God cannot avoid noting the sparrow because the Sparrow is God. And when a cat stalks a sparrow both of them are God, carrying out God’s thoughts.”

Another sky car started to land and vanished just before touching; Jubal hardly thought it worth comment. “How many did you find worthy of being tossed out of the game last night?”

“Oh, quite a number. About a hundred and fifty, I guess—I didn’t count. This is a large city, you know. But for a while it is going to be an unusually decent one. No cure, of course—there is no cure, short of acquiring a hard discipline.” Mike looked unhappy. “And that is what I must ask you about, Father. I’m afraid I have misled the people who have followed me. All our brothers.”

“How, Mike?”

“They’re too optimistic. They have seen how well it has worked for us, they all know how happy they are, how strong and healthy and aware—how deeply they love each other. And now they think they grok that it is just a matter of time until the whole human race will reach the same beatitude. Oh, not tomorrow—some of them grok that two thousand years is but a moment for such an experiment. But eventually.

“And I thought so, too, at first. I led them to think so.

“But, Jubal, I had missed a key point:

“Humans are not Martians.

“I made this mistake again and again—corrected myself . . . and still made it. What works perfectly for Martians does not necessarily work for humans. Oh, the conceptual logic which can be stated only in Martian does work for both races. The logic is invariant . . . but the data are different. So the results are different.

“I couldn’t see why, if people were hungry, some of them didn’t volunteer to be butchered so that the rest could eat . . . on Mars this is obvious—and an honor. I couldn’t understand why babies were so prized. On Mars our two little girls in there would simply be dumped outdoors, to live or to die—and on Mars nine out of ten nymphs die their first season. My logic was right but I had misread the data: here babies do not compete but adults do; on Mars adults don’t compete at all, they’ve been weeded out as babies. But one way or another, competing and weeding has to take place . . . or a race goes down hill.

“But whether or not I was wrong in trying to take the competition out at both ends, I have lately begun to grok that the human race won’t let me, no matter what.”

Duke stuck his head into the room. “Mike? Have you been watching outside? There is quite a crowd gathering around the hotel.”

“I know,” agreed Mike. “Tell the others that waiting has not filled.” He went on to Jubal, “‘Thou art God.’ It’s not a message of cheer and hope, Jubal. It’s a defiance—and an unafraid unabashed assumption of personal responsibility.” He looked sad. “But I rarely put it over. A very few, so far just these few here with us today, our brothers, understood me and accepted the bitter half along with the sweet, stood up and drank it—grokked it. The others, the hundreds and thousands of others, either insisted on treating it as a prize without a contest—a ‘conversion’ . . . or ignored it entirely. No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that all the trouble they are in is of their own doing . . . is one that they can’t or won’t entertain.”