“Watch yourself!” Ruth-Ann warned. “He’s your boss!”
The Admiral glowered at her, but stopped. He yawned and stretched. “Not used to staying up all night any more,” he said. “Kind of takes it out of me, but Go ahead!” he snapped as the intercom called hi name.
“Administrator Doane has been located by the search party, sir,” said the officer. “Any orders?”
“Hold him there,” roared the Admiral. “And get a car in front of the door in thirty seconds I’m going to meet him!”
He clicked off the switch as Ruth-Ann corrected, “We’re going to meet him, Admiral! If that big stuffed-shirt thinks he can scare me out of my wits and stir up every Martian from here to”
“Hey, wait a minute!” the Admiral protested. “I thought you wouldn’t let me call him names!”
“That’s you,” Ruth-Ann said shortly. “The rules are different for me. Come on. Admiral. What are you waiting for?”
They found Earth Administrator Jaffa Doane sitting on the ramp before an abandoned and decrepit Martian dwelling, staring into space. Admiral Rosenman dismissed the detail and helped the Administrator into the pressurized car. Doane’s attention was elsewhere. Rosenman had to remind him even to take the oxygen plugs out of his nostrils.
“Thanks,” said Doane absently.
And, after a pause, “I messed it up, didn’t I?”
“You did,” the Admiral told him. “You messed it up enough to put forty-eight Martians in the hospital the Earth hospital.”
Doane blinked.
“For physical injuries,” the Admiral explained. “The Martians don’t ordinarily hospitalize for that; a couple of hours of what they call good thinking and they can patch almost anything that’s wrong with themselves. But these were pretty well beat up, mostly from running into moving vehicles, and I don’t think there’s a Martian within fifty miles that’s capable of good thinking right now.”
Jaffa Doane shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he com-plained. “All I did was try to save a man’s life. Maybe I was wrong I don’t know. But how could it make so much trouble? Rioting like crazy people. Getting themselves run over and all because of a thing like that. I could understand it if they were ignorant natives, only they’re not ignorant; they have a civilization of their own. How can these silly customs mean so much to them?”
The Admiral exploded, “Don’t you understand yet? It is not just a silly custom! They were crazy, all right, but not because you violated a silly tabu because you did the thing that was bound to drive them insane. You pushed them across the brink. They were sick. Infected by you.”
“But”
“Don’t argue with me! Sickness is not only of the body; even an Earthman can have mental illnesses, too. And Martians have no other kind. Shock them and they get sick. When they’re sick, they need to be healed. If you break a leg, you splint it; if a Martian’s mind is injured, it needs to be splinted with a stronger, stabler mind.
“Think back to the ship, Doane! When Ne Mieek begged you to touch the other Martian, did you think it was only a primitive custom? It was not. It was splinting and healing. When you made contact with him, his mind was braced against yours and you were the one who helped him grow well.”
Doane swallowed. “All right,” he said reasonably.
“Granted. But that’s one thing and murder is another.
What about the one I was supposed to kill?”
“The same principle, Doane. Even a Martian doesn’t live forever and when he is too sick to be cured, he has to die. The only way a Martian can die is by being physically destroyed. He can’t kill himself. No Martian can.
He can’t be killed by another Martianthe shock would destroy him. So you’re elected, Doanethe strongest, stablest being on Mars the Earth Administrator.”
Doane protested, “But what about the time before the Earthmen were here? How did they manage?”
Rosenman shrugged. “They didn’t have Earthmen to do the dirty work, so they used Martians, of course.”
“But you said”
“I know what I said. Take a look around you, Doane.”
He gestured out the window at the rickety, abandoned buildings called the Shacks.
Compared with the clean, functional lines of the rest of the Martian architecture, the Shacks were a hideous blot. They leaned and they staggered. They were put together at random distances out of random materials. They looked unfit for even human habitation, much less Martian.
“This is where they lived, the Outcasts,” Rosenman said. “The strongest and healthiest of every generation, selected by rigorous tests and segregated into a caste of Healers. It was an honor to be a Healer, Doane the greatest, most tragic honor that a Martian could attain.
Read the Martian literature. It has noble stories in it, the Healers who sacrificed themselves for others. They were untouchables. There were a couple of hundred of them all the time, right here in the Shacks, injured mentally every time they had to put an incurable out of his misery, until they were beyond repair and had to be destroyed after a few years of agonizing service.”
“And when we came, we became the untouchables?”
Rosenman hesitated. “Well, not exactly,” he said, a little less roughly. “We took over the functions of the Healers to some extent, yes. After all, we Earthmen aren’t as sensitive; and just for that reason, we’re more stable.
But, of course, even we crack up when the pressure is too great. Suppose the picture was different, Doane; suppose it was the Martians who were stronger and stabler, and suppose they came to Earth and showed us a way of emptying our asylums.
“We use psychiatrists because they’re all we have all the Martians had were the Healers. But the Healers weren’t altogether satisfactory, as you can see, because it’s an expensive cure that merely passes the disease on to someone else. Our psychiatrists aren’t as effective as they should be, either they’re human, too; they have their own problems, which seriously interfere with and become intermingled with those of their patients.
“If the Martians had come to us with a real cure, not the half-cure that psychiatrists are capable of, we’d be stupid to go on using inadequate therapy. And the Martians aren’t stupid. In fact, that’s the mistake you and your Equality League made.”
The Administrator flared, “That’s enough, Resenman!
The Equality League never”
“Wait a minute! Admit it, Doane you came here all full of red-hot ideas-about how the Earth masters should be kind to their Martian slaves. No, don’t argue; that’s how it looked to you. Think it over. But the Martians aren’t slaves, you see. In many ways, they’re more cultured and smarter and a lot more sensitive than you and 1. In some ways, in fact, they remind me of my grandfather.”
“Your what?” Doane gasped, baffled.
“My grandfather. He was a very religious man,” the Admiral explained reminiscently. “Every Friday night, we’d have the candles for the Sabbath, and well, I don’t know how familiar you are with the ritual, but on the Sabbath, the truly orthodox aren’t allowed to work from sundown to sundown’. Not even lighting the candles. So my grandfather used to hire an Irish kid from the neighborhood to be our candle lightera shabbas goy, he called him.
“Marty Madden, the boy’s name was. Marty wasn’t any better than we were or any worse I don’t think my grandfather ever thought that. But he was, in that one way, different; he could do something for us that we weren’t allowed to do for ourselves. So, naturally, he did it. Just as you and I, Doane, do things for the Martians that they can’t do for themselves.”
The Admiral started the car for the trip back.
“I used to know Marty pretty well,” he said. “We went to the same school during the week. In a way, I was sorry for him he missed all the fun of the feasts and so on. In another way, I envied him, because he could do things I couldn’t. But I never thought that so many years later, forty million miles from Mosholu Parkway, I’d be taking his job away from him…”