“waste food”

“waste food” is Mike’s literal, unsettling expression for the remains left by a person he has made disappear. The phrase brings his unfamiliar Martian understanding into the language of an ordinary household: Mike worries that he has wasted food, while Jubal and Jill must translate what he means and confront the fact that the “food” was two human beings. Its recurrence makes a linguistic misunderstanding into an account of Mike’s lethal power and the moral framework through which he understands it.

Meaning and First Use

After Mike makes Gil Berquist and the man accompanying him disappear, he apologizes for wasting food. Jill quickly clarifies to Jubal that Mike means the two men. The phrase does not erase the event’s gravity for the humans around him; instead, it shows how differently Mike organizes what happened. His regret concerns the loss of food, and he says he did not know how to prevent it, but that a necessity had arisen and he acted as he understood it.

Jubal’s response reveals a corresponding gap on the human side. He admits that he still retains un-Martian ideas about food, then tries to comfort Mike by imagining that the men would have been poor eating and would not have passed inspection. He invokes the Federation convention against “long pig” to reassure Mike that the remains could be considered unfit for food. The attempted joke does not change the outcome; it gives Jubal a way to address Mike within the terms Mike has supplied, while exposing how strange those terms remain to him.

Necessity, Choice, and Danger

Mike takes Jubal’s comfort seriously. Relieved, he says that only an Old One can always be certain of acting rightly at a cusp, and that he still has much to learn and much growing to do before joining them. In this exchange, “waste food” is bound to Mike’s developing judgment: he sees the removal of the men as necessary, yet does not claim the certainty or authority of the Old Ones. His concern is not simply whether the action was permitted, but whether he understood the necessity correctly.

Jubal later tests what Mike would do if someone pointed a gun at Jill. Before answering, Mike asks whether Jubal would be angry if he wasted food. The question connects the earlier event to a possible future threat, and shows that Mike anticipates the same consequence: defending someone may mean making an attacker disappear. When Jubal asks whether the gun alone could be made to vanish, Mike says he could instead stop the man without pain, leaving him discorporate, and that the food left behind would not be damaged.

Jubal presses the distinction further, asking whether Mike could remove only the gun and let its owner continue living. Mike considers this easier, but objects that an armed man left alive might still hurt Jill. The exchange clarifies the phrase’s place in Mike’s reasoning. “Wasting food” is not a separate impulse to consume; it names the consequence of an intervention he regards as necessary to protect someone he trusts. Jubal, by contrast, is trying to find a less final way to neutralize the immediate danger.

Jubal’s Warning and the Expression’s Significance

Jubal uses the expression again when explaining Mike to Duke. Mike may appear gentle, docile, clumsy, and eager to learn, Jubal says, but if he distrusts someone—especially someone he believes is threatening Jill or another water brother—he can become instantly dangerous. Jubal imagines that, had Duke acted on his impulse to strike him while Mike was nearby, Mike would have killed Duke before Jubal could intervene. Mike, Jubal warns, would have been sorrowful about wasting Duke’s body as food, but would not have felt guilty about the killing itself: he would have understood it as a necessity forced upon him.

That contrast gives the phrase its darkest implication. Regret over wasted food is not the same as regret over taking a life. As Jubal explains it, Mike believes the soul is immortal, so death does not carry the same meaning for him that it does for the humans listening. The phrase therefore holds together tenderness and threat: it records Mike’s concern, but also marks the distance between his unfamiliar assumptions and the human fear of irreversible death. What sounds at first like a child’s literal mistake becomes a compact measure of the danger in their incomplete understanding of one another.