Stranger in a Strange Land

Jubal wanted pictures, the more the better; as for questions, he did not fear them. A week of talking with Mike had convinced him that no reporter could get anything out of Mike without expert help. Mike's habit of answering literally and stopping would nullify attempts to pump him.

Most questions Mike answered with: «I do not know,» or «Beg pardon?»

A Reuter's correspondent, anticipating a fight over Mike's status as an heir, tried to sneak in his own test of Mike's competence: «Mr. Smith? What do you know about the laws of inheritance?»

Mike knew that he was having trouble grokking the human concept of property and, in particular, the ideas of bequest and inheritance. So he stuck to the book — which Jubal recognized as «Ely on Inheritance and Bequest,» chapter one.

Mike recited what he had read, with precision and no expression, for page after page, while the room settled into silence and his interrogator gulped.

Jubal let it go on until every newsman there knew more than he wanted to know about dower and curtesy, consangui nean and uterine, per stirpes and per capita. At last Jubal said, «That's enough, Mike.»

Mike looked puzzled. «There is more.»

«Later. Does someone have a question on another subject?»

A reporter for a London Sunday paper jumped in with one close to his employer's pocketbook: «Mr. Smith, we understand you like girls. Have you ever kissed a girl?»

«Yes.»

«Did you like it?»

«Yes.»

«How did you like it?»

Mike hardly hesitated. «Kissing girls is a goodness,» he explained. «It beats the hell out of card games.»

Their applause frightened him. But he could feel that Jill and Dorcas were not frightened; they were trying to restrain that noisy expression of pleasure which he could not learn. So he calmed his fright and waited.

He was saved from further questions and was granted a great joy; he saw a familiar figure entering by a side door. «My brother Dr. Mahmoud!» Mike went on in overpowering excitement — in Martian.

The Champion's semantician waved and smiled, answered in the same jarring language while hurrying to Mike. The two continued talking in unhuman symbols, Mike in eager torrent, Mahmoud not as rapidly, with sounds like a rhinoceros ramming a steel shed.

The newsmen stood it for some time, those who used sound recording it and writers noting it as color. At last one interrupted. «Dr. Mahmoud! What are you saying?»

Mahmoud answered in clipped Oxonian, «For the most part I've been saying, “Slow down, my dear boy — do, please”.»

«And what does he say?»

«The rest is personal, private, of no possible int'rest. Greetings, y'know. Old friends.» He continued to chat — in Martian.

Mike was telling his brother all that had happened since he had last seen him, so that they might grok closer — but Mike's abstraction of what to tell was Martian in concept, it being concerned primarily with new water brothers and the flavor of each … the gentle water that was Jill … the depth of Anne … the strange not-yet-fully-grokked fact that Jubal tasted now like an egg, then like an Old One, but was neither — the un grokkable vastness of ocean —

Mahmoud had less to tell since less had happened to him, by Martian standards — one Dionysian excess of which he was not proud, one long day spent lying face down in Washington's Suleiman Mosque, the results of which he had not yet grokked and would not discuss. No new water brothers.

He stopped Mike presently and offered his hand to Jubal. «You're Dr. Harshaw. Valentine Michael thinks he has introduced me — and he has, by his rules.»

Harshaw looked him over as he shook hands. Chap looked like a huntin', shootin', sportin' Britisher, from tweedy, expensively casual clothes to clipped grey mustache… but his skin was swarthy and the genes for that nose came from somewhere near the Levant. Harshaw did not like fakes and would choose cold cornpone over the most perfect syntho «sirloin.»

But Mike treated him as a friend, so «friend» he was, until proved otherwise.

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a «Yank» — vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant, and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, their cooking (cooking!!!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts — and their blind, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris. Four of them crowded around Valentine Michael — at a meeting which should be all male —