«Very well. We'll chat with 'em.»
«No, Doctor. I have instructions — »
«Youngster, you can take your instructions, fold them until they are all comers — and shove them in your oubliette. We are here for one purpose: a public conference. If the conference is not ready, we'll see the press — in the conference room.»
«But — »
«You're keeping the Man from Mars standing on a windy roof.» Harshaw raised his voice. «Is there anyone smart enough to lead us to this conference room?»
Sanforth swallowed and said, «Follow me, Doctor.»
The conference room was alive with newsmen and technicians but there was a big oval table, chairs, and several smaller tables. Mike was spotted and Sanforth's protest did not keep the crowd back. Mike's flying wedge of Amazons got him to the big table; Jubal sat him against it with Dorcas and Jill flanking him and the Fair Witness and Miriam seated behind him. Then Jubal made no attempt to fend off questions or pictures. Mike had been told that people would do strange things and Jubal had warned him to take no sudden actions (such as causing persons or things to go away, or stop) unless Jill told him to.
Mike took the confusion gravely; Jill was holding his hand and her touch reassured him.
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 —
But Valentine Michael offered these people — including these ubiquitous female creatures — offered them proudly and eagerly as his water brothers, thereby laying on Mahmoud an obligation more binding than that owed to the sons of one's father's brother — since Mahmoud understood the Martian term for such accretive relationships from observation of Martians and did not need to translate it inadequately as «catenative assemblage,» nor even as «things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.» He had seen Martians at home; he knew their poverty (by Earth standards); he had dipped into — and had guessed at far more of — their cultural wealth; and grokked the supreme value that Martians placed on inter-personal relationships.
Well, there was nothing else for it — he had shared water with Valentine Michael and now he must justify his friend's faith in him… he hoped that these Yanks were not complete bounders.
So he smiled warmly. «Yes. Valentine Michael has explained to me — most proudly — that you are all in — » (Mahmoud used one word of Martian.) « — to him.»
«Eh?»
«Water brotherhood. You understand?»
«I grok it.»
Mahmoud doubted if Harshaw did, but went on smoothly, «Since I am in that relationship to him, I must ask to be considered a member of the family. I know your name, Doctor, and I have guessed that this must be Mr. Caxton — I have seen your face pictured at the head of your column, Mr. Caxton — but let me see if I have the young ladies straight. This must be Anne.»
«Yes. But she's cloaked.»
«Yes, of course. I'll pay my respects to her later.»
Harshaw introduced him to the others… and Jill startled him by addressing him with the correct honorific for a water brother, pronouncing it three octaves higher than any Martian would talk but with sore-throat purity of accent. It was one of a dozen words she could speak out of a hundred-odd that she was beginning to understand — but this one she had down pat because it was used to her and by her many times each day.