Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Bradley locked eyes with Jubal, then said, “Jim, take over,” and left, with the letter. Jubal sighed inwardly. He had sweated over that letter; Anne and he had been up most of the night preparing draft after draft. Jubal had every intention of arriving at an open settlement, in full view of the world’s news cameras and microphones—but he had no intention of letting Douglas be taken by surprise by any proposal.

Another man stepped forward in answer to Bradley’s order; Jubal sized him up as a prime specimen of the clever, conscienceless young-men-on-the-way-up who gravitate to those in power and do their dirty work; he disliked him on sight. The man smiled heartily and said smoothly, “The name’s Jim Sanforth, Doctor—I’m the Chief’s press secretary. I’ll be buffering for you from now on—arranging your press interviews and so forth. I’m sorry to say that the conference room is not quite ready; there have been last minute changes and we’ve had to move to a larger room. Now it’s my thought that—”

“It’s my thought that we’ll go to that conference room right now. We’ll stand up until chairs are fetched for us.”

“Doctor, I’m sure you don’t understand the situation. They are still stringing wires and things, and that room is swarming with reporters and commentators.”

“Very well. We’ll chat with ’em till you’re ready.”

“No, Doctor. I have instructions—”

“Youngster, you can take your instructions, fold them until they are all corners and shove them in your oubliette. We are not at your beck and call. You will not arrange press interviews for us. We are here for just one purpose: a public conference. If the conference is not ready to meet, we’ll see the press now—in the conference room.”

“But—”

“And that’s not all. You’re keeping the Man from Mars standing on a windy roof.” Harshaw raised his voice. “Is there anyone here smart enough to lead us straight to this conference room without getting lost?”

Sanforth swallowed and said, “Follow me, Doctor.”

The conference room was indeed crowded with newsmen and technicians but there was a big oval table, plenty of chairs, and several smaller tables. Mike was spotted at once and Sanforth’s protests did not keep them from crowding in on him. But Mike’s flying wedge of amateur Amazons got him as far as the big table; Jubal sat him against it with Dorcas and Jill in chairs flanking him and the Fair Witness and Miriam seated behind him. Once this was done, Jubal made no attempt to fend off questions or pictures. Mike had been warned that he would meet lots of people and that many of them would do strange things and Jubal had most particularly warned him to take no sudden actions (such as causing persons or things to go away, or to stop) unless Jill told him to.

Mike took the confusion gravely, without apparent upset; Jill was holding his hand and her touch reassured him.

Jubal wanted news pictures taken, the more the better; as for questions put directly to Mike, Jubal did not fear them and made no attempt to field them. A week of trying to talk with Mike had convinced him that no reporter could possibly get anything of importance out of Mike in only a few minutes—without expert help. Mike’s habit of answering a question as asked, answering it literally and stopping, would be enough to nullify most attempts to pump him.

And so it proved. Most questions Mike answered with a polite: “I do not know,” or an even less committal; “Beg pardon?”

But one question backfired on the questioner. A Reuters correspondent, anticipating a monumental 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 here?”

Mike was aware that he was having trouble grokking in fullness the human concept of property and, in particular, the ideas of bequest and inheritance. So he most carefully avoided inserting his own ideas and stuck to the book—a book which Jubal recognized shortly as Ely on Inheritance and Bequest, chapter one.

Mike related what he had read, with precision and careful lack of expression, like a boring but exact law professor, for page after tedious page, while the room gradually settled into stunned 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, consanguinean and uterine, per stirpes and per capita, and related mysteries. At last Jubal touched his shoulder, “That’s enough, Mike.”

Mike looked puzzled. “There is much more.”

“Yes, but later. Does someone have a question on some other subject?”

A reporter for a London Sunday paper of enormous circulation jumped in with a question closer to his employer’s pocketbook: “Mr. Smith, we understand you like the girls here on Earth. But have you ever kissed a girl?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes.”

“How did you like it?”

Mike barely hesitated over his answer. “Kissing girls is a goodness,” he explained very seriously. “It is a growing-closer. It beats the hell out of card games.”

Their applause frightened him. But he could feel that Jill and Dorcas were not frightened, that indeed they were both trying to restrain that incomprehensible noisy expression of pleasure which he himself could not learn. So he calmed his fright and waited gravely for whatever might happen next.

By what did happen next he was saved from further questions, answerable or not, and was granted a great joy; he saw a familiar face and figure just entering by a side door, “My brother Dr. Mahmoud!” Mike went on talking in overpowering excitement—but in Martian.

The Champion’s staff semanticist waved and smiled and answered in the same jarring language while hurrying to Mike’s side. The two continued talking in unhuman symbols, Mike in an eager torrent, Mahmoud not quite as rapidly, with sound effects like a rhinoceros ramming an ironmonger’s lorry.

The newsmen stood it for some time, those who operated by sound recording it and the writers noting it as local color. But at last one interrupted. “Dr. Mahmoud! What are you saying? Clue us!”

Mahmoud turned, smiled briefly and said in clipped Oxonian speech, “For the most part, I’ve been saying, ‘Slow down, my dear boy—do, please.’”

“And what does he say?”

“The rest of our conversation is personal, private, of no possible interest to others, I assure you. Greetings, y’know. Old friends.” He turned back to Mike and continued to chat—in Martian.

In fact, Mike was telling his brother Mahmoud all that had happened to him in the fortnight since he had last seen him, so that they might grok closer—but Mike’s abstraction of what to tell was purely Martian in concept, it being concerned primarily with new water brothers and the unique 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 ungrokkable vastness of ocean—

Mahmoud had less to tell Mike since less had happened in the interim to him, by Martian standards—one Dionysian excess quite un-Martian and 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 was not ready to discuss. No new water brothers.

He stopped Mike presently and offered his hand to Jubal. “You’re Dr. Harshaw, I know. Valentine Michael thinks he has introduced me to all of you—and he has, by his rules.”

Harshaw looked him over as he shook hands with him. Chap looked and sounded like a huntin’, shootin’, sportin’ Britisher, from his tweedy, expensively casual clothes to a clipped grey moustache… but his skin was naturally swarthy rather than ruddy tan and the genes for that nose came from somewhere close to the Levant. Harshaw did not like fake anything and would choose to eat cold compone over the most perfect syntho “sirloin.”