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."

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 most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, of course, although they were hardly to be blamed for that� their cooking (cooking!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts� and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris. Four of them here, crowded around Valentine Michael - at a meeting which certainly should be all male. But Valentine Michael had offered him all these people - including these ubiquitous female creatures - offered them proudly and eagerly as his water brothers, thereby laying on Mahmoud a family obligation closer and 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 direct observation of what it meant to Martians and did not need to translate it clumsily and 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 extreme poverty (by Earth standards); he had dipped into - and had guessed at far more - of their cultural extreme wealth; and had grokked quite accurately the supreme value that Martians place on interpersonal 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 simply hoped that these Yanks were not complete bounders.

So he smiled warmly and shook hands firmly. "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 strongly doubted if Harshaw did, but he went on smoothly, "Since I myself am already in that relationship to him, I must ask to be considered a member of the family. I know your name, and I have guessed that this must be Mr. Caxton - in fact I have seen your face pictured at the head of your column, Mr. Caxton; I read it when I have opportunity - but let me see if I have the young ladies straight. This must be Anne."

"Yes. But she's cloaked at the moment."

"Yes, of course. I'll pay my respects to her when she is not busy professionally."

Harshaw introduced him to the other three� and Jill startled him by addressing him with the correct honorific for a water brother, pronouncing it about three octaves higher than any adult Martian would talk but with sore-throat purity of accent. It was one of the scant dozen Martian words she could speak out of the 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.