Stranger in a Strange Land

drank to their female water brothers and Nelson continued, "Jubal, where do you find them?"
                "Raise 'em in my own cellar. Then just when I've got 'em trained and some use to me, some city slicker always comes along and marries them. It's a losing game."
                "I can see how you suffer," Nelson said sympathetically.
                "I do. I trust all of you gentlemen are married?"
                Two were. Mahmoud was not. Jubal looked at him bleakly. "Would you have the grace to discorporate yourself? After lunch, of course-I wouldn't want you to do it on an empty stomach."
                "I'm no threat, I'm a permanent bachelor."
                "Come, come, sir! I saw Dorcas making eyes at you ... and you were purring."
                "I'm safe, I assure you." Mahmoud thought of telling Jubal that he would never marry out of his faith, decided that a gentile would take it amiss-even a rare exception like Jubal. He changed the subject. "But, Jubal, don't make a suggestion like that to Mike. He wouldn't grok that you were joking-and you might have a corpse on your hands. I don't know . . . I don't know that Mike can actually think himself dead. But he would try . . . and if he were truly a Martian, it would work."
                "I'm sure he can," Nelson said firmly. "Doctor-'Jubal,' I mean- have you noticed anything odd about Mike's metabolism?"
                "Uh, let me put it this way. There isn't anything about his metabolism which I have noticed that is not odd. Very."
                "Exactly."
                Jubal turned to Mahmoud. "But don't worry that I might invite Mike to suicide. I've learned not to joke with him, not ever. I grok that he doesn't grok joking." Jubal blinked thoughtfully. "But I don't grok 'grok' -not really. Stinky, you speak Martian."
                "A little."
                "You speak it fluently, I heard you. Do you grok 'grok'?"
                Mahmoud looked very thoughtful. "No. Not really. 'Grok' is the most important word in the Martian language-and I expect to spend the next forty years trying to understand it and perhaps use some millions of printed words trying to explain it. But I don't expect to be successful. You need to think in Martian to grok the word 'grok.' Which Mike does and I don't. Perhaps you have noticed that Mike takes a rather veering approach to some of the simplest human ideas?"
                "Have I! My throbbing head!"
                "Mine, too."
                "Food," announced Jubal. "Lunch, and about time, too. Girls, put it down where we can reach it and maintain a respectful silence. Go on talking, Doctor, if you will. Or does Mike's presence make it better to postpone it?"
                "Not at all." Mahmoud spoke briefly in Martian to Mike. Mike answered him, smiled sunnily; his expression became blank again and he applied himself to food, quite content to be allowed to eat in silence. "I told him what I was trying to do and he told me that I would speak rightly; this was not his opinion but a simple statement of fact, a necessity. I hope that if I fail to, he will notice and tell me. But I doubt if he will. You see, Mike thinks in Martian-and this gives him an entirely different 'map' of the universe from that which you and I use. You follow me?"
                "I grok it," agreed Jubal. "Language itself shapes a man's basic ideas."
                "Yes, but- Doctor, you speak Arabic, do you not?"
                "Eh? I used to, badly, many years ago," admitted Jubal. "Put in a while as a surgeon with the American Field Service, in Palestine. But I don't now. I still read it a little . . . because I prefer to read the words of the Prophet in the original."
                "Proper. Since the Koran cannot be translated-the 'map' changes on translation no matter how carefully one tries. You will understand, then, how difficult I found English. It was not alone that my native language has much simpler inflections and more limited tenses; the whole 'map' changed. English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language-this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible-despite