Jubal tried to explain that all human religions claimed to be in touch with “Old Ones” in one way or another; nevertheless their answers were all different.

Mike looked patiently troubled. “Jubal my brother, I try . . . but I do not grok how this can be right speaking. With my people, the Old Ones speak always rightly. Your people—”

“Hold it, Mike.”

“Beg pardon?”

“When you said, ‘my people’ you were talking about Martians. Mike, you are not a Martian; you are a man.”

“What is ‘Man’?”

Jubal groaned inwardly. Mike could, he was sure, quote the full list of dictionary definitions. Yet the lad never asked a question simply to be annoying; he asked always for information—and he expected his water brother Jubal to be able to tell him. “I am a man, you are a man, Larry is a man.”

“But Anne is not a man?”

“Uh . . . Anne is a man, a female man. A woman.”

(“Thanks, Jubal.”—“Shut up, Anne.”)

“A baby is a man? I have not seen babies, but I have seen pictures—and in the goddam-noi—in stereovision. A baby is not shaped like Anne . . . and Anne is not shaped like you . . . and you are not shaped like I. But a baby is a nestling man?”

“Uh . . . yes, a baby is a man.”

“Jubal . . . I think I grok that my People—‘Martians’—are man. Not shape. Shape is not man. Man is grokking. I speak rightly?”

Jubal made a fierce resolve to resign from the Philosophical Society and take up tatting. What was “grokking”? He had been using the word himself for a week now—and he still didn’t grok it. But what was “Man”? A fearless biped? God’s image? Or simply a fortuitous result of the “survival of the fittest” in a completely circular and tautological definition? The heir of death and taxes? The Martians seemed to have defeated death, and he had already learned that they seemed to have neither money, property, nor government in any human sense—so how could they have taxes?

And yet the boy was right; shape was an irrelevancy in defining “Man,” as unimportant as the bottle containing the wine. You could even take a man out of his bottle, like that poor fellow whose life those Russians had persisted in “saving” by placing his living brain in a vitreous envelope and wiring him like a telephone exchange. Gad, what a horrible joke! He wondered if the poor devil appreciated the grisly humor of what had been done to him.

But how, in essence, from the unprejudiced viewpoint of a Martian, did Man differ from other earthly animals? Would a race that could levitate (and God knows what else) be impressed by engineering? And, if so, would the Aswan Dam, or a thousand miles of coral reef, win first prize? Man’s self-awareness? Sheer local conceit; the upstate counties had not reported, for there was no way to prove that sperm whales or giant sequoias were not philosophers and poets far exceeding any human merit.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself. The very bedrock of humor was—

“Man is the animal who laughs,” Jubal answered.

Mike considered this seriously. “Then I am not a man.”

“Huh?”

“I do not laugh. I have heard laughing and it frighted me. Then I grokked that it did not hurt. I have tried to learn—” Mike threw his head back and gave out a raucous cackle, more nerve-racking than the idiot call of a kookaburra.

Jubal covered his ears. “Stop! Stop!”

“You heard,” Mike agreed sadly. “I cannot rightly do it. So I am not man.”

“Wait a minute, son. Don’t give up so quickly. You simply haven’t learned to laugh yet . . . and you’ll never learn just by trying. But you will learn, I promise you. If you live among us long enough, one day you will see how funny we are—and you will laugh.”

“I will?”

“You will. Don’t worry about it and don’t try to grok it; just let it come. Why, son, even a Martian would laugh once he grokked us.”

“I will wait,” Smith agreed placidly.

“And while you are waiting, don’t ever doubt that you are a man. You are. Man born of woman and born to trouble . . . and some day you will grok its fullness and you will laugh—because man is the animal that laughs at himself. About your Martian friends, I do not know. I have never met them, I do not grok them. But I grok that they may be ‘man.’”

“Yes, Jubal.”