Right now, Stromberg and Hinton were straightening their dress uniforms preparatory to the feting promised when the rocket was wheeled into Madison Square Garden. UN notables would be there, everyone of any importance, plus every one who could be jammed into the Garden. The rocket would be wheeled up to a speaker's platform, the doors would open and out would step the three heroes and Zeke. Johnson looked at Zeke now with a new and uneasy appraisal. He slumped and then as Johnson motioned to him, Zeke gave a series of grotesque hops. His face, like a monstrous soft rubber mask bought in a novelty shop, twisted into a series of fantastic grimaces. Stromberg and Hinton grinned appreciatively. They thought Zeke was pretty funny. Johnson no longer thought so because he had realized the cultural significance of Zeke's actions. Johnson gestured for Zeke to look through the port view plate. His rubberoid features, which at times suggested a travesty of something very remotely human, bunched up and then spread in all directions as though running into yellow putty. "They're welcoming you to Earth, Zeke. 'Welcome, Zeke,' the signs say. You'll be royally entertained. You'll be wined and dined as they say. You're probably the most extraordinary visitor ever seen anywhere." * * * * * Zeke swung his long, stick-like arms, or appendages, whatever one chose to call them, in long arcs like pendulums, back and forth and to and fro. His three eyes spread wider and wider in an expression of such intense and gigantic astonishment that Stromberg and Hinton bent over and held their stomachs with uncontrollable laughter. The flicker of unease in Johnson's stomach flamed a little stronger. The trouble was that Zeke's culture was so serious, so old and wise and serious, there seemed to be absolutely no sense of humor in it. At least none of any human kind that Johnson had been able to discover. To Zeke, this being an object of humor had no meaning. Zeke could understand, however, the meaning of ridicule, derision and insults and sadness in their actual and realistic sense, divorced from the necessity of contrast that connected these things with laughter, gags, jokes in the human psychology. So Johnson had never explained to Zeke that he was being laughed at, nor what it would mean if he did know he was being an object of laughter. Somehow now, Johnson wished he hadn't lied, that he hadn't explained to Zeke about Stromberg's and Hinton's laughter: "Well, Zeke, that's a kind of appreciation humans express to each other. It means they accept you. A form of politeness, a social amenity." Zeke was saying in the peculiar slurred, high-pitched Martian speech. "It is over-powering, so many of you humans! Even in our most ancient records there is no account of there ever having been so many of us as I see of your kind out there!"