I Speak for Earth by John Brunner Page A

I love to sing!” And everyone chuckled.
    “Mrs. King?” said Schneider, turning to the spectacled woman.
    “Yes,” she said in a soft, rather high voice—higher than her round face and rather thick set body would have suggested. “Well, my name is King Ti-Pao, or
vice-versa
in the Western style, and I am thirty-six years old. I am a widow; my husband and child were killed by lightning ten years ago. I am a biologist; I have been fortunate to work with Professor Ji-Lao in Hankow for many years and have studied all aspects of the subject, particularly the genetical aspect. I was with the professor during his celebrated experiments with the spawn of frogs in which he contrived to produce an entirely new animal which had never been seen before by chemical and radiative manipulation of the gene material. You will know about this, perhaps.”
    The others nodded; it had been a sensation a few years ago. The new animal had even turned out to be capable ofreproducing its kind, and Ji-Lao’s techniques, people said, would eventually lead to the creation of a whole new species tailored to serve mankind.
    “Also,” Mrs. King continued, “my husband encouraged me to paint pictures, and I have become very successful with my water colors. I do not sing”—this with a shy, amused look at Prodshenko—“but I play very badly the Chinese guitar.”
    “We are all modest,” said Schneider after a pause. “You were actually responsible for designing the genes which Professor Ji-Lao then developed from his frog spawn, weren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the last member of the group. “Right, Lawrence,” he said. “You are obviously bursting to tell us about yourself.”
    The African bounced forward on his chair. “Of course!” he said, grinning. “I am most proud of myself! I am Lawrence Tshekele, which is a sort of South African name which you find in what used to be the Nguni land, but actually I’m from Lagos because my father was a council member of the very first council of the United States of Africa and I was on the way when he was appointed, so I was born there the day the council opened; that makes me age twenty-nine. Nobody has to tell me to be modest, believe me: my father dinned it into me fifty times a day that we in my country had to stand up and blow our own trumpets. So here I blow!” He grinned again in appreciation of his own joke.
    “First off, I speak all the African languages pretty well. Then I speak English like you hear, and French and German and Russian and Hindi and Urdu and some Chinese and some Japanese; now I’m learning Spanish. I pick ’em up like a flytrap collects flies. Professionally I’m an adviser to the government of my country, handling public education campaigns, endeavoring to bring the advantages of civilization to depressed areas, attempting to integrate backward people into a city society. In my spare time I write, the results of this effort are
The Harbor Bar
and
African Checkerboard
and a couple of others.”
    He sat back, and suddenly he was again the same rather ugly nervous-seeming person Joe had seen him to be when he came in. The transformation was almost startling.
    There was a short pause. During it, Joe found himself looking at Schneider. Everyone else, suddenly, was also lookingat him. It came to Joe that somehow, without it being clear how, Schneider was dominating this group. It showed, for instance, in the way he had broken the Russian Prodshenko’s defiant mask with a well-chosen remark.
    And yet Schneider had said he was worried.
    Well, the only logical conclusion was that he worried over very small problems. All the major ones—Joe was certain-were safe in his capable hands.
    “Right!” said Schneider thoughtfully. “I’d like you to get a bit better acquainted with one another, to start with. I’m not making that an order—just telling you. We won’t make any demands on your time for a few days yet; it’s up to you what