 Why does the Martian boy speak so many languages?
With never a moment to rest, the pursuit through space felt like a game of hounds and hares ... or was it follow the leader? The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets. Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO 2 -breathing Venusians, the first he'd ever seen. "Here we are, monsieur ," piped the Martian boy. The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for their spindly bodies. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and forgotten grandeur. "Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen." He was twenty-four and dressed in the white, crimson-braided uniform of the Odyssey's junior astrogation officer. He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe. At the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents' death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his collection of astronomy and rocketry books. At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space. And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the Odyssey —the first ship, it was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps beyond. A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone above him through Luna City's transparent dome. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. They don't want new men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids.
 He must meet humans from many places, and has only picked up bits of language here and there.
 He must meet humans from many places, and has just taken to learning a little of everything.  Martians have a different perception of Earth culture, and it's what he thinks is appropriate.  He must meet humans from many places, and has only picked up bits of language here and there.  He is trying to confuse Ben, and get him to say something.