the way he did it. I thought of a dog snappinga bumblebee out of the air. Yet my idea that Etl was just an animalhad almost vanished by then.
I got into the habit of talking to him the way you do to a pup. Sortof crooning. "Good fella, Etl. Smart. You learn fast, don't you?"
Stuff like that. And I'd coax him to climb up the front of myspacesuit. There were fine, barb-like prongs along the length of hismany tentacles; I could feel them pulling in the tough, rubberizedfabric, like the claws of a climbing kitten. And he would make a kindof contented chirping that might have had affection in it.
But then there was the time when he bit me. I don't know the reason,unless it was that I had held onto his ball too long. He got myfinger, through the glove, with his snaggy, chalk-hued mandibles,while he made a thin hissing noise.
Pretty soon my hand swelled up to twice its size, and I felt sick.Klein had to relieve me in the cage for a while. The bite turned outto be mildly venomous. Before that, I'd had a rash on my arms. Anallergy, probably; maybe some substance from those Martian plants hadgotten inside my spacesuit and rubbed onto my skin. Who knows? PerhapsEarthly flesh can sense alien life, and reddens to fight it off. Andthere you have one of the potential disadvantages of contact withunknown worlds.
* * * * *
That poisoned bite was one thing. But Etl's show of rage wasanother--a sign of the mixed nature of all his kind, emerging a bitfrom the shadows of enigma. Here revealed was the emotion on whichthings like murder are based. These creatures had it, just as we did.Maybe it's necessary for any kind of thing that can progress upwardfrom nothing. Still, people did not find it reassuring when they heardabout it on the newscast.
After that, popular opinion insisted that the cage be constantlysurrounded by four manned machine-guns pointing inward. And tanks ofcyanogen were so arranged that the poison gas could be sent gushinginto the cage at any time.
Part of my mind felt these precautions were completely exaggerated.There is a certain, ever-present segment of any public, whose jitteryimagination is a constant fuse-cap for panic. Such cowardice angeredme.
But the rest of me went along with Miller when he said: "We're in thedark, Nolan. For all we know, we might be up against very swiftmaturity and inherited memory. And we've got to go on testing Etl ...with toys, psychological apparatus and tools and devices made by hisown people. Suppose he 'remembers' skills from his ancestors, and canbuild dangerous new devices, or make old ones work again? If his kindare bent on being enemies, we'd better find it out as soon aspossible, too, hadn't we? No, I don't truly expect any seriousdevelopments, Nolan. Still--just for insurance--eh?"
* * * * *
A year passed without great mishap--unless I should mention that Aliceand I got married. But it didn't spoil anything, and it raised mymorale. We got a bungalow right on the lab grounds.
A lot had been accomplished, otherwise. Once I let Etl play with mygun, minus cartridges. He was avidly interested; but he paid noattention to the Hopalong cap pistol that I left in its place when Itook the gun back. He figured out how to grip simple Martian tools,threading his tactile members through the holes in their handles; butcomplicated devices of the same origin seemed more of a puzzle to himthan to the rest of us. So our inherited-memory idea faded out.
Etl liked to work with those slender tendrils of his. The dexterityand speed with which he soon learned to build many things with aconstruction set seemed to prove a race background of perhaps ages ofsuch activities. I made a tower or a bridge, while he watched. Then hewas ready to try it on his own, using screwdrivers that Klein had madewith special grips.
Of course we tried dozens of intelligence tests on Etl, mostly of thepuzzle variety, like fitting odd-shaped pieces of plastic together toform a sphere or a cube. He was hard to rate on any common human I.Q.scale. Even for an Earthian, an I.Q. rating is pretty much of amakeshift proposition. There are too many scattered factors that can'tbe touched.
With Etl, it was even tougher. But at the end of that first yearMiller had him pegged at about 120, judging him on the same basis as afive-year-old child. This score scared people a lot, because it seemedto hint at a race of super-beings.
But Miller wasn't jumping to conclusions. He pointed out to thereporters that Etl's kind seemed to grow up very rapidly; 120 wasonly twenty points above the norm--not uncommon among Earthyoungsters, especially those from more gifted families. Etl seemed tohave sprung from corresponding parentage, he said, for it seemed clearthat they had been of the kind that does big things. They'd made apioneering voyage across space, hadn't they?
* * * * *
Etl could make chirps and squeaks and weird animal cries. Humanspeech, however, was beyond his vocal powers, though I knew that hecould understand simple orders. He had a large tympanic membrane or"ear" on his ventral surface. Of course we wondered how his kindcommunicated with one another. The way he groped at my fingers withcertain of his tentacles gave us a clue. There were tiny, nerve-likethreads at their extremities. Seeing them prompted Miller to dosomething as brave as it was foolhardy.
He called in a surgeon and had a nerve in his arm bared. It must havehurt like the devil, but he let Etl clutch it with those thread-likemembers.
I was cockeyed enough to follow Miller's example and found out howmuch it really hurt. The idea was to establish a nerve channel, brainto brain, along which thoughts might pass. But nothing came throughexcept a vague and restless questioning, mixed with the pain of ourexperiment.
"It doesn't work with us, Nolan," Miller said regretfully. "Ournervous systems aren't hooked up right for this sort of stunt, orEtl's nerve cells are too different from ours."
So we had to fall back on simpler methods of communication with Etl.We tried teaching him sign language, but it didn't work too well,because tentacles aren't hands. Klein's inventive ability, plus somepointers from me about how Etl used his tendrils, finally solved theproblem.
Klein made a cylindrical apparatus with a tonal buzzer, operated byelectricity, at one end. It had dozens of stops and controls, theirgrips in the shape of tiny metal rings, along the sides of thecylinder.
First I had to learn a little about how to work that instrument withmy big fingers. The trick was to mold the sounds of the buzzer, ashuman lips and tongue mold and shape tones of the vocal cords, so thatthey became syllables and words.
"Hell-oh-g-g-Et-t-l-l.... Chee-s-s-ee-whad-d I-ee got-t?"
It was tougher for me than learning to play a saxophone is for a boyof ten. And the noises were almost as bad.
I turned the apparatus over to Etl as soon as I could. Let him figureout how to use it. I'd just give him the words, the ideas. Of coursehe had to get educated, learn his cat, dog and rat, and hisarithmetic, the same as a human kid, even if he was from anotherworld. In a way, it was the law. You can't let a youngster, capable oflearning, stay home from school.
And I was Etl's tutor. I thought what a crazy situation we had here;an entity from one planet being brought up on another, without anyreal knowledge of his own folks, and unable to be very close to thoseentities by whom he was being reared. It was strange and sad and alittle comic.
For a while I thought I had a stammering parrot on my hands:"Hel-l-l-l-o ... Hell-oh-g-o ... N-n-ol-l-an-n-n ... Hell-lo-oh."
Etl never lost that habit of repetition. But he made progress in hisstudies.
"One, two, t'ree, fo', fibe, siss ... One time one ee one, toot timeone ee two...."
Picture it the way it was--I, clad in a spacesuit, crouching besideEtl in the cold, thin air inside that cage, tracing numbers and wordsin the dusty soil on the floor, while he read aloud with his voicetube or copied my words and figures with a sharp stick. Outside thetransparent cage, the television cameras would be watching. And Iwould think that maybe in a way Etl was like Tarzan, being raised byapes.
* * * * *
Four more years went by. I had offspring of my own. Pat
ty and Ron.Good-looking, lovable brats. But Etl was my job--and maybe a littlemore than that.
At the end of two years, he stopped growing. He weighed fifty-twopounds and he was the ugliest-looking, elongated, gray-pink, leatheryovoid that you could imagine. But with his voice tube clutched in histendrils, he could talk like a man.
He could take the finest watch, apart, repair and clean it injig-time--and this was just one skill among scores. Toward the end ofthe four years, a Professor Jonas was coming in regularly and gettinginto a spacesuit to give him lessons in physics, chemistry, collegemath, astronomy and biology. Etl was having his troubles withcalculus.
And Etl could at least ape the outward aspects of the thoughts andfeelings of men. There were things he said to me that werecharacteristic, though they came out of apparent sullenness that, forall I knew, had seeds of murder in it: "You're my pal,