"I have seen you," said Villa to Adam, who was gnawing on a drumstick.
"You wear the wig and a bone in the nose, and a tigerskin around you."
"Sure," said Adam. "I'm the Wild Man from Zululand. It's one job where
my color's an advantage."
"A fine job!" said Villa. "You should have come down to my stand. The
best chili in New York."
"I had a bowl there last week. Without my make-up, I mean."
"I will give you a bowl free when we go home. With tacos," added Villa
generously.
"It's good stuff," said the boy.
Calvin Full wiped his fingers and his lips on a handkerchief. He looked
about at the hall, through which the giants had now scattered; some of
them were tinkering with the machines, others were simply loitering, as
if bored by the whole matter of scientific research. They had lost their
early wariness of the humans, and did not carry the green goads, but
kept them tucked into holsters at the back of their swishing skirts.
One of them removed the blond man, Watkins, and set him to doing
something with a pipe-and-block apparatus. The processes they went
through with their strange mechanical and electrical gadgets, the end
results they achieved, were a mystery to Calvin. And as the afternoon
wore on, their conduct as a whole became even more mysterious. It was,
from human standards, totally irrational. One would begin a test,
analysis, or whatever it might be; he would follow it through its
devious windings to its ambiguous result, or to no result, and suddenly
leave it to begin something else, or come to watch the humans perform.
* * * * *
The longer he observed their conduct, the more worried he became.
Finally, after a good bit of hiding and spying, he found out something
which he had been trying to figure for hours; and then it seemed time
for him to talk to someone about their escape.
The blond man had been peering into his briefcase. He zipped it shut
quickly as Calvin approached, with a kind of guilty movement. What does
he have in there? Calvin wondered.
"Mr. Watkins," he said, rubbing his chin and wishing he had a razor,
"did you ever see a scientist, or laboratory assistant, skip from one
thing to another as these creatures do?"
"I never did."
"Nor did I. They don't take care of their equipment, either; several
times one or another has kicked down a neat pile of gear, and once I
distinctly heard something break."
"It might be junked machinery," suggested Watkins.
"I doubt it."