That same night, Klein and Craig put the lump of mud in a small glass
case from which two-thirds of the air had been exhausted. The
remainder was kept dehydrated and chilled. It was guess work, backed
up by evidence: The rusty red of that mud; the high hemoglobin content
of the alien blood we had seen; the dead-air cells--resistant to
cold--in the shreds of rough skin that we had examined. And then there
was the fair proximity of Mars and Earth in their orbits at the time.
My job didn't really begin till the following evening, when Craig and
Klein had completed a much larger glass cage, to which my
outlandish--or, rather, outworldish--ward was transferred. Miller
provided me with a wire-braced, airtight costume and oxygen helmet,
the kind fliers use at extreme altitudes. Okay, call it a spacesuit.
He also gave me a small tear-gas pistol, an automatic, and a knife.
All there was to pit such armament against was a seemingly helpless
lump of protoplasm, two inches in diameter. Still, here was an
illustration of how cautiously you are prompted to treat so unknown a
quantity. You are unable to gauge its powers, or lack of them, for you
have nothing on which to base a judgment.
I became like a monk--my pressure armor was my robe; the chilly
semi-vacuum inside that glass cage, my cell. Nights out with Alice
were going to be far between.
* * * * *
On the third evening, that lump of mud, resting in dried-out soil
similar to itself, split along the line where Craig had originally cut
it. Out onto the cage floor crept what the records designated as
_E.T.L._--Extra-Terrestrial-Life. It was finished with the mud shell
that had enabled it to survive a crash and fire.
Craig, Klein, Miller and a lot of news reporters stared into the glass
cage from outside. There was nothing for me to do just then except
watch that tiny monster, and try to read, in its every clumsy,
dragging movement, some fragmentary unveiling of many riddles.
Although it might have shrunk a bit since I had last seen it, it
looked more complete. The dusky pink of its wrinkled integument was
darker. It had dozens of short tendrils, hardly thicker than
horsehair, with which it pulled itself along. It had lost some
leaflike pieces of skin. Laterally, two eyes gleamed, clear and
slit-pupiled. Its jaws, hinged on a horizontal plane, opened and
closed between fleshy flaps. Through the thin plastic of my oxygen
helmet, I heard a querulous "chip-chip-chip," which reminded me of the
squeaking of an infant bat.
The E.T.L. crept in a small looping course on the cage floor, back to
one half of the mud shell that had encased it. It tried to mount this,
perhaps to gain a vantage point for better observation. But it fell
and turned over. Its ventral surface was ceiling-ward; its tendrils
writhed furiously as it tried to right itself. I thought of a
horseshoe crab, stranded on its back and kicking helplessly. But this
thing's form and movement were even more alien.
After a moment, I followed an impulse which was part duty to my job
and part pity. I tipped the little horror back on its bottom, glad
that there was a glove between me and it. Then I did the same thing I
would do with a pet puppy or kitten. I set a dish of food--chemically
prepared to duplicate the contents of the tubes we had found in the
wreck--right down in front of the E.T.L.
It fumbled at the stuff and, possibly because of a gravity
two-and-a-half times as great as it was made for, it almost got itself
stuck in the mess. But it freed itself. Its mouth-flaps began to make
lapping movements as it sucked the nourishment.
I felt prematurely relieved. This was no potentially dominant wizard
in a strange body, I told myself. This was pure animal.
Over my helmet radiophone--there was a mike outside the cage, so they
could communicate with me when I was inside--I heard Miller say to the
reporters:
"The feeding instinct. They've got it, too. Now we know for sure...."
* * * * *
I think that the E.T.L. had colic from that first meal, though, like
any half-smart puppy trainer, I tried not to let it eat too much. It
writhed for a while, as if in pain. And I was on pins. How was I
supposed to know just what was best to feed the thing, so it would
survive? Everything was guesswork, varying formulas cautiously,
groping. And it wasn't only the food. There was the searching for the
temperature, the air-pressure and the degree of dryness at which the
E.T.L. seemed most comfortable. And there was also the fiddling around
with light-composition and intensities, variable in the sun lamps, to
find what seemed best.
We seemed to have figured things out right--or else the monster was
just rugged. It shed several skins, thrived and grew active. Its size
increased steadily. And other things began to grow in that cage. Odd,
hard-shelled, bluish-green weeds; lichenous patches, dry as dust;
invisible, un-Earthly bacteria--all were harmless, possibly even
beneficial, to my charge.
How did all this stuff come into being? Miller and Craig had examined
the dried clay of the E.T.L.'s discarded casing with microscopes. They
scraped dust from every fragment of the wreck that hadn't been blasted
too much with fire, and made cultures. They were looking for spores
and seeds and microbes. And it wasn't long before they had classified
quite a list of other-world biological forms. The most common of these
they transplanted into the cage.
Often I even slept inside the cage, clad in my armor. That's devotion
to a purpose for you. In a way, it was like living on a little piece
of Mars. Often enough I was bored stiff.
But plenty did happen. From the start Etl--we began calling the thing
that--showed an almost electrically intense curiosity for everything.
Some of the habits of its kind were written in its instincts. It
basked in strong light, but it liked dark corners, too. At night--when
we turned the sun lamps off, that is--it would bury itself in the
dusty soil. Protection against nocturnal cold might have been the
reason for that.
* * * * *
When he was a month and two days out of his clay shell, Etl tried to
rear up vertically on his tendrils. He kept toppling over. Maybe he
was trying to "walk." But there were no bones in those tendrils and,
of course, the strong Earth gravity defeated him.
Lots of times I tried to see what he could do. A real scientist would
call this "making tests." I just called it fooling around. I made him
climb a stool for his food. He seemed to make a careful survey first,
eying each rung; then he drew himself up in one motion.
During one of my rare nights in town--to get a refresher from
outlandish stuff in Alice's company--I bought some toys. When I came
back to relieve Craig, who had taken care of Etl during my absence, I
said: "Etl, here's a rubber ball. Let's play."
He caught it on the second try, in those swift, dextrous tendrils.
There was a savagery in the way he did it. I thought of a dog snapping
a bumblebee out of the air. Yet my idea that Etl was just an animal
had almost vanished by then.
I got into the habit of talking to him the way you do to a pup. Sort
of 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 my
spacesuit. There were fine, barb-like prongs along the length of his
many tentacles; I could feel them pulling in the tough, rubberized
fabric, like the claws of a climbing kitten. And he would make a kind
of 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 my
finger, 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 out
to be mildly venomous. Before that, I'd had a rash on my arms. An
allergy, probably; maybe some substance from those Martian plants had
gotten inside my spacesuit and rubbed onto my skin. Who knows? Perhaps
Earthly flesh can sense alien life, and reddens to fight it off. And
there you have one of the potential disadvantages of contact with
unknown worlds.
* * * * *
That poisoned bite was one thing. But Etl's show of rage was
another--a sign of the mixed nature of all his kind, emerging a bit
from the shadows of enigma. Here revealed was the emotion on which
things like murder are based. These creatures had it, just as we did.
Maybe it's necessary for any kind of thing that can progress upward
from nothing. Still, people did not find it reassuring when they heard
about it on the newscast.
After that, popular opinion insisted that the cage be constantly
surrounded by four manned machine-guns pointing inward. And tanks of
cyanogen were so arranged that the poison gas could be sent gushing
into 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 jittery
imagination is a constant fuse-cap for panic. Such cowardice angered
me.
But the rest of me went along with Miller when he said: "We're in the
dark, Nolan. For all we know, we might be up against very swift
maturity and inherited memory. And we've got to go on testing Etl ...
with toys, psychological apparatus and tools and devices made by his
own people. Suppose he 'remembers' skills from his ancestors, and can
build dangerous new devices, or make old ones work again? If his kind
are bent on being enemies, we'd better find it out as soon as
possible, too, hadn't we? No, I don't truly expect any serious
developments, Nolan. Still--just for insurance--eh?"
* * * * *
A year passed without great mishap--unless I should mention that Alice
and I got married. But it didn't spoil anything, and it raised my
morale. We got a bungalow right on the lab grounds.
A lot had been accomplished, otherwise. Once I let Etl play with my
gun, minus cartridges. He was avidly interested; but he paid no
attention to the Hopalong cap pistol that I left in its place when I
took the gun back. He figured out how to grip simple Martian tools,
threading his tactile members through the holes in their handles; but
complicated devices of the same origin seemed more of a puzzle to him
than to the rest of us. So our inherited-memory idea faded out.
Etl liked to work with those slender tendrils of his. The dexterity
and speed with which he soon learned to build many things with a
construction set seemed to prove a race background of perhaps ages of
such activities. I made a tower or a bridge, while he watched. Then he
was ready to try it on his own, using screwdrivers that Klein had made
with special grips.
Of course we tried dozens of intelligence tests on Etl, mostly of the
puzzle variety, like fitting odd-shaped pieces of plastic together to
form 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 a
makeshift proposition. There are too many scattered factors that can't
be touched.
With Etl, it was even tougher. But at the end of that first year
Miller had him pegged at about 120, judging him on the same basis as a
five-year-old child. This score scared people a lot, because it seemed
to hint at a race of super-beings.
But Miller wasn't jumping to conclusions. He pointed out to the
reporters that Etl's kind seemed to grow up very rapidly; 120 was
only twenty points above the norm--not uncommon among Earth
youngsters, especially those from more gifted families. Etl seemed to
have sprung from corresponding parentage, he said, for it seemed clear
that they had been of the kind that does big things. They'd made a
pioneering voyage across space, hadn't they?
* * * * *
Etl could make chirps and squeaks and weird animal cries. Human
speech, however, was beyond his vocal powers, though I knew that he
could understand simple orders. He had a large tympanic membrane or
"ear" on his ventral surface. Of course we wondered how his kind
communicated with one another. The way he groped at my fingers with
certain of his tentacles gave us a clue. There were tiny, nerve-like
threads at their extremities. Seeing them prompted Miller to do
something as brave as it was foolhardy.
He called in a surgeon and had a nerve in his arm bared. It must have
hurt like the devil, but he let Etl clutch it with those thread-like
members.
I was cockeyed enough to follow Miller's example and found out how
much it really hurt. The idea was to establish a nerve channel, brain
to brain, along which thoughts might pass. But nothing came through
except a vague and restless questioning, mixed with the pain of our
experiment.
"It doesn't work with us, Nolan," Miller said regretfully. "Our
nervous systems aren't hooked up right for this sort of stunt, or
Etl'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 some
pointers from me about how Etl used his tendrils, finally solved the
problem.
Klein made a cylindrical apparatus with a tonal buzzer, operated by
electricity, at one end. It had dozens of stops and controls, their
grips in the shape of tiny metal rings, along the sides of the
cylinder.
First I had to learn a little about how to work that instrument with
my big fingers. The trick was to mold the sounds of the buzzer, as
human lips and tongue mold and shape tones of the vocal cords, so that
they 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 boy
of ten. And the noises were almost as bad.
I turned the apparatus over to Etl as soon as I could. Let him figure
out how to use it. I'd just give him the words, the ideas. Of course
he had to get educated, learn his cat, dog and rat, and his
arithmetic, the same as a human kid, even if he was from another
world. In a way, it was the law. You can't let a youngster, capable of
learning, 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 any
real knowledge of his own folks, and unable to be very close to those
entities by whom he was being reared. It was strange and sad and a
little 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 his
studies.
"One, two, t'ree, fo', fibe, siss ... One time one ee one, toot time
one ee two...."
Picture it the way it was--I, clad in a spacesuit, crouching beside
Etl in the cold, thin air inside that cage, tracing numbers and words
in the dusty soil on the floor, while he read aloud with his voice
tube or copied my words and figures with a sharp stick. Outside the
transparent cage, the television cameras would be watching. And I
would think that maybe in a way Etl was like Tarzan, being raised by
apes.
* * * * *
Four more years went by. I had offspring of my own. Patty and Ron.
Good-looking, lovable brats. But Etl was my job--and maybe a little
more than that.
At the end of two years, he stopped growing. He weighed fifty-two
pounds and he was the ugliest-looking, elongated, gray-pink, leathery
ovoid that you could imagine. But with his voice tube clutched in his
tendrils, he could talk like a man.
He could take the finest watch, apart, repair and clean it in
jig-time--and this was just one skill among scores. Toward the end of
the four years, a Professor Jonas was coming in regularly and getting
into a spacesuit to give him lessons in physics, chemistry, college
math, astronomy and biology. Etl was having his troubles with
calculus.
And Etl could at least ape the outward aspects of the thoughts and
feelings of men. There were things he said to me that were
characteristic, though they came out of apparent sullenness that, for
all I knew, had seeds of murder in it: "You're my pal, Nolan. Sort of
my uncle. I won't say my father; you wouldn't like that."
Nice, embarrassing sentiment, on the surface. Maybe it was just cool
mimicry--a keen mind adding up human ways from observation of me and
my kids, and making up something that sounded the same, without being
the same at all. Yet somehow I hoped that Etl was sincere.
Almost from the building of the cage, of course, we'd kept photographs
and drawings of Mars inside for Etl to see.
Hundreds of times I had said to him things like: "It's a ninety-nine
and ninety-nine hundredths per cent probability that your race lives
on that world, Etl. Before the ship that brought you crashed on Earth,
we weren't at all sure that it was inhabited, and it's still an awful
mystery. I guess maybe you'll want to go there. Maybe you'll help us
make contact and establish amicable relations with the inhabitants--if
there's any way we can do that."
During those five years, no more ships came to Earth from space, as
far as we knew. I guessed that the Martians understood how supremely
hard it would be to make friendly contact between the peoples of two
worlds that had always been separate. There was difference of form,
and certainly difference of esthetic concepts. Of custom, nothing
could be the same. We didn't have even an inkling of what the Martian
civilization would be like.
* * * * *
One thing happened during the third year of Etl's existence. And his
presence on Earth was responsible. Enough serious interest in space
travel was built up to overcome the human inertia that had
counteracted the long-standing knowledge that such things were
possible. A hydrogen-fusion reaction motor was built into a rocket,
which was then hurled to the moon.
Miller went along, ostensibly to help establish the first Army
experimental station there, but mostly to acquire the practical
experience for a far longer leap.
In a way, I wished I could have gone, too; but, after all, the shadows
in Etl's background were far more intriguing than the dead and airless
craters and plains of the lunar surface.
Before Miller and the other moon-voyagers even returned, Detroit was
busy forging, casting and machining the parts for a better, larger and
much longer-range rocket, to be assembled in White Sands, New Mexico.
When Miller got back, he was too eager and busy to say much about the
moon. For the next two and a half years, he was mostly out in White
Sands.
But during the first of our now infrequent meetings, he said to Craig
and Klein and me: "When I go out to Mars, I'd like to keep my old
bunch as crew. I need men I'm used to working with, those who
understand the problems we're up against. I have a plan that makes
sense. The trouble is, to join this expedition, a man has to be part
damn-fool."