immediately apprehended—and immediately forgotten—emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary death of nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body requires the battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long last, the somnolent self-confident adult which has been written aforetime in its genes; and here, too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was soap in his mud, a calculated percentage which allowed him to thrash on the floor of his cage without permitting him to make enough progress to bump his head against its walls. This was conservative of his head, but it wasted the muscles of his limbs. When his croaking days were over, and he was transformed into a totally air-breathing, leaping thing, he did not leap well. This too had been arranged, in a sense. There was nothing in this childhood of his from which he needed to leap away in terror, nor was there any place in it to which a small leap could have carried him. Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible bang and a slithering fall for the end of which, harmless though it invariably proved to be, no instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex helped him to cultivate a graceful recovery. Besides, an animal with a perpetually sprained tail cannot be graceful regardless of its instincts.
Finally, he forgot how to leap entirely, and simply sat huddled until the next transformation overcame him, looking back dully at the many bobbing heads that were beginning to ring him round during his every waking hour. By the time he realized that all these watchers were alive like himself, and much larger than he was, his instincts were so far submerged as to produce in him nothing more than a vague alarm which resulted in no action. The new transformation turned him into a weak and spindly walker with no head for distance, oversized though it was. It was here that Somebody saw to it that he was transferred to the terrarium.
Here at last the hormones of his true adolescence awakened and began to flow in his blood. The proper responses for a world something like this tiny jungle had been written imperatively upon every chromosome in his body; here, all at once, he was almost at home. He roved through the verdure of the terrarium on his shaky shanks with a counterfeit of gladness, looking for something to flee, something to fight, something to eat, something to learn. Yet in the long run he hardly found even a place to sleep, for in the terrarium night was as unknown as ever. Here he also became aware for the first time that there were differences among the creatures who looked in at him and sometimes molested him. There were two who were almost always to be seen, either alone or together. They were always the molesters, as well—except-except that it was not always exactly molestation, for sometimes these beings with their sharp stings and their rough hands would give him something to eat which he had never tasted before, or do something else to him which pleased as much as it annoyed. He did not understand this relationship at all, and he did not like it.
After a while, he hid from all the watchers except these two—and even from them most of the time, for he was always sleepy. When he wanted them, he would call: “Szan-tchez!” (For he could not say “Liu” at all; his mesentery-tied tongue and almost cleft palate would never master so demanding a combination of liquid sounds— that had to wait for his adulthood.)
But eventually he stopped calling, and took to squatting apathetically beside the pond in the center of the miniature jungle. When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight…
And so he awoke; and so the world was changed. The multiple doors from sense to soul had closed; suddenly, the world was an abstract; he had made that crossing from animal to automaton which had caused all the trouble eastward of Eden in 4004 B. C. He was not a man, but he would pay the toll on that bridge all the same. From this point on, nobody would ever be able to guess what he felt in his animal soul, least of all Egtverchi himself. “But what is he thinking about?” Liu said wonderingly, staring up at the huge, grave Lithian head which bent down upon them from the other side of the transparent pyroceram door.
Egtverchi—he had told them his name very early—could hear her, of course, despite the division of the laboratory into two;, but he said nothing. Thus far, he was anything but talkative, though he was a voracious reader.
Ruiz did not respond for a while, though the nine-foot, young Lithian awed and puzzled him quite as much as he did Liu—and for better reasons. He looked sidewise at Michelis. The chemist was ignoring them both. Ruiz could understand that well enough, as far as he himself was concerned; the attempt to write a joint but impartial report on the Lithia expedition for the J.I.R. had proven disastrous for the already tense relationship between the two scientists. But that same tension, he could see, was distressing Liu without her being quite aware of it, and that he could not let pass; she was innocent. He mustered a last-ditch attempt to draw Mike out.
“This is their learning period,” he said. “Necessarily, they spend most of it listening. They’re like the old legend of the wolf boy, who is raised by animals and comes into human cities without even knowing human speech—except that the Lithians don’t learn speech in infancy and so have no block against learning it in young adulthood. To do that, they must listen very hard—most wolf boys never learn to talk at all—and that’s what he’s doing.”
“But why won’t he at least answer questions?” Liu said troubledly, without quite looking at Michelis. “How is he going to learn if he won’t practice?”
“He hasn’t anything to tell us yet, by his lights,” Ruiz said. “And for him, we lack the authority to put questions. Any adult Lithian could question him, but obviously we don’t qualify—and what Mike calls the foster- parent relationship couldn’t mean anything to a creature adapted to a solitary childhood.”
Michelis did not respond.
“He used to call us,” Liu said sadly. “At least, he used to call you.”
“That’s different. That’s the pleasure response; it has nothing to do with authority, or affection either. If you were to put an electrode into the septal or caudate nucleus areas in the brain of a cat, or a rat, so that they could stimulate themselves electrically by pushing a pedal, you could train them to do almost anything that’s within their powers, for no other reward but that jolt in the head. In the same way, a cat or a rat or a dog will learn to respond to its name, or to initiate some action, in order to gain pleasure. But you don’t expect the animal to talk to you or answer questions just because it can do that.”
“I never heard of the brain experiments,” Liu said. “I think that’s horrible.”
“I think so too,” Ruiz said. “It’s an old line of research that got sidetracked somehow. I’ve never understood why some of our megalomaniacs didn’t follow it up in human beings. A dictatorship founded on that device might really last a thousand years. But it has nothing to do with what you’re asking of Egtverchi. When he’s ready to talk, he’ll talk. In the meantime, we don’t have the stature to compel him to answer questions. For that, we would have to be twelve-foot Lithian adults.”
Egtverchi’s eyes filmed, and he brought his hands together suddenly.
“You are already too tall,” his harsh voice said over the annunciator system.
Liu clapped her hands together in delighted imitation.
“See, see, Ramon, you’re wrong! Egtverchi, what do you mean? Tell us!”
Egtverchi said experimentally: “Liu. Liu. Liu.”
“Yes, yes. That’s right, Egtverchi. Go on, go on—what did you mean—tell us!”
“Liu.” Egtverchi seemed satisfied. The colors in his wattles died down. He was again almost a statue.
After a moment, there was an explosive snort from Michelis. Liu turned to him with a start, and, without really meaning to, so did Ruiz. But it was too late. The big New Englander had already turned his back on them, as though disgusted at himself for having broken his own silence. Slowly, Liu too turned her back, if only to hide her face from everyone, even Egtverchi. Ruiz was left standing alone at the vertex of the tetrahedron of disaffection.
“This is going to be a fine performance for a prospective citizen of the United Nations to turn in,” Michelis said suddenly, bitterly, from somewhere behind his shoulder. “I suppose you expected nothing else when you asked me here. What moved you to tell me what vast progress he was making? As I got the story, he ought to have been propounding theorems by this time.”
“Time,” Egtverchi said, “is a function of change, and change is the expression of the relative validity of two propositions, one of which contains a time’tand the other a time f-prime, which differ from each other in no respect except that one contains the coordinate’tand the other the coordinate f-prime.”
“That’s all very well,” Michelis said coldly, turning to look up at the great head. “But I know where you got it from. If you’re only a parrot, you’re not going to be a Citizen of this culture; you can take that from me.”
“Who are you?” Egtverchi said.
