I give the transcription of his answer, as yet not fully deciphered: ITHINKIGETWHATYOUMEAN.ANDITHINKTHEANSWERISALITTLEOF BOTH.OK,SOWE’REINTELUGENTMAMMALS.WEHAVEMOREFEAROFDEATH THANTHEUNINTFLUGENTLIKErHEPOORLITTLEKITTENYOUBUTCHERED; BUTCERTAINLYNOTSUCHADOMINANTOBSESSIONASIGATHERYOURRACE HAS.
Trubz thinks that this was an ambiguous answer, which will not satisfy either party among our specialists in psychology.
We then proposed, as a sub-question, the matter of the art. Is it this same psychological manifestation that has led us to develop such an art? That magnificent and highest of arts which consists in the extinction with the greatest aesthetic subtlety of all other forms of life?
Here the mans reactions were as confusing as they had been beside the corpse of the kitten. He said:
SO THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO SNOWPUSS? ART . . . ! ART, YOU CALL IT, YET! AND YOU’VE COME HERE TO PRACTICE THAT ART ON THIS WORLD? I’LL SEE YOU FRIED CRISP ON BOTH SIDES ON HADES’ HOTTEST GRIDDLE FIRST!
Trubz believes that the extremely violent emotion expressed was shock at realization of the vast new reaches of aesthetic experience which lay before him.
Later, when he thought he was alone, I overheard him talking to himself. There was something so emphatically inimical in his thought patterns that I transcribed his words, though I have not yet had a chance to secure Trubz’s opinion on them. He beat the clenched digits of one forelimb against the other and said:
SO THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT. BUT HOW? HOW . . . ? GOT IT! THOSE PICTURES I TOOK FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH CAMPAIGN . . .
I am worried. If this attitude indicated by his thought patterns persists, we may have to bring about his extinction and proceed at once by ourselves. At least it will give Lilil a chance to compose one of his masterpieces.
Final Report of the First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:
How I could so completely have misinterpreted the mans thought patterns I do not understand. Trubz is working on the psychology of it. Far from any hatred or enmity, the man was even then resolving to save our lives. The First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition owes him a debt that it can never repay.
It was after sunup the next day that he approached us with his noble change of heart. As I describe this scene I cannot unfortunately give his direct words; I was too carried away by my own emotions to remember to transcribe. Such phrases as I attribute to him here are reconstructed from the complex of our intercourse and were largely a matter of signs and pictures.
What he did first was to show us one of his pictures. We stared at it and drew back horrified. For it represented a being closely allied to us, almost to be taken for one of us, meeting extinction beneath a titanic weapon wielded by what was obviously the characteristic five-digited forelimb of a man. And that forelimb was many, many times the size of the being resembling us.
“I’ve been keeping this from you,” he informed us. “I’ll admit I’ve been trying to trap you. But the truth is: I’m a dwarf man. The real ones are as much bigger than me as you are bigger than the kitten. More, even. And their favorite pastime—only they call it a sport, not art—is killing bugs like you.”
We realized now what should have struck us before—the minute size of his structure compared with those which we had seen before. Obviously he spoke the truth—he was a dwarf specimen of his race.
Then he produced more pictures—horrible, terrifying, monstrous pictures, all showing something perturbingly like us meeting cruel extinction at the whim of a man.
“I’ve just been keeping you here,” he said, “until some real members of my race could come and play with you. They’d like it. But I haven’t got the heart to do it. I like you, and what you told me about your art convinces me that you don’t deserve extinction like that. So I’m giving you your chance: Clear out of here and stay away from this planet. It’s the most unsafe place in the universe for your kind. If you dread extinction, stay away from the third planet!”
His resolve to spare our lives had made him happy. His face kept twisting into that grimace which we had learned to recognize as a sign of mans pleasure. But we hardly watched him or even listened to him. Our eyes kept returning with awful fascination to those morbidly terrifying pictures. Then our thoughts fused into one, and with hardly a word of farewell to our savior we sped back to the ship.
This is our last report. We are now on the temporary base established on the satellite and will return as soon as we have recovered from the shock of our narrow escape. Lilil has achieveci a new composition with a captive pergut from the ship which has somewhat solaced us.
Murvin to First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition:
You dopes! You low mammalian idiots! It’s what comes of sending nothing but specialists on an expedition. I tried to convince them you needed a good general worker like me, but no. And look at you!
It’s obvious what happened. On our planet, mammals are minute pests and the large intelligent beings are arthropodal hexapods. All right. On the third planet things have worked out the other way round. Bugs, as the man calls our kin, are tiny, insignificant things. You saw those pictures and thought the mans were enormous; actually they meant only that the bugs were minute!
That man tricked you unpardonably, and I like him for it. Specialists . . . ! You deserve extinction for this, and you know it. But Vardanek has another idea. Stay where you are. Develop the temporary base in any way you can. We’ll send others to help you. We’ll build up a major encampment on that side of the satellite, and in our own sweet time we can invade the third planet
