“Tim!” Paul exclaimed. “Where on earth are you running to? Or from? Lion escaped or what?”
“Mr. Peters!” the attendant gasped. “I been chasing all over the place making phone calls to God knows who all. There’s something screwy going on over in the wombats’.”
“It couldn’t pick a better place,” Paul smiled. “Catch your breath a minute and tell me what gives.”
“Got a cigarette? Thanks. Well, Mr. Peters, I’ll tell you: Couple of times lately some of the boys they say they see something funny in one of the cages. Somebody checks up, it’s always gone. Only today it’s in there with the wombats and everybody’s looking at it and nobody knows what—”
Paul Peters had always had a highly developed sense of curiosity. (Schizoid externalization? he reflected. No, cancel that. You’re forgetting things. This may be fun.) He was already walking toward the wombats’ enclosure as he asked. “This thing. What does it look like?”
‘Well, Mr. Peters, it’s pretty much like a koala,” Tim explained, “except for where it’s like an anteater.”
Paul was never able to better that description. With the exception, of course, that neither koalas nor anteaters have six-digited forepaws with opposing thumbs. But that factor was not obvious on first glance.
He could see the thing now, and it was in body very much like an outsize koala— that oddly charming Australian eucalyptus-climber after whom the Teddy bear was patterned. It had no visible pouch—but then it might be a male—and its ears were less prominent. Its body was about two feet long. And its face was nothing like the flat and permanently startled visage of the koala, but a hairless expanse sloping from a high forehead, past sharp bright eyes, to a protracted proboscis which did indeed resemble nothing so much as the snout of an anteater.
The buzz through which they pushed their way consisted chiefly of “What is that?” and “I don’t know,” with an occasional treble obbligato of “Why don’t you know, Daddy?”
But it was not what it was so much as what it was doing that fascinated Paul. It concentrated on rubbing its right forepaw in circles on the ground, abruptly looking up from time to time at the nearest wombat, while those stumpy marsupials either stared at it detachedly or backed away with suspicion.
“When the other boys saw it,” Paul asked, “what was it doing then?”
“It’s funny you ask that, Mr. Peters, on account of that’s one of the things that’s funny about it. What it was doing, I mean. One time when it was in with the llamas it was doing like this, just playing in the dirt.”
“Playing?” Paul wondered softly.
“Only when it was in with the monkeys it was chattering at them something fierce, just like a monkey too, this guy said. And when it was in with the lions, well I’m not asking you to believe this and God knows I didn’t yesterday and I don’t know as I do now, but this other guy says it gives a roar just like a lion. Only not just like, of course, because look at it, but like as if you didn’t have your radio turned up quite enough.”
“Wombats don’t make much noise, do they? Or llamas?” All right, Paul said to himself. You’re crazy. This is worse than wood talking; but it’s nicer. And there is a pattern. “Tim,” he said abruptly, “can you let me in the wombat enclosure?”
“Jeez, Mr. Peters, there’s bigshots coming from the University and . . . But you did give us that show for free at the pension benefit and . . . And,” Tim concluded more firmly as he tucked the five unobtrusively into his pocket, “can do, I guess. O.K., everybody! Let’s have a little room here. Got to let Dr. Peters in!”
Paul hesitated at the gate. This was unquestionably either the most momentous or the most ridiculous effort he had made in a reasonably momentousridiculous life. “Joe Henderson, thou shouldst be with me at this hour!” he breathed, and went in.
He walked up to where the creature squatted by its circles.
He knelt down beside it and pointed his forefinger, first at the small central circle with the lines sticking out all around it, then up at the sun. Next he tapped his finger insistently on the unmarked ground, then thrust it at the large dot on the third of the bigger concentric circles.
The creature looked up at him, and for the first time in his life Paul understood just what Keats had meant by a wild surmise. He saw it on the creature’s face, and he felt it thrill through his own being.
An animal who can draw, an animal who can recognize a crude diagram of the solar system, is rational—is not merely a beast like the numbly staring wombats.
Hastily the creature held up a single digit of one forepaw and then drew a straight line in the dirt. Paul did the same, with an amused sudden realization of the fact that the figure one is probably a straight line in almost any system.
The creature held up two fingers and made an odd squiggle. Paul held up two fingers and made our own particular odd squiggle which is shaped 2. They almost raced each other through the next three numbers.
At the squiggle shape 5, the creature looked at Paul’s five fingers, hesitated, then advanced by a daring step. It held up both its hands, each with its six digits, and made a straight line followed by an S-shaped curve.
Paul thought frantically, and wished that he had majored in mathematics. He held up his ten fingers, then marked down a straight line followed by a circle. The creature paused a moment, as if rapidly calculating. Then it nodded, looked
