Paul sank back on his heels. This twelve-fingered being had, as was plausible, a duodecimal system, based on twelve as our decimal system is on ten. And it had almost instantaneously grasped the human ten-system so well as to write down its twelve in our method.
“Friend,” said Paul softly, pitching his voice too low for the crowds outside the enclosure, “you can’t understand my language; but in the name of God and Man, welcome to Earth.”
“Oh dear,” said the creature, “you communicate only by speech! And otherwise you seem such a highly rational being.”
Paul gulped. “That’s an accusation I haven’t had leveled against me recently.”
“I never dreamed,” it went on, “that the beings shaped like you were the rational ones. I couldn’t get any waves from them. I can from you, though, even enough to pick up the language.”
“And you got waves from the other animals,” Paul mused. “That’s why you chattered like a monkey and roared like a lion-not-turned-up-enough. Only they didn’t understand your diagrams, so you knew they weren’t high enough for you to deal with.”
“But why do you have waves and not the others?”
“I am not,” said Paul hastily, “a mutant. We can figure out why later. The trouble right now, if I know anything about the people-without-waves, is that nobody’s going to believe a word of this scene. As if indeed I did. But it’s nicer than wood . . .”
The creature shuddered, then apologized. “I’m sorry. Something I touched in there. . .”
“I know,” said Paul, abruptly grave and humble. “Maybe we can help each other. God grant. I’m taking a chance—but I think the first thing is to get you out of here before Tim’s ‘bigshots from the University’ show up and maybe decide to dissect you. Will you trust me?”
The pause was a long one—long enough for Paul to think of all the vile weakness of his humanity and know his infinite unworthiness of trust. He could hear the words pouring forth from the wood—and then the creature said simply, “Yes.”
And the wood was silent even in memory.
Never, Paul felt, had he invested twenty dollars more wisely. And never had he discovered such unsuspected inborn acting talent as Tim’s. There was something approaching genius, in a pure vein of Stanislavsky realism, in Tim’s denunciation of Paul as a publicity-seeker—in his explanation to the crowd that the koala-like object was a highly ingenious mechanical dummy planted here by a venal ventriloquist who had planned to “discover” it as some strange being and trade on the good name of the Zoo itself for his own selfish promotional advancement. Bitter lashings of denunciation followed Paul and the creature as they departed—a matter of minutes, Tim confessed sotto voce, before the professors from across the Bay were due.
Now they were parked by the beach in Paul’s convertible. Sensibly, he felt he should head for home and privacy; but he still could not quite bring himself to enter that room where Chuck Woodchuck waited.
“First of all, I suppose,” he ventured, “comes: what’s your name?”
“The nearest, my dear Paul, that your phonetics can come to it is something like Tarvish.”
“Glad to meet you. Now—how did you know mine? But of course,” he added hastily, “if you can read . . . Well, next: where are you from? Mars?”
Tarvish thought. “Mars . . . Ah, you mean the fourth planet? All that sand . . .” He shuddered as if at a memory of infinite boredom. “No. I’m from a planet called Earth, which revolves around a star called the sun.”
“Look!” Paul exclaimed. “Fun’s fun, but isn’t this a little too much of a muchness? This is Earth. That ball getting low over there is the sun. And you—”
“Don’t you understand?” The tip of Tarvish’s nose twitched faintly. “Then ask me what kind of a creature I am, what race I belong to.”
“All right, Mr. Bones, I’m asking.”
“I,” said Tarvish, twitching violently, “am a man.”
It took Paul a minute to interpret; then his laugh, his first free laugh in days, was as loud as Tarvish’s twitching was vigorous. “Of course. Everybody has a name for everything in the universe—everything else. But there aren’t names for your own race or your own planet or your own star. You’re men, you’re people, you live on the Earth, you’re warmed by the sun. I remember reading that some Indian languages were like that: the name for the tribe meant simply the people and the name for their country was just the land. We’ve smiled at that, and interplanetarily we’re doing the same damned thing. All right—where is your sun?”
“How can I tell you? You don’t know our system of spatial coordinates. I don’t understand what I find in your mind about ‘constellations,’ meaningless pictures which look different from any two points in space, or ‘lightyears,’ because your year doesn’t convey a time-meaning to me.”
“It’s three hundred and sixty-five days.”
“And what is a day?”
“Twenty-four—no, skip it. I can see that this is going to be a lot tougher than Joe Henderson and his friends think. Let’s start over again. How did you get here?” Two minutes later Paul repeated the question.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Tarvish. “Trying to find the words in your mind. But they aren’t there. Your words make too sharp a distinction between matter and energy. If I say ‘a spaceship,’ you will think of a metal structure. If I say ‘a force field,’ you will picture me traveling in something immaterial. Both are wrong.”
“Let’s try again. Why did you—” Paul stopped abruptly.
The nose twitched. “No,” said Tarvish gently, “I am not the advance guard of an invasion and you are not betraying your race by being human to me. Please forget your science-fiction friends. We men of Earth have no desire to take over any of the planets of this star; ever since our terrible experience with the—” it sounded a little like Khrj “—we
