“Then what are you doing here?”
“Because . . .” Tarvish hesitated. A faint blue colored the root of his nose. “Because my girl is here.”
“I’m improving,” Paul said. “It took me only five seconds to adjust to that girl. You’re in love?” Oddly, he didn’t even feel like smiling.
“That’s why I had to land. You see, she went off by herself in the . . . I think if I invent the word ‘space dinghy’ it will give you the idea. I warned her that the . . . well, an important part was defective; but we had just had a small quarrel and she insisted on spiting me. She never came back. That’s why I had to make contact with intelligent life to learn something of the planet which I have to search.”
“Only the intelligent life doesn’t have waves. Except me because, God help me, I expect strange things to speak. You need a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Frank Buck, and you’re stuck with a possibly not quite sane ventriloquist.”
“You will help me? When you see her!” Tarvish was almost rapturous. “The most beautiful girl, I swear, on the whole earth. With,” he added reminiscently, “the finest pair of ears in the universe.” On the word ears his voice sank a little, and the blue tinge deepened at the root of his proboscis.
The universe, Paul smiled to himself, must provide a fascinating variety of significant secondary sexual characteristics. “If I can help you,” he said sincerely, “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. And in the meantime we’ve the little problem of feeding you. I’ll have to take you—” he tensed a little “—home. I suppose, that is, you do eat?”
“So far as we have observed,” Tarvish pronounced solemnly, “all races of rational beings eat and sleep and . . .” The blue was again intensified.
“And relish a fine pair of ears,” Paul concluded for him. “Definition of rationality.” He started the car.
By the next morning Paul Peters had learned a number of things.
He had learned that men of Tarvish’s race are, as they choose, bipeds or quadrupeds. When they entered the Montgomery Block, that sprawling warren of odd studios where Paul lived, Tarvish had trotted behind him on all fours “because,” he said, “it would be less conspicuous,” as indeed was true. He was only by a small margin the most unusual of the animal and human companions whom Montgomery Block denizens had brought home, few of whom—including the humans—were at the moment functionally bipedal. But once inside the studio apartment, he seemed to prefer the erect posture.
Between them they had worked out the problem of feeding. The pro-boscidiferous Tarvish was of course edentate, and accustomed to subsisting on liquids and pap. Milk, raw eggs, and tomato juice sufficed him for the time being—a surprisingly simple diet to contain most of the requisite vitamins and proteins. Later Paul planned to lay in a supply of prepared baby foods, and looked forward to the astonishment of the clerk at the nearby chain store who knew him as a resolute bachelor.
Paul had also learned an astonishing amount, considering the relative brevity of the conversation, concerning the planet which was to Tarvish the Earth—from its socio-economic systems to the fascinating fact that at present fine full, ripe ears were, as any man would prefer, in style, whereas only a generation ago they had been unaccountably minimized and even strapped down. Paul’s amused explanation of the analogy on this Earth served perhaps as much as anything to establish an easy man-to-man intimacy. Tarvish went so far as to elaborate a plan for introducing gradually inflatable false earlobes on his Earth. It was never quite clear to Paul how an edentate being could speak so easily, but he imagined that the power resembled his own professional skill.
All of these strange thoughts coursed through Paul’s head as he lay slowly waking up the next morning; and it was only after several minutes of savoring them that he perceived the wonderful background note that served as their ground-bass. Not since the first difficult instant of entering the apartment had he so much as thought of the corner of the main room in which Chuck Woodchuck lay.
“You know, Tarvish,” Paul said as they finished breakfast, “I like you. You’re easy to be with.”
“Thank you, Paul.” The root of the proboscis blushed faintly blue. “I like you too. We could spend happy days simply talking, exchanging, learning to know. . . But there is Vishta.”
“Vishta?”
“My girl. I dreamed about her last night, Paul . . .” Tarvish gave a little sigh, rose, and began bipedally to pace the room. “Your Earth is enormous, even though the figures you tell me convey no meaning to me. Whatever a square mile means, one hundred and ninety-seven million of them must represent quite an area. There must be some way. . .”
“Look,” Paul said. “Before we tackle the problem again, let’s try restating it. (A), we must find Vishta. But that doesn’t necessarily mean literally, physically, Dr. Livingstone-I-presume find, does it? She’ll be over the lovers’ quarrel by now; she’ll want to get back to the—you’ll pardon the expression—spaceship. If we can let her know where you are, that’s enough, isn’t it?”
Tarvish rubbed the tip of his large nose. “I should think so.”
“All right. Restate the restatement. (A), get word to Vishta. (B), without revealing your interplanetary presence to the world at large. Both because it’s against your mores and because I think it’ll cause just too damned much trouble. Agreed?”
“Agreed. ”
The two sat in silence for perhaps five minutes. Paul alternately cudgeled his brains, and addressed brief prayers to the Holy Ghost for assistance in helping this other creature of God. Meanwhile, his eyes drifted around the apartment, and for a moment rested on the noble two-volume Knopf edition of Poe.
“My God in Heaven!” he exclaimed. The most devout could not have considered this a violation
