uldn't one extra effort, a final attempt to break through that
closed mind be made?

All right.

Communication, then. That was wanted. He would try. But if Their
frameworks were so different from his that They misinterpreted all his
efforts?

He was interrupted by the soft pad of footsteps, bare feet on grass that
sprang up to leave no sign it had been trod upon. A young colonist and
his wife, hand in hand, laughing gaily, were coming toward him. The man
was carrying a fresh-caught fish. They came to a stop at the base of his
rock and looked up at him, the Ceti light glinting on their smiling
faces.

"We gave Louie a fish because he said it was our duty," the young man
said. "I don't remember why it is our duty. Perhaps it is our duty to
give you one too."

At least they were being impartial.

22

When he had pulled the scaled skin of the fish away from the flesh, the
flesh away from the bones, and eaten his fill, Cal lay back on the rock
again, to doze, to continue his search for a means of communicating.

He was now sharply aware of Their presence, of Their urgency, of Their
long patience. Awareness! Once man had got over his greedy delight in
occupying more and more of the universe simply because he could, to
protect himself against the cosmic loneliness that must follow, he too
would be searching for awareness.

But he would define it in his own terms, and pass it by if it did not
meet those terms.

That there was some other intelligence which had found man instead, Cal
did not doubt. The experiment of Eden, the manipulation of natural laws,
the denial of physical tools--for what purpose? To clear away the debris
which prevented communication of awareness as They defined it?

There was a trace, a minor trace of awareness in man not dependent upon
the tools and artifacts of physical science--extra-sensory perception,
psi. Underdeveloped, because with physical tools its development had
been made unnecessary? Because having found the answers with physical
tools, man stopped looking for answers other than these?

Was there, then, a science of controlling things, forces, without the
use of physical tools? Was there a road of transition from the crude
manipulation of things and forces through tools to a manipulation
without them? There was precedent in man's science. The elaborate
wirings of the first bulky and crude electronic sets, that gave way to a
printed diagram of such wirings on a card to o