From that moment our relations improved immensely. Joe enlisted the help
of various females to keep him supplied with skins of tala, and with the
satiation of his craving he took a completely new interest in life.

* * * * *

We spent hours every day working out our language difficulties. He
learned so rapidly that I abandoned learning his language in favor of
teaching him ours. Even such abstract concepts as time and space proved
no obstacles. He grasped the purpose of my wristwatch after a single
day's demonstration of its relationship to the passage of Sirius across
the sky.

Using a pencil I had managed to convey our symbols for large numbers.
Joe could count up to any number now, and he seemed actually to
understand the open-end nature of our system of enumeration.

It made possible a mutual agreement on such matters as the number of
"days" in a year, which he was mildly interested to learn numbered 440
on his planet. Then a startling piece of information came from him when
I asked how long his people lived.

"Two years. Maybe three," he replied. Because of the shorter days, a
Sirian year about equalled an Earth year, and I found it difficult to
believe that these wonderful little animals lived only two or three
years. He persisted until I believed him.

He was strangely vague when I tried to determine the common manner of
death. Indeed, personal death was a concept either so hazy or
distasteful to him that he refused to dwell on it. The most he would
convey was that there were always new faces in the tribe, and the old
faces rarely remained more than three years. At this time, he described
himself as being more than a year old.

This was only one of several startling items that were revealed in our
conversations. The golden people matured in three months to fully grown
adults. A female could bear several babies a year and usually did. Yet
Joe insisted that his tribe was the only clan on the face of the planet,
so far as he knew, and that it numbered fewer than a thousand
individuals.

There was no such thing as monogamy or even polygamy. True, at night
when the air was cooler, they paired off, male and female, and each male
chose from among several favorites. But there was no formal nor
permanent mating arrangement.

Benson, who had set up a sheltered desk outside Joe's window in order to
listen in with an anthropologist's avid interest, posed the question
which grew i