s
case from which two-thirds of the air had been exhausted. The
remainder was kept dehydrated and chilled. It was guess work, backed
up by evidence: The rusty red of that mud; the high hemoglobin content
of the alien blood we had seen; the dead-air cells--resistant to
cold--in the shreds of rough skin that we had examined. And then there
was the fair proximity of Mars and Earth in their orbits at the time.

My job didn't really begin till the following evening, when Craig and
Klein had completed a much larger glass cage, to which my
outlandish--or, rather, outworldish--ward was transferred. Miller
provided me with a wire-braced, airtight costume and oxygen helmet,
the kind fliers use at extreme altitudes. Okay, call it a spacesuit.
He also gave me a small tear-gas pistol, an automatic, and a knife.

All there was to pit such armament against was a seemingly helpless
lump of protoplasm, two inches in diameter. Still, here was an
illustration of how cautiously you are prompted to treat so unknown a
quantity. You are unable to gauge its powers, or lack of them, for you
have nothing on which to base a judgment.

I became like a monk--my pressure armor was my robe; the chilly
semi-vacuum inside that glass cage, my cell. Nights out with Alice
were going to be far between.

* * * * *

On the third evening, that lump of mud, resting in dried-out soil
similar to itself, split along the line where Craig had originally cut
it. Out onto the cage floor crept what the records designated as
_E.T.L._--Extra-Terrestrial-Life. It was finished with the mud shell
that had enabled it to survive a crash and fire.

Craig, Klein, Miller and a lot of news reporters stared into the glass
cage from outside. There was nothing for me to do just then except
watch that tiny monster, and try to read, in its every clumsy,
dragging movement, some fragmentary unveiling of many riddles.

Although it might have shrunk a bit since I had last seen it, it
looked more complete. The dusky pink of its wrinkled integument was
darker. It had dozens of short tendrils, hardly thicker than
horsehair, with which it pulled itself along. It had lost some
leaflike pieces of skin. Laterally, two eyes gleamed, clear and
slit-pupiled. Its jaws, hinged on a horizontal plane, opened and
closed between fleshy flaps. Through the thin plastic of my oxygen
helmet, I heard a querulous "chip-chip-chip," which reminded me of the
squeaking of a