harmless, possibly even
beneficial, to my charge.

How did all this stuff come into being? Miller and Craig had examined
the dried clay of the E.T.L.'s discarded casing with microscopes. They
scraped dust from every fragment of the wreck that hadn't been blasted
too much with fire, and made cultures. They were looking for spores
and seeds and microbes. And it wasn't long before they had classified
quite a list of other-world biological forms. The most common of these
they transplanted into the cage.

Often I even slept inside the cage, clad in my armor. That's devotion
to a purpose for you. In a way, it was like living on a little piece
of Mars. Often enough I was bored stiff.

But plenty did happen. From the start Etl--we began calling the thing
that--showed an almost electrically intense curiosity for everything.
Some of the habits of its kind were written in its instincts. It
basked in strong light, but it liked dark corners, too. At night--when
we turned the sun lamps off, that is--it would bury itself in the
dusty soil. Protection against nocturnal cold might have been the
reason for that.

* * * * *

When he was a month and two days out of his clay shell, Etl tried to
rear up vertically on his tendrils. He kept toppling over. Maybe he
was trying to "walk." But there were no bones in those tendrils and,
of course, the strong Earth gravity defeated him.

Lots of times I tried to see what he could do. A real scientist would
call this "making tests." I just called it fooling around. I made him
climb a stool for his food. He seemed to make a careful survey first,
eying each rung; then he drew himself up in one motion.

During one of my rare nights in town--to get a refresher from
outlandish stuff in Alice's company--I bought some toys. When I came
back to relieve Craig, who had taken care of Etl during my absence, I
said: "Etl, here's a rubber ball. Let's play."

He caught it on the second try, in those swift, dextrous tendrils.
There was a savagery in the way he did it. I thought of a dog snapping
a bumblebee out of the air. Yet my idea that Etl was just an animal
had almost vanished by then.

I got into the habit of talking to him the way you do to a pup. Sort
of crooning. "Good fella, Etl. Smart. You learn fast, don't you?"

Stuff like that. And I'd coax him to climb up the front of my
spacesuit. There were fine, barb-like prongs along the length of his
many tentacles; I c