*

A year passed without great mishap--unless I should mention that Alice
and I got married. But it didn't spoil anything, and it raised my
morale. We got a bungalow right on the lab grounds.

A lot had been accomplished, otherwise. Once I let Etl play with my
gun, minus cartridges. He was avidly interested; but he paid no
attention to the Hopalong cap pistol that I left in its place when I
took the gun back. He figured out how to grip simple Martian tools,
threading his tactile members through the holes in their handles; but
complicated devices of the same origin seemed more of a puzzle to him
than to the rest of us. So our inherited-memory idea faded out.

Etl liked to work with those slender tendrils of his. The dexterity
and speed with which he soon learned to build many things with a
construction set seemed to prove a race background of perhaps ages of
such activities. I made a tower or a bridge, while he watched. Then he
was ready to try it on his own, using screwdrivers that Klein had made
with special grips.

Of course we tried dozens of intelligence tests on Etl, mostly of the
puzzle variety, like fitting odd-shaped pieces of plastic together to
form a sphere or a cube. He was hard to rate on any common human I.Q.
scale. Even for an Earthian, an I.Q. rating is pretty much of a
makeshift proposition. There are too many scattered factors that can't
be touched.

With Etl, it was even tougher. But at the end of that first year
Miller had him pegged at about 120, judging him on the same basis as a
five-year-old child. This score scared people a lot, because it seemed
to hint at a race of super-beings.

But Miller wasn't jumping to conclusions. He pointed out to the
reporters that Etl's kind seemed to grow up very rapidly; 120 was
only twenty points above the norm--not uncommon among Earth
youngsters, especially those from more gifted families. Etl seemed to
have sprung from corresponding parentage, he said, for it seemed clear
that they had been of the kind that does big things. They'd made a
pioneering voyage across space, hadn't they?

* * * * *

Etl could make chirps and squeaks and weird animal cries. Human
speech, however, was beyond his vocal powers, though I knew that he
could understand simple orders. He had a large tympanic membrane or
"ear" on his ventral surface. Of course we wondered how his kind
communicated with one another. The way he groped at my fingers w