arth managed to say.

He climbed the short ladder, passed through the two sets of doors and
entered a small room to kneel, with downcast eyes, before the ancient
figure huddled in the wheelchair.

* * * * *

The Visitor looked at the kneeling figure for a moment without
speaking. The boy looked very much like a human, in spite of such
superficial differences as crest and tail. In fact, as a
smooth-skinned thinking biped, with a well-developed moral sense, he
fit The Visitor's definition of a human. It wasn't just the loneliness
of seven thousand years of isolation, either. When he had first
analyzed these people, just after that disastrous forced landing so
long ago, he had classified them as human. Not _homo sapiens_, of
course, but human all the same.

"Okay," he said, somewhat querulously. "Get up, get up. You've got
some questions for me, I hope? I don't get many people up here asking
questions any more. Mostly I'm all alone except for the ceremonial
visits." He paused. "Well, speak up, young man. Have you got something
to ask me?"

Garth scrambled to his feet "Yes, my Lord Visitor," he said. "I have
several questions."

The Visitor chuckled reedily. "You may find the answers just a little
bit hard to understand."

Garth smiled, some of his fear vanishing. The Visitor sounded a little
like his senile grandfather, back home. "That is why you are asked so
few questions these days, my Lord," he said. "Our scientists have
about as much trouble figuring out what your answers mean as they do
in solving the problems without consulting you at all."

"Of course." The head of The Visitor bobbed affirmatively several
times as he propelled his wheelchair a few inches forward. "If I gave
you the answers to all your problems for you, so you could figure them
out too easily, you'd never be developing your own thinking powers.
But I've never failed to answer any questions you asked. Now have I?
And accurately, too." The thin voice rang with pride. "You've never
stumped me yet, and you never will."

[Illustration]

"No, my Lord," answered Garth. "So perhaps you'll answer my questions,
too, even though they're a little different from the kind you're
accustomed to. I'm a newspaper reporter, and I want to verify some of
our traditions about you."

* * * * *

As The Visitor remained silent, Garth paused and looked around him at
the small, bare, naked-walled r