ain. "Kin I go?" he asked.

"Please may I be excused," corrected his father.

* * * * *

Richie repeated, received a nod and ran out of the dinette and through
the kitchen, grabbing a handful of cookies on the way. The screen door
banged behind him as he raced into the backyard.

"Richie!" Margery started after him, eyes ablaze. Then she stopped and
came back to the table with the coffee. "That boy! How long does it
take before they get to be civilized?" Jonathan laughed. "Oh, sure,"
she went on, sitting down opposite him. "It's funny to you. But if you
were here all day long--" She stirred sugar into her cup. "We should
have sent him to camp, even if it would have wrecked the budget!"

"Oh? Is it that bad?"

Margery shuddered. "Sometimes he's a perfect angel, and then--It's
unbelievable, the things that child can think of! Sometimes I'm
convinced children are another species altogether! Why, only this
morning--"

"Well," Jonathan broke in, "next summer he goes to camp." He stood up
and stretched.

Margery said wistfully, "I suppose you want to get back to work."

"Ummmm." Jonathan leaned over and kissed her briefly. "I've got a new
line of attack," he said, picking up his coffee. He patted his wife's
shoulder. "If things work out well, we might get away on that vacation
sooner than we thought."

"Really?" she asked, brightening.

"Really." He left the table and went back to his den.

Putting the next tape on the machine, he settled down to his job. Time
passed and finally there were no more tapes to listen to.

He stacked his notes and began making lists, checking through the
sheets of paper for repetitions of words Easton had used, listing the
various connotations which had occurred to Jonathan while he had
listened to the tapes.

As he worked, he was struck by the similarity of the words he was
recording to the occasional bits of double-talk he had heard used by
comedians in theaters and on the air, and he allowed his mind to
wander a bit, exploring the possibilities.

Was Martian actually such a close relative to English? Or had the
Martians learned English from Easton, and had Easton then formed a
sort of pidgin-English-Martian of his own?

Jonathan found it difficult to believe in the coincidence of the two
languages being alike, unless--

He laughed. Unless, of course, Earthmen were descended from Martians,
or vice versa. Oh, well, not my problem, he thought ja