ith
certain of his tentacles gave us a clue. There were tiny, nerve-like
threads at their extremities. Seeing them prompted Miller to do
something as brave as it was foolhardy.

He called in a surgeon and had a nerve in his arm bared. It must have
hurt like the devil, but he let Etl clutch it with those thread-like
members.

I was cockeyed enough to follow Miller's example and found out how
much it really hurt. The idea was to establish a nerve channel, brain
to brain, along which thoughts might pass. But nothing came through
except a vague and restless questioning, mixed with the pain of our
experiment.

"It doesn't work with us, Nolan," Miller said regretfully. "Our
nervous systems aren't hooked up right for this sort of stunt, or
Etl's nerve cells are too different from ours."

So we had to fall back on simpler methods of communication with Etl.
We tried teaching him sign language, but it didn't work too well,
because tentacles aren't hands. Klein's inventive ability, plus some
pointers from me about how Etl used his tendrils, finally solved the
problem.

Klein made a cylindrical apparatus with a tonal buzzer, operated by
electricity, at one end. It had dozens of stops and controls, their
grips in the shape of tiny metal rings, along the sides of the
cylinder.

First I had to learn a little about how to work that instrument with
my big fingers. The trick was to mold the sounds of the buzzer, as
human lips and tongue mold and shape tones of the vocal cords, so that
they became syllables and words.

"Hell-oh-g-g-Et-t-l-l.... Chee-s-s-ee-whad-d I-ee got-t?"

It was tougher for me than learning to play a saxophone is for a boy
of ten. And the noises were almost as bad.

I turned the apparatus over to Etl as soon as I could. Let him figure
out how to use it. I'd just give him the words, the ideas. Of course
he had to get educated, learn his cat, dog and rat, and his
arithmetic, the same as a human kid, even if he was from another
world. In a way, it was the law. You can't let a youngster, capable of
learning, stay home from school.

And I was Etl's tutor. I thought what a crazy situation we had here;
an entity from one planet being brought up on another, without any
real knowledge of his own folks, and unable to be very close to those
entities by whom he was being reared. It was strange and sad and a
little comic.

For a while I thought I had a stammering parrot on my hands:
"Hel-l-l-l-o ... Hell-oh-g-o .