.. N-n-ol-l-an-n-n ... Hell-lo-oh."

Etl never lost that habit of repetition. But he made progress in his
studies.

"One, two, t'ree, fo', fibe, siss ... One time one ee one, toot time
one ee two...."

Picture it the way it was--I, clad in a spacesuit, crouching beside
Etl in the cold, thin air inside that cage, tracing numbers and words
in the dusty soil on the floor, while he read aloud with his voice
tube or copied my words and figures with a sharp stick. Outside the
transparent cage, the television cameras would be watching. And I
would think that maybe in a way Etl was like Tarzan, being raised by
apes.

* * * * *

Four more years went by. I had offspring of my own. Patty and Ron.
Good-looking, lovable brats. But Etl was my job--and maybe a little
more than that.

At the end of two years, he stopped growing. He weighed fifty-two
pounds and he was the ugliest-looking, elongated, gray-pink, leathery
ovoid that you could imagine. But with his voice tube clutched in his
tendrils, he could talk like a man.

He could take the finest watch, apart, repair and clean it in
jig-time--and this was just one skill among scores. Toward the end of
the four years, a Professor Jonas was coming in regularly and getting
into a spacesuit to give him lessons in physics, chemistry, college
math, astronomy and biology. Etl was having his troubles with
calculus.

And Etl could at least ape the outward aspects of the thoughts and
feelings of men. There were things he said to me that were
characteristic, though they came out of apparent sullenness that, for
all I knew, had seeds of murder in it: "You're my pal, Nolan. Sort of
my uncle. I won't say my father; you wouldn't like that."

Nice, embarrassing sentiment, on the surface. Maybe it was just cool
mimicry--a keen mind adding up human ways from observation of me and
my kids, and making up something that sounded the same, without being
the same at all. Yet somehow I hoped that Etl was sincere.

Almost from the building of the cage, of course, we'd kept photographs
and drawings of Mars inside for Etl to see.

Hundreds of times I had said to him things like: "It's a ninety-nine
and ninety-nine hundredths per cent probability that your race lives
on that world, Etl. Before the ship that brought you crashed on Earth,
we weren't at all sure that it was inhabited, and it's still an awful
mystery. I guess maybe you'll want to go there. Maybe you'll he