I saw him
silhouetted against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head
first, and land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square
in the center of my sun-circle in the sand--a bull's eye!"

"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"

"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed while he
pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I figured he'd missed
my point, and I went through the whole blamed rigamarole again, and it
ended the same way, with Tweel on his nose in the middle of my picture!"

"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.

"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We could exchange
ideas up to a certain point, and then--blooey! Something in us was
different, unrelated; I don't doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy
as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different
viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours. But--we
couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I
_liked_ Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."

"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"

"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we--"
He paused, and then resumed his narrative. "Anyway, I finally gave it
up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any
too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes
after I closed myself in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some
eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant
little frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my
rocket.

"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I
woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I
heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that
three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to
myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the
south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.

"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing
through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He
seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in
beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and
stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come
shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his
coming at me li