Unwelcomed Visitor — Reading Notes

You did this, I did that. He learned the names of the objects with which they played, he learned the words for first and second persons in their different forms. He learned the word for the maternal parent, who seemed to stand in the closest relation to the young ones.

By evening he had acquired a fairly good child's grasp of the language. He rolled back in the direction of the ship. When he came to the place where it should be, he had a sudden feeling of panic. The ship was gone.

They must have dragged it away. Their whole pretense of indifference must have been a trick, he thought excitedly. They had waited until they could tamper with it without his interference, in order to learn its secrets. What had they done with it? Perhaps they had harmed it, possibly they had ruined the drive. How could he ever get off this accursed planet, how would he ever get back to Gfun?

He rolled hastily over to the nearest man and tried to put his newfound vocabulary to use. "Where--where--" He realized suddenly that he didn't know the word for ship. "Where galenfain?"

The man looked at him as if he were crazy, and walked on.

Xhanph did some swearing on his own account. He began to roll madly around the square, becoming more desperate from moment to moment. Finally, just when he thought he would explode from rage and frustration, he found the ship again. It had been dragged to a neighboring street and left on a vacant lot, surrounded by rusty cans, broken bottles, and various other forms of garbage and rubbish indigenous to this section of the planet.

Relief mingled with a feeling of outrage. Xhanph swore again. The indignity of it was enough to start an interplanetary war. If they ever heard of it back on Gfun, they would want to blast this stupid and insulting planet out of existence.

He hastened into the ship, and found to his joy that there had been no damage. There was nothing to prevent him from taking off again and getting back to Gfun. But the mystery of his reception still intrigued him. He could not leave without solving it.

He rolled out of the ship again and stood there watching it. Evidently they had regarded this miracle of engineering as nothing more than so much rubbish. They would probably leave it alone now. He could let it remain here, and in the meantime carry on his investigating as before.

Things would go more rapidly now that he understood some of the elements of human speech. All he had to do was keep his hearing appendages open and interpret the key words as he heard them. It shouldn't take him long. One of the reasons he had been selected to make the trip was that he had a gift for languages, and a day or two more should suffice to establish communications.

He left the ship again, and began to roll around the city. He listened to traffic policemen directing the flow of helicopters, he stood by unobtrusively while boy talked with girl--these conversations turned out to be very limited in scope, as well as uninstructive in syntax--and he even managed to get into a place of amusement where three dimensional images created in him a sense of nostalgia. From his slight knowledge of the language, he could perceive that the dialogue was so stale that he himself could have supplied it from stories written long ago on his native planet. After a lapse of many hours, the majority of the people disappeared from the streets, and he decided it was time to return to his ship and suspend animation.

In the morning he set out again. By the end of that day he felt he could understand the spoken language well enough. What next?

To learn the language in written form might take too long, and besides, to solve his mystery he would have to waste time in digging up the recorded forms that contained the necessary information. No, he would have to find some one to talk to, some one who would have the necessary information at his tentacle-tips, or as they called the appendages here, finger-tips.

He began to approach various people again, undiscouraged by their cold and impolite replies. Finally he found the informant he had been seeking, an old, white-haired individual who was walking slowly, with the aid of a cane, along one of the wider and quieter streets.

The man looked at him with calm lack of interest as he approached. Xhanph came to a stop, and said, "Greetings! I, Xhanph, bring you greetings from the inhabitants of the planet, Gfun. I come with a message of friendship."