5 Unearthly Visions by Groff Conklin

Author:Groff Conklin [Conklin, Groff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fawcett Gold Medal
Published: 1964-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

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 help us make contact and establish amicable relations with the inhabitants—if there’s any way we can do that.”

During those five years, no more ships came to Earth from space, as far as we knew. I guessed that the Martians understood how supremely hard it would be to make friendly contact between the peoples of two worlds that had always been separate. There was difference of form, and certainly difference of esthetic concepts. Of custom, nothing could be the same. We didn’t have even an inkling of what the Martian civilization would be like.

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