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forgotten--emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary death of
nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body requires the
battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long last, the somnolent
self-confident adult which has been written aforetime in its genes; and here,
too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was soap in his mud, a calculated
percentage which allowed him to thrash on the floor of his cage without
permitting him to make enough progress to bump his head against its walls.
This was conservative of his head, but it wasted the muscles of his limbs.
When his croaking days were over, and he was transformed into a totally
air-breathing, leaping thing, he did not leap well. This too had been
arranged, in a sense. There was nothing in
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish this childhood of his from which he
needed to leap away in terror, nor was there any place in it to which a small
leap could have carried him. Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible
bang and a slithering fall for the end of which, harmless though it invariably
proved to be, no instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex
helped him to cultivate a graceful recovery.
Besides, an animal with a perpetually sprained tail cannot be graceful
regardless of its instincts.
Finally, he forgot how to leap entirely, and simply sat huddled until the next
transformation overcame him, looking back dully at the many bobbing heads that
were beginning to ring him round during his every waking hour. By the time he
realized that all these watchers were alive like himself, and much larger than
he was, his instincts were so far submerged as to produce in him nothing more
than a vague alarm which resulted in no action. The new transformation turned
him into a weak and spindly walker with no head for distance, oversized though
it was. It was here that Somebody saw to it that he was transferred to the
terrarium.
Here at last the hormones of his true adolescence awakened and began to flow
in his blood. The proper responses for a world something like this tiny jungle
had been written imperatively upon every chromosome in his body; here, all at
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once, he was almost at home. He roved through the verdure of the terrarium on
his shaky shanks with a counterfeit of gladness, looking for something to
flee, something to fight, something to eat, something to learn. Yet in the
long run he hardly found even a place to sleep, for in the terrarium night was
as unknown as ever. Here he also became aware for the first time that there
were differences among the creatures who looked in at him and sometimes
molested him. There were two who were almost always to be seen, either alone
or together. They were always the molesters, as well--except-except that it
was not always exactly molestation, for sometimes these beings with their
sharp stings and their rough hands would give him something to eat which he
had never tasted before, or do something else to him which pleased as much as
it annoyed. He did not understand this relationship at all, and he did not
like it.
After a while, he hid from all the watchers except these two--and even from
them most of the time, for he was always sleepy. When he wanted them, he would
call: "Szan-tchez!" (For he could not say "Liu" at all; his mesentery-tied
tongue and almost cleft palate would never master so demanding a combination
of liquid sounds--that had to wait for his adulthood.)
But eventually he stopped calling, and took to squatting apathetically beside
the pond in the center of the miniature jungle. When on the last night of his
lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses
where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow,
when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that
age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow
he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight...
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish
And so he awoke; and so the world was changed. The multiple doors from sense
to soul had closed; suddenly, the world was an abstract; he had made that
crossing from animal to automaton which had caused all the trouble eastward of
Eden in 4004 B. C. He was not a man, but he would pay the toll on that bridge
all the same. From this point on, nobody would ever be able to guess what he
felt in his animal soul, least of all Egtverchi himself. "But what is he
thinking about?"
Liu said wonderingly, staring up at the huge, grave Lithian head which bent
down upon them from the other side of the transparent pyroceram door.
Egtverchi--he had told them his name very early--could hear her, of course,
despite the division of the laboratory into two;, but he said nothing. Thus
far, he was anything but talkative, though he was a voracious reader.
Ruiz did not respond for a while, though the nine-foot, young Lithian awed and
puzzled him quite as much as he did Liu--and for better reasons. He looked
sidewise at Michelis. The chemist was ignoring them both. Ruiz could
understand that well enough, as far as he himself was concerned; the attempt
to write a joint but impartial report on the Lithia expedition for the J.I.R.
had proven disastrous for the already tense relationship between the two
scientists. But that same tension, he could see, was distressing Liu without
her being quite aware of it, and that he could not let pass; she was innocent.
He mustered a last-ditch attempt to draw Mike out.
"This is their learning period," he said. "Necessarily, they spend most of it
listening. They're like the old legend of the wolf boy, who is raised by
animals and comes into human cities without even knowing human speech--except
that the Lithians don't learn speech in infancy and so have no block against
learning it in young adulthood. To do that, they must listen very hard--most
wolf boys never learn to talk at all--and that's what he's doing."
"But why won't he at least answer questions?" Liu said troubledly, without
quite looking at
Michelis. "How is he going to learn if he won't practice?"
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"He hasn't anything to tell us yet, by his lights," Ruiz said. "And for him,
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