The thing that puzzled him was this: If the mine car had burnt up from moving too far too fast, why hadn't the baby's hand and arm been scorched by the motion? The heat of the car had affected it, so that let out inborn heat-resistance....
His hands once again went to his face. He felt not only the features—familiar features, eerily like a human baby's—but the skull-size. When he'd finished, he no longer had reason to doubt that the baby was of an intelligent species. Too much cranial allotment to think any differently.
The whole situation, Jerry mused with grim humor, was screwy. The six-month roborocket could not have missed a creature with such an intense life-pulse, but it had. Contact could not be achieved with an intelligent mind, but it had been. Invisibility—except for certain species of underwater, creatures—was supposed to be impossible for a living organism. Yet here it was.
Three separate impossibles ... all accomplished.
"Still," said Jerry to himself, "that's not the main puzzle. The vanishing of those two shifts of miners is still beyond me. They could, of course, have simply walked head-on into this invisible leviathan. But how fast can a man walk? And would they all have done it? Now, if this kid happened to pick one of them up—" Jerry gave a shudder at the thought of what had happened to that metal mine car. "Still," he sighed, baffled, "a man who bursts into flame is no more fun to hold than a hot mine car. After maybe two or three deaths at the outside, the kid would've learned not to touch them."
Then he had an even eerier thought. If this creature were a baby—where did its mother and father lurk?
The thought of two more invisible giants at large on the planet was unbearable.
Jerry decided to chance losing control over the alien mind, to let its own instincts come to the fore.
There was the possibility that it knew where its folks were, and would try moving in that direction. Or it might cry for its mother, and she'd hurry back. If there were invisible giants, the sooner the colony was informed the better.