“Kayin. My name Kayin.”
“Kane. That’s rather a strange name for a foreigner. Well, don’t worry, Mr. Kane, we’ll take care of you.”
Her attitude helped erase the hostile encounter of an hour before. When they finally showed him a cot, one of a row on which many men were already stretched out, he tried to reconcile the contradictory kinds of behavior he had met, and decided that the psychology of this race would prove more complicated than he had at first believed.
The cot was extremely inconvenient, but somehow he managed to stretch out on it like the others. He slept little, and in the morning, when he awoke, it was with strained muscles and a sense of fatigue, but he was eager to see more of the world on which he found himself, and he left the next day, to continue his wanderings. During the hours that followed, he covered many miles of ground. With ears and mind open, he picked up more and more words, and by evening he was fairly confident in his ability to make himself understood in almost any situation.
He went hungry that day, but in the evening he slept much more comfortably at the foot of an old tree on a vacant lot. Far above he could see the star from which he had come. He stared at it impersonally for a short time, wondering whether he would see his own planet again. Then he fell into a half-sleep, one that rested him, though still leaving his senses partly alert.
He was becoming more accustomed to the rather short day-and-night rhythm of the planet, and he awoke at the first faint signs of daylight before anyone had noticed him.
That day he encountered groups of men congregated about dingy little buildings on a dingy street. He found that they were seeking employment, and knowing that the best way to learn about a strange race was to study the manner in which the people worked, he joined one of the groups. But there was not a single occupation with regard to which he could claim experience, and he was hired finally to do heavy, but unskilled labor, at eighty cents an hour.
The work was more difficult for him than for the others. He looked like them, but they had muscles which he simply did not possess. He was so clumsy at lifting rocks that another man, with whom he was working, said finally in exasperation, “Didn’t you ever lift anything before? Look, pal, do it like this. Bend at the knees, see? That’s it, like this—no, you’re doing it all wrong!”
It was a nuisance, it might even be dangerous, to be stared at so closely. The fact was that his knees simply would not bend as human knees did. They were jointed in quite another fashion, and no surface similarities could conceal the fact that in action there was all the difference of two worlds between them.