Kayin threw another stone, but the beast dodged and continued to bark. His audience was growing now, and Kayin’s skin began to twitch nervously, in a way that itself might have drawn an audience if they had been in a mood to notice such details of behavior. “I patted cat this morning,” he said apologetically. “Crazy dog smells cat.”
He would have them all staring at him if this went on much longer, and he knew that he had to act quickly. Looking around him, he spied a compressed air hose lying on the ground. He picked it up, turned on the air, and directed the nozzle at the dog. The blast knocked the animal head over heels, and sent him howling on his way. Everyone laughed, and Kayin turned back to his work in relief. But from now on he knew that he must wear no new clothes.
As the work progressed, his attention turned from the immediate tasks at hand, and he began to wonder what its purpose was. There seemed to be hundreds of men, all engaged in menial tasks, all part of some greater overall plan. He began to wonder, too, if people who could make such plans could be so unintelligent as he had first assumed. Or was it simply that their intelligence had not developed, that they lacked the background of science to make the most of their minds, to use the resources their planet possessed?
A rough voice, almost the twin of that first rough voice of two days before, growled, “Hey, you, wake up and get movin’. Whaddya think you’re gettin’ paid for?”
He swung his pick without looking up. The foreman had no idea that the tall foreigner he knew as Kane was staring at him curiously with tiny camouflaged eyes that quite literally grew in the back of the strangely shaped head, trying to understand what made the human being tick.
By the end of a week Kayin was confident that he knew the language well enough to start reading it. He went to a public school which he found was open in the evenings, and there joined a class where someone explained the alphabet, and made clear to foreigners that English was a language full of traps and pitfalls. Kayin absorbed the information eagerly, but after the third lesson he found the pace much too slow, and did not return. He had never before encountered a language of so strange a structure, and the actual making of the sounds gave him trouble, but the basic principles of language study were as valid here as on his home planet, and he learned rapidly. By the end of a month he could read.
By the end of the same month he had learned, too, the nature of the project on which he was working. On several occasions, the engineer in charge had passed by him to exchange a few words with the foreman and once with the man who had ordered the building.
The words had been significant. There could be no mistake, for Kayin had come across them in his reading. “Laboratory” had a very definite meaning. And there were such expressions as “incubation tanks,” and “thermostat controls.” All in all, enough to let him know that they were engaged in constructing a plant for the manufacture of biochemical substances.
He knew that there were biochemical plants already in existence, scattered over the civilized part of the planet, and the thought of great danger did not occur to him. But he continued, as the men around him would have put it, to keep his ears open, and as time went on he became more and more disquieted.