His hands went up and swept the phones from his head.
He stared at Gilmer, half in horror.
'It's lonesome,' he said. 'Crying for Mars. Like a lost baby.'
Gilmer nodded.
'It's not trying to talk to anyone now,' he said. 'Just lying there, crying its heart out. Not dangerous now. Never intentionally dangerous, but dangerous just the same.'
'But,' cried Woods, 'you were here all afternoon. It didn't bother you. You didn't go insane.'
Gilmer shook his head.
'No,' he said, 'I didn't go insane. Just the animals. And they would become immune after a while with this one certain animal. Because Fur-Ball is intelligent. His frantic attempts to communicate with some living things touched my brain time and time again… but it didn't stay. It swept on. It ignored me.
'You see, back in the ship it found that the human brain couldn't communicate with it. It recognized it as an alien being. So it didn't waste any more time with the human brain. But it tried the brains of monkeys and elephants and lions, hoping madly that it would find some intelligence to which it could talk, some intelligence that could explain what had happened, tell it where it was, reassure it that it wasn't marooned from Mars forever.
'I am convinced it has no visual sense, very little else except this ultrasonic voice to acquaint itself with its surroundings and its conditions. Maybe back on Mars it could talk to its own kind and to other things as well. It didn't move around much. It probably didn't have many enemies. It didn't need so many senses.'