as if he were crazy, and walked on.

Xhanph did some swearing on his own account. He began to roll madly around the square, becoming more desperate from moment to moment. Finally, just when he thought he would explode from rage and frustration, he found the ship again. It had been dragged to a neighboring street and left on a vacant lot, surrounded by rusty cans, broken bottles, and various other forms of garbage and rubbish indigenous to this section of the planet.

Relief mingled with a feeling of outrage. Xhanph swore again. The indignity of it was enough to start an interplanetary war. If they ever heard of it back on Gfun, they would want to blast this stupid and insulting planet out of existence.

He hastened into the ship, and found to his joy that there had been no damage. There was nothing to prevent him from taking off again and getting back to Gfun. But the mystery of his reception still intrigued him. He could not leave without solving it.

He rolled out of the ship again and stood there watching it. Evidently they had regarded this miracle of engineering as nothing more than so much rubbish. They would probably leave it alone now. He could let it remain here, and in the meantime carry on his investigating as before.

Things would go more rapidly now that he understood some of the elements of human speech. All he had to do was keep his hearing appendages open and interpret the key words as he heard them. It shouldn't take him long. One of the reasons he had been selected to make the trip was that he had a gift for languages, and a day or two more should suffice to establish communications.

He left the ship again, and began to roll around the city. He listened to traffic policemen directing the flow of helicopters, he stood by unobtrusively while boy talked with girl—these conversations turned out to be very limited in scope, as well as uninstructive in syntax—and he even managed to get into a place of amusement where three dimensional images created in him a sense of nostalgia. From his slight knowledge of the language, he could perceive that the dialogue was so stale that he himself could have supplied it from stories written long ago on his native planet. After a lapse of many hours, the majority of the people disappeared from the streets, and he decided it was time to return to his ship and suspend animation.

In the morning he set out again. By the end of that day he felt he could understand the spoken 

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