Needle

This turned out to be quite a long ride; the vehicle took them far outside the city and through several smaller towns, and the sun was almost down when it finally left them by the roadside.

A smaller side road, with broad, well-kept lawns on either side, led off up a gentle slope, and at the top of this slope was a large, sprawling building, or group of buildings—the Hunter was not sure which from his viewpoint. Robert picked up his bags and walked up the hill toward this structure, and the alien began to hope that the journey had ended, for the time being at least. He was far enough from his quarry already. As it turned out, his hopes for once were fulfilled.

To the boy the return to school, assignment to a room, and meeting with old acquaintances were by now familiar, but to the Hunter every activity and everything he saw and heard were of absorbing interest. He had no intention, even yet, of making a really detailed study of the human race, but some subconscious guide was begi

He looked and listened almost feverishly as Bob went to his room, unpacked, and then wandered about the dormitory meeting friends from former terms. He found himself trying almost constantly to co

He decided, after an hour or two, that it would be best to turn his full attention to the language problem. There was nothing whatever at the moment that he could do about his own mission, and if he understood the speech around him he might be able to learn when his host was to return to the place where they had met. Until he did return, the Hunter was simply out of play-he could do nothing at all toward locating and eliminating his quarry.

With this idea finally settled upon he spent Robert's sleeping hours organizing the few words he had learned, trying to deduce some grammatical rules, and developing a definite campaign for learning more as quickly as possible. It may seem odd that one who was so completely unable to control his own comings and goings should dream of pla

It would have been far simpler, if he could only control his host's movements in some way or other, or interpret and influence the multitudinous reactions that went on in his nervous system. He had controlled the perit, of course, but not directly; the little creature had been trained to respond to twinges administered directly to its muscles, as a horse is trained to respond to the pressure of the reins. The Hunter's people used the perils to perform actions which their own semi-liquid bodies lacked the strength to do, and which were too delicate for their intelligent hosts to perform-or which had to be performed in places which had brought the Hunter to earth.

Unfortunately for this line of thought Robert Ki

Classes began the day after their arrival. Their purpose was at once obvious to the unlisted pupil though the subjects were frequently obscure. The boy's course included, among other subjects, English, physics, Latin, and French; and of those four, oddly enough, physics proved most helpful in teaching the Hunter the English language. The reason is not too difficult to understand.

While the Hunter was not a scientist, he knew something of science-one can hardly operate a machine like a space ship without having some notion of what makes it work. The elementary principles of the physical sciences are the same anywhere, and while the drawing conventions accepted by the authors of Bob's textbooks differed from those of the Hunter's people, the diagrams were still understandable. Since the diagrams were usually accompanied by written explanations, they were clues to the meanings of a great many words.

The co

The learning process was one which automatically increased its speed as time went on, for the more words the Hunter knew, the more he could guess at from the context in which he met them. By the begi

By this time, however, he had reached a point where tenth-grade English had some meaning to him, and the opportunities to judge word meanings from context became very frequent indeed, ignorant as the Hunter was of human customs.

About the begi

Bob, reconstructing one of the more exciting moments of the game to prove his point in an argument, slipped and twisted an ankle severely enough to put him to bed for several days. The Hunter felt guilty about it because, had he realized the danger even two or three seconds in advance, he would have "tightened up" the net of his tissue that existed around the boy's joints and tendons. Of course his physical strength being what it was, this would not actually have been much help, but he regretted not trying. Now that the damage had actually been done, there was nothing whatever he could do-the danger of infection was already nil without his help, since the skin had not been broken.

The incident, at any rate, recalled him not only to his duties to his host but also those he had as a police agent; and once again he started thinking over what he had learned that could bear on his police problem. To his astonishment and chagrin this turned out to be nothing at all; he did not even know where the boy had been at the time of his own arrival.

He did learn, from a chance remark passed between Bob and one of his friends, that the place was an island, which was one of the few bright spots in the picture- his quarry, if it had landed at the same place, must either still be there or have left by some traceable means. The Hunter remembered too vividly his own experience with the shark to believe that the other could escape successfully in a fish, and he had never heard of a warm-blooded air-breather that lived in the water. Seals and whales had not come up in Bob's conversation or reading, at least not since the Hunter had been able to understand it.