After some time spent letting down through the gray murk, the machine broke out into clear air. As it banked into a wide turn the Hunter saw a large city built around a great, crowded harbor; then the faint drone of the engines increased in pitch, a large double wheel appeared below one of the nacelles, and the craft glided easily downward to contact with a faint jar a broad, hard-surfaced runway located on a point of land across the harbor from the largest buildings.
As Robert disembarked he glanced back at the airplane, so the Hunter was better able to form an estimate of its size and construction details. He had no idea of the power developed by the four bulky engines, and could not, therefore, guess at the speed; but he could see the quivering in the air above the huge nacelles that told of hot metal within and knew at least that they were not the phoenix converters used by his race and its allies. Whatever they were, though, it had already become evident that the machine could put a very respectable fraction of the planet's circumference behind it without having to descend for fuel.
After alighting from the airplane the boy went through the usual formalities incident to reclaiming his baggage, took a bus around the harbor to the city, walked about for a while, and visited a movie. This the Hunter also enjoyed; his vision persistence involved about the same tune lapse as the human eye, so he saw the show as a movie rather than a set of separate pictures. It was still daylight when they emerged and walked back to the bus station, where Bob reclaimed the luggage he had checked, then they boarded another bus.
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 buildingsthe 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 beginning to warn him that his mission was not to be quite the routine job he had expected and that he might possibly have use for all the earthly knowledge he could get. He didn't know it yet, but he had come to the best possible place for knowledge.
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 connect the flood of spoken words with their meanings; but it was difficult, since most of the conversation concerned events of the vacation just past, and the words usually lacked visible referents. He did learn the personal names of some of the beings, however, among them that of his host.
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 planning anything, but the extra effective width of his vision angle must be remembered. He was to some extent able to determine what he saw and therefore felt that he should decide what to look for.
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 Kinnaird was not a perit and could not be treated as one. There was no hope, at present, of influencing his actions at all, and any such hope in the future must rest on appeals to the boy's reason rather than on force. At the moment the Hunter was rather in the position of a movie spectator who wants to change the plot of the film he is seeing.
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 connection between spoken and written English was also cleared up one day in a physics class, when the instructor used a heavily lettered diagram to explain a problem in mechanics. The unseen watcher suddenly understood the connection between letter and sound and within a few days was able to visualize the written form of any new word he heard-allowing, of course, for the spelling irregularities that are the curse of the English language.
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 beginning of November, two months after the opening of school, the alien's vocabulary had the size, though not the precise content, of an intelligent ten-year-old's. He had a rather excessive store of scientific terms and many blanks where less specialized words should have been. Also, the meanings he attached to many terms were the strictly scientific ones- for example, he thought work meant "force times distance," and only that.
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 beginning of December, when the strange little being had almost forgotten everything in the pleasure of learning, an interruption occurred in his education. It occurred, the Hunter felt, through his own negligence and restored him to a better sense of duty. Robert Kinnaird had been a member of the school football team during the fall. The Hunter, with his intense interest in the health of his host, somewhat disapproved of this, though he understood the need of any muscled animal for exercise. The final game of the school season was played on Thanksgiving Day, and when the Hunter realized it was the final one, no one gave more thanks than he. However, he rejoiced too soon.