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Admit that even as a scientist you hate them.
    SELF: No. No, damn you, I won't. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, "I hate the Asadi, I hate the Asadi," when we killed every pygmy? —Even though, my God, I do. . . .

    PART TWO
    Daily Life: In-the-Field Report
    From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: Once again, it's evening. I've a lean-to now, and it protects me from the rain much better than did the porous roof of the forest. I've been here twenty-two days now. Beneath this mildewed flesh my muscles crawl like the evil snakes BoskVeld doesn't possess. I'm saturated with Denebola's garish light. I'm Gulliver among the Yahoos.
    This, however, isn't what you want to hear.
    You want facts, my conclusions about the behavior of the Asadi, evidence that we're studying a life form capable of at least elementary reasoning and ratiocination. The Asadi have this ability, I swear it—but only slowly has the evidence for intelligence begun to accumulate.

    Okay, base-camp buggers. Let me deHver myself of an in-tbe-field report as an objective scientist, forgetting the buncbes of my mortal self. Tbe rest of tbis tape will deal witb tbe daily life of tbe Asadi.
    A day in tbe life of. A typical day in the life of.
    Except that I'm going to cap my reporting of mundane occurrences with tbe account of an extraordinary event that took place just tbis afternoon. Also, I'm going to compress time to suit my own artistic/scientific purposes.
    At dawn tbe Asadi return to their football fields. For approximately twelve hours they mill about in tbe clearing doing whatever they care to do. Sexual activity and quirkish staring matches are the only sort of behavior that can in any way be called "social"— unless you believe milling about in a crowd qualifies. Their daylight way of life I call Indifferent Togetherness.
    But when the Asadi engage in coitus, their indifference dissolves and gives way to a brutal hostility. Both partners behave as if they desire to kill each other, and frequently tbis is nearly the result. (Births, in case you're wondering, must take place in the Wild, the female self-exiled and unattended.) As for the staring matches, they're of brief duration and involve fierce gesticulation and mane shaking. The eyes change color with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum, and maybe beyond, in a matter of seconds.
    I'm now prepared to say these instantaneous changes of eye color are tbe Asadi equivalent of human speech. Three weeks of observation have finally convinced me that tbe adversaries in these staring matches control tbe internal chemical changes that trigger the cbfmges in the succeeding hues of their eyes. In other words, patterns exist. Tbe minds that control these chemical changes cannot be primitive ones. The alterations are willed, and they're infinitely complex.
    Ole Oliver Oliphant was right. The Asadi have a "language."
    Still, for all tbe good it does me, they might as well have none. One day's agonizingly like another. And I can't blame my

    pariahhood, for the only things even a well-adjusted Asadi may participate in are sex and staring. It doesn't pain me overmuch to be outcast from participation in these. To some extent, I'm not much more of a pariah than any of these creatures. We're all, so to speak, outcast from life's feast. . . .
    Unlike every other society I've ever read about or seen, the Asadi don't even have any meaningful communal gatherings, any festivals of solidarity, any unique rituals of group consciousness. They don't even have families. The individual is the basic unit of their "society." What they have done, in fact, is to institutionalize the processes of alienation. Their dispersal at dusk simply translates into physical distance the incohesiveness by which they live during the day. How do the Asadi continue to live as a people? For that matter, why do they do so?
    Enough questions. As I mentioned