Then, halfway to his eyes, it began to glow, to smoke, to grow terribly hot. And as Jerry released it with a reflex of pain, it burst into white flame and hit the ground as a shapeless gobbet of molten slag. Jerry's hand came to his mouth automatically. He sucked and licked at the sore surfaces of his finger and thumb, trying to drain some of the hurt out of them. Then he froze. After a heartbeat, he felt carefully about the interior of his mouth with a forefinger. Gums. Warm, wet, soft-boned toothless gums. Whatever the alien looked like--it was still only a baby. Which meant-- Quickly Jerry looked at the sky again. Not a cloud had moved. Their rotund fleeciness might have been carven there. He gave himself a mental kick. Hadn't one of his first alien awarenesses been the sound of wind? And yet the grass lay still. The trees stood silent. And the clouds, so nearly over his head that he could have touched one, hung quietly against a perfectly calm sky. It was not the wind he had heard. It was air. Just molecules of air, as they shifted and flew about at incredible speeds. The alien-baby's time-sense was occluded, as that of any Earth-baby, by shortness of life. It was the paradox of relative lifetime. A lifetime, Old Peters had said, training the eager young men who were to become graduate Space Zoologists, is a lifetime. He'd written it on the blackboard so they might understand he was not speaking in circles. "A lifetime," he'd said, "is the time one spends from birth until any present moment. A lifetime is the actual count of moments of existence from birth. When a baby has been born for an hour, its lifetime is sixty minutes. And to the baby, that sixty minutes is a lifetime." He'd written the two words on the board, and would point from one to the other as he spoke, so the class could understand the distinction visually, and not have to rely on his inflection to tell which term he'd used. "A lifetime," he'd continued, "is subjective; a lifetime is objective. The first deals in one's personal sense of time passed. The second is simply readings from a clock. When a man turns ninety, he is usually surprised to find how short a life he's seemed to have had. His ninety years seem hardly longer to him than a single day seemed when he was a baby. "It is a lucky thing that we cannot penetrate the mind of an intelligent creature. If any of us got into the mind of a baby, we'd soon start going out of our minds with the maddening length of a day's time, seen from a baby's viewpoint. Remember, when you are in Contact with an alien mind, for that immutable forty minutes your _sensation_ of elapsed time will be subject to that of your host. To a baby, forty minutes is forever." * * * * * And here Jerry Norcriss was, in a baby's mind.