Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham

sees a motor car for the first time. I've only a thin crust of reason, through which the barbarism is likely to break at any moment ' And he went on in this strain until he had resurrected his self respect to the point where the machine was no more frightening than a clockwork mouse. But his interest in it increased almost to an obsession. He became afraid that other people would find out about it and want to remove it before he had discovered its secret. Save in that one incautious moment that Mr. Froud told you about, I don't believe he mentioned it to a soul. He would spend hours a day examining it and trying to find out how it worked, but he never did. One time he even went as far as to remove the upper part of the casing, but he could make nothing of the machinery inside; he could not even comprehend the motive force; it was something utterly and completely new to him. When he became too interested and started poking about inside, it slowly uncoiled one of its tentacles, pushed him gently aside and replaced its cover itself.
    As for me, I didn't attempt to understand it. I just accepted it as a puzzle, and though it took me longer than it did him to lose my fear of it, I found myself after a few days thinking of it as what shall I say? Perhaps as a sort of large dog a very intelligent large dog -- -Froud, unable to restrain himself, interrupted her for the first time: 'What did your father think it was?'
    He quite soon began to think, as he still thinks, that it was a kind of remote control mechanism operated and powered from its place of origin. It had several of the senses. It could see, it seemed to hear, it certainly had a tactile sense. and the noises which came from its diaphragm must have been speech of a kind, though we could make nothing of it. He got it into his head that it had been sent to establish communication between us and its makers, and, in effect, was a kind of transmitting and receiving station made self portable. He evolved the idea that perhaps the conditions on Earth were unsuitable for the race that had built it, although they had found a way of crossing space, and so they had constructed this ingenious way of getting round the difficulty.
    On that theory he started working to develop two way communication. When we found that the vocal language was hopeless, we began on diagrams and signs. We established to our satisfaction that its place of origin was Mars, but it was less easy to understand what kind of space ship had brought it. Later on, we began to be able to translate slowly and with a lot of difficulty its written language. It left quite a lot of that behind. But just as we were hoping that communication would soon be fluent, it destroyed itself, as you heard.
    Joan stopped speaking, and through a period of increasing discomfort each of the men waited for another to speak. She looked from face to face, her own expression quite inscrutable. It was Dale who broke the spell. His tone was coldly contemptuous.
    'And so you've no proof of a single word of all this except these?' He pointed to the photographs.
    'None,' she told him calmly.
    'Well, I've heard a few fairy tales in my time, but this ' He left the sentence uncompleted. When he went on, it was in a different tone: 'Come on, you're here now and you can't be sent back, why not tell me the truth? Who put you up to this game? Movie company, news agency, what was it?'
    'Nobody "put me up to it". I wanted to come, and I came. Nobody knew anything about it except the man who helped me. I didn't even tell my father I left a letter for him.'
    'Now, look here, I won't take it out on you, but I just want to know who's behind it, that's all.'
    'And I tell you there's no one.' For a moment she glared at him. Then, deliberately controlling her rising anger, she went on. 'I'll tell you why I'm here. It's because I intend to clear my father and myself. We were branded as a pair of liars. He was thrown out of his job. We had to change our names and go