ster. He is
not a criminal. No. He is a gentleman. He behaves as a gentleman. He is
shipwrecked on an alien planet. Around his, he sees evidence that ours is
a technological society. But that is a contradiction! A paradox!

"For _we_ are not civilized! No! We are not rational! We are not sane! We
do not obey the Laws, we do not perform the Rituals. We are animals.
Apparently intelligent animals, but animals never the less. How can this
be?

"Ha! Says the Nipe to himself. These animals must be ruled over by Real
People. It is the only explanation. Not so?"

"Colonel Mannheim mentioned that. Are you implying that the Nipe thinks
that there are other Nipes around, running the world from secret hideouts,
like the Fu Manchu novel?"

[Illustration]

"Not quite. The Nipe is not incapable of learning something new; in fact,
he is quite good at it, as witness the fact that he has learned many Earth
languages. He picked up Russian in less then eight months simply by
listening and observing. Like our own race, his undoubtedly evolved many
languages during the beginnings of its progress--when there were many
tribes, separated and out of communication. It would not surprise me to
find that most of those languages have survived and that our distressed
astronaut knows them all. A new language would not distress him.

"Nor would strangely-shaped intelligent beings distress him. His race
should be aware, by now, that such things exist. But it is very likely
that he equates _true_ intelligence with technology, and I do not think he
has ever met a race higher than the barbarian level before. Such races
were not, of course, human--by his definition. They showed possibilities,
perhaps, but they had not evolved far enough. Considering the time span
involved, it is not at all unlikely that the Nipe thinks of technology as
something that evolves with a race in the same way intelligence does--or
the body itself.

"So it would not surprise him to find that the Real People of this system
were humanoid in shape. That is something new, and he can absorb it. It
does not contradict anything he _knows_.

"_But--!_ Any truly intelligent being which did not obey the Law and
follow the Ritual _would_ be a contradiction in terms. For he has no
notion of a Real Person without those characteristics. Without those
characteristics, technology is impossible. Since he sees technology all
around him, it follows that there must be Real People with those