guage.

Still there was no answer. Whoever it was had crawled out of sight.

Then he realized that it couldn't be anyone crawling. No one could even
have run the distance between here and the ship in the time since it had
hit, much less crawled.

He frowned. A wolf, then? Possibly. They weren't too common, but there
were still plenty of them around.

He unholstered the heavy pistol at his side.

And, as he slid the barrel free, he became the first human being ever to
see the Nipe.

For an instant, as the Nipe came out from behind a tree fifteen feet away,
Wang Kulichenko froze as he saw those four baleful violet eyes glaring at
him from the snouted head. He jerked up the pistol to fire.

He was much too late. His reflexes were too slow by far. The Nipe launched
itself across the intervening space in a blur of speed that would have
made a leopard seem slow. The alien's hands slapped aside the gun with a
violence that broke the man's wrist, while other hands slammed at his
skull.

Wang Kulichenko hardly had time to be surprised before he died.

* * * * *

The Nipe stood quietly for a moment, looking down at the thing he had
killed. His stomach churned with disgust. He ignored the fading hoofbeats
of the slave-animal from which he had knocked the thing that lay on the
ground with a crushed skull. The slave-animal was unintelligent and
unimportant.

This was the intelligent one.

But so slow! So incredibly slow! And so weak and soft!

It seemed impossible that such poorly-equipped beasts could have survived
long enough on any world to evolve to become the dominant life form.

Perhaps it was not the dominant form. Perhaps it was merely a higher
slave-animal. He would have to do more investigating.

He picked up the weapon the thing had drawn and examined it carefully. The
mechanism was unfamiliar, but a glance at the muzzle told him that it was
a projectile weapon of some sort. The twisted grooves in the barrel were
obviously designed to impart a spin to the projectile, to give it
gyroscopic stability while in flight.

The dead thing must have thought he was a wild animal, the Nipe decided.
Surely no being would carry a weapon for use against members of its own or
another intelligent species.

He examined the rest of the equipment on the thing. Not much information
there. Too bad the slave-animal was gone; there had apparently been more
equipment strapped to it.

The next