t from there to
Leningrad without being seen once was more of a mystery, but certainly
not impossible in the light of what had been done since.

Eight months later, a non-vision phone call had been received by the
Regent's Board of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in
Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice offered (in very bad Russian!) a meeting.
The Nipe had managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that
he did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with the
forest ranger.

The psychiatrists were divided in their opinions. Some thought that the
call had been from a deranged person. When the Nipe actually showed up at
the appointed place, those minds changed rapidly.

The Nipe's ability to use any human language was limited. He picked up
vocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completely
unable to use a language beyond discussion of concrete actions and
objects. His mind was simply too alien to enable him to do more than touch
the edges of human communication.

In the discussion of mathematics, in particular, the Nipe seemed to be
completely at a loss. He apparently thought of mathematics as a _spoken_
language instead of a _written_ one, and could not progress beyond simple
diagrams.

He wasn't captured in any real sense of the word. He refused to allow any
physical tests on his body, and, short of threatening him at gun-point,
there didn't seem to be any practicable way to force him to accede to the
human's wishes. And they couldn't do that.

The Nipe had to be treated as an emissary from his home world, wherever
that was. He'd killed a man, yes. But that had to be allowed as
justifiable homicide in self-defense, since the forester had drawn a gun
and was ready to fire. Nobody could blame the late Wang Kulichenko for
that, but nobody could blame the Nipe, either.

For six weeks, the humans and the Nipe had tried to arrive at a meeting of
minds, and just when it would seem within grasp, it would fade away into
mist. It was nearly a month before the Russian psychologists and
psychiatrists realized that the reason the Nipe had come to them was
because he had thought that they were the ruling body of that territory!

The UN observers stayed out of it at first. Before there was any kind of
talk on a Government level, there must be some kind of understanding on a
personal level. And that, of course, was never achieved.

Just what had set off the Nipe's an