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. Then he jerked up his pistol to
fire.

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

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

_[3]_

The Nipe stood quietly for a moment, looking down at the thing he had
killed. His stomachs 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--had been--the intelligent one.

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

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

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

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

He tossed the weapon aside. Now there was a certain compassion in his
thoughts as he looked again at the dead thing. It must surely have
thought it was faced with 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. There was very
little further information. The fabric in which it wrapped itself was
crude, but ingeniously put together, and its presence indicated that the
being needed some sort of protection against the temperature. It
appeared to have a thermal insulating quality. Evidently the creature
was used to a warmer climate. That served as additional information to
help substantiate his observation from