obey the Laws; we do not perform the Rituals. We are animals.
Apparently intelligent animals, but animals nevertheless. 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," Stanton said. "Are you implying that
the Nipe thinks there are other Nipes around, running the world from
secret hideouts, like the villains in a Fu Manchu novel?"

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

"Nor would strangely shaped intelligent beings make him unhappy. His
race should be aware, by now, that such things must exist. But it is
very likely that he equates _true_ intelligence with technology, and I
do not think it likely that 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 by any
means evolved far enough. And, considering the time span involved in
their own progress toward a technological civilization, it is not at all
unlikely that the Nipe thinks of technology as something that evolves in
a race in the same way that 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 instead of--ah--Nipoid? A bad word, but it
will do for the nonce. To find Real People of a different shape is
something new, but he can absorb it because it does not contradict
anything he _knows_.

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