opened the small book and riffled through it to find the names he
wanted.

_[7]_

The image of the Nipe on the glowing screen was clear and finely
detailed. It was, Stanton thought, as though one were looking through a
window into the Nipe's nest itself. Only the tremendous depth of focus
of the lens that had caught the picture gave the illusion a feeling of
unreality. Everything--background and foreground alike--was sharply in
focus.

Like some horrendous dream monster, the Nipe moved in slow motion,
giving Stanton the eerie feeling that the alien was moving through a
thicker, heavier medium than air, in a place where the gravity was much
less than that of Earth. With ponderous deliberation, the fingers of one
of his hands closed upon the handle of an oddly shaped tool and lifted
it slowly from the surface upon which he worked.

"That's our best-placed camera," said Colonel Mannheim, "but some of the
others can always get details that this one doesn't. The trouble is
that we'll never really have enough cameras in there--not unless we stud
the walls, ceilings, and floors with them, and even then I'm not so sure
we'd get everything. It isn't the same as having a trained expert on
camera who is _trying_ to demonstrate what he's doing. An expert plays
to the camera and never obstructs any of his own movements. But the
Nipe ..." He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head sadly.

Stanton narrowed his eyes at the image. To his own speeded-up perceptive
processes, the motion seemed intolerably slow. "Would you mind speeding
it up a little?" he asked the colonel. "I want to get an idea of the way
he moves, and I can't really get the feeling of it at this speed."

"Certainly." The colonel turned to the technician at the controls.
"Speed the tape up to normal. If there's anything Mr. Stanton wants to
look at more closely, we can run it through again."

As if in obedience to the colonel's command, the Nipe seemed to shake
himself a little and go about his business more briskly, and the air and
gravity seemed to revert to those of Earth.

"What's he doing?" Stanton asked. The Nipe was performing some sort of
operation on an odd-looking box that sat on the floor in front of him.

The colonel pointed. "He's got a screwdriver that he's modified to give
it a head with an L-shaped cross section, and he's wiggling it around
inside that hole in the box. But what he's doing is a secret between God
and the Nipe at