this point," Colonel Mannheim said glumly.

Stanton glanced away from the screen for a moment to look at the other
men who were there. Some of them were watching the screen, but most of
them seemed to be watching Stanton, although they looked away as soon as
they saw his eyes on them. All, that is, except Dr. George Yoritomo,
who simply gave him a smile of confidence.

_Trying to see what kind of a bloke this touted superman is_, Stanton
thought. _Well, I can't say I blame 'em._

He brought his attention back to the screen.

So this was the Nipe's hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the
fashion that a Nipe's living quarters would be furnished on whatever
planet the multilegged horror had come from. Probably it had the same
similarity as Robinson Crusoe's island home had to a middle-class
nineteenth-century English home.

There was no furniture in it at all, as such. Low-slung as he was, the
Nipe needed no tables or workbenches; all his work was spread out on the
floor, with a neatness and tidiness that would have surprised many human
technicians. For the same reason, he needed no chairs, and, since true
sleep was a form of metabolic rest he evidently found unnecessary, he
needed no bed. The closest thing he did that might be called sleep was
his habit of stopping whatever he was doing and remaining quiet for
periods of time that ranged from a few minutes to a couple of hours.
Sometimes his eyes remained opened during these periods, sometimes they
were closed. It was difficult to tell whether he was sleeping or just
thinking.

"The difficulty was in getting cameras in there in the first place,"
Colonel Mannheim was saying. "That's why we missed so much of his early
work. There! Look at that!" His finger jabbed at the image.

"The attachment he's making?"

"That's right. Now, it looks as though it's a meter of some kind, but we
don't know whether it's a test instrument or an integral and necessary
part of the machine he's making. The whole machine might even be only a
test instrument for something else he's building. Or perhaps a machine
to make parts for some other machine. After all, he had to start out
from the very beginning--making the tools to make the tools to make the
tools, you know."

Dr. Yoritomo spoke for the first time. "It's not quite as bad as all
that, eh, Colonel? We must remember that he had our technology to draw
upon. If he'd been wrecked on Earth two or three centuries ago, he
wou