"Yes. They have no missing aircraft, but they're checking with the space
fields. The way you describe it, the thing must be a spaceship of some
kind."
"I think so, too. I wish I had a radiation detector here, though. I'd
like to know whether that thing is hot or not. It's only a couple of miles
or so away. I think I'd better stay away. Meanwhile, you'd better put in a
call to Central Headquarters Fire Control. There's going to be a holocaust
if I'm any judge unless they get here fast with plenty of equipment."
"I'll see to it," said his grandfather, cutting off.
The bluish glow in the sky had quite died away by now, and the distant
rumbling was gone, too. And, oddly enough, there was not much smoke in the
distance. There was a small cloud of gray that rose, streamerlike, from
where the glow had been, but even that faded away fairly rapidly in the
chill breeze. Quite obviously, there would be no fire. After several more
minutes of watching, he was sure of it. There couldn't have been much heat
produced in that explosion--if it could really be called an explosion.
Then he saw something moving in the trees between himself and the spot
where the ship had come down. He couldn't quite see what it was, but it
looked like someone crawling.
"Halloo, there!" he called out. "Are you hurt?"
There was no answer. Perhaps whoever it was didn't understand Russian.
Wang's command of English wasn't too good, but he called out in that
language.
Still there was no answer. Whoever it was had crawled out of sight.
Then he realized that it couldn't be anyone crawling. No one could even
have run the distance between here and the ship in the time since it had
hit, much less crawled.
He frowned. A wolf, then? Possibly. They weren't too common, but there
were still plenty of them around.
He unholstered the heavy pistol at his side.
And, as he slid 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. He jerked up the pistol to fire.
He was much too late. His reflexes were too slow by far. The Nipe launched
itself across the intervening space in a blur of speed that would have
made a leopard seem slow. The alien's hands slapped aside the gun with a
violence that broke the man's wrist, while other hands slammed at his
skull.
Wang Kulichenko hardly had time to be surprised before he died.
* * * * *
The Nipe stood quietly for a moment, looking down at the thing he had
killed. His stomach 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 the intelligent one.
But so slow! So incredibly slow! And so weak and soft!
It seemed impossible that such poorly-equipped beasts could have survived
long enough on any world to evolve to become the dominant life form.
Perhaps it was not the dominant form. Perhaps it was merely a higher
slave-animal. He would have to do more investigating.
He picked up the weapon the thing had drawn and examined it carefully. The
mechanism was unfamiliar, but a glance at the muzzle told him that it was
a projectile weapon of some sort. The twisted grooves in the barrel were
obviously designed to impart a spin to the projectile, to give it
gyroscopic stability while in flight.
The dead thing must have thought he was 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. Not much information
there. Too bad the slave-animal was gone; there had apparently been more
equipment strapped to it.
The next question was, what should he do with the body?
Devour it properly, as one should with a validly slain foe?
It didn't seem that he could do anything else, and yet his stomachs wanted
to rebel at the thought. After all, it wasn't as if the thing were really
a proper being. It was astonishing to find another intelligent race; none
had ever been found before. But he was determined to show them that he was
civilized and intelligent, too.
On the other hand, they were obviously of a lower order than the Nipe, and
that made the question even more puzzling.
In the end, he decided to leave the thing here, for others of its kind to
find. They would doubtless consume it properly.
And--he glanced at the sky and listened--they would be here in time. There
were aircraft coming.
He would have to leave quickly. He had to find one of their production or
supply centers, and he would have to do it alone, with only the equipment
he had on him. The utter destruction of his ship had left him seriously
hampered.
He began moving, staying in the protection of the trees. His ethical sense
still bothered him. It was not at all civilized to leave a body to the
mercy of lesser animals or monocells like that. What kind of monster would
they think he was?
Still, there was no help for it. If they caught him while feeding, they
might have thought him a lower animal and shot him. He couldn't put an
onus like that upon them.
He moved on.