television or the hot water, except to grumble occasionally that theywere a little old and out of date and that the mail-order catalog showedthat better models were available in Vladivostok.
And Wang would remind the old man, very gently, that a paper-forest rangermade only so much money, and that there would have to be more savingbefore such things could be bought. He did not--_ever_--remind the old manthat he, Wang, was stretching a point to keep his grandfather on thepayroll as an assistant.
Wang Kulichenko patted his horse's rump and urged her softly to step upher pace just a bit. He had a certain amount of territory to cover, and,although he wanted to be careful in his checking, he also wanted to gethome early.
Around him, the neatly-planted forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alienbranches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wangthought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he alwayswondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have thoughtabout a forest growing up here, where no forest like this one had evergrown before.
They were called paper-trees because the bulk of their pulp was used tomake paper (they were of no use whatever as lumber), but they weren'ttrees, really, and the organic chemicals that were leached from themduring the pulping process were of far more value than the paper pulp.
They were mutations of a smaller plant that had been found in thetemperate regions of Mars and purposely changed genetically to grow on theSiberian tundra, where the conditions were similar to, but superior to,their natural habitat. They looked as though someone had managed to crossbreed the Joshua tree with the cypress and then persuaded the result togrow grass instead of leaves.
In the distance, Wang heard the whining of the wind and he automaticallypulled his coat a little tighter, even though he noticed no increase inthe wind velocity around him.
Then, as the whine became louder, he realized that it was not the wind.
He turned his head toward the noise and looked up. For a long minute, hewatched the sky as the sound gained volume, but he could see nothing atfirst. Then he caught a glimpse of motion. A dot that was hard todistinguish against the cloud-mottled gray sky.
What was it? An air transport in trouble? There were two trans-polarroutes that passed within a few hundred miles of here, but no airtransport he had ever seen had made a noise like that. Normally, they wereso high as to be both invisible and inaudible. Must be trouble of somesort.
He reached down to the saddle pack without taking his eyes off the movingspeck and took out the radiophone. He held it to his ear and thumbed thecall button insistently.
_Grandfather_, he thought with growing irritation as the seconds passed,_wake up! Come on, old dozer, rouse yourself from your dreams!_
At the same time, he checked his wrist compass and estimated the directionof flight of the dot and its direction from him. He'd at least be able togive the airline authorities some information if the ship fell. He wishedthere were some way to triangulate its height and so on, but he had noneed for that kind of thing, so he hadn't the equipment.
"Yes? Yes?" came a testy, dry voice through the earphone.
Quickly, Wang gave his grandfather all the information he had on theflying thing. By now, the whine had become a shrill roar, and the thing inthe air had become a silver-pink fish shape.
"I think it's coming down very close to here," Wang concluded. "You callthe authorities and let them know that one of the aircraft is in trouble.I'll see if I can be of any help here. I'll call you back later."
"As you say," the old man said hurriedly. He cut off.
* * * * *
Wang was beginning to realize that the thing was a spaceship, not anairship. By this time, he could see the thing more clearly. He had neveractually seen a spacecraft, but he'd seen enough of them on television toknow what they looked like. This one didn't look like a standard type atall, and it didn't behave like one, but it looked even less like anairship, and he knew enough to know that he didn't necessarily know everytype of spaceship ever built.
In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been firstused for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like thefat ovoids that he was used to. But there were no signs of rocketexhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have aninertia drive.
It was coming in much lower now, on a line north of him, headed almost dueeast. He urged the mare forward, in order to try to keep up with thecraft, although it was obviously going several hundred miles perhour--hardly a horse's pace.
Still, it was slowing rapidly--very rapidly. Maybe--
He kept the mare moving.
The strange ship skimmed along the treetops in the distance anddisappeared from sight. Then there was a thunderous crash, a tearing ofwood and foliage, and a grinding, plowing sound.
For a few seconds afterward, there was silence. Then there came a softrumble, as of water beginning to boil in some huge, but distant, samovar.It seemed to go on and on and on.
And there was a bluish, fluctuating glow on the horizon.
_Radioactivity?_ Wang wondered. Surely not an atomic-powered ship withoutsafety cutoffs in this day and age.
He pulled out his radiophone and thumbed the call button again.
This time, there was no delay. "Yes?"
"How are the radiation detectors behaving there, Grandfather?"
"One moment. I shall see." There was a silence. Then: "No unusualactivity, young Wang. Why?"
Wang told him, then asked: "Did you get hold of the air authorities?"
"Yes. They have no missing aircraft, but they're checking with the spacefields. The way you describe it, the thing must be a spaceship of somekind."
"I think so, too. I wish I had a radiation detector here, though. I'dlike to know whether that thing is hot or not. It's only a couple of milesor so away. I think I'd better stay away. Meanwhile, you'd better put in acall to Central Headquarters Fire Control. There's going to be a holocaustif 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 distantrumbling was gone, too. And, oddly enough, there was not much smoke in thedistance. There was a small cloud of gray that rose, streamerlike, fromwhere the glow had been, but even that faded away fairly rapidly in thechill breeze. Quite obviously, there would be no fire. After several moreminutes of watching, he was sure of it. There couldn't have been much heatproduced in that explosion--if it could really be called an explosion.
Then he saw something moving in the trees between himself and the spotwhere the ship had come down. He couldn't quite see what it was, but itlooked 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 thatlanguage.
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 evenhave run the distance between here and the ship in the time since it hadhit, much less crawled.
He frowned. A wolf, then? Possibly. They weren't too common, but therewere 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 tosee 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 athim 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 launcheditself across the intervening space in a blur of speed that would havemade a leopard seem slow. The alien's hands slapped aside the gun with aviolence that broke the man's wrist, while other hands slammed at hisskull.
Wang Kulichenko hardly had time to be surprised before he
died.
* * * * *
The Nipe stood quietly for a moment, looking down at the thing he hadkilled. His stomach churned with disgust. He ignored the fading hoofbeatsof the slave-animal from which he had knocked the thing that lay on theground with a crushed skull. The slave-animal was unintelligent andunimportant.
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 survivedlong enough on any world to evolve to become the dominant life form.
Perhaps it was not the dominant form. Perhaps it was merely a higherslave-animal. He would have to do more investigating.
He picked up the weapon the thing had drawn and examined it carefully. Themechanism was unfamiliar, but a glance at the muzzle told him that it wasa projectile weapon of some sort. The twisted grooves in