Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction, American
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 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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account