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.