Wang Kulichenko pulled the collar of his uniform coat up closer around his ears and pulled the helmet and face-mask down a bit. It was only early October, but here in the tundra country the wind had a tendency to be chill and biting in the morning, even at this time of year. Within a week or so, he'd have to start using the power pack on his horse to electrically warm his protective clothing and the horse's wrappings, but there was no necessity of that yet. He smiled a little as he always did when he thought of his grandfather's remarks about such "new-fangled nonsense".

"Your ancestors, son of my son," he would say, "conquered the tundra and lived upon it for thousands of years without the need of such womanish things. Are there no men anymore? Are there none who can face nature alone and unafraid without the aid of artifices that bring softness?"

But Wang Kulichenko noticed—though, out of politeness, he never pointed it out—that the old man never failed to take advantage of the electric warmth of the house when the short days came and the snow blew across the country like fine white sand. And he never complained about the lights or the television or the hot water, except to grumble occasionally that they were a little old and out of date and that the mail-order catalog showed that better models were available in Vladivostok.

And Wang would remind the old man, very gently, that a paper-forest ranger made only so much money, and that there would have to be more saving before such things could be bought. He did not—ever—remind the old man that he, Wang, was stretching a point to keep his grandfather on the payroll as an assistant.

Wang Kulichenko patted his horse's rump and urged her softly to step up her 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 get home early.

Around him, the neatly-planted forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alien branches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wang thought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he always wondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have thought about a forest growing up here, where no forest like this one had ever grown before.

They were called paper-trees because the bulk of their pulp was used to make paper (they were of no use whatever as lumber), but they weren't trees, really, and the organic chemicals that were leached from them during the pulping process were of far more value than the paper pulp.

They were mutations of a smaller plant that had been found in the temperate regions of Mars and purposely changed genetically to grow on the Siberian tundra, where the conditions were similar to, but superior to, their natural habitat. They looked as though someone had managed to cross breed the Joshua tree with the cypress and then persuaded the result to grow grass instead of leaves.

In the distance, Wang heard the whining of the wind and he automatically pulled his coat a little tighter, even though he noticed no increase in the 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, he watched the sky as the sound gained volume, but he could see nothing at first. Then he caught a glimpse of motion. A dot that was hard to distinguish against the cloud-mottled gray sky.

What was it? An air transport in trouble? There were two trans-polar routes that passed within a few hundred miles of here, but no air transport he had ever seen had made a noise like that. Normally, they were so high as to be both invisible and inaudible. Must be trouble of some sort.

He reached down to the saddle pack without taking his eyes off the moving speck and took out the radiophone. He held it to his ear and thumbed the call 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 direction of flight of the dot and its direction from him. He'd at least be able to give the airline authorities some information if the ship fell. He wished there were some way to triangulate its height and so on, but he had no need 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 the flying thing. By now, the whine had become a shrill roar, and the thing in the air had become a silver-pink fish shape.

"I think it's coming down very close to here," Wang concluded. "You call the 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 an airship. By this time, he could see the thing more clearly. He had never actually seen a spacecraft, but he'd seen enough of them on television to know what they looked like. This one didn't look like a standard type at all, and it didn't behave like one, but it looked even less like an airship, and he knew enough to know that he didn't necessarily know every type of spaceship ever built.

In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been first used for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like the fat ovoids that he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive.

It was coming in much lower now, on a line north of him, headed almost due east. He urged the mare forward, in order to try to keep up with the craft, although it was obviously going several hundred miles per hour—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 and disappeared from sight. Then there was a thunderous crash, a tearing of wood and foliage, and a grinding, plowing sound.

For a few seconds afterward, there was silence. Then there came a soft rumble, 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 without safety 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 unusual activity, 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 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.