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Updated: May 10, 2025
Mannheim was a man with tremendous confidence in himself, but who was capable of recognizing that there were men who were his superiors, in one field or another. "If I can't dispose of the Nipe," Stanton said, "no one can." Colonel Mannheim nodded slowly. "I believe you're right," he said at last. His voice was firm with inner conviction. He shot a glance at Farnsworth. "How about the second man?"
It was odd, he thought, that he should feel a kinship toward both the Nipe and his brother in such similar ways. He had never met the Nipe, and his brother was a dim picture in his old memories, but they were both very well known to him. Certainly better known to him than he was to them.
He anchored to the south of them on the twenty-sixth of October, and on the next day sailed once more for Cuba. On Sunday, October 28, he arrived there, in what is now called the Puerto de Nipe; he named it the Puerto de San Salvador. Here, as he went on, he was again charmed by the beautiful country. He found palms "of another sort," says Las Casas, "from those of Guinea, and from ours."
He didn't want any encumbrances now. And then, as fast as any express train that had ever moved in these underground ways, the Nipe came around a corner thirty feet away, his four violet eyes gleaming, his limbs rippling beneath his centipede-like body. From fifteen feet away, he launched himself through the air, his outstretched hands ready to kill.
Could he beat the Nipe in hand-to-hand combat? There would be no way of knowing until the final moment of success or failure. "At that time," the colonel went on, "we hadn't formulated any definite policy on the Nipe. We didn't know what he was up to; we weren't even sure he was actually down in those tunnels. We had to find out."
Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blown the ship to atoms. The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to die foolishly. It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun's planetary system, but using the power plants any more than absolutely necessary would have been fool-hardy.
Yoritomo assumed that Mannheim would spread a story about the Nipe's death perhaps even display a carefully-made "corpse". But Stanton had the feeling that the colonel had something else up his sleeve. The phone rang. Stanton walked over, thumbed the answer stud, and watched Dr. Farnsworth's face take shape on the screen. "Bart, I just saw the tapes of your fight with the Nipe, Incredible!
But that had to be allowed as justifiable homicide in self-defense, since the forester had drawn a gun and was ready to fire. Nobody could blame the late Wang Kulichenko for that, but nobody could blame the Nipe, either. For six weeks, the humans and the Nipe had tried to arrive at a meeting of minds, and just when it would seem within grasp, it would fade away into mist.
The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitive fear fear of the dark and fear of the unknown, combined with the rational fear of a very real, very tangible danger. And yet, there had been a crowd of onlookers. In spite of their fear, it is hard to keep human beings from being curious.
The Nipe is not incapable of learning something new; in fact, he is quite good at it, as witness the fact that he has learned many Earth languages. He picked up Russian in less then eight months simply by listening and observing. Like our own race, his undoubtedly evolved many languages during the beginnings of its progress when there were many tribes, separated and out of communication.
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