Anything You Can Do ...

  _[14]_

  The Nipe squatted, brooding, in his underground nest, waiting for thespecial crystallization process to take place in the sodium-gold alloythat was forming in the reactor.

  _How long?_ he wondered. He was not thinking of the complexcrystallization reaction; he knew the timing of that to a fraction of asecond. His dark thoughts were, instead, focused inwardly, upon himself.

  How long would it be before he would be able to construct thecommunicator that would span the light-years of intervening distance andput him in touch with his own race again? How long would it be before hecould again hold discourse with reasonable beings? How much longer wouldhe have to be stranded on this planet, surrounded by an insane societycomposed of degraded, insane beings?

  The work was going incredibly slowly. He had known at the beginning thathis knowledge of the basic arts required to build a communicator wasincomplete, but he had not realized just how painfully inadequate itwas. Time after time, his instruments had simply refused to functionbecause of some basic flaw in their manufacture--some flaw that anexpert in that field could have pointed out at once. Time after time,equipment had had to be rebuilt almost from the beginning. And, timeafter time, only cut-and-try methods were available for correcting hiserrors.

  Not even his prodigious and accurate memory could hold all theinformation that was necessary for the work, and there were no referencetapes available, of course. They had all been destroyed when his shiphad crashed.

  He had long since given up any attempt to understand the functioning ofthe mad pseudo-civilization that surrounded him. He was quite certainthat the beings he had seen could not possibly be the real rulers ofthis society, but he had no inkling, as yet, as to who the real rulerswere.

  As to _where_ they were, that question seemed a little easier to answer.It was highly probable that they were out in space, on the asteroidsthat his instruments had detected when he was dropping in toward thisplanet so many years before. He had made an error then in not landing inthe Belt, but at no time since had he experienced the emotion of regretor wished he had done differently; both thoughts would have beenincomprehensible to the Nipe. He had made an error; the circumstanceshad been checked and noted; he would not make that error again.

  What further action could be taken by a logical mind?

  None. The past was immutable and unchangeable. It existed only as amemory in his own mind, and there was no way to change that indeliblerecord, even had the Nipe wished to do so insane a thing.

  Surely, he thought, the real rulers must know of his existence. He hadtried, by his every action, to show that he was a reasoning,intelligent, and civilized being. Why, then, had they taken no action?

  There was, of course, the possibility that the rulers cared very littlefor their subjects here on Earth, that they ignored what went on most ofthe time. Still, it would seem that they would recognize the actions ofone of their own kind and take steps to investigate.

  He was still not absolutely certain about Colonel Walther Mannheim. Washe a Real Person or merely an underling? The information on the man waspitifully small. It would, of course, be possible to wait, to see howColonel Walther Mannheim behaved if and when he discovered the Nipe'snest. But if he had not discovered it after all these years--and theinformation indicated that he had been looking almost since thefirst--then it was unlikely that he was a Real Person. In which case, itwould be dangerous to allow him to find the nest.

  No, the best plan of action would be to go to Colonel Walther Mannheimfirst.