He began to talk, rapidly but carefully, telling the colonel all he knew about the situation up to the present.
It wasn't much. It was late October, 2091, and the Nipe, blithely evading capture for ten long years, was still going about his unknown and possibly incomprehensible business.
The Nipe had become a legend. He had replaced Satan, the Bogeyman, Frankenstein's monster, and Mumbo Jumbo, Lord of the Congo, in the public mind. He had taken on, in popular thought, the attributes of the djinn, the vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf, and every other horror and hobgoblin that the mind of Man had conjured up in the previous half-million years.
That he had been connected with the mysterious crash in Siberia ten years before was almost a certainty. How he had managed to get from there to Leningrad without being seen once was more of a mystery, but certainly not impossible in the light of what had been done since.
Eight months later, a non-vision phone call had been received by the Regent's Board of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice offered (in very bad Russian!) a meeting. The Nipe had managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with the forest ranger.
The psychiatrists were divided in their opinions. Some thought that the call had been from a deranged person. When the Nipe actually showed up at the appointed place, those minds changed rapidly.
The Nipe's ability to use any human language was limited. He picked up vocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completely unable to use a language beyond discussion of concrete actions and objects. His mind was simply too alien to enable him to do more than touch the edges of human communication.
In the discussion of mathematics, in particular, the Nipe seemed to be completely at a loss. He apparently thought of mathematics as a spoken language instead of a written one, and could not progress beyond simple diagrams.
He wasn't captured in any real sense of the word. He refused to allow any physical tests on his body, and, short of threatening him at gun-point, there didn't seem to be any practicable way to force him to accede to the human's wishes. And they couldn't do that.