All right, Stanton thought,he's looking for something. I'll let him have both barrels and see if I hit the target.
"I've thought about it," he admitted. He got up, went over to the coffee urn, and refilled his cup. "I've got a pet theory of my own. It's just a notion, really. I wouldn't dare reduce it to syllogistic form, because it might not hold much water, logically speaking. But the evidence seems conclusive enough to me."
He walked back to his seat. Colonel Mannheim was watching him, a look of interest on his face, but he said nothing.
"To me," Stanton said, "it seems incredible that the combined intelligence and organizational ability of the UN Government is incapable of finding anything out about one single alien, no matter how competent he may be. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have gotten a line on the Nipe. He must have a base for his operations, and someone should have found it by this time.
"I may be faster and stronger and more sensitive than any other living human being, but that doesn't mean I have superhuman powers, or that I'm a magician. And I'm quite certain that you, Colonel, don't credit me with such abilities. You don't believe that I can do in a short time what the combined forces of the Government couldn't do in ten. Certainly you wouldn't rely too heavily on it.
"And yet, apparently, you are.
"To me, that can only mean that you have another ace up your sleeve. Youknowwe're going to get the Nipe fairly quickly. You either have a sure way of tracing him, or you already know where he is.
"Which is it?"
Colonel Mannheim sighed. "We know where he is," he said. "We have known for six years."
The Nipe prowled around the huge underground room, carefully checking his alarms. If anyone entered the network of tunnels at any point, the instruments would register that fact. They had to be adjusted, of course, for the presence of the small, omnivorous quadrupeds that ran through the tunnels in such numbers, but anything larger than they would be noted immediately.
He did not like to leave this place. Here, over a period of ten revolutions of this planet about its primary, he had built himself a nest that was almost comfortable. Here, too, were his workshops and his storehouses. He had reason to believe that he was safe here, screened and protected as he was, but each time he left or entered he ran the chance of being observed.
Still, there was no help for it. Thus far, he had been hampered by technical problems. There were things he needed that he could not make for himself. Even his own vast memory, with its every bit of information instantly available, could only contain what had been acquired over a lifetime, and even his long life had not been long enough to acquire every bit of knowledge he needed.
His work had been long and tedious. There were many things that could neither be made in his workshops nor obtained from the natives, things he did not know how to make and which the local species had not yet evolved in their own technology. Or, more likely, which had not been allowed them. In such cases, he had had to make do with other, lesser techniques, which added to the complexity of his job.
But now another problem had intruded itself into his schedule.
He had a name. Colonel Walther Mannheim. The meaning of the verbal symbolism was unknown to him. The patterns of the symbolism were even more evasive than the patterns of the language itself. "Colonel" seemed simple enough. It indicated a certain sociomilitary class that was rigidly defined in one way and very hazy in another. But the meanings and relationships of both "Walther" and "Mannheim" were beyond him. What difference, for instance, was there between a "Walther" and a "William"? Did a "Mannheim" outrank a "Mandeville", or the other way around? What functions differentiated a "John Smith" from a "Peter Taylor"? He knew what a "john" was and what a "smith" was, but "John Smith" was not, apparently, necessarily associated with sanitary plumbing. The meaning of some other names eluded him entirely.
But that made little difference at the moment. The meaning of Colonel Walther Mannheim's symbolic nomenclature was secondary in comparison with his known function.
That required that the Nipe must eventually find and confront Colonel Walther Mannheim.
It meant time lost, of course. It meant that precious time, which should be given to building his communicator, must be given over to what was merely a protective action.
But there was nothing to do but go on. It would never have occurred to the Nipe to give up, for to quit meant to die. And to die—here, now—was unthinkable.
His alarms were all functioning, his defenses all set. He could now leave his hideaway knowing that if it were broken into while he was away he would be warned in time. But he had no real fear of that. He had done everything he could do. And no intelligent creature, to the Nipe's way ofthinking, would waste time worrying about a situation he could not improve upon.
Taking with him the equipment he needed for the job he had to do, he entered the tunnel that ran southward from his base of operations. Once, as he moved along, one of the little quadrupeds approached him, its teeth bared. With an almost negligent flip of one powerful, superfast hand, he slammed it against a nearby wall. It dropped and lay still. Another of its kind approached it cautiously. The Nipe noticed the approach with approval. The quadrupeds had no real intelligence, but they had the proper instincts.
At last the Nipe came to another of the many places where the tunnels met with others of the network. He crossed through several rooms, all very large and cluttered with the dusty, long-dead bones of hundreds of the local intelligent life-form—if (and he was not sure in his own mind of this) they could actually be called intelligent. But he moved carefully, stepping over the human bones and the empty, staring skulls. They had apparently been properly devoured, although he could not be sure whether it had been done by their own kind or by the little quadrupeds. Nonetheless, he would not willingly disturb their repose.
He went on into the tunnel that led westward and followed it as it began to angle down. Finally he came to the water's edge.
To a human being, the cold expanse of water that gleamed like ink in the light of the Nipe's illuminator would have been a barricade as impenetrable as steel. But to the Nipe the tidal pool was simply another of his defenses, for it concealed the only entrance he ever used. He went in after adjusting his scuba mask and began swimming toward the opening that led to the estuary of the sea, his eight strong limbs working in unison in a way that would have been the envy of a rowing team.
At the jagged hole in the tunnel wall, the gap that led into open water, he paused to check his instruments. Only after he was certain that there were no sonar or other detector radiations did he propel himself onward, out into the estuary itself.
An hour later, he was warily circling the spot where his little submarine was hidden. He pressed a button on a small device in his hand, and a signal was sent to the submarine. The various devices within it all responded properly. Nothing had been disturbed since the Nipe had set those devices weeks before.
This was the touchiest part of any of his expeditions. There was always the chance, unlikely as it might be, that some one of the bipedal natives had found his machine. He dared not use it too close to his base because of the possibility of its drive vibrations being detected in the narrow estuary. Out here in the open sea there was far less likelihood of that, but leaving his submarine concealed out here increased the danger he exposed himself to every time he left his hidden nest.
Satisfied that the machine was just as he had left it, he entered it and started its engines. He moved slowly and cautiously until he was well out to sea, well away from the continental shelf and over the ocean deeps. Then and only then did he accelerate to full cruising speed.
The full moon was in the west, hiding behind an array of low, scudding clouds, revealing its radiance in fitful bursts of silvery splendor that died again as another clotted cloud moved before the face of the white disk. The shifting light, shining through the breeze-tossed leaves of the palm trees on the beach below, made strange shadows on the sand, ever-changing patterns of gray and black on a background of white, moonlit sand.
But the strangest shadow of all was one that did not change as the others did—a great centipede-like shape that seemed to wash slowly ashore on the receding tide. For a short while, it remained at the water's edge, apparently unmoving in the wash of the waves.
Then, keeping low and balancing himself on his third pair of limbs, the Nipe moved in across the beach. The specially constructed sandals he wore left behind them a set of very human-looking footprints—prints that would remain unnoticed among the myriad of others that were already on the beach, left there by daytime bathers.
It required more time yet to reach the city, and still more time to find the place he was looking for. It was almost dawn before he managed to find a storm sewer in which to hide for the day.
It was partly his difficulty in finding a given spot in a city—almost any city—that had convinced the Nipe that the pseudo-intelligence of the bipeds of this planet could not really be called true intelligence. There was no standardized method of orienting oneself in a city. Not only were no two cities alike in their orientation systems, but the same city would often vary from section to section. Their co-ordinate systems meant almost nothing. Part of a given co-ordinate might be a number, and the rest of it a name, but the meanings of the numbers and names were never the same. It was as though some really intelligent outside agency had given them the basic idea of a co-ordinate system, and they, not having the intelligence to use it properly, had simply jumbled the whole thing up.
That the natives themselves had no real understanding of any such system had long been apparent to him. The dwellers in any one area would naturally be familiar with it; they would know where each place was, regardless of what meaningless names and numbers might be attachedto it. But strangers to that area would not know, and could not know. The only thing they could possibly do would be to ask directions of a local citizen—which, the Nipe had learned, was exactly what they did.
Unfortunately, it was not that simple for the Nipe. There was no way for him to walk up to a native and inquire for an address. He had to prowl unseen through the alleys and sewers of a city, picking up a name here, a number there, by eavesdropping on street conversations. He had found that every city contained certain uniformed individuals whose duty it was to direct strangers, and by focusing a directional microphone on such men and listening, it was possible to glean little bits of knowledge that could eventually be co-ordinated into a whole understanding of the city's layout. It was a time-consuming process, but it was the only way the job could be done. Reconnaissance took a tremendous amount of time away from his serious work, but that work could not proceed without materials to work with, and to get those materials required reconnaissance. The dilemma was unavoidable.
And, being what he was, the Nipe accepted the unavoidable and pursued his course with phlegmatic equanimity.
Overhead, the city was beginning to waken. The volume of sound began to increase.
Police Patrolman John Flanders relieved his fellow officer, Patrolman Fred Pilsudski, at a few minutes of eight in the morning.
It was a beautiful day, even for Miami. In the east, the morning sun shone brightly through the hard, transparent pressure glass that covered the street, making the smooth, resilient surface of the street itself glow with warm light. Overhead, Patrolman Flanders could see the aircars in their incessant motion—apparently random, unless one knew whatthe traffic pattern was and how to look for it. It was Patrolman Flanders' immediate ambition to be promoted to traffic patrol, so that he could be in an aircar above the city instead of watching pedestrians down here on the streets.
"Morning, Fred," he said to his brother officer. "How'd the night go?"
"Hi, Johnny. Pretty good. Not much excitement." He looked at his wristwatch. "You're a couple minutes early yet."
"Yeah. The baby started singing for his breakfast at a God-awful hour. Harriet woke up to feed him, which woke me up, so here I am. If you want to give me the call button, I'll take over. You can go get yourself a cup of coffee."
"I'm up to here with coffee," Pilsudski said, indicating a point just below his left ear. "I'll have a beer instead."
He touched a switch at his belt and said: "Area 37 HQ, this is 13392 Pilsudski."
A voice in his helmet phones said: "37 HQ, go ahead, Pilsudski."
"Time: 0758 hours. I am being relieved by 14278 Flanders."
"Right. Go ahead."
Pilsudski took off the light, strong helmet, reached inside it, opened a small sliding panel, and took out an object the size and shape of an aspirin tablet—the sealed unit that permitted him to understand the conversation over the police wave band. Without it, the police calls would have been gibberish.
Flanders accepted the little gadget from the other officer and inserted it in his own helmet. Then he replaced the helmet on his head. "Area 37 HQ, this is 14278 Flanders. I am relieving 13392 Pilsudski."
"37 HQ," said the voice in his ears. "Okay, Flanders. Transfer recorded."
Police Patrolman John Flanders, Badge Number 14278, was now officially on duty.
He looked up into the sky. "Now there's the place to be on a day like this, Fred. Traffic patrol."
"Not me," said Pilsudski. "Too damn dull. I was on it for six months. Damn near drove me nuts. Nobody to talk to but another cop—same cop, day after day. He was a nice guy, don't get me wrong, but Christ! Nothin' to do but watch for people breakin' traffic pattern. Can't even pull over to the side and watch the traffic go by. It's dull, I'm tellin' you, Johnny. I asked for a transfer back to a beat so's I could see some people again."
"Maybe," said Flanders. "I'd still like to try it."
"Ever'body to their own taste, I guess. Mitchell and Warber were in luck last night, though. Excitement." He sounded as though he meant the word to be sarcastic.
"What happened?" Flanders asked.
"Some boob was having a fight with his wife and his air intake was goofing off at the same time. So, while she's yelling at him, he puts his aircar on hover." He pointed upward. "Right up there, in Level Two. He opens the window of his aircar, mind you. His air intake ain't workin', like I said. Mitchell, in Car 87, spots him and heads for him, figuring there's trouble."
"But no trouble?" asked Flanders.
"Trouble enough. The driver's old lady throws a wrench at him, an' it goes out the window." He chuckled. "First I heard about it was when that damn wrench comes down and bounces off the pressure glass, then up to the side of the building there, and back to the pressure glass. Then it slides off into the rain gutter."
Flanders looked up at the curve of hard, tough, almost invisible pressure glass that covered the street. "With all the cars overhead that we got in this city," Flanders said philosophically,"something like that's bound to happen every so often. That's why that glass is up there, besides for keepin' the rain off your head."
"Yeah," Pilsudski said. "Anyway, Mitchell and Warber got there just as she tossed the wrench. Arrested both of 'em. Now, wasn't that exciting?"
Flanders grinned. "Fred, if the rest of their tour of duty was as dull as you say it was, then I reckon that must have been real exciting."
"Hah." Pilsudski shrugged. "Well, I'm for that beer. See you tomorrow, Johnny."
"Right. Take care o' yourself."
As Pilsudski walked away, Flanders put his hands behind his back, grasping the left in the right. He spread his feet slightly apart. In that time-honored position of the foot patrolman, he surveyed his beat, up and down both sides of the street. Everything looked perfectly normal. Another working day had begun.
He had no idea that he was standing only a few yards from the most hated and feared killer on the face of the Earth.
The only clue that he could possibly have had to that killer's presence was a small ovoid the size and shape of a match head, a dark, dull gray in color, which protruded slightly from a sewer grating six feet away, supported on a hair-thin stalk. In one end was a tiny dark opening, and that opening was pointed directly at Officer Flanders' head. When he began walking slowly down the street, the little ovoid moved, turning slowly on its stalk to keep that dark hole pointed steadily. It was so small, that ovoid, and so inconspicuous, that no one, even looking directly at it, would have noticed it.
The Nipe could see and hear without being either seen or heard himself.
All morning long the tiny ovoid remained in place, watching, listening.
At 11:24 a woman in a cherry-pink dress walked up to Officer Flanders and said: "Pardon me, Officer. Could you tell me where I could find the Donahue Building?"
And while the policeman told her, the Nipe listened carefully. Now he knew what street he was on and its location in respect to two other streets. He also had a number. He remembered them all, accurately and completely. It was a good beginning, he decided. It would not be too long before he would have enough to enable him to locate the address he was looking for. After that, there would only remain the job of observing and making plans to get what he wanted at that address.
He settled himself to wait for more information. He knew that it would be a long wait.
But he was prepared for that.
The woman's eyes were filled with tears, for which the doctor was privately thankful. At least, he thought to himself, the original shock has worn off.
"And there's nothing we can do?" she asked. "Nothing?" There was anguish in her voice.
"I'm afraid not," the doctor told her gently. "Not yet. There are research men working on the problem, and one day ... perhaps ..." Then he shook his head. "But not yet." He paused. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Stanton."
The woman sat there in the comfortable chair and looked at the specialist's diploma on the doctor's wall—and yet, she really didn't see the diploma at all. She was seeing something else—a kind of dream that had been shattered.
After a moment, she began to speak, her voice low and gentle, as though the dream were still going on and she were half afraid she might waken herself if she spoke too loudly.
"Jim and I were so glad they were twins. Identical twinboys. He said ... I remember, he said, 'We ought to call them Ike and Mike.' And he laughed a little when he said it, to show he didn't mean it."
The doctor said nothing, waiting for her to go on.
"I remember, I was propped up in the bed, the afternoon after they were born, and Jim brought me a new bed jacket, and I said I didn't need a new one because I'd be going right home the very next day, and he said, 'Hell, kid, you don't think I'd buy a bed jacket just for hospital use, now do you? This is for breakfasts in bed, too.'
"And that's when he said he'd seen the boys and said we ought to name them Ike and Mike."
The tears were coming down Mrs. Stanton's cheeks heavily now, and the grief made her look older than her twenty-four years, but the doctor said nothing, letting her spill out her emotions in words.
"We'd talked about it before, you know—soon as the obstetrician found out that I was going to have twins. And Jim ... Jim said that we shouldn't name them alike unless they were identical twins or mirror twins. If they were fraternal twins, we'd just name them as if they'd been ordinary brothers or sisters or whatever. You know?" She looked at the doctor, her eyes pleading for understanding.
"I know," he said.
"And Jim was always kidding. If they were girls, he said, we ought to call them Flora and Dora, or Annie and Fanny, or maybe Susie and Floozie. He was always kidding about it. You know?"
"I know," said the doctor.
"And then ... and then when theywereidentical boys, he was very sensible about it. He was always so sensible. 'We'll call them Martin and Bartholomew,' he said. 'Then if they want to call themselves Mart and Bart, they can, but they won't be stuck with any rhyming names if they don'twant them.' Jim was always very thoughtful that way, Doctor. Very thoughtful."
She seemed suddenly to realize that she was crying and took a handkerchief out of her sleeve to dab at her eyes and face.
"I'll have to quit crying," she said, trying to sound very brave and very strong. "After all, it could have been worse, couldn't it? I mean, the radiation could have killed my boy, too. Jim's dead, yes, and I've got to get used to that. But I still have two boys to take care of, and they'll need me."
"Yes, Mrs. Stanton, they will," said the doctor. "They'll both need you very much. And you'll have to be very gentle and very careful with both of them."
"How ... how do you mean that?" she asked.
The doctor settled back in his chair and chose his words carefully. "Identical twins tend to identify with each other, Mrs. Stanton. There is a great deal of empathy between people who are not only of the same age, but genetically identical. If they were both completely healthy, there would normally be very little trouble in their education at home or in school. Any of the standard texts on psychodynamics in education will show you the pitfalls to avoid when dealing with identical siblings.
"But your sons are no longer identical, Mrs. Stanton. One is normal, healthy, and lively. The other is ... well, as you know, he is slow, sluggish, and badly co-ordinated. The condition may improve with time, but, until we know more about such damage than we do now, he will remain an invalid."
He had been watching her for further signs of emotional upset. But she seemed to be listening calmly enough. He went on.
"That's the trouble with radiation damage, Mrs. Stanton.Even when we can save the victim's life, we cannot always save his health.
"You can see, I think, what sort of psychic disturbances this might bring about in such a pair. The ill boy tends to identify with the well one, and, oddly enough, the reverse is also true. If they are not properly handled during their formative years, Mrs. Stanton, both can be badly damaged emotionally."
"I ... I think I understand, Doctor," the young woman said. "But what sort of thing should I look out for? What sort of things should I avoid?"
"First off, I suggest you get a good man in psychic development," the doctor said. "I, myself, would hesitate to prescribe. It's out of my field. But I can say that, in general, most of your trouble will be caused by a tendency for the pair to swing into one of two extremes.
"At one extreme, you will have mutual antagonism. This arises when the ill child becomes jealous of the other's health, while, on the other hand, the healthy one becomes jealous of the extra consideration that is shown to his crippled brother.
"At the other extreme, the healthy boy may identify so closely with his brother that he feels every slight or hurt, real or imagined, which the ill boy is subjected to. He becomes extremely over-solicitous, over-protective. At the same time, the invalid brother may come to depend completely on his healthy twin.
"In both these situations there is a positive feedback that constantly worsens the condition. It requires a great deal of careful observation and careful application of the proper educational stimuli to keep the situation from developing toward either extreme. You'll need expert help if you want both boys to display the full abilities of which they are potentially capable."
"I see," the woman said. "Could you give me the name of a good man, Doctor?"
The doctor nodded and picked up a book on his desk. "I'll give you the names of several. You can pick the one you like best, the one with whom you seem to be most comfortable. Try several or all of them before you decide. They're all good men. There are many good women in the field, too, but in this case I think a man would be best. Of course, if one of them thinks a woman is indicated, that's up to him. As I said, that isn't my field."
He opened the small book and riffled through it to find the names he wanted.
The image of the Nipe on the glowing screen was clear and finely detailed. It was, Stanton thought, as though one were looking through a window into the Nipe's nest itself. Only the tremendous depth of focus of the lens that had caught the picture gave the illusion a feeling of unreality. Everything—background and foreground alike—was sharply in focus.
Like some horrendous dream monster, the Nipe moved in slow motion, giving Stanton the eerie feeling that the alien was moving through a thicker, heavier medium than air, in a place where the gravity was much less than that of Earth. With ponderous deliberation, the fingers of one of his hands closed upon the handle of an oddly shaped tool and lifted it slowly from the surface upon which he worked.
"That's our best-placed camera," said Colonel Mannheim, "but some of the others can always get details thatthis one doesn't. The trouble is that we'll never really have enough cameras in there—not unless we stud the walls, ceilings, and floors with them, and even then I'm not so sure we'd get everything. It isn't the same as having a trained expert on camera who istryingto demonstrate what he's doing. An expert plays to the camera and never obstructs any of his own movements. But the Nipe ..." He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head sadly.
Stanton narrowed his eyes at the image. To his own speeded-up perceptive processes, the motion seemed intolerably slow. "Would you mind speeding it up a little?" he asked the colonel. "I want to get an idea of the way he moves, and I can't really get the feeling of it at this speed."
"Certainly." The colonel turned to the technician at the controls. "Speed the tape up to normal. If there's anything Mr. Stanton wants to look at more closely, we can run it through again."
As if in obedience to the colonel's command, the Nipe seemed to shake himself a little and go about his business more briskly, and the air and gravity seemed to revert to those of Earth.
"What's he doing?" Stanton asked. The Nipe was performing some sort of operation on an odd-looking box that sat on the floor in front of him.
The colonel pointed. "He's got a screwdriver that he's modified to give it a head with an L-shaped cross section, and he's wiggling it around inside that hole in the box. But what he's doing is a secret between God and the Nipe at this point," Colonel Mannheim said glumly.
Stanton glanced away from the screen for a moment to look at the other men who were there. Some of them were watching the screen, but most of them seemed to be watching Stanton, although they looked away as soon as they sawhis eyes on them. All, that is, except Dr. George Yoritomo, who simply gave him a smile of confidence.
Trying to see what kind of a bloke this touted superman is, Stanton thought.Well, I can't say I blame 'em.
He brought his attention back to the screen.
So this was the Nipe's hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the fashion that a Nipe's living quarters would be furnished on whatever planet the multilegged horror had come from. Probably it had the same similarity as Robinson Crusoe's island home had to a middle-class nineteenth-century English home.
There was no furniture in it at all, as such. Low-slung as he was, the Nipe needed no tables or workbenches; all his work was spread out on the floor, with a neatness and tidiness that would have surprised many human technicians. For the same reason, he needed no chairs, and, since true sleep was a form of metabolic rest he evidently found unnecessary, he needed no bed. The closest thing he did that might be called sleep was his habit of stopping whatever he was doing and remaining quiet for periods of time that ranged from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Sometimes his eyes remained opened during these periods, sometimes they were closed. It was difficult to tell whether he was sleeping or just thinking.
"The difficulty was in getting cameras in there in the first place," Colonel Mannheim was saying. "That's why we missed so much of his early work. There! Look at that!" His finger jabbed at the image.
"The attachment he's making?"
"That's right. Now, it looks as though it's a meter of some kind, but we don't know whether it's a test instrument or an integral and necessary part of the machine he's making. The whole machine might even be only a test instrument for something else he's building. Or perhaps a machine tomake parts for some other machine. After all, he had to start out from the very beginning—making the tools to make the tools to make the tools, you know."
Dr. Yoritomo spoke for the first time. "It's not quite as bad as all that, eh, Colonel? We must remember that he had our technology to draw upon. If he'd been wrecked on Earth two or three centuries ago, he wouldn't have been able to do a thing."
Colonel Mannheim smiled at the tall, lean man. "Granted," he said agreeably, "but it's quite obvious that there are parts of our technology that are just as alien to him as parts of his are to us. Remember how he went to all the trouble of building a pentode vacuum tube for a job that could have been done by transistors he already had had a chance to get and didn't. His knowledge of solid-state physics seems to be about a century and a half behind ours."
Stanton listened. Dr. Yoritomo was, in effect, one of his training instructors.Advanced Alien Psychology, Stanton thought;Seminar Course. The Mental Whys & Wherefores of the Nipe, or How to Outthink the Enemy in Twelve Dozen Easy Lessons. Instructor: Dr. George Yoritomo.
The smile on Yoritomo's face was beatific, but he held up a warning finger. "Ah, ah, Colonel! We mustn't fall into a trap like that so easily. Remember that gimmick he built last year? The one that blinded those people in Baghdad? It had five perfect emeralds in it, connected in series with silver wire. Eh?"
"That's true," the colonel admitted. "But they weren't used the way we'd use semiconducting materials."
"Indeed not. But the thingworked, didn't it? He has a knowledge of solid-state physics that we don't have, and vice versa."
"Which one would you say was ahead of the other?" Stantonasked. "I don't mean just in solid-state physics, but in science as a whole."
"That's a difficult question to answer," Dr. Yoritomo said thoughtfully. "Frankly, I'd put my money on his technology as encompassing more than ours—at least, insofar as the physical sciences are concerned."
"I agree," said Colonel Mannheim. "He's got things in that little nest of his that—" He stopped and shook his head slowly, as though he couldn't find words.
"I will say this," Yoritomo continued. "Whatever his great technological abilities, our friend the Nipe has plenty of good, solid guts. And patience." He smiled a little, and then amended his statement. "From our own point of view."
Stanton looked at him quizzically. "How do you mean? I was just about to agree with you until you tacked that last phrase on. What does point of view have to do with it?"
"Everything, I should say," said Yoritomo. "It all depends on the equipment an individual has. A man, for instance, who rushes into a building to save a life, wearing nothing but street clothes, has courage. A man who does the same thing when he's wearing a nullotherm suit is an unknown quantity. There is no way of knowing, from that action alone, whether he has courage or not."
Stanton thought he saw what the scientist was driving at. "But you're not talking about technological equipment now," he said.
"Not at all. I'm talking about personal equipment." He turned his head slightly to look at the colonel. "Colonel Mannheim, do you think it would require any personal courage on Mr. Stanton's part to stand up against you in a face-to-face gunfight?"
The colonel grinned tightly. "I see what you mean."
Stanton grinned back rather wryly. "So do I. No, it wouldn't."
"On the other hand," Yoritomo continued, "if you were to challenge Mr. Stanton, would that show courage on your part, Colonel?"
"Not really. Foolhardiness, stupidity or insanity—but not courage."
"Ah, then," said Yoritomo with a beaming smile, "neither of you can prove you have guts enough to fight the other. Can you?"
Mannheim smiled grimly and said nothing. But Stanton was thinking the whole thing out very carefully. "Just a second," he said. "That depends on the circumstances. If Colonel Mannheim, say, knew that forcing me to shoot him would save the life of someone more important than himself—or, perhaps, the lives of a great many people—what then?"
Yoritomo bowed his head in a quick nod. "Exactly. That is what I meant by viewpoint. Whether the Nipe has courage or patience or any other human feeling depends on two things: his own abilities and exactly how much information he has. A man can perform any action without fear if he knows that it will not hurt him—or if he doesnotknow that itwill."
Stanton thought that over in silence.
The image of the Nipe was no longer moving. He had settled down into his "sleeping position"—unmoving, although the baleful violet eyes were still open. "Cut that off," Colonel Mannheim said to the operator. "There's not much to learn from the rest of that tape."
As the image blanked out, Stanton said, "Have you actually managed to build any of the devices he's constructed, Colonel?"
"Some," said Colonel Mannheim. "We have specialists all over the world studying those tapes. We have the advantage of being able to watch every step the Nipe makes, and weknow the materials he's been using to work with. But, even so, the scientists are baffled by many of them. Can you imagine the time James Clerk Maxwell would have had trying to build a modern television set from tapes like this?"
"I can imagine," Stanton said.
"You can see, then, why we're depending on you," Mannheim said.
Stanton merely nodded. The knowledge that he was actually a focal point in human history, that the whole future of the human race depended to a tremendous extent on him, was a realization that weighed heavily and, at the same time, was immensely bracing.
"And now," the colonel said, "I'll turn you over to Dr. Yoritomo. He'll be able to give you a great deal more information than I can."
The girl moved with the peculiar gliding walk so characteristic of a person walking under low-gravity conditions, and the ease and grace with which she did it showed that she was no stranger to low-gee. To the three men from Earth who followed her a few paces behind, the gee-pull seemed so low as to be almost nonexistent, although it was actually a shade over one quarter of that of Earth, the highest gravitational pull of any planetoid in the Belt. Their faint feeling of nausea was due simply to their lack of experience withreallylow gravity—the largest planetoid in the Belt had a surface gravity that was only one eighth of the pull they were now experiencing, and only one thirty-second of the Earth gravity they were used to.
The planetoid they were on—or rather,in—was known throughout the Belt simply as Threadneedle Street, and was nowhere near as large as Ceres. What accounted for the relatively high gravity pull of this tiny body was its spin. Moving in its orbit, out beyond the orbit of Mars, it turned fairly rapidly on its axis—rapidly enough to overcome the feeble gravitational field of its mass. It was a solid, roughly spherical mass of nickel-iron, nearly two thirds of a mile in diameter and, like the other inhabited planetoids of the Belt, honeycombed with corridors and rooms cut out of the living metal itself. But the corridors and rooms were oriented differently from those of the other planetoids; Threadneedle Street made one complete rotation about its axis in something less than a minute and a half, and the resulting centrifugal force reversed the normal "up" and "down", so that the center of the planetoid was overhead to anyone walking inside it. It was that fact which added to the queasiness of the three men from Earth who were following the girl down the corridor. They knew that only a few floors beneath them yawned the mighty nothingness of infinite space.
The girl, totally unconcerned with thoughts of that vast emptiness, stopped before a door that led off the corridor and opened it. "Mr. Martin," she said, "these are the gentlemen who have an appointment with you. Mr. Gerrol. Mr. Vandenbosch. Mr. Nguma." She called off each name as the man bearing it walked awkwardly through the door. "Gentlemen," she finished, "this is Mr. Stanley Martin." Then she left, discreetly closing the door.
The young man behind the desk in the metal-walled office stood up smiling as the three men entered, offered his hand to each, and shook hands warmly. "Sit down, gentlemen," he said, gesturing toward three solidly built chairs that had been anchored magnetically to the nickel-iron floor of the room.
"Well," he said genially when the three had seated themselves, "how was the trip out?"
He watched them closely, without appearing to do so, as they made their polite responses to his question. He was acquainted with them only through correspondence; now was his first chance to evaluate them in person.
Barnabas Nguma, a very tall man whose dark brown skin and eyes made a sharp contrast with the white of the mass of tiny, crisp curls on his head, smiled when he spoke, but there were lines of worry etched around his eyes. "Pleasant enough, Mr. Martin. I'm afraid that steady one-gee acceleration has left me unprepared for this low gravity."
"Well," said Stefan Vandenbosch, "it really isn't so bad, once you get used to it. As long as it's steady, I don't mind it." He was a rather chubby man of average height, with blond hair that was beginning to gray at the temples and pale blue eyes that gave his face an expression of almost childlike innocence.
Arthur Gerrol, the third man, was almost as light-complexioned as Vandenbosch. His thinning hair was light brown, and his eyes were a deep gray-blue, and the lines in his hard, blocky face gave him a look of grim determination. "I agree, Stefan. It isn't the low gravityper se. It's the doggone surges. We went from one gee to zero when the ship came in for a landing at the pole of Threadneedle Street. Then, as we came back down here, the gravity kept going up, and that ... what do you call it? Coriolis force? Yeah, that's it. It made my head feel as though the whole room was spinning." Then, realizing what he'd said, he laughed sharply.
The man behind the desk laughed with him. "Yes, it is a bit disconcerting at first, but the spin gives enough gee-pull to make a man feel comfortable, once he's used to it. That's one of the reasons why Threadneedle Street was picked.As the financial center of the Belt, we have a great many visitors from Earth, and one-quarter gee is a lot easier to get used to than a fiftieth." Then he looked quickly at the others and said, "Now, gentlemen, how can Lloyd's of London help you?"
He had phrased it that way on purpose, deliberately making it awkward for them to bring up the subject they had on their minds.
It was Nguma who broke the short silence. "Quite simply, Mr. Martin, we have come to put our case before you in person. It is not Lloyd's we want—it is you."
"You refer to our correspondence on the Nipe case, Mr. Nguma?"
"Exactly. We feel—"
The man behind the desk interrupted him. "Mr. Nguma, do you have any further information?" He looked as though such news would be welcome but that it would not change his mind in the least.
"That's just it, Mr. Martin," said Nguma, "we don't know whether our little bits and dribbles of information are worth anything."
The man behind the desk leaned back in his chair again. "I see," he said softly. "Well, just what is it you want of me, Mr. Nguma?"
Nguma looked surprised. "Why, just what I've written, sir! You are acknowledged as the greatest detective in the Solar System—bar none. We need you, Mr. Martin!Earthneeds you! That inhuman monster has been killing and robbing for ten years! Men, women, and children have been slaughtered and eaten as though they were cattle! You'vegotto help us find that God-awful thing!"
Before there could be any answer, Arthur Gerrol leaned forward earnestly and said, "Mr. Martin, we don't just represent businessmen who have been robbed. We also representhundreds and hundreds of people who have had friends and relatives murdered by that horror. Little people, Mr. Martin. Ordinary people who are helpless against the terror of a superhuman evil. This isn't just a matter of money and goods lost—it's a matter ofliveslost. Human lives, Mr. Martin."
"They're not the only ones who are concerned, either," Vandenbosch broke in. "If that hellish thing isn't destroyed, more will die. Who knows how long a beast like that may live? What is its life-span? Nobody knows!" He waved a hand in the air. "For all we know, it could go on for another century—maybe more—killing, killing, killing."
The detective looked at them for a moment in silence. These three men represented more than just a group of businessmen who had grown uneasy about the Government's ability to catch the Nipe; they represented more than a few hundred or even a few thousand people who had been directly affected by the monster's depredations. They represented the growing feeling of unrest that was making itself known all over Earth. It was even making itself felt out here in the Belt, although the Nipe had not, in the past decade, shown any desire to leave Earth. Why hadn't the beast been found? Why couldn't it be killed? Why were its raids always so fantastically successful?
For every toothmark that inhuman thing had left on a human bone, it had left a thousand on human minds—marks of a fear that was more than a fear. It was a deep-seated terror of the unknown.
The number of people killed in ordinary accidents in a single week was greater than the total number killed by the Nipe in the last decade, but nowhere were men banding together to put a stop to that sort of death. Accidental death was a known factor, almost a friend; the Nipe was stark horror.
The detective said: "Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but what I said in my last letter still goes. I can't take the job. I will not go to Earth."
Every one of the three men could sense the determination in his voice, the utter finality of his words. There was no mistaking the iron-hard will of the man. They knew that nothing could shake him—nothing, at least, that they could do.
But they couldn't admit defeat. No matter how futile they knew it to be, they still had to try.
Nguma took a billfold from his jacket pocket, opened it, and took out an engraved sheet of paper with an embossed seal in one corner. He put it on the desk in front of the detective.
"Would you look at that, Mr. Martin?" he asked.
The detective picked it up and looked at it. The expression on his face did not change. "Two hundred and fifty thousand," he said, in a voice that showed only polite interest. "A cool quarter of a million. That's a lot of money, Mr. Nguma."
"It is," said Nguma. "As you can see, that sum has just been deposited here, in the Belt branch of the Bank of England. It will be transferred to your account immediately, as soon as you agree to come to Earth to find and kill the Nipe."
The detective looked up from his inspection of the certificate. He had known that the three men had made a visit to the Bank's offices, and he had been fairly sure of their purpose when he had received the information. He had not known the sum would be quite so large.
"A quarter of a million, just to take the job?" he asked. "And what if I don't catch him?"
"We have faith in you, Mr. Martin," Nguma said. "We know your reputation. We know what you've done in thepast. The Government police haven't been able to do anything. They're completely baffled, and have been for ten years. They will continue to be so. This alien's mind is too devilishly sharp for the kind of men in Government service. We know that when you take this job the finest brain in the Solar System will be searching for that horror. If you can't find him ..." He spread his hands in a gesture that was partly a dismissal of all hope and partly an appeal to the man whose services he wanted so desperately.
The detective put the certificate down on the desk top and pushed it toward Nguma. "That's very flattering, sir. Really. And I wish there were some more diplomatic way of saying no—but that's all I can say."
"There will be a like sum deposited to your account as soon as you either kill or capture the Nipe, or, discovering his hideout, enable the Government officials to kill or capture him," said Nguma.
"That's half a million in all," Gerrol put in. "We've worked hard to raise that money, Mr. Martin. It should be enough."
The detective kept his temper under icy control, allowing just enough of his anger to show to make his point. "Mr. Gerrol ... it is not a question of money. Your offer is more than generous."
"It's our final offer," Gerrol said flatly.
"I hope it is, Mr. Gerrol," the detective said coldly. "I sincerely hope it is. For the past six months, you and your organization have been trying to get me to take this job. I appreciate the sincerity of your efforts, believe me. And, as I said, I am honored and flattered that you should think so highly of me. On the other hand, your method of going about it is hardly flattering. I turned down your first offer of twenty thousand six months ago. Since then, you have been going up and up and up until you have finallyreached twenty-five times the original amount. You seem to think I have been holding out for more money. I have attempted to disabuse you of that notion, but you would not read what I put down in my communications, evidently. If I had wanted more money than you offered at first, I would have said so. I would have quoted you a price. I did not. I gave you an unqualified refusal. I give it to you still.No.Flatly, absolutely, and finally ...no."
Nguma was the only one of the three who could find his tongue immediately. "I should think," he said somewhat acidly, "that you would consider it your duty to—"
The detective cut him off. "My duty, Mr. Nguma, is, at this moment, to my employers. I am a paid investigator for Lloyd's of London, Belt branch. I draw a salary that is more than adequate for my needs and almost adequate for my taste in the little luxuries of life. I am, for the time being at least, satisfied with my work. So are my employers. Until one or the other of us becomes dissatisfied, the situation will remain as it is. I will not accept any outside work of any kind except at the instructions of, or with the permission of, my employers. I have neither. I want neither at this time. That is all, gentlemen. Good day."
"But the money ..." Nguma said.
"The money should be withdrawn from the bank and returned to Earth. I suggest you return it to the people who have donated it to your organization. If that is impossible, I suggest you donate it to the Government officials who are working so hard to do the job you want done. I assure you, they are much more capable than I of dealing with the Nipe. Good day, Mr. Nguma, Mr. Vandenbosch, Mr. Gerrol."
They looked hurt, bewildered, and angry. Only Mr. Barnabas Nguma looked as if he might have some slight understanding of what had happened. He was the only one who spoke. "Good day, Mr. Martin. I am sorry we havedisturbed you. Thank you for your valuable time," he said with dignity. And then the three men walked out the door, closing it behind them.
The detective sat behind his desk, looking at the door, almost as if he could see the men beyond it as they moved down the corridor. Several minutes later, when his secretary opened the door again, he was still staring thoughtfully at it. She thought he was staring at her.
"Something the matter, Mr. Martin?" she asked.
"What? Oh. No, no. Nothing, Helen; nothing. Just wool-gathering. Did you see our visitors out all right?"
She glided in and closed the door behind her. "Well, none of them fell and broke a leg, if that's what you mean. But that Mr. Gerrol looked as though he might break a blood vessel. I take it you turned them down again?"
"Yes. For the last time, I think. It's a shame they had to travel out here, all that distance, to be turned down. They looked on me as their great white hope. They couldn't really believe I would turn them down. Couldn't let themselves believe it, I guess. They're scared, Helen—bright green scared."
"I know. But if it weren't for the fact that I have certain pretensions to being a lady, I would have booted that Gerrol into orbit without a spacesuit."
"Oh?"
"He implied," Helen said angrily, "that you were a coward. That you were afraid to face the Nipe."
The detective chuckled. "I hope you didn't say anything."
"I wanted to," she admitted. "I wanted to tell him that guns were easy to buy, that all he had to do was buy one and go after the Nipe himself. I would like to have seen his face if I'd asked him how scaredhewas of the beast. But I didn't say a word. They weren't talking to me, anyway; they were talking to each other."
"I'd almost be willing to bet that Nguma disagreed with Gerrol. Nguma didn't think I was a physical coward; he thought I was a moral coward."
"How'd you know?"
"Intuition. Just from the way he talked and acted. He felt the failure more than the others because he felt that there was no hope left at all. He was quite certain that I, myself, did not believe the Nipe could be caught—by me or anyone else. He thinks that I turned down the job because I know I'd fail and I don't want to have a failure on my record. Notthatbig a failure."
"That's ridiculous, of course," the girl said angrily.
The detective noticed a faint note in her voice.She thinks the same as Nguma, he thought,but she doesn't want to admit it to herself. He massaged his closed eyes with the tips of his fingers.Maybe she's right, he thought.Maybe they're both right.Aloud, he said, "Well, we've had our little diversion. Let's get back to work."
"Yes, sir. You want the BenChaim file again?"
"Yes. I've got to figure that tricky line down to a T, or we may never see that boy again. We haven't much time, either—two weeks at most."
She went over to the file cabinet and took out several heavy folders. "Imagine," she said, almost to herself, "imagine them trying to get you away from here when you have a kidnap case to solve. They must be out of their minds."
There was no kidnap case six months ago, the detective thought.She knows that's not the reason. She's only trying to convince herself. Why did I turn them down?
His mind veered away from the dangerous subject, and for a moment his mental processes refused to focus on anything at all.
The girl put the files down on his desk.
"Thanks, Helen. Now, let's see ..."I'll work on this, he thought.I won't even think about the other at all.
Colonel Walther Mannheim tapped with one thick finger the map that glowed on the wall before him. "That's his nest," he said firmly. "Right there, where those tunnels come together."
Bart Stanton looked at the map of Manhattan Island and at the gleaming colored traceries that threaded their various ways across it. "Just what was the purpose of all those tunnels?" he asked.
"The majority of them were for rail transportation," said the colonel. "The island was hit by a sun bomb during the Holocaust and was almost completely leveled and slagged down. When the city was completely rebuilt afterwards, there was naturally no need for such things, so they were simply all sealed off and forgotten."
"He's hiding directly under Government City," Stanton said. "Incredible."
"It used to be one of the largest seaports in the world," Colonel Mannheim said, "and it very probably still would be if the inertia drive hadn't made air travel cheaper and easier than seagoing."
"How did he find out about those tunnels?" Stanton asked.
The colonel pointed at the north end of the island. "After the Holocaust, the first returnees to the island were wild animals which crossed over from the mainland to the north. The Harlem River isn't very wide at this point, as you cansee. There was a bridge right at about this point here—the very tip of the island. It had collapsed into the water, but there was enough of it to allow animals to cross. Because of the rocky hills at this end of the island, there were places which were spared the direct effects of the bomb, and grasses and trees began growing there. That's why it was decided that section should be left as a game preserve when the Government built the capital on the southern part of the island." His finger moved down the map. "The upper three miles of the island, down to here, where it begins to widen, are all game preserve. There's a high wall at this point which separates it from the city, which keeps the animals penned in, and the ruins of the bridges which connected with the mainland have been removed, so animals can't get across any more.
"Two years after he arrived, the Nipe was almost caught. He had managed to get here from Asia by stealing a flyer in Leningrad. According to Dr. Yoritomo and the other psychologists who have been studying the Nipe, he apparently does not believe that human beings are anything more than trained animals. He was looking then—as he is apparently still looking—for the 'real' rulers of Earth. He expected to find them, of course, in Government City. Needless to say," said the colonel with a touch of irony, "he failed."
"But he was seen?" asked Stanton.
"He was seen. And pursued. But he got away easily, heading north. The whole island was searched, from the southern tip to the wall, and the police were ready to start an inch-by-inch combing of the game preserve by the end of the third day after he was seen. But he hit and robbed a chemical supply house in northern Pennsylvania, killing two men, so the search was called off.
"It wasn't until two years later, after an exhaustive analysis of the pattern of his raids had given us enoughmaterial to work with, that we determined that he must have found an opening into one of the tunnels up here in the game preserve." He gestured again at the map. "Very likely he immediately saw that no human being had been down there in a long time and that there wasn't much chance of a man coming down there in the foreseeable future. It was a perfect place for his base."
"How does he move in and out?" Stanton asked.
"This way." The colonel traced a finger down one of the red lines on the map, southward, until he came to a spot only a little over two miles from the southernmost tip of the island. The line turned abruptly toward the western shore of the island, where it stopped. "There are tunnels that go underneath the Hudson River at this point and emerge on the other side, over here, in New Jersey. The one he uses is only one of several, but it has one distinct advantage that the others do not. All of them are flooded now; the sun bomb caved them in when the primary shock wave hit the surface of the water. The tunnel he uses has a hole in it big enough for him to swim through.
"In spite of his high rate of metabolism, the Nipe can store a tremendous amount of oxygen in his body and can stay underwater for as long as half an hour without breathing apparatus, if he conserves his energy. When he's wearing his scuba mask, he's practically a self-contained submarine. The pressure doesn't seem to bother him much. He's a tough cookie."
"I'll remember that," said Stanton somberly. "I won't try to race him underwater."
"No," said Colonel Mannheim. "No, I wouldn't do that if I were you."
They both knew that there was a great deal more to it than that. In spite of the near miracle that the staff of the Neurophysical Institute had wrought upon Stanton's nervesand muscles and glands, they could only go so far. They could only improve the functioning of the equipment that Stanton already had; they could not add more.
His lungs could be, and had been, increased tremendously in efficiency of operation, but the amount of air they could actually hold could only be increased slightly. There was no way to add much extra volume to them without doing so at the expense of other organs. In a breath-holding contest, the Nipe would win easily, since his body had evolved organs for oxygen storage, while the human body had not.
You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear if you are limited to the structures and compounds found in sows' ears. The best you can do is make a finer, stronger, more sensitive sow's ear.
"I understand that the Nipe has his hideout pretty well bugged with all kinds of alarms," Stanton said. "How did you get your own bugs in there without setting off his?"
"Well, at first we didn't know for sure what he was up to; we weren't even sure he was actually down in those tunnels. But we suspected that if he was he'd have alarms set all over the place—perhaps even alarms of types we couldn't recognize. But we had to take that chance. Wehadto watch him."
He walked over to the nearby table and opened a box some twelve inches long and five-by-five inches in cross-section.
"See this?" he said, as he took a furry object from the box.
It looked like a large rat. Dead, stiff, unmoving.
"Our spy," said Colonel Mannheim.
The rat moved along the rusted steel rail that ran the length of the huge tunnel. To a human being, the tunnel would have seemed to be in utter darkness, but the littleeyes of the rat saw the surroundings as faintly luminescent, glowing from the infra-red radiations given out by the internal warmth of the cement and steel. The main source of the radiations was from above, where the heat of the sun and the warmth from the energy sources in the buildings on the surface seeped through the roof of the tunnel. But here and there were even brighter spots of warmth, spots that moved about on glowing feet and sniffed blindly at the air with tiny glowing noses. Rats.
On and on moved the rat, its little pinkish feet pattering almost silently on the oxidized metal surface of the rails. Its sensitive ears picked up the movements and the squeals of other rats, but it paid them no heed. Several times it met other rats on the rail, but most of them sensed the alienness ofthisrat and scuttled out of its way.
Once, it met a rat who did not give way. Hungry, perhaps, or perhaps merely yielding to the paranoid fury that was a normal component of the rattish mind, it squealed its defiance to the rat that was not a rat. It advanced, baring its rodent teeth in a yellow-daggered snarl of hate.
The rat that was not a rat became suddenly motionless, its sharp little nose pointed directly at the oncoming enemy. There came a noise, a tiny popping hiss, like that of a very small drop of water striking hot metal. From the left nostril of the not-rat, a tiny, glasslike needle snapped out at bullet speed. It struck the advancing rat in the center of the pink tongue that was visible in the open mouth. Then the not-rat scuttled backward faster than any real rat could have moved.
For a second the real rat hesitated, and it may be that the realization penetrated into its dim brain that rats did not fight this way. Then, as the tiny needle dissolved in its bloodstream, it closed its eyes and collapsed, rolling limply off the rail to the rotted wooden tie beneath.
The rat might come to before it was found and devoured by its fellows—or it might not. The not-rat moved on, not caring either way. The human intelligence that looked out from the eyes of the not-rat was only concerned with getting to the Nipe.
"That's how we found the Nipe," Colonel Mannheim said, "and that's how we keep tabs on him now. We have over seven hundred of these remote-control robots hidden in strategic spots throughout those tunnels now, and we can put more in whenever we want, but it took time to get everything set up this way. Now we can follow the Nipe wherever he goes, so long as he stays in those tunnels. If he went out through the one open-air exit up in the northern part of the island, we could have him followed by bird-robots. But"—he shrugged wryly—"I'm afraid the underwater problem still has us stumped. We can't get the carrier wave for the remote-control impulses to go very far underwater."
"How do you get your carrier wave underground to those tunnels?" Stanton asked. "And how do you keep the Nipe from picking up the radiation?"
The colonel grinned widely. "One of the boys dreamed up a real cute gimmick. Those old steel rails themselves act as antennas for the broadcaster, and the rat's tail is the pickup antenna. As long as the rat is crawling right on the rail, only a microscopic amount of power is needed for control, not enough for the Nipe to pick up with his instruments. Each rat carries its own battery for motive power, and there are old copper power cables down there that we can send direct current through to recharge the batteries. And, when we need them, the copper cables can be used as antennas. It took us quite a while to work the system out, but it's running smoothly now."
Stanton rubbed his head thoughtfully.Damn these gaps in my memory!he thought. It was sometimes embarrassing to ask questions that any schoolboy should know the answers to.
"Aren't there ways of detecting objects underwater?" he asked after a moment.
"Yes," said the colonel, "several of them. But they all require beamed energy of some kind to be reflected from the object we want to look at, and we don't dare use anything like that." He sat down on one corner of the table, his bright blue eyes looking up at Stanton.
"That's been our big problem all along," he said seriously. "We have to keep the Nipe from knowing he's being watched. In the tunnels themselves, we've only used equipment that was already there, adding only what we absolutely had to—small things. A few strands of wire, a tiny relay, things that can be hidden in out-of-the-way places and can be made to look as though they were a part of the original old equipment. After all, he has his own alarm system in that maze of tunnels, and we have deliberately kept away from his detecting devices. He knows about the rats and ignores them. They're part of the environment. But we don't dare use anything that would tip him off to our knowledge of his whereabouts. One slip like that, and hundreds of human beings will have died in vain."
"And if he stays down there too long," Stanton said levelly, "millions more may die."
The colonel's face was grim as he looked directly into Stanton's eyes. "That's why you have to know your job down to the most minute detail when the time comes to act. The whole success of the plan will depend on you and you alone."
Stanton's eyes didn't avoid the colonel's.That's not true, he thought,I'll be only one man on a team. And you knowthat, Colonel Mannheim. But you'd like to shove all the responsibility off onto someone else—someone stronger. You've finally met someone that you consider your superior in that way, and you want to unload. I wish I felt as confident as you do ... but I don't.
Aloud, he said: "Sure. Nothing to it. All I have to do is take into account everything that's known about the Nipe and make allowances for everything that's not known." Then he smiled. "Not," he added, "that I can think of any other way to go about it."