Two-fifths of a second. That was all the time Bart Stanton had from the
first moment his supersensitive ears heard the faint whisper of metal
against leather.
He made good use of it.
The noise had come from behind and slightly to the left of him, so he drew
his own gun with his left hand and spun to his left as he dropped to a
crouch. He had turned almost completely around, drawn his gun, and fired
three shots before the other man had even leveled his own weapon.
The bullets from Stanton's gun made three round spots on the man's jacket,
almost touching each other and directly over the heart. The man blinked
stupidly for a moment, looking down at the round spots.
"My God," he said softly.
Then the man returned his weapon slowly to his holster.
[Illustration]
The big room was noisy. The three shots had merely added to the noise of
the gunfire that rattled intermittently around the two men. And even that
gunfire was only a part of the cacophony. The tortured molecules of the
air in the room were so besieged by the beat of drums, the blare of
trumpets, the crackle of lightning, the rumble of heavy machinery, the
squawks and shrieks of horns and whistles, the rustle of autumn leaves,
the machine-gun snap of popping popcorn, the clink and jingle of falling
coins, and the yelps, bellows, howls, roars, snarls, grunts, bleats, moos,
purrs, cackles, quacks, chirps, buzzes, and hisses of a myriad of animals,
that each molecule would have thought that it was being shoved in a
hundred thousand different directions at once if it had had a mind to
think with.
The noise wasn't deafening, but it was certainly all-pervasive.
Bart Stanton had reholstered his own weapon and half opened his lips to
speak when he heard another sound behind him.
Again he whirled his guns in hand--both of them this time--and his
forefingers only fractions of a millimeter from the point that would fire
the hair triggers.
But he did not fire.
The second man had merely shifted the weapons in his holsters and then
dropped his hands away.
The noise, which had been flooding into the room over the speaker system,
died instantly.
Stanton shoved his guns back into place and rose from his crouch. "Real
cute," he said, grinning. "I wasn't expecting that one."
The man he was facing smiled back. "Well, Bart, maybe we've proved our
point. What do you think, Colonel?" The last was addressed to the third
man, who was still standing quietly, looking worried and surprised about
the three spots on his jacket that had come from the special harmless
projectiles in Stanton's gun.
Colonel Mannheim was four inches shorter than Stanton's five-ten, and was
fifteen years older. But, in spite of the differences, he would have
laughed at anyone who had told him, five minutes before, that he couldn't
outdraw a man who was standing with his back turned.
His bright blue eyes, set deep beneath craggy brows in a tanned face,
looked speculatively at the younger man. "Incredible," he said gently.
"Absolutely incredible." Then he looked at the other man, a lean civilian
with mild blue eyes a shade lighter than his own. "All right, Dr.
Farnsworth, I'm convinced. You and your staff have quite literally created
a superman. Anyone who can stand in a noise-filled room and hear a man
draw a gun twenty feet behind him is incredible enough. The fact that he
could and did outdraw and outshoot me after I had started ... well, that's
almost beyond comprehension."
He looked back at Bart Stanton. "What's your opinion, Mr. Stanton? Think
you can handle the Nipe?"
Stanton paused imperceptibly before answering, while his ultrafast mind
considered the problem and arrived at a decision. Just how much confidence
should he show the colonel? 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?"
Farnsworth shook his head. "He'll never make it. In another two years, we
can put him into reasonable shape again, but his nervous system just
couldn't stand the gaff."
"Can we get another man ready in time?"
"Hardly. We can't just pick a man up off the street and turn him into a
superman. Even if we could find another subject with Bart's genetic
possibilities, it would take more time than we have to spare."
"This isn't magic, Colonel. You don't change a nobody into a physical and
mental giant by saying _abracadabra_ or by teaching him how to pronounce
_shazam_ properly."
"I'm aware of that," said Colonel Mannheim without rancor. "Five years of
work on Mr. Stanton must have taught you something, though. I should think
you could repeat the process in less time."
Farnsworth repeated the headshaking. "Human beings aren't machines,
Colonel. They require time to heal, time to learn, time to integrate
themselves. Remember that, in spite of all our increased knowledge of
anesthesia, antibiotics, viricides, and obstetrics, it still takes nine
months to produce a baby. We're in the same position, only more so."
"I see," said Mannheim.
"Besides," Dr. Farnsworth continued, "Stanton's body and nervous system
are now close to the theoretical limit for human tissue. I'm afraid you
don't realize what kind of mental stability and organization are required
to handle the equipment he now has."
"I'm sure I don't," the colonel agreed. "I doubt if anyone besides Stanton
himself knows."
Dr. Farnsworth's manner softened a little. "You're probably quite right.
Suffice it to say that Bartholomew Stanton is the only answer we've found
so far, and the only answer visible in the foreseeable future to the
problem posed by the Nipe."
The colonel's face darkened. "I keep hoping that our policy of handling
the Nipe hasn't been a mistake. If it has, it's going to prove a fatal
one--for the whole race."
"Let's go into the lounge," Farnsworth said. "Standing around in an empty
chamber like this isn't the most comfortable way to discuss the fate of
mankind." His voice brought hollow echoes from the walls.
Colonel Mannheim grinned at the touch of lightness the biophysicist had
injected into the conversation. "Very well. I could do with some coffee,
if you have some."
"All you want," said Dr. Farnsworth, leading the way toward the door of
the chamber and opening it. "Or, if you'd prefer something with a little
more power to it--?"
"Thanks, no. Coffee will do fine," said Mannheim. "How about you, Mr.
Stanton?"
Bart Stanton shook his head. "I'd love to have some coffee, but I'll leave
the alcohol alone. I'd just have the luck to be finishing a drink when
our friend, the Nipe, popped in on us. And when I do meet him, I'm going
to need every microsecond of reflex speed I can scrape up."
* * * * *
They walked down a soft-floored, warmly-lit corridor to an elevator which
whisked them up to the main level of the Neurophysical Institute Building.
Another corridor led them to a room that might have been the common room
of one of the more exclusive men's clubs. There were soft chairs and
shelves of books and reading tables and smoking stands, all quietly
luxurious. There was no one in the room when the three men entered.
"We can have some privacy here," Dr. Farnsworth said. "None of the rest of
the staff will come in until we're through."
Colonel Mannheim looked at the biophysicist speculatively. "You seem to
think secrecy's important all of a sudden."
Bart Stanton grinned and kept silent.
Dr. Farnsworth went over to a table, where an urn of coffee radiated soft
warmth. "Cream and sugar over there on the tray," he said as he began to
fill cups.
"Frankly," Colonel Mannheim said, "I was going to ask you to find us a
place where we could talk privately. You seem to have anticipated me."
"I thought you might have something like that in mind," said Dr.
Farnsworth without looking up.
The cups were filled and the three men sat down in a triangle of chairs
before any of them spoke again. Colonel Mannheim took a sip from his cup
and then looked up.
"All right, we'll begin this way. Mr. Stanton, granted that you've been
through five years of hell--but how closely have you stayed in touch with
the Nipe situation?"
"As best I could through news bulletins and information that your office
has sent here."
"Could you give me an oral summary?"
Bart Stanton thought for a moment. It was true that he'd been out of touch
with what had been going on outside the walls of the Neurophysical
Institute for the past five years. In spite of the reading he'd done and
the newscasts he'd watched and the TV tapes he'd seen, he still had no
real feeling for the situation.
There were hazy periods during that five years. He had undergone extensive
glandular and neural operations of great delicacy, many of which had
resulted in what could have been agonizing pain without the use of
suppressors. As a result, he possessed a biological engine that, for sheer
driving power and nicety of control, surpassed any other known to exist or
to have ever existed on Earth--with the possible exception of the Nipe.
But those five years of rebuilding and retraining had left a gap in his
life.
Several of the steps required to make the conversion from man to superman
had resulted in temporary insanity; the wild, swinging imbalances of
glandular secretions seeking a new balance, the erratic misfirings of
neurons as they attempted to adjust to higher nerve-impulse velocities,
and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells which were acting too rapidly
for a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greater
or lesser mental abnormality.
That he was sane now, there was no question. But there were holes in his
memory that still had to be filled.
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.
The Nipe had to be treated as an emissary from his home world, wherever
that was. He'd killed a man, yes. 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. It was nearly a month before the Russian psychologists and
psychiatrists realized that the reason the Nipe had come to them was
because he had thought that they were the ruling body of that territory!
The UN observers stayed out of it at first. Before there was any kind of
talk on a Government level, there must be some kind of understanding on a
personal level. And that, of course, was never achieved.
Just what had set off the Nipe's anger hasn't been established yet, as far
as Stanton knew. At a meeting one day, he had simply become more and more
incomprehensible, and then, without any warning, he had leaped out, killed
three of the men with his bare hands, and gone out the window.
And that had been the end of any diplomatic relations between humanity and
the Nipe.
Since that time, he'd been on a rampage of robbery and murder. He was as
callously indifferent to human life and property as a human being might be
with the life and property of a cockroach.
There have been human criminals whose actions could be described in the
same way, but the Nipe had a few touches that few human criminals would
have thought of and almost none would have had the capacity to execute.
If, for instance, the Nipe had time to spare, his victims would be an
annoying problem in identification when found, for there would be nothing
left but well-gnawed bones. And "time to spare," in this case meant twenty
or thirty minutes. The Nipe had, if nothing else, a very efficient
digestive tract. He ate like a shrew.
And the Nipe never, under any circumstances, used any weapon but the
weapons Nature had given him--hands-or-feet, or claws or teeth. Never did
he use a knife or gun or even a club.
* * * * *
Almost as an afterthought, one realized that the loot which the Nipe stole
was seemingly unpredictable. Money, as such, he apparently had no use for.
He had taken gold, silver, and platinum, but one raid for each of these
elements had evidently been enough, except for silver, which had required
three raids over a period of four years. Since then, he hadn't touched
silver again.
He hadn't tried yet for any of the radioactives except radium. He'd taken
a full ounce of that in five raids, but hadn't attempted to get his hands
on uranium, thorium, plutonium, or any of the other elements normally
associated with atomic energy. Nor had he tried to steal any of the fusion
materials; the heavy isotopes of hydrogen or any of the lithium isotopes.
Beryllium had been taken, but whether there was any significance in the
thefts or not, no one knew.
[Illustration]
There was a pattern in the thefts, nonetheless. They had begun small and
increased. Scientific and technical instruments--oscilloscopes, X-ray
generators, radar equipment, maser sets, dynostatic crystals, thermolight
resonators, and so on--were stolen complete or gutted for various parts.
After awhile, he went on to bigger things--whole aircraft, with their
crews, had vanished.
That he had not committed anywhere near all the crimes that had been
attributed to him was certain; that he _had_ committed a great many of
them was equally certain.
There was no doubt at all that his loot was being used to make instruments
and devices of unknown kinds. He had used several of them on his raids.
The one that could apparently phase out almost any electromagnetic
frequency up to about a hundred thousand megacycles--including sixty-cycle
power frequencies--was considered to be a particularly cute item. So was
the gadget that reduced the tensile strength of concrete to about that of
a good grade of marshmallow.
After he had been operating for a few years, there was no installation on
the face of the earth that could be considered Nipe-proof for more than a
few minutes. He struck when and where he wanted and took whatever he
needed.
It was manifestly impossible to guard against the Nipe, since no one knew
what sort of loot might strike his fancy next, and there was therefore no
way of knowing where or how he would hit next.
Nor could he ever be found after one of his raids. They were plotted and
followed out with diabolical accuracy and thoroughness. He struck, looted,
and vanished. And wasn't seen again until his next strike.
Colonel Mannheim, who had carefully puffed a cigar alight and smoked it
thoughtfully during Stanton's recitation, dropped the remains of the cigar
into an ash receptacle. "Accurate but incomplete," he said quietly. "You
must have made some guesses." He looked from Bart Stanton to Dr.
Farnsworth. "I'd like to hear them."
Farnsworth finished off the last of his coffee. "We've talked about it,"
he admitted. "Although I must say the hypothesis Bart has come up with
would never have occurred to me. I'm still not sure I credit it, but" ...
he shrugged ... "I can't say that I disbelieve it, either."
Mannheim turned his eyes back to Stanton. His silence was a question.
"Logically, my theory mightn't hold much water," Stanton admitted. "But
the evidence seems to be conclusive enough to me." He got up, went over to
the coffee urn, and refilled his cup. "It seems incredible to me 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," he said as he returned to his seat.
"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.
"If there is such a base, then it must be possible to blast him out of it
without resorting to the kind of work it took to produce--me.
"I may be faster and more sensitive and stronger than the average man, but
that doesn't mean that I have superhuman abilities to the extent that I
can do in two or three years 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've got another ace up your sleeve. You
_know_ we're going to get the Nipe before I die. You either have a sure
way of tracing him or else you already know where he is.
"Which is it?"