Colonel Walther Mannheim tapped the map that glowed on the wall before
him. "He's 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 those tunnels?" he asked curiously.
"They were for rail transportation," said the colonel. "The island was hit
by a sun bomb during the Holocaust, and almost completely leveled and
slagged down. When the city was rebuilt, there was naturally no need for
such things, so they were simply sealed off and forgotten."
"Right under Government City," Stanton said. "Incredible."
"It used to be one of the largest seaports in the world," Colonel Mannheim
said, "and it probably still would be if the inertia drive hadn't made air
travel cheaper and easier than seagoing."
"How did he find out about the 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 from the
mainland from the north. The Harlem River isn't very wide at this point.
Also, 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 to leave that section
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 here which separates it from the city, and
the ruins of the bridges which connected with the mainland have been
removed, so the animals can't get back across any more.
"Two years after he arrived, the Nipe was almost caught. He had managed,
somehow--we're not sure yet exactly how--to get here from Asia. According
to the psychologists who have been studying him, he apparently does not
believe that human beings are any 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
island was searched, and the police were ready to start an inch-by-inch
going over of the island two days later. But the Nipe hit and robbed a
chemical supply house in northern Pennsylvania, killing two men, so the
search was called off.
[Illustration]
"It wasn't until two years later, after exhaustive analysis of the pattern
of his raids had given us something to work with, that we decided that he
must have found an opening into one of the tunnels up here in the game
preserve." He gestured again at the map. "It wouldn't take him long to see
that no human being had been down there in a long time. 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 edge of the island, where it stopped. "This tunnel goes underneath
the Hudson River at this point, and emerges on the other side. It's only
one of several that do so. They're all flooded now; the sun bomb caved
them in when the primary shock wave hit the surface of the river.
"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 apparatus, he's practically a self-contained submarine.
The pressure doesn't seem to bother him much. He's a tough cookie."
Stanton nodded silently and slowly. 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."
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 something out.
It looked like a large dead rat.
"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 little eyes of the rat saw its surroundings as faintly
luminescent, glowing from the infra-red radiations given out by the
internal warmth of cement and steel. The main source came from above,
where the heat of the sun and of the energy sources in the buildings on
the surface seeped through the roof of the tunnel.
On and on it moved, its little pinkish feet pattering almost silently on
the oxidized metal surface of the rail. 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 of _this_ rat 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 teeth.
The rat that was not a rat became suddenly motionless, its sharp rodent's
nose pointed directly at the 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 backwards faster
than any 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.
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-controlled robots hidden in strategic spots in those tunnels now,
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 the tunnels. If he went out
through an open air exit, 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 far underwater."
"How do you get your carrier wave underground to those tunnels?" Stanton
asked.
The colonel grinned widely. "One of the boys dreamed up a real cute
gimmick. The rails themselves act as antenna 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."
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.
"Aren't there ways of detecting objects underwater?" he asked after a
moment.
"Yes," said the colonel, "But they all require beamed energy of some kind
to be reflected from the object, 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 problem all along," he said seriously. "Keeping the Nipe
from knowing that he's being watched. In the tunnels, we've used only
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. After all, he has his own alarm system in
the maze of tunnels, and we've 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 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 only be one man on a team, and you know it, 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 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."
X
St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust; it still retained much of
the old-fashioned flavor of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
especially in the residential districts. Bart Stanton liked to walk along
those quiet streets of an evening, just to let the peacefulness seep into
him. And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small
pleasure of playing hookey from the Neurophysics Institute. Technically,
he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that he had accepted
Colonel Mannheim's assignment, he was presumably under military
discipline. But he assumed that, if he had asked permission to leave the
Institute's grounds, he would have been given that permission without
question.
But, like playing hookey, or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if it
was done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wicked
and delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can have
his whole day ruined by being told that it was a holiday and that the
school had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his own fun by
asking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easy for a man
with his special abilities to get out without asking.
Besides, there _was_ a chance--a small one, he thought--that permission
might be refused for one reason or another, and Bart was fully aware that
he would not disobey a direct request--to say nothing of a direct
order--that he stay within the walls of the Institute. He didn't want to
run any risk of losing his freedom, small though it was. After five years
of mental and physical hell, he felt a need to get out into the world of
normal, everyday people.
His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly
along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the street lights. The
people around him walked as casually and with seemingly as little purpose
as he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that he felt
inside the walls of the Institute.
He knew he could never get away from that sense of urgency completely,
even out here. There were times when it seemed that all he had ever done,
all his life, was to train himself for the single purpose of besting the
Nipe.
If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from the
psychologists or from Colonel Mannheim--laying plans and considering
possibilities for the one great goal that seemed to be the focal point of
his whole life.
What would happen if he failed? He would die, of course, and Mannheim's
Plan Beta would immediately go into effect. The Nipe would be killed
eventually.
But what if he, Stanton, won? Then what?
The people around him were not a part of his world, really. Their
thoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy in
comparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purpose
would there be in the life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded by
people, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society that was
not his own because it was not, could not be, geared to his abilities and
potentials. But there was no other society to turn to, either.
He was not a man "alone, afraid" in a world he had never made; he was a
man who had been made for a world, a society, that did not exist.
Women? A wife? A family life?
Where? With whom?
He pushed the thoughts from his mind, the questions, unanswered and
perhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future, he
had no desire to die, and there was the possibility that too much brooding
of that kind would evoke a subconscious reaction that could slow him down
or cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. A feeling of futility could
operate to bring on his death in spite of his conscious determination to
win the coming battle with the Nipe.
The Nipe was his first duty. When that job was finished, he would consider
the problem of himself. Just because he could not now see the answer to
that problem did not mean that no answer existed.
* * * * *
He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He had been walking through
Memorial Park, past the museum, an old, worn edifice that was still called
the Missouri Pacific Building. There was a small restaurant only a block
away. He reached into his pocket and took out the few coins that were
there. Not much, but enough to buy a sandwich and a glass of milk. Because
of the trust fund that had been set up when he had started the treatment
at the Neurophysics Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't have
much cash. What good was cash in the Institute, where everything was
provided?
He stopped at a news-vendor, dropped in a coin, and waited for the
reproducing mechanism to turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the folded
sheets and went on to the restaurant.
He rarely read a news-sheet. Mostly, his information about the world that
existed outside the walls of the Institute came from the televised
newscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relatively
unimportant little stories about people who had done small, relatively
unimportant things--stories that didn't appear in the headlines or on the
newscasts.
The last important news story had come two nights before, when the Nipe
had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown the
shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow open the door of the
vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the whole front
door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted paraglass
that had lain on the pavement showed how much force had been applied from
within.
And yet, the results were not that of an explosion. It was more as though
some tremendous force had _pushed_ outward from within. It had not been
the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that had
unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.
Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. It
appeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered by a
giant hand. The main braces of the store front were still there, bent
outward a little, but not broken.
The vault door had lain on the floor of the shop, only a few feet from the
front door. The vault itself had been farther back, and the camera had
showed it, standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there had been pieces of
fragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.
The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from a
point within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outward to
tear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin or modeling
clay.
Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisier
construction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known,
outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In a
widely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vault had
been cut open by a team of well-trained, well-equipped technicians. It had
taken twenty-one hours for them to breach the wall, and they had no fear
of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the intricate
alarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even a borazon drill
could make much of an impression on a metal which had been formed under
millions of atmospheres of pressure.
And yet the Nipe had taken that door out in a second, without much effort
at all.
The crowd that had gathered at the scene of the crime had not been large.
The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places where he was
known to have been. 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. It was known that the
Nipe didn't stay around after he had struck; and, besides, the area was
now full of armed men. So the curious came to look and to stare in
revulsion at the neat pile of gnawed and bloody bones that had been the
night watchman, carefully killed and eaten by the Nipe before he had
opened the vault.
_Thus curiosity does make fools of us all, and the native hue of caution
is crimsoned o'er by the bright red of morbid fascination._
* * * * *
Stanton went through the door of the automat restaurant and walked over to
the vending wall. The dining room was only about three-quarters full of
people; there were plenty of seats available. He fed coins into the proper
slots, took his sandwich and milk over to a seat in one corner and made
himself comfortable.
He flipped open the newspaper and looked at the front page.
And, for a moment, his brain seemed to freeze.
The story itself was straightforward enough:
BENCHAIM KIDNAPERS
NABBED!
STAN MARTIN DOES IT
AGAIN!
Ceres, June 3 (Interplanetary News Service)--The three men
and three women who allegedly kidnapped ten-year-old Shmuel
BenChaim were brought to justice today through the
single-handed efforts of Stanley Martin, famed investigator
for Lloyd's of London. The boy, held prisoner for more than
ten months on a small asteroid, was reported in very good
health.
According to Lt. John Vale, of the Planetoid Police, the
kidnap gang could not have been taken by direct assault on
their hideout because of fear that the boy might be killed.
"The operation required a carefully-planned, one-man
infiltration of their hideout," he said. "Mr. Martin was the
man for the job."
Labeled "the most outrageous kidnapping in history", the
affair was conceived as a long-term method of gaining
control of Heavy Metals Incorporated, controlled by Moishe
BenChaim, the boy's father. The details....
* * * * *
But Bart Stanton wasn't interested in the details. After only a glance
through the first part of the article, his eyes returned to the picture
alongside the article. The line of print beneath it identified the man in
the picture as Stanley Martin.
But a voice in Bart Stanton's brain said: _Not Stan Martin! The name is
Mart Stanton!_
And Bartholomew felt a roar of confusion in his mind, because he didn't
know who Mart Stanton was, and because the face in the picture was his
own.