Stanton sat in his hotel room, smoking a cigarette, staring at the wall,
and thinking.
He was alone again. All the fuss, feathers, and fooferaw were over.
Farnsworth was in another room of the suite, making his plans for a
complete physical examination of the Nipe. Yoritomo was having the time of
his life, holding a conversation with the Nipe, drawing the alien out and
getting him to talk about his own race and their history. And Mannheim was
plotting the next phase of the capture--the cover-up.
Stanton smiled a little. Colonel Mannheim was a great one for planning,
all right. Every little detail was taken care of. It sometimes made his
plans more complex than necessary, Stanton suspected. Mannheim tended to
try to account for every eventuality, and, after he had done that, he
would set aside reserves here and there, just in case they might be useful
if something unforeseen happened.
Stanton got up, walked over to the window, and looked down at the streets
of Government City, eight floors below.
All things considered, the Government had done the right thing. And, in
picking Mannheim, they had picked the right man. What would the average
citizen think if he knew the true story of the Nipe? If he discovered
that, at this very moment, the Nipe was being treated almost as an honored
guest of the Government? If he suspected that the Nipe could have been
killed easily at any time during the past six years?
Would it be possible to explain that, in the long run, the knowledge
possessed by the Nipe was tremendously more valuable to the Race of Man
that the lives of a few individuals?
Could those people down there, and the others like them all over the
world, be made to understand that, by his own lights, the Nipe had been
acting in a most civilized and gentlemanly way he knew? Would they see
that, because of the priceless information stored in that alien brain, the
Nipe's life had to be preserved at any cost?
Dr. Yoritomo assumed that Mannheim would spread a story about the Nipe's
death--perhaps even display a carefully-made "corpse". But Stanton had the
feeling that the colonel had something else up his sleeve.
The phone rang. Stanton walked over, thumbed the answer stud, and watched
Dr. Farnsworth's face take shape on the screen.
"Bart, I just saw the tapes of your fight with the Nipe, Incredible! I'm
going to have them run over again, slowed down, so that I can see what
went on, and I'd like to have you tell as best you can, what went on in
your mind at each stage of the fight."
"You mean right now? I have an appointment--"
Farnsworth waved a hand. "No, no. Later. Take your time. But I am honestly
amazed that you won so easily. I knew you were good, and I knew you'd win,
but I honestly expected you to be injured."
Stanton looked down at his bandaged hands, and felt the ache of his broken
rib and the blue bruise on his thigh. In spite of the way it looked, he
had actually been hurt worse than the Nipe had. That boy was _tough_!
"The trouble was that he couldn't adapt himself to fighting in a new way,"
he told Farnsworth. "He fought me as he would have fought another Nipe,
and that didn't work. I had the reach on him, and I could maneuver
faster."
"It looked to me as though you were fighting him as you would fight
another human being," Farnsworth said.