"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 scared _he_ was
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.
Not _that_ big 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._
_[9]_
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 can see. 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 enough material 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 nerves and 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. We _had_
to 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 little eyes 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 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 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 know that, 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."
_THIRD INTERLUDE_
Mrs. Frobisher touched the control button that depolarized the window in
the breakfast room, letting the morning sun stream in through the now
transparent sheet of glass. Her attention was caught by something across
the street, and she said, in a low voice, "Larry, come here."