And then he shot them both with gun number two.
No needle charges this time. Such shots would have blown them both in
two, unprotected as they were by spacesuits. The small handgun merely
jangled their nerves with a high-powered blast of accurately beamed
supersonics. While they were still twitching, he went over and jabbed
them with a drug needle.
Then he went on into the hideout.
He had to knock out one more man, whom he found asleep in a small room
off the short corridor.
It took a gas bomb to get the two women who were guarding the kid.
He made sure that the BenChaim boy was all right, then he went to the
little communications room and called for help.
_[12]_
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. The old homes, some of them
dating clear back to the time of Sam Clemens and the paddle-wheel
steamboat, still stood, warm and well preserved.
Bart Stanton liked to walk along those quiet streets of an evening, just
to let the placid peacefulness seep into him.
And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small
Huckleberry Finn pleasure of playing hooky from the Neurophysical
Institute.
Technically, he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that
he had completely accepted Colonel Walther Mannheim's assignment, he was
presumably under military discipline. 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 hooky 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 completely by being told that it was a holiday and
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 Stanton 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, ordinary, everyday people.
His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly
along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the streetlights.
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.
But 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 whole life, was to train himself for the one
single purpose of besting the Nipe.
If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from Dr.
George Yoritomo or from Colonel Mannheim. If he wasn't working his
muscles, he was 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?
What would happen if he, the great hyped-up superman, found that the
Nipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What would
happen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast hand
and showed Colonel Mannheim and all his watching technicians that they
had completely underestimated his alien ability?
What would happen?
Why, Bart Stanton would die, of course, just as hundreds of other human
beings had died in the past ten years. Stanton would become another
statistic. And then Mannheim's Plan Beta would 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, psychologically, 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 Neurophysical Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't have
much cash. What good was cash at the Institute, where everything was
provided?
He stopped at a newsvendor, 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 newssheet. 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 the
newscasts.
The last important news story that he had heard had come two nights
before. 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 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 had not been those 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 storefront were still there, bent
outward a little, but not broken.
The vault door had been slammed to 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
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 automatic restaurant and walked
over to the vending wall. The big dining room was only about three
quarters full of people, and 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: