It took a second for the words to really impress themselves on his mind.
He read them over again.
And the veil began to drop from the closed-off part of his mind.
Memories began to swarm back into his mind--memories that had been
walled off and kept away from his conscious mind by the hypnotic
suggestion implanted so long ago.
Oddly, it did not surprise or shock him. He was an expert at hypnosis,
especially self-hypnosis. He recognized the message for exactly what it
was: a series of code phrases designed to break the blockage that had
been placed in his mind.
His only reaction was to laugh aloud. "By God!" he said. "It worked! It
actually worked! Nearly six years, and I never suspected once!"
The phone hummed. He switched it on. "Mr. Pelham is on the phone, Mr.
Martin," Helen said.
He watched as the florid, smiling face of Pelham, his superior, appeared
on the screen. "What can I do for you, Martin?" he asked.
"I have a favor to ask, Mr. Pelham."
"Anything within reason," Pelham said. "After this BenChaim affair,
you're in good standing around here." He chuckled.
"I want a leave of absence," the detective said.
Pelham looked a little surprised. "Well, I guess you deserve it. You
need a rest, I imagine."
"No," the detective said. "No, it isn't that. I'm going after bigger
game, is all."
"What's that?"
"I'm going to Earth to find the Nipe."
_[19]_
From the very moment he had heard that "Stanley Martin" had arrived to
take charge of the project, Bart Stanton pushed all thoughts of his
brother out of his mind. He had fouled up once by thinking of himself
rather than thinking of what had to be done; he would not make that
mistake again.
Nor, apparently, did Martin have any desire to meet Bart Stanton. He
took control of the project smoothly. Apparently Mannheim had taken into
account the possibility of his own death and had arranged things
accordingly. Although Martin was not a member of the World Police, his
own record showed that he had the ability to handle the job, and an
Executive Session had unanimously accepted Colonel Mannheim's wishes in
the matter. There was little else they could do; the very fact that
Mannheim had died in the way he had, ordering the guard to hold his
fire, had stilled those voices on the Executive Council who had been
wavering before.
Martin had come in to Earth almost secretly, without fanfare, and the
general public was totally unaware that anything at all had happened.
Special messages, going through the channels known to be tapped by the
Nipe, said that it would not be in the public interest to admit that the
Nipe could actually penetrate the defenses of World Police Headquarters,
so the Nipe was not surprised when the public news channels announced
quietly that Colonel Walther Mannheim, the man who had been decorated
twelve years before for the quelling of the Central Brazilian
Insurrection, had died peacefully in his sleep. The funeral was quiet,
but with full honors.
Stanton stopped worrying about such things. Until he had done the job
that he had been rebuilt for, he was determined to make that goal his
sole purpose. As the weeks sped by, he kept determinedly to his regime,
exercising regularly to keep himself in top physical condition, and
studying the three-dimensional motion studies of the Nipe in action.
Only one of these made him ill the first time he watched it, but it was
the only recording of the Nipe actually in the process of killing a
man, so he watched, over and over again, the shots taken from the gun
tower when the Nipe attacked Colonel Mannheim.
A full-sized mockup of the Nipe's body had been built, with the best
approximation possible of the Nipe's bone structure and musculature, and
Stanton worked with it to determine what, if any, were the Nipe's
physical limitations.
His only periods of relative relaxation occurred when he discussed the
psychological peculiarities of the Nipe mind with George Yoritomo.
One afternoon, after a particularly strenuous boxing session, he walked
into Yoritomo's office with a grin on his face. "I've been considering
the problem of the apparent paradox of a high technology in a
ritual-taboo system."
Yoritomo grinned back delightedly and waved Stanton to a chair.
"Excellent! It is always much better if the student thinks these things
out for himself. Now, while I fill this hand-furnace with tobacco and
fire up, you will please explain to me all about it."
Stanton sat down and settled himself comfortably. "All right. In the
first place, there's the notion of religion. In tribal cultures, the
religion is usually--uh--animistic, I think the word is."
Yoritomo nodded silently.
"They believe there are spirits everywhere," Stanton said. "That sort of
belief, it seems to me, would grow up in any race that had imagination,
and the Nipes must have had plenty of that, or they wouldn't have the
technology that we know they do have. Am I on the right track?"
"Very good. _Very_ good," Yoritomo said in approval. "But what evidence
have you that this technology was not given to them by some other, more
advanced race?"
"I hadn't thought of that." Stanton stared into space for a moment, then
nodded his head. "Of course. It would take too long to teach them. It
wouldn't be worth all the trouble it would take to make them unlearn
their fallacies and learn the new facts. It would take generations to do
it unless this hypothetical other race killed off all the adult Nipes
and started the little ones off fresh. And that didn't happen, because
if it had, the ritual-taboo system would have died out, too. So that
other-race theory is out."
"The argument is imperfect," Yoritomo said, "but it will suffice for the
moment. Go on about the religion."
"Okay. Religious beliefs are not subject to pragmatic tests. That is,
the spiritual beliefs aren't. Any belief that _could_ be disproven by
such a test would eventually die out. But beliefs in ghosts or demons or
angels or life after death aren't disprovable by material tests, any
more than they are provable. So, as a race increases its knowledge of
the physical world, its religion would tend to become more and more
spiritual."
"Agreed. Yes. It happened so among human beings," said Yoritomo. "But
how do you link this fact with ritual-taboo?"
"Well, once a belief gains a foothold," Stanton said, "it is very
difficult to wipe it out, even among human beings. Among Nipes, it would
be well-nigh impossible. Once a code of ritual and of social behavior
had been set up, it became permanent."
"For example?" Yoritomo urged.
"Well, shaking hands, for example," Stanton said after a pause. "We
still do that, even if we don't have it fixed solidly in our heads that
we _must_ do it. I suppose it would never occur to a Nipe not to perform
such a ritual."
"Just so," Yoritomo agreed vigorously. "Such things, once established in
the minds of the race, would tend to remain. But it is a characteristic
of a ritual-taboo system that it resists change. Change is evil. Change
is wrong. We must use what we know to be true, not try something that
has never been tried before. In a ritual-taboo system, a thing which is
not ritual is, _ipso facto_, taboo. How, then, can we account for their
high technological achievements?"
"The pragmatic engineering approach, I imagine," Stanton said. "If a
thing works, then go ahead and use it. It is usable. If not, it isn't."
"Approximately," said Yoritomo. "But only approximately. Now it is my
turn to lecture." He put his pipe in an ashtray and held up a long, bony
finger. "Firstly, we must remember that the Nipe is equipped with a
functioning imagination. Secondly, he has in his memory a tremendous
amount of data, all ready at hand. He is capable of working out theories
in his head, you see. Like the ancient Greeks, he finds no need to test
such theories--_unless_ his thinking indicates that such an experiment
would yield something useful. Unlike the Greeks, he has no aversion to
experiment. But he sees no need for useless experiment, either.
"Oh, he would learn, yes. But once a given theory proved workable, how
resistant he would be to a new theory. Innovators, even in our own
culture, have a very hard time working against the great inertia of a
recognized theory. How much harder it would be in a ritual-taboo society
with a perfect memory! How long--how _incredibly_ long--it would take
such a race to achieve the technology the Nipe now has!"
"Hundreds of thousands of years," said Stanton.
Yoritomo shook his head briskly. "Puh! Longer! Much longer!" He smiled
with satisfaction. "I estimate that the Nipe race first invented the
steam engine not less than ten million years ago!"
He kept smiling into the dead silence that followed.