_[12]_
St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust. It still retained muchof the old-fashioned flavor of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,especially in the residential districts. The old homes, some of themdating clear back to the time of Sam Clemens and the paddle-wheelsteamboat, still stood, warm and well preserved.
Bart Stanton liked to walk along those quiet streets of an evening, justto let the placid peacefulness seep into him.
And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the smallHuckleberry Finn pleasure of playing hooky from the NeurophysicalInstitute.
Technically, he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now thathe had completely accepted Colonel Walther Mannheim's assignment, he waspresumably under military discipline. He assumed that if he had askedpermission to leave the Institute's grounds he would have been giventhat permission without question.
But, like playing hooky or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if itwas done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wickedand delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can havehis whole day ruined completely by being told that it was a holiday andthe school had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his ownfun by asking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easyfor a man with his special abilities to get out without asking.
Besides, there _was_ a chance--a small one, he thought--that permissionmight be refused for one reason or another, and Stanton was fully awarethat he would not disobey a direct request--to say nothing of a directorder--that he stay within the walls of the Institute.
He didn't want to run any risk of losing his freedom, small though itwas. After five years of mental and physical hell, he felt a need to getout into the world of normal, ordinary, everyday people.
His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlesslyalong the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the streetlights.The people around him walked as casually and with seemingly as littlepurpose as he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that hefelt inside the walls of the Institute.
But he knew he could never get away from that sense of urgencycompletely, even out here. There were times when it seemed that all hehad ever done, all his whole life, was to train himself for the onesingle 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 hismuscles, he was laying plans and considering possibilities for the onegreat 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 theNipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What wouldhappen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast handand showed Colonel Mannheim and all his watching technicians that theyhad completely underestimated his alien ability?
What would happen?
Why, Bart Stanton would die, of course, just as hundreds of other humanbeings had died in the past ten years. Stanton would become anotherstatistic. And then Mannheim's Plan Beta would go into effect. The Nipewould be killed eventually.
But what if he, Stanton, won? Then what?
The people around him were not a part of his world, really. Theirthoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy incomparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purposewould there be in the life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded bypeople, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society thatwas not his own because it was not, could not be, geared to hisabilities 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 aman 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 andperhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future,he had no desire to die, and there was, psychologically, the possibilitythat too much brooding of that kind would evoke a subconscious reactionthat could slow him down or cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. Afeeling of futility could operate to bring on his death in spite of hisconscious determination to win the coming battle with the Nipe.
The Nipe was his first duty. When that job was finished, he wouldconsider the problem of himself. Just because he could not now see theanswer to that problem did not mean that no answer existed.
He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He had been walking throughMemorial Park, past the museum--an old, worn edifice that was stillcalled the Missouri Pacific Building. There was a small restaurant onlya 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 ofthe trust fund that had been set up when he had started the treatment atthe Neurophysical Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't havemuch cash. What good was cash at the Institute, where everything wasprovided?
He stopped at a newsvendor, dropped in a coin, and waited for thereproducing mechanism to turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the foldedsheets and went on to the restaurant.
He rarely read a newssheet. Mostly, his information about the world thatexisted outside the walls of the Institute came from the televisednewscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relativelyunimportant little stories about people who had done small, relativelyunimportant things--stories that didn't appear in the headlines or thenewscasts.
The last important news story that he had heard had come two nightsbefore. The Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. Thecamera had shown the shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blowopen the vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken thewhole front door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twistedparaglass that had lain on the pavement showed how much force had beenapplied from within.
And yet, the results had not been those of an explosion. It was more asthough some tremendous force had _pushed_ outward from within. It hadnot been the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrustthat had unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.
Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. Itappeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered bya giant hand. The main braces of the storefront were still there, bentoutward a little, but not broken.
The vault door had been slammed to the floor of the shop, only a fewfeet from the front door. The vault itself had been farther back, andthe camera had showed it standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there hadbeen pieces of fragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.
The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from apoint within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outwardto tear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin ormodeling clay.
Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisierconstruction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known,outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In awidely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vaulthad 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 hadhad no fear of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off theintricate alarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even aborazon drill could make much of an impression on a metal which had beenformed under millions of atmospheres of pressure.
And yet the Nipe had taken that door out in a second, without mucheffort at all.
The crowd that had gathered at the scene of the crime had not beenlarge. The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places wherehe was known to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, aprimitive fear--fear of the dark and fear of the unknown--combined withthe rational fear of a very real, very tangible danger.
&nb
sp; 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 thatthe Nipe didn't stay around after he had struck, and, besides, the areawas now full of armed men. So the curious came to look and to stare inrevulsion at the neat pile of gnawed and bloody bones that had been thenight watchman, carefully killed and eaten by the Nipe before he hadopened the vault.
_Thus curiosity does make fools of us all, and the native hue of cautionis crimsoned o'er by the bright red of morbid fascination._
Stanton went through the door of the automatic restaurant and walkedover to the vending wall. The big dining room was only about threequarters full of people, and there were plenty of seats available. Hefed coins into the proper slots, took his sandwich and milk over to aseat 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 KIDNAPPERS NABBED!
STAN MARTIN DOES IT AGAIN!
CERES, June 3 (_Interplanetary News Service_)--The three men and three women who allegedly kidnapped 10-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 weeks on a small planetoid, was reported in 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," Lt. Vale 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 glancethrough the first part of the article, his eyes returned to the picturethat had caught his attention. The line of print beneath it identifiedthe picture as being that of a man named Stanley Martin.
But a voice in Bart Stanton's brain said: _Not Stan Martin! The name isMart Stanton!_
And Bartholomew felt a roar of confusion in his mind--because he didn'tknow who Mart Stanton was, and because the face in the picture was hisown.
Anything You Can Do ... Page 15
