“‘Bravely spoken!’” said the colonel. “‘Come, you are one of us once more.’”
“‘Lead on. I follow.’”
And the two of them broke out in laughter while Farnsworth looked on in total incomprehension. His was not the kind of mind that could face a grim situation with a laugh.
Even after he quit laughing, the smile remained on the young man’s face. “All right, Colonel, you win. We’ll go through with it, Martin and I.”
“Good!” Mannheim said warmly. “Do you have the papers, Dr. Farnsworth?”
“Right here,” Farnsworth said, opening a briefcase that was lying on the table. He was glad to be back in the conversation again. He took out a thick sheaf of papers and spread them on the table. Then he handed the young man a pen. “You’ll have to sign at the bottom of each sheet,” he said.
The young man picked up the papers and read through them carefully. Then he looked up at Farnsworth. “They seem to be in order. Uh—about Martin. You know what’s the matter with him—I mean, aside from the radiation. Do you think he’ll be able to handle his part of the job after—after the operations?”
“I’m quite sure he will. The operations, plus the therapy we’ll give him afterward should put him in fine shape.”
“Well.” He looked thoughtful. “Five more years. And then I’ll have the twin brother that I never really had at all. Somehow that part of it just doesn’t really register, I guess.”
“Don’t worry about it, Stanton,” said Dr. Farnsworth. “We have a complex enough job ahead of us without your worrying in the bargain. We’ll want your mind perfectly relaxed. You have your own ordeal to undergo.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” the young man said, but there was a smile on his face when he said it. He looked at the release forms again. “All nice and legal, huh? Well…” He hesitated for a moment, then he took the pen and wrote Bartholomew Stanton in a firm, clear hand.
CHAPTER 21
Captain Davidson Greer sat in a chair before an array of TV screens, his gray-green eyes watchful. In the center of one of the screens, the Nipe’s image sat immobile, surrounded by the paraphernalia in his hidden nest. Other screens showed various sections of the long tunnel that led south from the opening in the northern end of the island. At the captain’s fingertips was a bank of controls that would allow him to switch from one pickup to another if necessary, so that he could see anything anywhere in the tunnels. He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. He did not want any of the action to take place anywhere but in the places where it was expected—but he was prepared for alterations in the plan. In other rooms, nearly a hundred other men were linked into the special controls that allowed them to operate the little rat spies that scuttled through the underground darkness, and the captain’s system would allow him to see through the eyes of any one of those rats at an instant’s notice.
The screen which he was watching at the moment, however, was not connected with an underground pickup. It was linked with a pickup in the bottom of a basketball-sized sphere driven by a small inertial engine that held the sphere hovering in the air above the game sanctuary on the northern tip of Manhattan Island. In the screen, he had an aerial view of the grassy, rocky mounds where the earth hid the shattered and partially melted ruins of long-collapsed buildings. In the center of the screen was a bird’s-eye view of a man holding a rifle. He was walking slowly, picking his way carefully along the bottom of the shallow gully that had once been upper Broadway.
“Barbell,” the captain said. A throat microphone picked up the words and transmitted them to the ears of the man in the screen. “Barbell, this is Barhop. There are no wild animals within sight, but remember, we can’t see everything from up here, so keep your eyes open.”
“Right, Barhop,” said a rather muffled voice in the captain’s ear.
“Fine. And if you do meet up with anything, shoot to kill.” There were plenty of wild animals in the game sanctuary—some of them dangerous. Not all of the inhabitants of the Bronx Zoological Gardens had been killed on that day when the sun bomb fell. Being farther north, they had had better protection, and some of them, later, had wandered southward to the island. Captain Greer knew perfectly well that Stanton, bare-handed, was more than a match for a leopard or a lion, but he didn’t want Stanton to tire himself fighting with an animal. The rifle would most likely never be used; it was merely another precaution.
It would have been possible, and perhaps simpler, to have taken Stanton to the opening by flyer, but that would have created other complications. Traffic rules forbade flyers to go over the game sanctuary at any altitude less than one thousand feet. One flyer, going in low, would have attracted the attention of the traffic police, and Stanley Martin wanted no attention whatever drawn to this area. Even the procedure of instructing the traffic officers to ignore one flyer would have attracted more attention than he wanted. They would have remembered those instructions afterward.
Stanton walked.
Captain Greer’s eye caught something at the edge of the screen. It moved toward the center as the floating eye moved with Stanton.
“Barbell,” the captain said, “there’s a deer ahead of you. Just keep moving.”
Stanton rounded the corner of a pile of masonry. He could see the animal now himself. The deer stared at the intruder for a few seconds, then bounded away with long, graceful leaps.
“Magnificent animal.” It was Stanton’s voice, very low. The remark wasn’t directed toward anyone in particular. Captain Greer didn’t answer.
The captain lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, his eyes on the screens. The Nipe still sat, unmoving. He was apparently in one of his “sleep” states. The captain wasn’t sure that that was the blessing that it might have seemed. He had no way of knowing how much external disturbance it would take to “wake” the Nipe, and as long as he was sitting quietly, the chances were greater that he would hear movement in the tunnel. If he were active, his senses might be more alert, but he would also be distracted by his own actions and the noises he made himself.
It didn’t matter, the captain decided. One way was as good as another in this case. The point was to get Stanton into an advantageous position before the Nipe knew he was anywhere around.
He looked back at the image of Stanton, a black-clad figure in a flexible, tough, skin-tight suit. The Nipe would have a hard time biting through that artificial hide, but it gave Stanton as much freedom as if he’d been naked.
Stanton knew where he was going. He had studied maps of the area, and had been taken on a vicarious tour of the route by means of the very flying eye that was watching him now. But things look different from the ground than from the air, and no amount of map study will familiarize a person with terrain as completely as an actual personal survey.
Stanton paused, and Captain Greer heard his voice. “Barhop, this is Barbell. Those are the cliffs up ahead, aren’t they?”
“That’s right, Barbell. You go up that slope to your left. The opening is in that pile of rock at the base of the cliff.”
“They’re higher than I’d thought,” Stanton commented. Then he started walking again.
The tunnel entrance he was heading for had once been a wide opening, drilled laterally into the side of the cliff, and big enough to allow easy access to the tunnels, so that the passengers of those old underground trains could get to the platforms where they stopped. But the sun bomb had changed all that. The concussion had shaken loose rock at the top of the cliff and a minor avalanche had obliterated all indications of the tunnel’s existence, except for one small, narrow opening near the top of what had once been a wide hole in the face of the cliff.
Stanton walked slowly toward the spot until he was finally at the base of the slope of rock created by that long-ago avalanche. “Up there?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said Captain Greer.
“I think I’ll leave the rifle here, Barhop,” Stanton said. “No point in carrying it up the slope.”
“Right. Put it in those bushes to your left. They’ll conceal it, won’t they?”
“I think so. Yeah.” Stanton hid the rifle and then began making his way up the talus slope.
Captain Greer flipped a switch. “Team One! He’s coming in. Are those alarms deactivated?”
“All okay, Barhop,” said a voice. “This is Leader One. I’ll meet him at the hole.”
“Right.” Captain Greer reversed the switch again. “Are you ready, Barbell?”
Stanton looked into the dark hole. It was hardly big enough to crawl through, and ended in a seeming infinity of blackness. He took the special goggles from the case at his belt and put them on. Inside the hole, he saw a single rat, staring at him with beady eyes.
“I’m ready to go in, Barhop,” Stanton said.
He got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl through the narrow tunnel. Ahead of him, the rat turned and began to lead the way.
CHAPTER 22
The big tunnel inside the cliff was long and black, and the air was stale and thick with the stench of rodents. Stanton stood still for a minute, stretching his muscles. Crawling through that cramped little opening had not been easy. He looked around him, trying to probe the luminescent gloom that the goggles he wore brought to his eyes.
The tunnel stretched out before him—on and on. Around him was the smell of viciousness and death. Ahead…
It goes on to infinity, Stanton thought, ending at last at zero.
The rat paused and looked back, waiting for him to follow.
“Okay,” Stanton muttered. “Let’s go.”
The rat led him down the long tunnel, deep into the cliffside, until at last they came to a stairway that led downward into the long tunnels where the trains had once run. They came to the platform where passengers had once waited for those trains. Four feet below the edge of the platform were the rusted tracks that had once borne those trains.
He lowered himself over the edge to stand on the rail.
“Barbell,” said a voice in his ear, “Barhop here. Do you read?”
It was the barest whisper, picked up by the antennas in his shoes from the steel rail that ran along the floor of the dark tunnel.
“Read you, Barhop.”
“Move out, then. You’ve got a long stroll to go.”
Stanton started walking, keeping his feet near the rail, in case Greer wanted to call again. As he walked, he could feel the slight motion of the skin-tight woven suit that he wore rubbing gently against his skin.
And he could hear the scratching patter of the rats.
Mostly they stayed away from him, avoiding the strange being that had invaded their underground realm, but he could see them hiding in corners and scurrying along the sides of the tunnels, going about their unfathomable rodent business.
Around him, six rat-like remote-control robots moved with him, shifting their pattern constantly as they patrolled his moving figure.
Far ahead, he knew, other rat robots were stationed, watching and waiting, ready to deactivate the Nipe’s detection devices at just the right moment. Behind him, another horde moved forward to turn the devices on again.
It had, he knew, taken the technicians a long time to learn how to shut off those detectors without giving the alarm to the Nipe’s instruments.
There were nearly a hundred men in on the operation, controlling the robot rats or watching the hidden cameras that spied upon the Nipe. Nearly a hundred. And every single one of them was safe.
They were all outside the tunnel and far away. They were with Stanton only by proxy. They could not die here in this stinking hole, no matter what happened. But Stanton could.
There was no help for it, no other way it could be done. Stanton had to go in person. A full-sized robot proxy might be stronger, although not faster unless Stanton was at the controls, than the Nipe. But the Nipe would be able to tell that the thing was a robot, and he would simply destroy it with one of his weapons. A remote-control robot could never get close enough to the Nipe to do any good.
“We do not know positively,” Dr. Yoritomo had said, “whether he would recognize it as a robot or not, but his instruments would show the metal easily enough, and his eyes would be able to tell him that the machine was not covered with human skin. The rats are small enough so that they can be made mostly of plastic, and they are covered with real rat hides. In addition, our friend, the Nipe, is used to seeing them around. But a human-sized robot? Ah, no. Never.”
So Stanton had to go in person, walking southward along the tracks, through the miles of blackness that led to the nest of the Nipe.
Overhead was Government City.
He had looked out upon those streets only the night before, and he knew that only a short distance away there was an entirely different world.
Somewhere up there, his brother was waiting, after having run the gamut of publicity. He was a celebrity. “Stanley Martin, the greatest detective in the Solar System,” they’d called him. Fine stuff, that. Stanton wondered what the asteroids were like. What would it be like to live out in space, where a man still had plenty of space to move around in and could fashion his life to suit himself? Maybe there would be a place in the asteroids for a hopped-up superman.
Or maybe there would only be a place here, beneath the streets of Government City, for a dead superman.
Not if I can help it, Stanton thought with a grim smile.
The walking seemed to take forever in one way, but, in another way, Stanton didn’t mind it. He had a lot to think over. Seeing his brother’s image on the TV had been unnerving yesterday, but today he felt as though everything had been all right all along.
His memory was still a long way from being complete, and it probably always would be, he thought. He could still scarcely recall any real memories of a boy named Martin Stanton, but—and he smiled a little at the thought—he knew more about him than his brother did, even so.
It made very little difference now. That Martin Stanton was gone. In effect, he had been demolished—what little there had been of him—and a new structure had been built on the old foundation.
And yet, it was highly probable that the new structure was very like that that would have developed naturally if the accident so early in Martin Stanton’s life had never occurred.
Stanton kept walking. There was a timeless feeling about his march through the depths of the ground, as though every step through the blackness was exactly like every other step, and it was only the same step over and over again.
He skirted a pile of rubble on his right. There had been a station here, once; the street above had caved in and filled it with brick, concrete, cobblestones, and steel scrap, and then it had been sealed over when Government City was built.
A part of one wall was still unbroken, though. A sign built of tile said 125TH STREET, he knew, although it was hard to make it out in the dim glow. He kept on walking, ignoring the rats that scampered over the rubble.
A mile or so farther on, he whispered: “Barbell to Barhop. How’s everything going?”
“Barhop to Barbell,” came the answer. “No sign of any activity from Target. So far, none of the alarms have been triggered.”
“What’s he doing?” Stanton whispered. It seemed only right to keep his voice low, although he was fairly certain that his voice would not carry to the Nipe, even through these echoing tunnels. He was still miles away.
“He’s still sitting motionless,” said Captain Greer. “Thinking, I suppose. Or sleeping. It’s hard to tell.”
“All right. Let me know if he starts moving, will you?”
“Will do.”
Poor unsuspecting beastie, Stanton thought. Ten long years of hard work, of feeling secure in his little nest, and within a very short time he’s going to get the shock of his life.
Or maybe not. There was no way of knowing what kind of shocks the Nipe had taken in the course of his life, Stanton thought. There was no way of knowing whether the Nipe was even capable
of feeling anything like shock, as a matter of fact.
It was odd, he thought, that he should feel a strong kinship toward both the Nipe and his brother in such similar ways. He had never met the Nipe, and his brother was only a dim picture in his old memories, but they were both very well known to him. Certainly they were better known to him than he was to them.
And yet, seeing his brother’s face on the TV screen, hearing his voice, watching the way he moved about, watching the changing expressions on his face, had been a tremendously moving experience. Not until that moment, he thought, had he really known himself.
Meeting him face to face would be much easier now, but it would still be a scene highly charged with emotional tension.
His foot kicked something that rattled and rolled away from him. He stopped, freezing in his tracks, looking downward, trying to pierce the dully glowing gloom. The thing he had kicked was a human skull.
He relaxed and began walking again.
There were plenty of human bones down here. Mannheim had told him that the tunnels had been used as air-raid shelters when the sun bomb had hit the island during the Holocaust. Men, women, and children by the thousands had crowded underground after the warning had come—and they had died by the thousands when the bright, hot, deadly gases had roared down the ventilators and stairwells.
There were even caches of canned goods down here, some of them still perfectly sealed after all this time. The hordes of rats, wiser than they knew, had chewed at them, exposing the steel beneath the thin tin plate. And, after a while, oxidation would weaken the can to the point where some lucky rat could gnaw through the rusty spot and find himself a meal. Then he would move the empty can aside and begin gnawing at the next in line. He couldn’t get through the steel, but he would scratch the tin off, and the cycle would begin again. Later, another rat would find that can weak enough to bite through. It kept the rats fed almost as well as an automatic machine might have.
The tunnel before him was an endless monochromatic world that was both artificial and natural. Here was a neatly squared-off mosaic of ceramic tile that was obviously man-made; over there, on a little hillock of earth, squatted a colony of fat mushrooms. In several places he had to skirt little pools of dark, stagnant water; twice he had to climb over long heaps of crumbling rust that had once been trains of subway cars.
The Randall Garrett Megapack Page 90