by Anthology
"How much longer, do you think, Colonel?"
"A few weeks, sir. Perhaps less."
"There was another raid in Miami, Colonel. Another man died. We could have prevented that death, Colonel. We could have prevented a great many deaths in the past six years."
And what answer was there to that? The Executive Council knew that the deaths were preventable in only one way—by killing the Nipe. And they had long ago agreed that the knowledge in that alien mind was worth the sacrifice. But, as he had known would happen when they made the decision six years before, there were some of them who had, inevitably, weakened. Not all—not even a majority—but a minority that was becoming stronger.
It had been, to a great degree, Mannheim's arguments that had convinced them then, and now they were tending to shift the blame for their decision to Mannheim's shoulders.
Most of the Executives were tough-minded, realistic men. They were not going to step out now unless there were good reason for it. But if the subtle undercutting of the vacillating minority weakened Mannheim's own resolve, or if he failed to give solid, well-reasoned answers to their questions, then the whole project would begin to crumble rapidly.
He had not directly answered the Executive who had pointed out that many lives could have been saved if the Nipe had been killed six years ago. There was no use in fighting back on such puerile terms.
"Gentlemen, within a few weeks, we will be ready to send Stanton in after the Nipe. If that fails, we can blast him out of his stronghold within minutes afterwards. But if we stop now, if we allow our judgment to be colored at this point, then all those who have died in the past six years will have died in vain."
He had gone on, exploring and explaining the ramifications of the plans for the next few weeks, but he had carefully kept it on the same level. It had been an emotional sort of speech, but it had been purposely so, in answer to the sort of emotionalism that the weakening minority had attempted to use on him.
Men had died, yes. But what of that? Men had died before for far less worthwhile causes. And men, do what they will, will die eventually. In the back of his mind, he had recalled the battle-cry of some sergeant of the old United States Marines during an early twentieth-century war. As he led his men over the top, he had shouted, "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you wanna live forever?"
But Mannheim hadn't mentioned it aloud to the Executive Council.
Nor had he pointed out that ten thousand times as many people had died during the same period through preventable accidents. That would not have had the effect he wanted.
These particular men had died for this particular purpose. They had not asked to die. They had not known they were being sacrificed. None of them could be said to have died a hero's death. They had died simply because they were in a particular place at a particular time.
They had been allowed to die for a specific purpose. To abort that purpose at this time would be to make their deaths, retroactively, murder.
Mannheim put his head on the pillow and lifted his feet up on the bed. All he wanted was a few minutes of relaxation. He'd get ready for sleep later. He pressed the control button on the bedframe that lifted the head of the bed up so that he was in a semi-reclining position. He picked up his drink and took a second long pull from it.
Then he touched the phone switch and put the receiver to his ear.
"Beta-beta," he said when he heard the tone.
He heard the hum, and he knew that the ultraprivate phone on the desk of Dr. Farnsworth, in St. Louis, was signaling. Then Farnsworth's voice came over the linkage.
"F here."
"M here," Mannheim replied. Then he asked guardedly, "Any sign of our boy?"
"None."
"Keep on him," Mannheim said. "Let me know immediately."
"Will do. Any further?"
"No. Carry on." Mannheim cut off the phone.
Where the hell had Stanton disappeared to, and why? He had wanted to bring the young man to Government City to show him off before the Executives. It would have helped. But Stanton had disappeared.
Mannheim was well aware that Stanton had been in the habit of leaving the Institute for long walks during the evenings, but this was the first time he had been gone for twenty-four hours. And even Yoritomo, that master psychologist, had been unable to give any solid reason for Stanton's disappearance.
"You must remember, my dear Colonel," Yoritomo had said, "our young Mr. Stanton is a great deal more complex in his thinking than is our friend the Nipe."
A hell of a job for a police officer, Mannheim thought to himself. I know where the criminal is, but I have to hunt for the only cop on Earth who can arrest him.
He drained his glass, put it on the nightstand, and closed his eyes to think.
* * * * *
An operator on duty at the spy screens that watched every move of the Nipe while he was in the tunnels underneath Government City thumbed down a switch and said, "All stations alert. Subject is moving southward toward exit, carrying raiding equipment."
It was all that was necessary. The Nipe could not be followed after he left his lair, but the proper groups would be standing by. Somewhere, the Nipe would hit and raid again. Somewhere, there were human lives in danger.
All anyone could do was wait.
* * * * *
Cautiously and carefully, the Nipe lifted his head out of the cool salt water of the Hudson River, near the point where it widened into New York Harbor—still so called after the city that had been the greatest on the North American continent before the violence of a sun bomb had demolished it forever.
He looked around carefully to get his bearings, then submerged again. The opening into the ancient sewer was nearby. Once into that network, he would know exactly where he was heading. It had taken weeks to find his way around within the unexplored maze of the old sewers, and he had been uncertain whether they would lead him to the place he intended to visit, but luck had been with him.
Now he knew exactly where he wanted to go, and exactly what he would find there.
He had avoided Government City itself since his first appearance there, shortly after his arrival, just as he had, as much as possible, avoided ever striking in the same place more than once. But now that it had become necessary, he went about his work with the same cool determination that had always marked his activities.
He knew his destination, too. He knew the two rooms thoroughly, having explored them carefully and gone away undetected. And now that he knew the one he sought was in those rooms, he was ready to make his final investigation of the man.
He swam on through the utter blackness of the brackish water until his head broke surface again. Then he went on along the great conduits that were above the level of the sea.
* * * * *
Captain Davidson Greer sat in the gun tower that overlooked the Officers' Barracks and the courtyard surrounding the five-story building. He was a tall, solidly built man in his early thirties, with dark gray-green eyes and dark blond hair. He didn't particularly care for gun-tower duty, but this sort of thing couldn't be left to anyone who was not in on the secret of the Nipe. As long as Colonel Mannheim was here in Government City, there would be special officers guarding him instead of the usual guard contingent.
Not that Captain Greer was actually expecting the Nipe to make any attempt on the colonel's life; that was too remote to be worried about. But the gun towers had been erected fifty or more years before because there were always those who wanted to attempt assassination. Officers of the World Police had not enjoyed great popularity during the reconstruction period after the Holocaust. The petty potentates who had set themselves up as autocratic rulers in various spots over the Earth had quite often decided that the best way to get the WP off their backs was to kill someone, and quite often that someone was a Police officer. Disgruntled nationalists and fanatics of all kinds had tried at various times to kill one officer or another. The protection was needed then.
Even now there wer
e occasional assassins who attempted to invade World Police Headquarters, but they were usually stopped long before they got into the enclosure itself.
Still, there was always the chance. There had been, in the past few years, an undercurrent of rebellion all over Earth because of the Nipe. The monster hadn't been killed, and there were those who screamed that the failure was due to the inefficiency of the Police.
One attempt had already been made on the life of a Major Thorensen because he had failed to get the Nipe after a raid in Leopoldville. The would-be assassin had been cut down just before he threw a grenade that would have killed half a dozen men. Captain Greer had been assigned to make sure that no such attempt would succeed with Colonel Mannheim.
He could see the length of the hallway that led to Colonel Mannheim's suite. The hallway had been purposely designed for watching from the gun tower. To one who was inside, it looked like an ordinary hallway, stretching down the length of the building. But it was walled with a special plastic that, while opaque to visible light, was perfectly transparent to infra-red. To the ordinary unaided eye, the walls of the building presented a blank face to the gun tower, but to the eye of an infra-red scope, the hallways of all five floors looked as though they were long, glass-enclosed terraces. And those walls were neither the ferro-concrete of the main building nor the pressure glass of the windows, but ordinary heavy-gauge plastic. To the bullets that could be spewed forth from the muzzle of the heavy-caliber, high-powered machine gun in the tower, those walls were practically nonexistent.
Captain Greer surveyed the hallways with his infra-red binoculars. Nothing. The halls were empty. He lowered the binoculars and lit a cigarette. Then he put his eyes to the aiming scope of the gun and swiveled the muzzle a little. The aiming scope showed nothing either.
He leaned back and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
* * * * *
Colonel Mannheim blinked and looked at the ceiling. It took him a minute to re-orient himself. Then he grinned rather sheepishly, realizing that he had dozed off with his clothes on. Even worse, the pressure at his hip told him that he hadn't even bothered to take his sidearm off. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, then glanced at his wrist. Three in the morning.
And the moral of that, my dear Walther, he told himself, is that a tired man should put on his pajamas first, before he lies down and drinks a Scotch.
He stood up. Might as well put his pajamas on and get to bed. He would have to be back in St. Louis by ten in the morning, so he ought to get as much sleep as possible.
The phone chimed.
He scooped it up and became instantly awake as he heard the voice of Captain Greer from the gun tower that faced the outer wall. "Colonel, the Nipe is just outside the wall of your apartment, in the hallway. I have him in my sights." He was trying to stay calm, Mannheim could tell by his voice, but he rattled the words off with machine-gun rapidity.
Mannheim thought rapidly. Whatever the Nipe was up to, it wouldn't include planting a bomb or anything that might kill anyone accidentally. If there was a life in danger, it was his own, and the danger would come from the Nipe's hands, not from any device or weapon.
He was thankful that it was Captain Greer up in that tower, not an ordinary guard who would have fired the instant he saw the alien through the infra-red-transparent walls. Even so, he knew that the captain's fingers must be tightening on those triggers. No human being could do otherwise with that monster in his sights.
Mannheim spoke very calmly and deliberately. "Captain, listen very carefully. Do not—I repeat, do not, under any circumstances whatever, fire that gun. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"What's he doing?"
"I can't tell, sir. He has some sort of gadget in his hands, but he just seems to be squatting there."
"At the door?"
"No. To the left of it, at the wall."
"You have your cameras going?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right. Get everything that happens. Under no circumstances shoot or give the alarm—even if he kills me. Let him go. I don't think that will happen, but if it does, let him go. I think I can talk to him. I don't think there's much danger. I'm going to leave the phone open so you can record everything, and—"
There was a muffled noise from the living room. He heard Captain Greer's gasp as he turned. He could see through the bedroom door to the wall of the living room. A large section of the ferro-concrete wall had sagged away and collapsed, having suddenly lost its tensile strength. On the top of the rubble, frozen for a long instant, stood the Nipe, watching with those four glowing violet eyes.
Mannheim let go the phone and turned to face the monster, and in that instant he realized his mistake.
* * * * *
The Nipe stared at the human being. Was this, at last, a Real Person? It was surprising that the man should be awake. Only a minute before, the instruments had shown him to be in the odd cataleptic state that these creatures lapsed into periodically, similar to, but not identical with, his own rest state. And yet he was now awake and fully dressed. Surely that indicated—
And then the man turned, and the Nipe saw the weapon in the holster at his waist. There was a blinding instant of despair as he realized that his hopes had been shattered—
—and then he launched himself across the room.
* * * * *
Colonel Mannheim's hand darted toward the gun at his hip. It was purely reflex action. Even as he did it, he was aware that he would never get the weapon out in time to bring it to bear on the onrushing monster, and he was content that it should be so.
* * * * *
Twenty-five minutes later, the Nipe, after carefully licking off the fingers of his first pair of hands, went back into the hallway and headed down toward the sewers again.
The emotion he felt is inexpressible in human terms. Although he had not wished to kill the man, it cannot be said that the Nipe felt contrition. Although he had had no desire to harm the family, if any, of the late Colonel Mannheim, it cannot be said that the Nipe felt sadness or compassion.
Nor, again, although his stomachs churned and his body felt sluggish and heavy, can it be said that he felt any regret for what he had done.
That is not to say that he felt no emotion. He did. His emotions were as strong and as deep as those of a very sensitive human being. His emotions could bring him pain and they could bring him pleasure. They could crush him or exalt him. His emotions were just as real and as effective as any human emotions.
But they were not human emotions.
They were emotions, but not human emotions.
It is impossible to render into any human terms the simple statement: "The Nipe felt that he had properly rendered homage to a validly slain foe."
That cannot even begin to indicate the emotion the Nipe felt as he moved down toward the sewer and escape.
* * * * *
Captain Davidson Greer, his eyes staring with glassy hatred through the infra-red gunsight, was registering a very human emotion. His trigger fingers were twitching spasmodically—squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
But his fingers were not on the triggers.
[17]
"It is not your fault, Bart," said George Yoritomo softly. "You had a perfect right to go."
Bart Stanton clenched his fists and turned suddenly to face the Japanese psychologist. "Sure! Hell, yes! We're not discussing my rights, George! We're discussing my criminal stupidity! I had the right to leave here any time I wanted to, sure. But I didn't have the right to exercise that right—if that makes any sense to you."
"It makes sense," Yoritomo agreed, "but it is not the way to look at it. You could not have been with the colonel every minute of every day. There was no way of knowing—"
"Of course not!" Stanton cut in angrily. "But I should have been there this time. He wanted me there, and I was gone. If I'd been there, he'd be alive at this moment."
"Possibly," Yoritomo said, "and then again, possibly not. Sit down o
ver there on your bed, my young friend, and listen to me. Sit! That's it. Take a deep breath, hold it, and relax. I want your ears functioning when I talk to you. That's better.
"Now. I do not know where you went. That is your business. All you—"
"I went to Denver," Stanton said.
"And you found?"
"Nothing," Stanton said. "Absolutely nothing."
"What were you looking for?"
"I don't know. Something about my past. Something about myself. I don't know."
"Ah. You went to look up your family. You were trying to fill the holes in your memory. Eh?"
"Yes."
"And you did not succeed."
"No. No. There wasn't anything there that I didn't remember. In general, I mean. I found the files in the Bureau of Statistics. I know how my father died now, and how my mother died. And what happened to my brother. But all that didn't tell me anything. I'm still looking for something, and I don't know what it is. I was stupid to have gone. I suppose I should have asked you or Dr. Farnsworth or the colonel."
"But you thought we wouldn't answer," Yoritomo said.
"I guess that's about it. I should have asked you."
Yoritomo shook his head. "Not necessarily. It was actually better that you looked for yourself. Besides, we could not have given you any answer if you yourself do not know the question. We still can't."
"I have a feeling," Stanton said, "that you know the question as well as the answer."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. But there are some things that every man must find out for himself. You were right to do as you did. If you had asked Colonel Mannheim for permission, he would have let you go. He would not have asked you to go to Government City with him. We—"
"That's the whole damned trouble!" Stanton snapped. "I'm the star boarder around here, the indispensable man. So I'm babied and I'm coddled, and when I goof off I'm patted on the back."
"And just how did you goof off?" Yoritomo asked.