Chapter 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.