Chapter 16

Colonel Walther Mannheim unlocked the door of his small suite of rooms in the Officers’ Barracks. God! he was tired. It wasn’t so much physical exhaustion as mental and emotional release from the tension he had been under for the preceding few hours. Or had it been years?

He dropped his heavy briefcase on a nearby chair, took off his cap and dropped it on the briefcase.

He stood there for a moment, looking tiredly around. Everything was in order, as usual. He seldom came to Government City any more. Twenty or so visits in the last ten years, and only a dozen of them had been long enough to force him to spend the night in his old suite at the World Police Headquarters at the southern end of the island. He didn’t like to stay in Government City; it made him uneasy, being this close to the Nipe’s underground nest. The Nipe had too many taps into government communication channels, too many ways of seeing and hearing what went on here in the nerve center of civilization.

One of the most difficult parts of this whole operation had been the careful balancing of information flow through those channels that the Nipe had tapped. To stop using them would betray immediately to that alien mind that his taps had been detected. The information flow must go on as usual. There was no way to censor the information, either, although it was known that the Nipe relied on them for planning his raids. But since there was no way of knowing, even after years of observation, what sort of thing the Nipe would be wanting next, there was no way of knowing which information should be removed from the tapped channels.

And, most certainly, removing all information about every possible material that the Nipe might want would make him even more suspicious than simply shutting down the channels altogether. To shut them down would only indicate that the human government had detected his taps; to censor them heavily would indicate that a trap was being laid.

It was even impossible to censor out news about the Nipe. That, too, would have invited suspicion. So a special corps of men had been set up, a group whose sole job was to investigate every raid of the Nipe. Every raid produced a flurry of activity by this special group. They rushed out to look over the scene of the raid, prowled around, and did everything that might be expected of an investigative body. Their reports were sent in over the usual channels. All the actual data they came up with was sent straight through the normal channels--but the conclusions they reached from that data were not. Always, in spite of everything, the messages indicated that the police were as baffled as before.

All other information relating to the Nipe went through special channels known to be untapped by the Nipe.

And yet, there was no way to be absolutely certain of the sum total of the information that the Nipe received. Believing, as he did, in the existence of Real People, he would necessarily assume that their communication systems were hidden from him, and the more difficult they were to find, the more certain he would be that they existed. And it was impossible to know what information the Nipe picked up when he was out on a raid, away from the spying devices that had been hidden in his tunnels.

Mannheim walked across the small living room to the sideboard that stood against one wall and opened a door. Fresh ice, soda, and a bottle of Scotch were waiting for him. He took one of the ten-ounce glasses, dropped in three of the hard-frozen cubes of ice, added a precisely measured ounce and a half of Scotch, and filled the glass to within an inch of the brim with soda. Holding the glass in one hand, he walked around the little apartment, checking everything with a sort of automatic abstractedness. The air conditioner was pouring sweet, cool, fresh air into the room; the windows--heavy, thick slabs of paraglass welded directly into the wall--admitted the light from the courtyard outside, but admitted nothing else. There was no need for them to open, because of the air conditioning. A century before, some buildings still had fire escapes running down their outsides, but modern fireproofing had rendered such anachronisms unnecessary.

But his mind was only partly on his surroundings. He went into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, took a long drink from the cold glass in his hand, and then put it on the nightstand. Absently he began pulling off his boots. His thoughts were on the Executive Session he had attended that afternoon.

“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.