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.