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.

He kept moving--one man, alone, walking through the dark toward a superhuman monster that had terrorized Earth for a decade.

A drug that would knock out the Nipe would have been very useful, but to synthesize such a drug would have required a greater knowledge of the biochemical processes of the Nipe than any human scientist had. The same applied to anesthetic gases, or electric shock, or supersonics. There was no way of determining how much would be required to knock him out or how much would be required to kill. There were no easy answers.

The only answer was a man called Stanton.

_Boots! Boots! Boots! Boots! Marchin’ up and down again!

And there’s no discharge in the war!_

Stanton hummed the song in his mind. It seemed that he had been walking forever through the Kingdom of Hades, while around him twittered the ghosts of the dead.

Poor shades, he thought, entertaining the fancy for a brief moment, will I be one of you in a short while?

There was no answer, though the squeaking continued. The sound of his feet and the snarling chirping of the rats were the only sounds in the world.

“Barhop to Barbell,” said a voice suddenly, sounding very loud in his ear, “this is where you have to make your change to the other tunnel.”

“Barbell to Barhop. I know. I’ve been watching the markers.”

“Just precaution, Barbell,” Captain Greer said. “How do you feel?”

“I’d like to rest for a few minutes, frankly,” Stanton said.