Chapter 23

Stanton sat in his hotel room, smoking a cigarette, staring at the wall, and thinking.

He was alone again. All the fuss and feathers and foofaraw were over. Dr. Farnsworth was in another room of the suite, making his plans for a complete physical examination of the Nipe. Dr. George Yoritomo was having the time of his life, holding a conversation with the Nipe, drawing the alien out, and getting him to talk about his own race and their history.

And Stanley Martin was plotting the next phase of the capture--the cover-up.

Stanton smiled a little. Colonel Mannheim had been a great one for planning, all right. Every little detail was taken care of. It had sometimes made his plans more complex than necessary, Stanton suspected. Mannheim had tended to try to account for every possible eventuality, and, after he had done that, he had set aside a few reserves here and there, just in case they might be useful if something unforeseen happened.

All things considered, the Government had certainly done the right thing. And, in picking Mannheim, they had picked the right man.

Stanton got up, walked over to the window, and looked down at the streets of Government City, eight floors below.

What would those people down there think if they were told the true story of the Nipe? What would the average citizen say if he discovered that, at this very moment, the Nipe was being treated almost as an honored guest of the Government? More, what would he say if he suspected that the Nipe--the horrible, murderous, man-eating Nipe--could have been killed easily at any time during the past six years?

Would it be possible for anyone to explain to the common average man that, in the long run, the knowledge possessed by the Nipe was tremendously more valuable to the race of Man than the lives of a few individuals?

Could those people down there, and the others like them all over the world, be made to understand that, by his own lights, the Nipe had been behaving in the most civilized and gentlemanly fashion he knew? Could they ever be made to understand that, because of the tremendous wealth of priceless information stored in that alien brain, the Nipe’s life had to be preserved at any cost?

Or would they scream for blood?

Dr. Farnsworth assumed that Stanley Martin was going to spread a story about the Nipe’s death--a carefully concocted story about how Stanley Martin had found the beast and the police had killed it. There might, Farnsworth assumed, be a carefully made “corpse” for the mob to hiss at. Maybe Farnsworth was right. But Stanton had the feeling that Martin and George Yoritomo had something else up their collective sleeve.

The phone hummed. Stanton walked over, thumbed the answer button, and watched George Yoritomo’s face take shape on the screen.

“Bart! I have just had the privilege of viewing the tapes of your fight with our friend, the Nipe. Incredible! I watched the original on the screen, of course, but I had to run the tapes. I wanted to slow it down, so that I could see what actually happened. Magnificent, that right of yours! So!“ He jabbed a fist out, shadowboxing with Stanton over the phone circuit.

“Awww, it weren’t nuthin’, Maw,” Stanton drawled. “I jes’ sorta flang out a fist an’ he got in the way.”

“Of course! But such a fling! Seriously, Bart, I want to run those tapes over again, and I want you to tell me, as best you can, just what went on in your mind at each stage of the fight. It will be most informative.”

“You mean right now? I have an appointment--”

Yoritomo waved a hand. “No, no. Later. Take your time. But I am honestly amazed that you won so easily. I knew you were good, and I was certain you’d win, but I must admit that I honestly expected you to be injured.”

Stanton looked down at his bandaged hands and felt the ache of his broken rib and the pain of the blue bruise on his thigh. In spite of the way it looked, he had actually been hurt worse than the Nipe had. That boy was tough!

“The trouble was that he couldn’t adapt himself to fighting in a new way, just as you predicted,” he told Yoritomo. “He fought me, I assume, in just the way he would have fought another Nipe. And that didn’t work. I had the reach on him, and I could maneuver faster. Besides, he can’t throw a straight punch with those shoulders of his.”

“It appeared to me,” Yoritomo said with a broad grin, “that you were fighting him as you would fight another human being. Eh?”

Stanton grinned back. “I was, in a modified way. But I wasn’t confined to a pattern. Besides, I won--the Nipe didn’t. And that’s all that counts.”

“It is, indeed. Well, I’ll let you know when I’m ready for your impressions of the fight. Probably tomorrow some time--say, in the afternoon?”

“Fine.”

George Yoritomo nodded his thanks, and his image collapsed and faded from the screen.

Stanton walked back over to the window, but this time he looked at the horizon, not the street.

George Yoritomo had called him “Bart”. It’s funny, Stanton thought, how habit can get the best of a man. Yoritomo had known the truth all along. And now he knew that his pupil--or patient--whichever it was--was aware of the truth. And still, he had called him “Bart”.

And I still think of myself as Bart, he thought. I probably always will.

And why not? Why shouldn’t he? Martin Stanton no longer existed--in a sense, he had never existed. And in actual fact, he had never had much of a real existence. He was only a bad dream. He had always been a bad dream. And now that the dream was over, only “Bart” was real.

He thought back, remembering George Yoritomo’s explanation.

“Take two people,” he had said. “Two people genetically identical. Damage one of them so badly that he is helpless and useless--to himself and to others. Damage him so badly that he is always only a step away from death.

“The vague telepathic bond that always links identical twins (they ‘think alike’, they say) becomes unbalanced under such conditions.

“Normally, there is a give-and-take. One mind is as strong as the other, and each preserves the sense of his own identity, since the two different sets of sense receptors give different viewpoints. But if one of the twins is damaged badly enough, then something must happen to that telepathic linkage.