walked down a soft-floored, warmly-lit corridor to an elevator whichwhisked them up to the main level of the Neurophysical Institute Building.
Another corridor led them to a room that might have been the common roomof one of the more exclusive men's clubs. There were soft chairs andshelves of books and reading tables and smoking stands, all quietlyluxurious. There was no one in the room when the three men entered.
"We can have some privacy here," Dr. Farnsworth said. "None of the rest ofthe staff will come in until we're through."
Colonel Mannheim looked at the biophysicist speculatively. "You seem tothink secrecy's important all of a sudden."
Bart Stanton grinned and kept silent.
Dr. Farnsworth went over to a table, where an urn of coffee radiated softwarmth. "Cream and sugar over there on the tray," he said as he began tofill cups.
"Frankly," Colonel Mannheim said, "I was going to ask you to find us aplace where we could talk privately. You seem to have anticipated me."
"I thought you might have something like that in mind," said Dr.Farnsworth without looking up.
The cups were filled and the three men sat down in a triangle of chairsbefore any of them spoke again. Colonel Mannheim took a sip from his cupand then looked up.
"All right, we'll begin this way. Mr. Stanton, granted that you've beenthrough five years of hell--but how closely have you stayed in touch withthe Nipe situation?"
"As best I could through news bulletins and information that your officehas sent here."
"Could you give me an oral summary?"
Bart Stanton thought for a moment. It was true that he'd been out of touchwith what had been going on outside the walls of the NeurophysicalInstitute for the past five years. In spite of the reading he'd done andthe newscasts he'd watched and the TV tapes he'd seen, he still had noreal feeling for the situation.
There were hazy periods during that five years. He had undergone extensiveglandular and neural operations of great delicacy, many of which hadresulted in what could have been agonizing pain without the use ofsuppressors. As a result, he possessed a biological engine that, for sheerdriving power and nicety of control, surpassed any other known to exist orto have ever existed on Earth--with the possible exception of the Nipe.But those five years of rebuilding and retraining had left a gap in hislife.
Several of the steps required to make the conversion from man to supermanhad resulted in temporary insanity; the wild, swinging imbalances ofglandular secretions seeking a new balance, the erratic misfirings ofneurons as they attempted to adjust to higher nerve-impulse velocities,and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells which were acting too rapidlyfor a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greateror lesser mental abnormality.
That he was sane now, there was no question. But there were holes in hismemory that still had to be filled.
He began to talk, rapidly but carefully, telling the colonel all he knewabout the situation up to the present.
* * * * *
It wasn't much. It was late October, 2091, and the Nipe, blithely evadingcapture for ten long years, was still going about his unknown and possiblyincomprehensible business.
The Nipe had become a legend. He had replaced Satan, the Bogeyman,Frankenstein's monster, and Mumbo Jumbo, Lord of the Congo, in the publicmind. He had taken on, in popular thought, the attributes of the djinn,the vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf, and every other horror and hobgoblinthat the mind of Man had conjured up in the previous half-million years.
That he had been connected with the mysterious crash in Siberia ten yearsbefore was almost a certainty. How he had managed to get from there toLeningrad without being seen once was more of a mystery, but certainlynot impossible in the light of what had been done since.
Eight months later, a non-vision phone call had been received by theRegent's Board of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital inLeningrad. An odd, breathy voice offered (in very bad Russian!) a meeting.The Nipe had managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, thathe did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with theforest ranger.
The psychiatrists were divided in their opinions. Some thought that thecall had been from a deranged person. When the Nipe actually showed up atthe appointed place, those minds changed rapidly.
The Nipe's ability to use any human language was limited. He picked upvocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completelyunable to use a language beyond discussion of concrete actions andobjects. His mind was simply too alien to enable him to do more than touchthe edges of human communication.
In the discussion of mathematics, in particular, the Nipe seemed to becompletely at a loss. He apparently thought of mathematics as a _spoken_language instead of a _written_ one, and could not progress beyond simplediagrams.
He wasn't captured in any real sense of the word. He refused to allow anyphysical tests on his body, and, short of threatening him at gun-point,there didn't seem to be any practicable way to force him to accede to thehuman's wishes. And they couldn't do that.
The Nipe had to be treated as an emissary from his home world, whereverthat was. He'd killed a man, yes. But that had to be allowed asjustifiable homicide in self-defense, since the forester had drawn a gunand was ready to fire. Nobody could blame the late Wang Kulichenko forthat, but nobody could blame the Nipe, either.
For six weeks, the humans and the Nipe had tried to arrive at a meeting ofminds, and just when it would seem within grasp, it would fade away intomist. It was nearly a month before the Russian psychologists andpsychiatrists realized that the reason the Nipe had come to them wasbecause he had thought that they were the ruling body of that territory!
The UN observers stayed out of it at first. Before there was any kind oftalk on a Government level, there must be some kind of understanding on apersonal level. And that, of course, was never achieved.
Just what had set off the Nipe's anger hasn't been established yet, as faras Stanton knew. At a meeting one day, he had simply become more and moreincomprehensible, and then, without any warning, he had leaped out, killedthree of the men with his bare hands, and gone out the window.
And that had been the end of any diplomatic relations between humanity andthe Nipe.
Since that time, he'd been on a rampage of robbery and murder. He was ascallously indifferent to human life and property as a human being might bewith the life and property of a cockroach.
There have been human criminals whose actions could be described in thesame way, but the Nipe had a few touches that few human criminals wouldhave thought of and almost none would have had the capacity to execute.
If, for instance, the Nipe had time to spare, his victims would be anannoying problem in identification when found, for there would be nothingleft but well-gnawed bones. And "time to spare," in this case meant twentyor thirty minutes. The Nipe had, if nothing else, a very efficientdigestive tract. He ate like a shrew.
And the Nipe never, under any circumstances, used any weapon but theweapons Nature had given him--hands-or-feet, or claws or teeth. Never didhe use a knife or gun or even a club.
* * * * *
Almost as an afterthought, one realized that the loot which the Nipe stolewas seemingly unpredictable. Money, as such, he apparently had no use for.He had taken gold, silver, and platinum, but one raid for each of theseelements had evidently been enough, except for silver, which had requiredthree raids over a period of four years. Since then, he hadn't touchedsilver again.
He hadn't tried yet for any of the radioactives except radium. He'd takena full ounce of that in five raids, but hadn't attempted to get his handson uranium, thorium, plutonium, or any of the other elements normallyassociated with atomic energy. Nor had he tried to steal any of the fusionmaterials; the heavy isotopes of hydrogen or any of the lithium isotopes.Beryllium had been taken, but whether there was any significance in thethefts or not, no one knew.
There was a pattern in
the thefts, nonetheless. They had begun small andincreased. Scientific and technical instruments--oscilloscopes, X-raygenerators, radar equipment, maser sets, dynostatic crystals, thermolightresonators, and so on--were stolen complete or gutted for various parts.After awhile, he went on to bigger things--whole aircraft, with theircrews, had vanished.
That he had not committed anywhere near all the crimes that had beenattributed to him was certain; that he _had_ committed a great many ofthem was equally certain.
There was no doubt at all that his loot was being used to make instrumentsand devices of unknown kinds. He had used several of them on his raids.The one that could apparently phase out almost any electromagneticfrequency up to about a hundred thousand megacycles--including sixty-cyclepower frequencies--was considered to be a particularly cute item. So wasthe gadget that reduced the tensile strength of concrete to about that ofa good