Anything You Can Do! Page 9
Stanton nodded silently and slowly. Could he beat the Nipe in hand-to-handcombat? There would be no way of knowing until the final moment of successor failure.
"At that time," the colonel went on, "we hadn't formulated any definitepolicy on the Nipe. We didn't know what he was up to; we weren't even surehe was actually down in those tunnels. We had to find out."
He walked over to the nearby table and opened a box some twelve incheslong and five-by-five inches in cross section.
"See this?" he said as he took something out.
It looked like a large dead rat.
"Our spy," said Colonel Mannheim.
* * * * *
The rat moved along the rusted steel rail that ran the length of the hugetunnel. To a human being, the tunnel would have seemed to be in utterdarkness, but the little eyes of the rat saw its surroundings as faintlyluminescent, glowing from the infra-red radiations given out by theinternal warmth of cement and steel. The main source came from above,where the heat of the sun and of the energy sources in the buildings onthe surface seeped through the roof of the tunnel.
On and on it moved, its little pinkish feet pattering almost silently onthe oxidized metal surface of the rail. Its sensitive ears picked up themovements and the squeals of other rats, but it paid them no heed. Severaltimes, it met other rats on the rail, but most of them sensed thealienness of _this_ rat and scuttled out of its way.
Once, it met a rat who did not give way. Hungry, perhaps, or perhapsmerely yielding to the paranoid fury that was a normal component of therattish mind, it squealed its defiance to the rat that was not a rat. Itadvanced, baring its teeth.
The rat that was not a rat became suddenly motionless, its sharp rodent'snose pointed directly at the enemy. There came a noise, a tiny poppinghiss, like that of a very small drop of water striking hot metal. From theleft nostril of the not-rat, a tiny glasslike needle snapped out at bulletspeed. It struck the advancing rat in the center of the pink tongue thatwas visible in the open mouth. Then the not-rat scuttled backwards fasterthan any rat could have moved.
For a second, the real rat hesitated, and it may be that the realizationpenetrated into its dim brain that rats did not fight this way. Then, asthe tiny needle dissolved in its bloodstream, it closed its eyes andcollapsed, rolling limply off the rail.
The rat might come to before it was found and devoured by its fellows--orit might not. The not-rat moved on, not caring either way. The humanintelligence that looked out from the eyes of the not-rat was onlyconcerned with getting to the Nipe.
* * * * *
"That's how we found the Nipe," Colonel Mannheim said, "and that's how wekeep tabs on him now. We have over seven hundred of theseremote-controlled robots hidden in strategic spots in those tunnels now,but it took time to get everything set up this way. Now, we can follow theNipe wherever he goes, so long as he stays in the tunnels. If he went outthrough an open air exit, we could have him followed by bird-robots but--"He shrugged wryly. "I'm afraid the underwater problem still has usstumped. We can't get the carrier wave for the remote-control impulses togo far underwater."
"How do you get your carrier wave underground to those tunnels?" Stantonasked.
The colonel grinned widely. "One of the boys dreamed up a real cutegimmick. The rails themselves act as antenna for the broadcaster, and therat's tail is the pickup antenna. As long as the rat is crawling right onthe rail, only a microscopic amount of power is needed for control, notenough for the Nipe to pick up with his instruments. Each rat carries itsown battery for motive power, and there are old copper power cables downthere that we can send direct current through to recharge the batteries.And, when we need them, the copper cables can be used as antennas. It tookus quite a while to work the system out."
Stanton rubbed his head thoughtfully. _Damn these gaps in my memory!_ hethought. It was sometimes embarrassing to ask questions that any schoolboyshould know.
"Aren't there ways of detecting objects underwater?" he asked after amoment.
"Yes," said the colonel, "But they all require beamed energy of some kindto be reflected from the object, and we don't dare use anything likethat." He sat down on one corner of the table, his bright blue eyeslooking up at Stanton.
"That's been our problem all along," he said seriously. "Keeping the Nipefrom knowing that he's being watched. In the tunnels, we've used onlyequipment that was already there, adding only what we absolutely hadto--small things, a few strands of wire, a tiny relay, things that can behidden in out of the way places. After all, he has his own alarm system inthe maze of tunnels, and we've deliberately kept away from his detectingdevices. He knows about the rats and ignores them; they're part of theenvironment. But we don't dare use anything that would tip him off to ourknowledge of his whereabouts. One slip like that, and hundreds of humanbeings will have died in vain."
"And if he stays there too long," Stanton said levelly, "millions more maydie."
The colonel's face was grim as he looked directly into Stanton's eyes."That's why you have to know your job down to the most minute detail whenthe time comes to act. The whole success of the plan will depend on youand you alone."
Stanton's eyes didn't avoid the colonel's. _That's not true,_ he thought._I'll only be one man on a team, and you know it, Colonel Mannheim. Butyou'd like to shove all the responsibility off onto someone else--someonestronger. You've finally met someone that you consider superior in thatway, and you want to unload. I wish I felt as confident as you do, but Idon't._
Aloud, he said: "Sure. Nothing to it. All I have to do is take intoaccount everything that's known about the Nipe and make allowances foreverything that's not known." Then he smiled. "Not," he added, "that I canthink of any other way to go about it."
X
St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust; it still retained much ofthe old-fashioned flavor of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,especially in the residential districts. Bart Stanton liked to walk alongthose quiet streets of an evening, just to let the peacefulness seep intohim. And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the smallpleasure of playing hookey from the Neurophysics Institute. Technically,he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that he had acceptedColonel Mannheim's assignment, he was presumably under militarydiscipline. But he assumed that, if he had asked permission to leave theInstitute's grounds, he would have been given that permission withoutquestion.
But, like playing hookey, or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if itwas done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wickedand delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can havehis whole day ruined by being told that it was a holiday and that theschool had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his own fun byasking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easy for a manwith his special abilities to get out without asking.
Besides, there _was_ a chance--a small one, he thought--that permissionmight be refused for one reason or another, and Bart was fully aware thathe would not disobey a direct request--to say nothing of a directorder--that he stay within the walls of the Institute. He didn't want torun any risk of losing his freedom, small though it was. After five yearsof mental and physical hell, he felt a need to get out into the world ofnormal, everyday people.
His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlesslyalong the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the street lights. Thepeople around him walked as casually and with seemingly as little purposeas he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that he feltinside the walls of the Institute.
He knew he could never get away from that sense of urgency completely,even out here. There were times when it seemed that all he had ever don
e,all his life, was to train himself for the single purpose of besting theNipe.
If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from thepsychologists or from Colonel Mannheim--laying plans and consideringpossibilities for the one great goal that seemed to be the focal point ofhis whole life.
What would happen if he failed? He would die, of course, and Mannheim'sPlan Beta would immediately go into effect. The Nipe would be killedeventually.
But what if he, Stanton, won? Then what?
The people around him were not a part of his world, really. Theirthoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy incomparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purposewould there be in the