He consulted his instruments again. The supply ship was ten minutes away.

The smile stayed on his face as he prepared for further action.

The first two minutes were conscientiously spent in inhaling oxygen. Even under the best cataleptic conditions, the body tended to slow down too much. He had to get himself prepared for violent movement.

Eight minutes left. He climbed out of the little grotto where he had concealed himself and moved toward the spot where he knew the air lock to the caverns underneath the planetoid's surface was hidden. Then again, he concealed himself and waited, while he continued to breathe deeply of the highly oxygenated air in his suit. Five minutes before the ship landed, he swallowed eight ounces of the nutrient solution from the tank in the back of his helmet. The solution of amino acids, vitamins, and honey sugar also contained a small amount of stimulant of the dexedrine type and one per cent ethanol. Then he unholstered his gun.

It wasn't a big ship. He had known it wouldn't be. It was only a little larger than the one he had used to come here. It dropped down to the surface of the small planetoid only ten meters from the hidden trapdoor that led to the air lock beneath the surface.

He could suddenly hear voices in the earphones of his helmet.

_La.s.ser?_

_It's me, Fritz. I got your supplies and good news._

The air lock trapdoor opened, and a s.p.a.cesuited figure came out. _How about the deal?_

_That's the good news,_ said the second suited figure as it came from the air lock of the grounded s.p.a.ceboat. _Another five million._

The man who was hidden behind the nearby crag of rock listened and watched for a minute or so more while the two men began unloading cases of foodstuffs from the s.p.a.ceboat. Then, satisfied that it was perfectly safe, he aimed his gun and shot twice in rapid succession. The range was almost point-blank, and there was, of course, no need to take either gravity or air resistance into account.

The pellets of the shotgun-like charge that blasted out from the gun were small, needle-shaped, and heavy. They were oriented point-forward by the magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds in each charge fired, only a few penetrated the s.p.a.cesuits of the targets, but those few were enough. The powerful drug in the needle-pointed head of each went into the bloodstream of the target.

Each man felt an itching sensation. He had less than two seconds to think about it before unconsciousness overtook him and he slumped nervelessly.

The man with the gun ran across the intervening s.p.a.ce quickly, his body only a few degrees from the horizontal, and his toes paddling rapidly to propel him over the rough rock.

He braked himself to a halt and slapped air patches over the area where his charges had struck the men's suits, sealing the tiny air leaks, and, at the same time, driving more of the tiny needles into their skins. They would be out for a long time.

Neither of them had yet fallen to the ground; that would take several minutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed toward the open air lock.

This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way in from the outside; he had had to wait until it was opened, and that time would come only when the supply ship came.

Once in the air lock, he touched the control stud that would close the outer door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door. Here was his greatest point of danger--greater, even, than the danger of coming to the planetoid, or the danger of waiting nineteen days for the coming of the supply ship. If the ones who remained within suspected anything--anything at all!--then his chances of coming out of this alive were practically nil.

But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think that the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the men outside had been limited to a few millimicrowatts of power--necessarily, since radio waves of very small wattage can be decoded at tremendous distances in open s.p.a.ce. The men inside the planetoid certainly should not have been able to pick up any more than the beginning of the conversation, before it had been cut off by solid rock.

It was a high-speed air lock. Unlike the soundless discharge of his special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of air that came into the waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise and force, as the room filled in a few seconds.

He held onto the handholds tightly while the brief but violent winds buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.

His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an even smaller fraction, his mind a.s.similated the picture.

The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wide and thick-lipped beneath a large nose.

The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced and beady-eyed.

The woman said: "Fritz, what--"

And then he shot them both with gun number two.

No needle charges this time; such shots would have blown them both in two, unprotected as they were by s.p.a.cesuits. The small handgun merely jangled their nerves with a high-powered blast of accurately beamed supersonics.

While they were still twitching, he went over and jabbed them with a drug needle.

Then he went on into the hideout.

He had to knock out one more man, whom he found sound asleep in a room off the short corridor.

It took a gas bomb to get the two women who were guarding the kid.

He made sure that the BenChaim boy was all right, then he went to the little communications room and called for help.

IX

Colonel Walther Mannheim tapped the map that glowed on the wall before him. "He's right there, where those tunnels come together."

Bart Stanton looked at the map of Manhattan Island and at the gleaming colored traceries that threaded their various ways across it. "Just what was the purpose of those tunnels?" he asked curiously.

"They were for rail transportation," said the colonel. "The island was. .h.i.t by a sun bomb during the Holocaust, and almost completely leveled and slagged down. When the city was rebuilt, there was naturally no need for such things, so they were simply sealed off and forgotten."

"Right under Government City," Stanton said. "Incredible."

"It used to be one of the largest seaports in the world," Colonel Mannheim said, "and it probably still would be if the inertia drive hadn't made air travel cheaper and easier than seagoing."

"How did he find out about the tunnels?" Stanton asked.

The colonel pointed at the north end of the island. "After the Holocaust, the first returnees to the island were wild animals which crossed from the mainland from the north. The Harlem River isn't very wide at this point.

Also, because of the rocky hills at this end of the island, there were places which were spared the direct effects of the bomb, and gra.s.ses and trees began growing there. That's why it was decided to leave that section as a game preserve when the Government built the capital on the southern part of the island." His finger moved down the map. "The upper three miles of the island, down to here, where it begins to widen, are all game preserve. There's a high wall here which separates it from the city, and the ruins of the bridges which connected with the mainland have been removed, so the animals can't get back across any more.

"Two years after he arrived, the Nipe was almost caught. He had managed, somehow--we're not sure yet exactly how--to get here from Asia. According to the psychologists who have been studying him, he apparently does not believe that human beings are any more than trained animals; he was looking then--as he is apparently still looking--for the 'real' rulers of Earth. He expected to find them, of course, in Government City. Needless to say," said the colonel with a touch of irony, "he failed."

"But he was seen?" asked Stanton.

"He was seen. And pursued. But he got away easily, heading north. The island was searched, and the police were ready to start an inch-by-inch going over of the island two days later. But the Nipe hit and robbed a chemical supply house in northern Pennsylvania, killing two men, so the search was called off.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"It wasn't until two years later, after exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of the pattern of his raids had given us something to work with, that we decided that he must have found an opening into one of the tunnels up here in the game preserve." He gestured again at the map. "It wouldn't take him long to see that no human being had been down there in a long time. It was a perfect place for his base."

"How does he move in and out?" Stanton asked.

"This way." The colonel traced a finger down one of the red lines on the map, southward, until he came to a spot only a little over two miles from the southernmost tip of the island. The line turned abruptly toward the western edge of the island, where it stopped. "This tunnel goes underneath the Hudson River at this point, and emerges on the other side. It's only one of several that do so. They're all flooded now; the sun bomb caved them in when the primary shock wave hit the surface of the river.

"In spite of his high rate of metabolism, the Nipe can store a tremendous amount of oxygen in his body, and can stay underwater for as long as half an hour without breathing apparatus--if he conserves his energy. When he's wearing his scuba apparatus, he's practically a self-contained submarine.

The pressure doesn't seem to bother him much. He's a tough cookie."

Stanton nodded silently and slowly. Could he beat the Nipe in hand-to-hand combat? There would be no way of knowing until the final moment of success or failure.

"At that time," the colonel went on, "we hadn't formulated any definite policy on the Nipe. We didn't know what he was up to; we weren't even sure he was actually down in those tunnels. We had to find out."