"Move out, then. You"ve got a long stroll to go."
Stanton started walking, keeping his feet near the rail, in case Barhop wanted to call again. As he walked, he could feel the slight motion of the skin-tight, woven elastic suit that he wore rubbing against his skin.
And he could hear the scratching patter of the rats.
Mostly, they stayed away from him, but he could see them hiding in corners and scurrying along the sides of the tunnel. 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 taken 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, operating the robot rats or watching the hidden cameras that spied upon the Nipe. Nearly a hundred. And all of them were safe.
They were outside the tunnel. They were with Stanton only in proxy. They could not die here in this stinking hole, but Stanton could.
There was no help for it. Stanton had to go in person. A full-sized robot proxy would be stronger, although not faster unless Stanton controlled it, than the Nipe. But the Nipe would be able to tell that it was a robot, and he would simply destroy it with one of his weapons. A remote-controlled robot would never get close enough to the Nipe to do any good.
"We do not know," 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 might be able to see that it was not covered with human skin.
The rats are covered with real rat hides; they are small, and he is used to seeing them around. But a human-sized robot? Ah, no. Never."
So Stanton had to go in in person, walking southward, along the miles of blackness that led to the nest of the Nipe.
Overhead was Government City.
He had walked those streets only the night before, and he knew that only a short distance above him was an entirely different world.
Somewhere up there, his brother was waiting after having run the gamut of televised interviews, dinner at one of the best restaurants, and a party afterward. A celebrity. "The greatest detective in the Solar System,"
they"d called him. Fine stuff, that. Stanton wondered what the asteroids were like. Maybe that would be the place to go after this job was done.
Maybe they"d have a place in the asteroids for a hopped-up superman.
Or maybe there"d 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, but, somehow, Stanton didn"t mind it.
He had a lot to think over. Seeing his brother had been unnerving yesterday, but today he felt as though everything had been all right all along.
His memory still was a long way from being complete, and it probably always would be. He could still scarcely recall any real memories of a boy named Martin Stanton, but--and he smiled at the thought--he knew more about him than his brother did, at that.
It didn"t matter. 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, in another way, the new structure was very like what would have developed naturally if the accident so early in life had not occurred.
Stanton skirted a pile of rubble on his right. There had been a station here, once; the street above had caved in and filled in with brick, concrete, cobblestones, and steel sc.r.a.p, 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 _86th Street_, he knew, although it wasn"t visible in the dim glow. He kept walking, ignoring the rats that scampered over the rubble.
"Barhop to Barbell," said the soft voice near his ear. "No sign of activity from the Nipe. So far, you haven"t triggered any of his alarms."
"Barbell to Barhop," Stanton whispered. "What"s he doing?"
"Still sitting motionless. Thinking, I guess. Or sleeping. It"s hard to tell."
"Let me know if he starts moving around."
"Will do."
_Poor, unsuspecting beastie,_ Stanton thought. _Ten years of hard work, ten years of feeling secure, 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 his life, Stanton thought. Not even of knowing whether the Nipe was capable of feeling anything like security.
It was odd, he thought, that he should feel a kinship toward both the Nipe and his brother in such similar ways. He had never met the Nipe, and his brother was a dim picture in his old memories, but they were both very well known to him. Certainly better known to him than he was to them.
And yet, seeing his brother"s face on the TV screen, hearing him talk, watching the way he moved about, watching the expressions on his face, had been a tremendously moving thing. Not until that moment had he really known himself.
Meeting him face to face would be easier now, but it would still be a scene highly charged with emotional tension.
He kicked something that rattled and rolled away from him. He stopped, freezing in his tracks, trying to pierce the dully glowing gloom. It was a human skull.
He relaxed and began walking again.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
There were plenty of bones down here. Mannheim had said that the tunnels had been used as air-raid shelters when the sun bomb had hit the island during the Holocaust. Thousands had crowded underground after the warning had come, and they had died when the bright, hot, deadly gas had roared down through ventilators and open stairwells.
There were even caches of canned goods down here, some of them still sealed after all this time. But the rats, wiser than they knew, had chewed at them, exposing the steel beneath the tin plate. After a while, oxidation would weaken a can to the point where some lucky rat could bite through it and find himself a meal. Then he could move the empty can aside and gnaw the next one in the pile, and the cycle would begin again. It kept the rats fed almost as well as an automatic machine might have.
The tunnel was an endless monochromatic world that was both artificial and natural. Here, there was a neatly squared-off mosaic of ceramic tile; over there, on a little hillock of earth, squatted a colony of fat mushrooms.
In one place, he had to skirt a pool of water; in another, climb over a heap of rust and debris that had once been a subway car.
One man, alone, walking through the dark towards a superhuman monster that had terrorized Earth for a decade.
A drug that would knock out the Nipe would have been useful, but that would have required a greater knowledge of the Nipe"s biochemistry than anyone had. The same applied to anesthetic gases, or electric shock, or supersonics.
The only answer was a man called Stanton.
And the voice near his ear said: "A hundred yards to go, Barbell."
"I know," he whispered. "He hasn"t moved?"
"No."
_Wouldn"t it be funny if he were dead?_ Stanton thought. _If his heart had stopped, or something. Wouldn"t that be a big joke on everybody?