through five years of hell--but how closely have you stayed in touch with
the Nipe situation?"

"As best I could through news bulletins and information that your office
has sent here."

"Could you give me an oral summary?"

Bart Stanton thought for a moment. It was true that he'd been out of touch
with what had been going on outside the walls of the Neurophysical
Institute for the past five years. In spite of the reading he'd done and
the newscasts he'd watched and the TV tapes he'd seen, he still had no
real feeling for the situation.

There were hazy periods during that five years. He had undergone extensive
glandular and neural operations of great delicacy, many of which had
resulted in what could have been agonizing pain without the use of
suppressors. As a result, he possessed a biological engine that, for sheer
driving power and nicety of control, surpassed any other known to exist or
to 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 his
life.

Several of the steps required to make the conversion from man to superman
had resulted in temporary insanity; the wild, swinging imbalances of
glandular secretions seeking a new balance, the erratic misfirings of
neurons as they attempted to adjust to higher nerve-impulse velocities,
and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells which were acting too rapidly
for a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greater
or lesser mental abnormality.

That he was sane now, there was no question. But there were holes in his
memory that still had to be filled.

He began to talk, rapidly but carefully, telling the colonel all he knew
about the situation up to the present.

* * * * *

It wasn't much. It was late October, 2091, and the Nipe, blithely evading
capture for ten long years, was still going about his unknown and possibly
incomprehensible 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 public
mind. He had taken on, in popular thought, the attributes of the djinn,
the vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf, and every other horror and hobgoblin
that 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 years
before was almost a certainty. How he had managed to ge