undless 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 assimilated 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 spacesuits. 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 hit
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 wi