," he said seriously. "Keeping the Nipe
from knowing that he's being watched. In the tunnels, we've used only
equipment that was already there, adding only what we absolutely had
to--small things, a few strands of wire, a tiny relay, things that can be
hidden in out of the way places. After all, he has his own alarm system in
the maze of tunnels, and we've deliberately kept away from his detecting
devices. He knows about the rats and ignores them; they're part of the
environment. But we don't dare use anything that would tip him off to our
knowledge of his whereabouts. One slip like that, and hundreds of human
beings will have died in vain."

"And if he stays there too long," Stanton said levelly, "millions more may
die."

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 when
the time comes to act. The whole success of the plan will depend on you
and 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. But
you'd like to shove all the responsibility off onto someone else--someone
stronger. You've finally met someone that you consider superior in that
way, and you want to unload. I wish I felt as confident as you do, but I
don't._

Aloud, he said: "Sure. Nothing to it. All I have to do is take into
account everything that's known about the Nipe and make allowances for
everything that's not known." Then he smiled. "Not," he added, "that I can
think of any other way to go about it."

X

St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust; it still retained much of
the old-fashioned flavor of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
especially in the residential districts. Bart Stanton liked to walk along
those quiet streets of an evening, just to let the peacefulness seep into
him. And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small
pleasure of playing hookey from the Neurophysics Institute. Technically,
he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that he had accepted
Colonel Mannheim's assignment, he was presumably under military
discipline. But he assumed that, if he had asked permission to leave the
Institute's grounds, he would have been given that permission without
question.

But, like playing hookey, or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if it
was done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling delic