iously wicked
and delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can have
his whole day ruined by being told that it was a holiday and that the
school had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his own fun by
asking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easy for a man
with his special abilities to get out without asking.

Besides, there _was_ a chance--a small one, he thought--that permission
might be refused for one reason or another, and Bart was fully aware that
he would not disobey a direct request--to say nothing of a direct
order--that he stay within the walls of the Institute. He didn't want to
run any risk of losing his freedom, small though it was. After five years
of mental and physical hell, he felt a need to get out into the world of
normal, everyday people.

His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly
along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the street lights. The
people around him walked as casually and with seemingly as little purpose
as he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that he felt
inside the walls of the Institute.

He knew he could never get away from that sense of urgency completely,
even out here. There were times when it seemed that all he had ever done,
all his life, was to train himself for the single purpose of besting the
Nipe.

If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from the
psychologists or from Colonel Mannheim--laying plans and considering
possibilities for the one great goal that seemed to be the focal point of
his whole life.

What would happen if he failed? He would die, of course, and Mannheim's
Plan Beta would immediately go into effect. The Nipe would be killed
eventually.

But what if he, Stanton, won? Then what?

The people around him were not a part of his world, really. Their
thoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy in
comparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purpose
would there be in the life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded by
people, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society that was
not his own because it was not, could not be, geared to his abilities and
potentials. But there was no other society to turn to, either.

He was not a man "alone, afraid" in a world he had never made; he was a
man who had been made for a world, a society, that did not exist.

Women? A wife? A family life?