had not been
the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that had
unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.

Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. It
appeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered by a
giant hand. The main braces of the store front were still there, bent
outward a little, but not broken.

The vault door had lain on the floor of the shop, only a few feet from the
front door. The vault itself had been farther back, and the camera had
showed it, standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there had been pieces of
fragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.

The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from a
point within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outward to
tear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin or modeling
clay.

Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisier
construction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known,
outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In a
widely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vault had
been cut open by a team of well-trained, well-equipped technicians. It had
taken twenty-one hours for them to breach the wall, and they had no fear
of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the intricate
alarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even a borazon drill
could make much of an impression on a metal which had been formed under
millions of atmospheres of pressure.

And yet the Nipe had taken that door out in a second, without much effort
at all.

The crowd that had gathered at the scene of the crime had not been large.
The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places where he was
known to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitive
fear--fear of the dark and fear of the unknown, combined with the rational
fear of a very real, very tangible danger.

And yet, there _had_ been a crowd of onlookers. In spite of their fear, it
is hard to keep human beings from being curious. It was known that the
Nipe didn't stay around after he had struck; and, besides, the area was
now full of armed men. So the curious came to look and to stare in
revulsion at the neat pile of gnawed and bloody bones that had been the
night watchman, carefully killed and eaten by the Nipe before he had
opened the vault.

_Thus curiosi