d managed
to get here from Asia by stealing a flyer in Leningrad. According to Dr.
Yoritomo and the other psychologists who have been studying the Nipe, he
apparently does not believe that human beings are anything more than
trained animals. He was looking then--as he is apparently still
looking--for the 'real' rulers of Earth. He expected to find them, of
course, in Government City. Needless to say," said the colonel with a
touch of irony, "he failed."

"But he was seen?" asked Stanton.

"He was seen. And pursued. But he got away easily, heading north. The
whole island was searched, from the southern tip to the wall, and the
police were ready to start an inch-by-inch combing of the game preserve
by the end of the third day after he was seen. But he hit and robbed a
chemical supply house in northern Pennsylvania, killing two men, so the
search was called off.

"It wasn't until two years later, after an exhaustive analysis of the
pattern of his raids had given us enough material to work with, that we
determined that he must have found an opening into one of the tunnels up
here in the game preserve." He gestured again at the map. "Very likely
he immediately saw that no human being had been down there in a long
time and that there wasn't much chance of a man coming down there in the
foreseeable future. It was a perfect place for his base."

"How does he move in and out?" Stanton asked.

"This way." The colonel traced a finger down one of the red lines on the
map, southward, until he came to a spot only a little over two miles
from the southernmost tip of the island. The line turned abruptly toward
the western shore of the island, where it stopped. "There are tunnels
that go underneath the Hudson River at this point and emerge on the
other side, over here, in New Jersey. The one he uses is only one of
several, but it has one distinct advantage that the others do not. All
of them are flooded now; the sun bomb caved them in when the primary
shock wave hit the surface of the water. The tunnel he uses has a hole
in it big enough for him to swim through.

"In spite of his high rate of metabolism, the Nipe can store a
tremendous amount of oxygen in his body and can stay underwater for as
long as half an hour without breathing apparatus, if he conserves his
energy. When he's wearing his scuba mask, he's practically a
self-contained submarine. The pressure doesn't seem to bother him much.
He's a tough cookie."

"I'll remem