inn pleasure of playing hooky from the Neurophysical
Institute.

Technically, he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that
he had completely accepted Colonel Walther Mannheim's assignment, he was
presumably under military discipline. 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 hooky or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if it
was done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wicked
and delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can have
his whole day ruined completely by being told that it was a holiday and
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 Stanton 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, ordinary, everyday people.

His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly
along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the streetlights.
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.

But 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 whole life, was to train himself for the one
single purpose of besting the Nipe.

If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from Dr.
George Yoritomo or from Colonel Mannheim. If he wasn't working his
muscles, he was 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?

What would happen if he, the great hyped-up superman, found that the
Nipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What would
happen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast hand
and showed Colonel Mannheim