turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the folded
sheets and went on to the restaurant.

He rarely read a newssheet. Mostly, his information about the world that
existed outside the walls of the Institute came from the televised
newscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relatively
unimportant little stories about people who had done small, relatively
unimportant things--stories that didn't appear in the headlines or the
newscasts.

The last important news story that he had heard had come two nights
before. The Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The
camera had shown the shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow
open the vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the
whole front door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted
paraglass that had lain on the pavement showed how much force had been
applied from within.

And yet, the results had not been those of an explosion. It was more as
though some tremendous force had _pushed_ outward from within. It 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 storefront were still there, bent
outward a little, but not broken.

The vault door had been slammed to 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
had no fear of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the
intricate alarms that