nd the Nipe."

_[19]_

From the very moment he had heard that "Stanley Martin" had arrived to
take charge of the project, Bart Stanton pushed all thoughts of his
brother out of his mind. He had fouled up once by thinking of himself
rather than thinking of what had to be done; he would not make that
mistake again.

Nor, apparently, did Martin have any desire to meet Bart Stanton. He
took control of the project smoothly. Apparently Mannheim had taken into
account the possibility of his own death and had arranged things
accordingly. Although Martin was not a member of the World Police, his
own record showed that he had the ability to handle the job, and an
Executive Session had unanimously accepted Colonel Mannheim's wishes in
the matter. There was little else they could do; the very fact that
Mannheim had died in the way he had, ordering the guard to hold his
fire, had stilled those voices on the Executive Council who had been
wavering before.

Martin had come in to Earth almost secretly, without fanfare, and the
general public was totally unaware that anything at all had happened.

Special messages, going through the channels known to be tapped by the
Nipe, said that it would not be in the public interest to admit that the
Nipe could actually penetrate the defenses of World Police Headquarters,
so the Nipe was not surprised when the public news channels announced
quietly that Colonel Walther Mannheim, the man who had been decorated
twelve years before for the quelling of the Central Brazilian
Insurrection, had died peacefully in his sleep. The funeral was quiet,
but with full honors.

Stanton stopped worrying about such things. Until he had done the job
that he had been rebuilt for, he was determined to make that goal his
sole purpose. As the weeks sped by, he kept determinedly to his regime,
exercising regularly to keep himself in top physical condition, and
studying the three-dimensional motion studies of the Nipe in action.

Only one of these made him ill the first time he watched it, but it was
the only recording of the Nipe actually in the process of killing a
man, so he watched, over and over again, the shots taken from the gun
tower when the Nipe attacked Colonel Mannheim.

A full-sized mockup of the Nipe's body had been built, with the best
approximation possible of the Nipe's bone structure and musculature, and
Stanton worked with it to determine what, if any, were the Nipe's
physical limitatio