e knowledge possessed by the Nipe was
tremendously more valuable to the race of Man than the lives of a few
individuals?

Could those people down there, and the others like them all over the
world, be made to understand that, by his own lights, the Nipe had been
behaving in the most civilized and gentlemanly fashion he knew? Could
they ever be made to understand that, because of the tremendous wealth
of priceless information stored in that alien brain, the Nipe's life had
to be preserved at any cost?

Or would they scream for blood?

Dr. Farnsworth assumed that Stanley Martin was going to spread a story
about the Nipe's death--a carefully concocted story about how Stanley
Martin had found the beast and the police had killed it. There might,
Farnsworth assumed, be a carefully made "corpse" for the mob to hiss at.
Maybe Farnsworth was right. But Stanton had the feeling that Martin and
George Yoritomo had something else up their collective sleeve.

The phone hummed. Stanton walked over, thumbed the answer button, and
watched George Yoritomo's face take shape on the screen.

"Bart! I have just had the privilege of viewing the tapes of your fight
with our friend, the Nipe. Incredible! I watched the original on the
screen, of course, but I had to run the tapes. I wanted to slow it down,
so that I could see what actually happened. Magnificent, that right of
yours! _So!_" He jabbed a fist out, shadowboxing with Stanton over the
phone circuit.

"Awww, it weren't nuthin', Maw," Stanton drawled. "I jes' sorta flang
out a fist an' he got in the way."

"Of course! But such a fling! Seriously, Bart, I want to run those tapes
over again, and I want you to tell me, as best you can, just what went
on in your mind at each stage of the fight. It will be most
informative."

"You mean right now? I have an appointment--"

Yoritomo waved a hand. "No, no. Later. Take your time. But I am honestly
amazed that you won so easily. I knew you were good, and I was certain
you'd win, but I must admit that I honestly expected you to be
injured."

Stanton looked down at his bandaged hands and felt the ache of his
broken rib and the pain of the blue bruise on his thigh. In spite of the
way it looked, he had actually been hurt worse than the Nipe had. That
boy was _tough_!

"The trouble was that he couldn't adapt himself to fighting in a new
way, just as you predicted," he told Yoritomo. "He fought me, I assume,
in just the way he would hav