touch with what had been going on outside the walls of the Neurophysical
Institute for the past five years. In spite of the reading he'd done and
the newscasts he'd watched and the TV tapes he'd seen, he still had no
real feeling for the situation.

There had been long hazy periods during that five years. He had
undergone extensive glandular and neural operations of great delicacy,
many of which had resulted in what could have been agonizing pain
without the use of suppressors. As a result of those operations, he
possessed a biological engine that, for sheer driving power and nicety
of control, surpassed any other known to exist or to have ever existed
on Earth--with the possible exception of the Nipe. But those five years
of rebuilding and retraining had left a gap in his life.

Several of the steps required to make the conversion from man to
superman had resulted in temporary insanity; the wild, swinging
imbalances of glandular secretions seeking a new balance, the erratic
misfirings of neurons as they attempted to adjust to higher
nerve-impulse velocities, and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells that
were acting too rapidly for a lagging excretory system, all had
contributed to periods of greater or lesser abnormality.

That he was sane now, there was no question. But there were holes in his
memory that still had to be filled.

He admitted as much to Colonel Mannheim.

"I see." The colonel rubbed one hand along the angle of his jaw,
considering his next words. "Can you give me, in your own words, a
general summary of the type of thing the Nipe has been doing?"

"I think so," Stanton said.

His verbal summary was succinct and accurate. The loot that the Nipe had
been stealing had, at first, seemed to be a hodgepodge of everything. It
was unpredictable. Money, as such, he apparently had no use for. He had
taken gold, silver, and platinum, but one raid for each of these
elements had evidently been enough, with the exception of silver, which
had required three raids over a period of four years. Since then, he
hadn't touched silver again.

He hadn't yet tried for any of the radioactives except radium. He'd
taken a full ounce of that in five raids, but hadn't attempted to get
his hands on uranium, thorium, plutonium, or any of the other elements
normally associated with atomic energy. Nor had he tried to steal any of
the fusion materials--the heavy isotopes of hydrogen or any of the
lithium isotopes. Beryllium