feet behind him is incredible enough. The fact that he could and did outdraw and outshoot me after I had started ... well, that's almost beyond comprehension."

He looked back at Bart Stanton. "What's your opinion, Mr. Stanton? Think you can handle the Nipe?"

Stanton paused imperceptibly before answering, while his ultrafast mind considered the problem and arrived at a decision. Just how much confidence should he show the colonel? Mannheim was a man with tremendous confidence in himself, but who was capable of recognizing that there were men who were his superiors, in one field or another.

"If I can't dispose of the Nipe," Stanton said, "no one can."

Colonel Mannheim nodded slowly. "I believe you're right," he said at last. His voice was firm with inner conviction. He shot a glance at Farnsworth. "How about the second man?"

Farnsworth shook his head. "He'll never make it. In another two years, we can put him into reasonable shape again, but his nervous system just couldn't stand the gaff."

"Can we get another man ready in time?"

"Hardly. We can't just pick a man up off the street and turn him into a superman. Even if we could find another subject with Bart's genetic possibilities, it would take more time than we have to spare."

"This isn't magic, Colonel. You don't change a nobody into a physical and mental giant by saying abracadabra or by teaching him how to pronounce shazam properly."

"I'm aware of that," said Colonel Mannheim without rancor. "Five years of work on Mr. Stanton must have taught you something, though. I should think you could repeat the process in less time."

Farnsworth repeated the headshaking. "Human beings aren't machines, Colonel. They require time to heal, time to learn, time to integrate themselves. Remember that, in spite of all our increased knowledge of anesthesia, antibiotics, viricides, and obstetrics, it still takes nine months to produce a baby. We're in the same position, only more so."

"I see," said Mannheim.

"Besides," Dr. Farnsworth continued, "Stanton's body and nervous system are now close to the theoretical limit for human tissue. I'm afraid you don't realize what kind of mental stability and organization are required to handle the equipment he now has."

"I'm sure I don't," the colonel agreed. "I doubt if anyone besides Stanton himself knows."

Dr. Farnsworth's manner softened a little. "You're probably quite right. Suffice it to say that Bartholomew Stanton is the only answer we've found so far, and the only answer visible in the foreseeable future to the problem posed by the Nipe."

The colonel's face darkened. "I keep hoping that our policy of handling the Nipe hasn't been a mistake. If it has, it's going to prove a fatal one—for the whole race."

"Let's go into the lounge," Farnsworth said. "Standing around in an empty chamber like this isn't the most comfortable way to discuss the fate of mankind." His voice brought hollow echoes from the walls.

Colonel Mannheim grinned at the touch of lightness the biophysicist had injected into the conversation. "Very well. I could do with some coffee, if you have some."

"All you want," said Dr. Farnsworth, leading the way toward the door of the chamber and opening it. "Or, if you'd prefer something with a little more power to it—?"

"Thanks, no. Coffee will do fine," said Mannheim. "How about you, Mr. Stanton?"

Bart Stanton shook his head. "I'd love to have some coffee, but I'll leave the alcohol alone. I'd just have the luck to be finishing a drink when our friend, the Nipe, popped in on us. And when I do meet him, I'm going to need every microsecond of reflex speed I can scrape up."

They walked down a soft-floored, warmly-lit corridor to an elevator which whisked them up to the main level of the Neurophysical Institute Building.

Another corridor led them to a room that might have been the common room of one of the more exclusive men's clubs. There were soft chairs and shelves of books and reading tables and smoking stands, all quietly luxurious. There was no one in the room when the three men entered.

"We can have some privacy here," Dr. Farnsworth said. "None of the rest of the staff will come in until we're through."

Colonel Mannheim looked at the biophysicist speculatively. "You seem to think secrecy's important all of a sudden."

Bart Stanton grinned and kept silent.

Dr. Farnsworth went over to a table, where an urn of coffee radiated soft warmth. "Cream and sugar over there on the tray," he said as he began to fill cups.

"Frankly," Colonel Mannheim said, "I was going to ask you to find us a place where we could talk privately. You seem to have anticipated me."

"I thought you might have something like that in mind," said Dr. Farnsworth without looking up.

The cups were filled and the three men sat down in a triangle of chairs before any of them spoke again. Colonel Mannheim took a sip from his cup and then looked up.

"All right, we'll begin this way. Mr. Stanton, granted that you've been through five years of hell—but how closely have you stayed in touch with the Nipe situation?"

"As best I could through news bulletins and information that your office has sent here."

"Could you give me an oral summary?"

Bart Stanton thought for a moment. It was true that he'd been out of 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 were 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, 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 which were acting too rapidly for a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greater or lesser mental abnormality.

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

He began to talk, rapidly but carefully, telling the colonel all he knew about the situation up to the present.

It wasn't much. It was late October, 2091, and the Nipe, blithely evading capture for ten long years, was still going about his unknown and possibly incomprehensible business.

The Nipe had become a legend. He had replaced Satan, the Bogeyman, Frankenstein's monster, and Mumbo Jumbo, Lord of the Congo, in the public mind. He had taken on, in popular thought, the attributes of the djinn, the vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf, and every other horror and hobgoblin that the mind of Man had conjured up in the previous half-million years.

That he had been connected with the mysterious crash in Siberia ten years before was almost a certainty. How he had managed to get from there to Leningrad without being seen once was more of a mystery, but certainly not impossible in the light of what had been done since.

Eight months later, a non-vision phone call had been received by the Regent's Board of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice offered (in very bad Russian!) a meeting. The Nipe had managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wild