r ways. He had never met the Nipe, and his
brother was a dim picture in his old memories, but they were both very
well known to him. Certainly better known to him than he was to them.

And yet, seeing his brother's face on the TV screen, hearing him talk,
watching the way he moved about, watching the expressions on his face, had
been a tremendously moving thing. Not until that moment had he really
known himself.

Meeting him face to face would be easier now, but it would still be a
scene highly charged with emotional tension.

He kicked something that rattled and rolled away from him. He stopped,
freezing in his tracks, trying to pierce the dully glowing gloom. It was a
human skull.

He relaxed and began walking again.

[Illustration]

There were plenty of bones down here. Mannheim had said that the tunnels
had been used as air-raid shelters when the sun bomb had hit the island
during the Holocaust. Thousands had crowded underground after the warning
had come, and they had died when the bright, hot, deadly gas had roared
down through ventilators and open stairwells.

There were even caches of canned goods down here, some of them still
sealed after all this time. But the rats, wiser than they knew, had chewed
at them, exposing the steel beneath the tin plate. After a while,
oxidation would weaken a can to the point where some lucky rat could bite
through it and find himself a meal. Then he could move the empty can aside
and gnaw the next one in the pile, and the cycle would begin again. It
kept the rats fed almost as well as an automatic machine might have.

* * * * *

The tunnel was an endless monochromatic world that was both artificial and
natural. Here, there was a neatly squared-off mosaic of ceramic tile; over
there, on a little hillock of earth, squatted a colony of fat mushrooms.
In one place, he had to skirt a pool of water; in another, climb over a
heap of rust and debris that had once been a subway car.

One man, alone, walking through the dark towards a superhuman monster that
had terrorized Earth for a decade.

A drug that would knock out the Nipe would have been useful, but that
would have required a greater knowledge of the Nipe's biochemistry than
anyone had. The same applied to anesthetic gases, or electric shock, or
supersonics.

The only answer was a man called Stanton.

And the voice near his ear said: "A hundred yards to go, Barbell."

"I know," he whis