Stanton's eyes didn't avoid the colonel's. _That's not true_, he
thought, _I'll be only one man on a team. And you know that, Colonel
Mannheim. But you'd like to shove all the responsibility off onto
someone else--someone stronger. You've finally met someone that you
consider your superior in that way, and you want to unload. I wish I
felt as confident as you do ... but I don't._

Aloud, he said: "Sure. Nothing to it. All I have to do is take into
account everything that's known about the Nipe and make allowances for
everything that's not known." Then he smiled. "Not," he added, "that I
can think of any other way to go about it."

_THIRD INTERLUDE_

Mrs. Frobisher touched the control button that depolarized the window in
the breakfast room, letting the morning sun stream in through the now
transparent sheet of glass. Her attention was caught by something across
the street, and she said, in a low voice, "Larry, come here."

Larry Frobisher looked up from his morning coffee. "What is it, hon?"

"The Stanton boys. Come look."

Frobisher sighed. "Who are the Stanton boys, and why should I come
look?" But he got up and came over to the window.

"See--over there on the walkway toward the play area," his wife said.

"I see a boy pushing a wheeled contraption and three girls playing with
a skip rope," Frobisher said. "Or do you mean that the Stanford boys are
dressed up as girls?"

"_Stanton_," she corrected him. "They just moved into the apartment on
the first floor."

"Who? The three girls?"

"No, silly! The two Stanton boys and their mother. One of them is in
that 'wheeled contraption'. It's called a therapeutic chair."

"Oh? So the poor kid's been hurt. What's so interesting about that,
aside from morbid curiosity?"

The boy pushing the chair went around a bend in the walkway, out of
sight, and Frobisher went back to his coffee while his wife spoke.

"Their names are Mart and Bart," she said. "They're twins."

"I should think," Frobisher said, applying himself to his breakfast,
"that the mother would get a self-powered chair for the boy instead of
making the other boy push it."

"The poor boy can't control the chair, dear," said Mrs. Frobisher, still
looking out the window after the vanished twins. "There's something
wrong with his nervous system. I understand that he was exposed to some
kind of radiation when he was only two years old. That's why the chair
has to have all those funny instruments