Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Science fiction, American
"He was seen. And pursued. But he got away easily, heading north. The
whole island was searched, from the southern tip to the wall, and the
police were ready to start an inch-by-inch combing of the game preserve
by the end of the third day after he was seen. But he hit and robbed a
chemical supply house in northern Pennsylvania, killing two men, so the
search was called off.
"It wasn't until two years later, after an exhaustive analysis of the
pattern of his raids had given us enough material to work with, that we
determined that he must have found an opening into one of the tunnels up
here in the game preserve." He gestured again at the map. "Very likely
he immediately saw that no human being had been down there in a long
time and that there wasn't much chance of a man coming down there in the
foreseeable future. It was a perfect place for his base."
"How does he move in and out?" Stanton asked.
"This way." The colonel traced a finger down one of the red lines on the
map, southward, until he came to a spot only a little over two miles
from the southernmost tip of the island. The line turned abruptly toward
the western shore of the island, where it stopped. "There are tunnels
that go underneath the Hudson River at this point and emerge on the
other side, over here, in New Jersey. The one he uses is only one of
several, but it has one distinct advantage that the others do not. All
of them are flooded now; the sun bomb caved them in when the primary
shock wave hit the surface of the water. The tunnel he uses has a hole
in it big enough for him to swim through.
"In spite of his high rate of metabolism, the Nipe can store a
tremendous amount of oxygen in his body and can stay underwater for as
long as half an hour without breathing apparatus, if he conserves his
energy. When he's wearing his scuba mask, he's practically a
self-contained submarine. The pressure doesn't seem to bother him much.
He's a tough cookie."
"I'll remember that," said Stanton somberly. "I won't try to race him
underwater."
"No," said Colonel Mannheim. "No, I wouldn't do that if I were you."
They both knew that there was a great deal more to it than that. In
spite of the near miracle that the staff of the Neurophysical Institute
had wrought upon Stanton's nerves and muscles and glands, they could
only go so far. They could only improve the functioning of the equipment
that Stanton already had; they could not add more.
His lungs could be, and had been, increased tremendously in efficiency
of operation, but the amount of air they could actually hold could only
be increased slightly. There was no way to add much extra volume to them
without doing so at the expense of other organs. In a breath-holding
contest, the Nipe would win easily, since his body had evolved organs
for oxygen storage, while the human body had not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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