There was, of course, the possibility that the rulers cared very little for their subjects here on Earth, that they ignored what went on most of the time. Still, it would seem that they would recognize the actions of one of their own kind and take steps to investigate. He was still not absolutely certain about Colonel Walther Mannheim. Was he a Real Person or merely an underling? The information on the man was pitifully small. It would, of course, be possible to wait, to see how Colonel Walther Mannheim behaved if and when he discovered the Nipe's nest. But if he had not discovered it after all these years--and the information indicated that he had been looking almost since the first--then it was unlikely that he was a Real Person. In which case, it would be dangerous to allow him to find the nest. No, the best plan of action would be to go to Colonel Walther Mannheim first. _[15]_ _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ The action around the handball court was beautiful to watch. The robot mechanism behind Bart Stanton would fire out a ball at random intervals ranging from a tenth to a quarter of a second, bouncing them off the wall in a random pattern. Stanton would retrieve the ball before it hit the ground and bounce it off the wall again to strike the target on the moving robot. Stanton had to work against a machine; no ordinary human being could have given him any competition. _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ _Pok! Pok!_ PLUNK. "One miss," Stanton said to himself. But he fielded the next one nicely and slammed it home. _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ The physical therapist who was standing to one side, well out of the way of those hard-slammed, fast-moving drives, glanced at his watch. It was almost time. _Pok! Pok! Ping!_ The machine, having delivered its last ball, shut itself off with a smug click. Stanton turned away from the handball court and walked toward the physical therapist, who was holding out a robe for him. "That was good, Bart," he said. "Real good." "One miss," Stanton said as he shrugged into the robe. "Yeah. Your timing was off a shade there, I guess. It's hard for me to tell till I look at the slow-motion photographs. Your arms and hands are just blurs to me when they're moving that fast. But you managed to chop another ten seconds off your previous record, anyway." Stanton looked at him. "You reset the timer again," he said accusingly. But there was a grin on his face. The P.T. man grinned back. "Yup. Come on, step into the mummy case." He waved toward the narrow niche in the wall of the court, a niche just big enough to hold a standing man. Stanton stepped in, and various instrument pickups came out of the walls and touched him at various points on his body. Hidden machines recorded his heartbeat, his blood pressure, his brain activity, his muscular tension, his breathing, and several other factors.