_The only way I'll ever get all of this stuff straightened out in my mind is to get more information. And it doesn't look as though anyone is going to give it to me on a platter, either. The Institute men seem to be awfully chary about giving information away, even to me. George even had to chase away old rub-and-pound (That feels good!) before he would talk about the Nipe. Can't blame 'em for that, of course. There'd be hell to pay for everyone around if the general public ever found out that the Nipe has been kept as a pet for six years._ _How many people has he killed in that time? Twenty? Thirty? How much blood does Colonel Mannheim have on his hands?_ _Though they know not why, Or for what they give, Still, the few must die, That the many may live._ _I wonder whether I read all that stuff complete or just browsed through a copy of Bartlett's_ Quotations. _Fragments._ _We've got to get organized around here, brother. Colonel Mannheim's puppet is going to have to cut his strings and do a Pinocchio._ _[16]_ Colonel Walther Mannheim unlocked the door of his small suite of rooms in the Officers' Barracks. God! he was tired. It wasn't so much physical exhaustion as mental and emotional release from the tension he had been under for the preceding few hours. Or had it been years? He dropped his heavy briefcase on a nearby chair, took off his cap and dropped it on the briefcase. He stood there for a moment, looking tiredly around. Everything was in order, as usual. He seldom came to Government City any more. Twenty or so visits in the last ten years, and only a dozen of them had been long enough to force him to spend the night in his old suite at the World Police Headquarters at the southern end of the island. He didn't like to stay in Government City; it made him uneasy, being this close to the Nipe's underground nest. The Nipe had too many taps into government communication channels, too many ways of seeing and hearing what went on here in the nerve center of civilization. One of the most difficult parts of this whole operation had been the careful balancing of information flow through those channels that the Nipe had tapped. To stop using them would betray immediately to that alien mind that his taps had been detected. The information flow must go on as usual. There was no way to censor the information, either, although it was known that the Nipe relied on them for planning his raids. But since there was no way of knowing, even after years of observation, what sort of thing the Nipe would be wanting next, there was no way of knowing which information should be removed from the tapped channels.