Bart Stanton liked to walk along those quiet streets of an evening, just to let the placid peacefulness seep into him.
And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small Huckleberry Finn pleasure of playing hooky from the Neurophysical Institute.
Technically, he supposed, he was still a patient there. More, now that he had completely accepted Colonel Walther Mannheim's assignment, he was presumably under military discipline. He assumed that if he had asked permission to leave the Institute's grounds he would have been given that permission without question.
But, like playing hooky or stealing watermelon, it was more fun if it was done on the sly. The boy who comes home feeling deliciously wicked and delightfully sinful after staying away from school all day can have his whole day ruined completely by being told that it was a holiday and the school had been closed. Bart Stanton didn't want to spoil his own fun by asking for permission to leave the grounds when it was so easy for a man with his special abilities to get out without asking.
Besides, there was a chance—a small one, he thought—that permission might be refused for one reason or another, and Stanton was fully aware that he would not disobey a direct request—to say nothing of a direct order—that he stay within the walls of the Institute.
He didn't want to run any risk of losing his freedom, small though it was. After five years of mental and physical hell, he felt a need to get out into the world of normal, ordinary, everyday people.
His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the streetlights. The people around him walked as casually and with seemingly as little purpose as he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that he felt inside the walls of the Institute.
But he knew he could never get away from that sense of urgency completely, even out here. There were times when it seemed that all he had ever done, all his whole life, was to train himself for the one single purpose of besting the Nipe.
If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from Dr. George Yoritomo or from Colonel Mannheim. If he wasn't working his muscles, he was laying plans and considering possibilities for the one great goal that seemed to be the focal point of his whole life.
What would happen if he failed?