He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He had been walking through Memorial Park, past the museum—an old, worn edifice that was still called the Missouri Pacific Building. There was a small restaurant only a block away.
He reached into his pocket and took out the few coins that were there. Not much, but enough to buy a sandwich and a glass of milk. Because of the trust fund that had been set up when he had started the treatment at the Neurophysical Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't have much cash. What good was cash at the Institute, where everything was provided?
He stopped at a newsvendor, dropped in a coin, and waited for the reproducing mechanism to turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the folded sheets and went on to the restaurant.
He rarely read a newssheet. Mostly, his information about the world that existed outside the walls of the Institute came from the televised newscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relatively unimportant little stories about people who had done small, relatively unimportant things—stories that didn't appear in the headlines or the newscasts.
The last important news story that he had heard had come two nights before. The Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown the shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow open the vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the whole front door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted paraglass that had lain on the pavement showed how much force had been applied from within.
And yet, the results had not been those of an explosion. It was more as though some tremendous force had pushed outward from within. It had not been the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that had unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.
Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. It appeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered by a giant hand. The main braces of the storefront were still there, bent outward a little, but not broken.
The vault door had been slammed to the floor of the shop, only a few feet from the front door. The vault itself had been farther back, and the camera had showed it standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there had been pieces of fragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.
The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from a point within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outward to tear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin or modeling clay.
Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisier construction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known, outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In a widely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vault had been cut open by a team of well-trained, well-equipped technicians. It had taken twenty-one hours for them to breach the wall, and they had had no fear of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the intricate alarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even a borazon drill could make much of an impression on a metal which had been formed under millions of atmospheres of pressure.