"That we should help each other," Stanton said.
It was as simple as that.
XVII
Stanton sat in his hotel room, smoking a cigarette, staring at the wall, and thinking.
He was alone again. All the fuss, feathers, and fooferaw were over. Farnsworth was in another room of the suite, making his plans for a complete physical examination of the Nipe. Yoritomo was having the time of his life, holding a conversation with the Nipe, drawing the alien out and getting him to talk about his own race and their history. And Mannheim was plotting the next phase of the capture—the cover-up.
Stanton smiled a little. Colonel Mannheim was a great one for planning, all right. Every little detail was taken care of. It sometimes made his plans more complex than necessary, Stanton suspected. Mannheim tended to try to account for every eventuality, and, after he had done that, he would set aside reserves here and there, just in case they might be useful if something unforeseen happened.
Stanton got up, walked over to the window, and looked down at the streets of Government City, eight floors below.
All things considered, the Government had done the right thing. And, in picking Mannheim, they had picked the right man. What would the average citizen think if he knew the true story of the Nipe? If he discovered that, at this very moment, the Nipe was being treated almost as an honored guest of the Government? If he suspected that the Nipe could have been killed easily at any time during the past six years?
Would it be possible to explain that, in the long run, the knowledge possessed by the Nipe was tremendously more valuable to the Race of Man that the lives of a few individuals?
Could those people down there, and the others like them all over the world, be made to understand that, by his own lights, the Nipe had been acting in a most civilized and gentlemanly way he knew? Would they see that, because of the priceless information stored in that alien brain, the Nipe's life had to be preserved at any cost?