by Algis Budrys
“This was taken about two a.m. today,” Finchley said. “He’d been lying there for a little over an hour and a half.”
Rogers frowned at the tinge of bafflement in Finchley’s voice. Yes, it was uncanny not being able to tell whether a man was asleep or not. But it was no use doing anything if they were all going to let their nerves go ragged. He almost said something about it until he realized his chest was aching. He relaxed his shoulders, shaking his head at himself.
A cue spot flickered on the film. “All right,” Finchley said, “now listen.” The tiny speaker in the projector began to crackle.
Martino had begun to thrash on his cot, his metal arm striking sparks from the wall.
Rogers winced.
Abruptly, the man started to babble in his sleep. The words poured out, each syllable distinct. But the speech was wildly faster than normal, and the voice was desperate:
“Name! Name! Name!
“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight, about…face! Detail…forward…march!
“Name! Name! Detail…Halt!
“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight!”
Rogers felt Finchley touch his arm. “Think they were walking him?”
Rogers shrugged. “If that’s a genuine nightmare, and if that’s Martino, then, yes — it sounds very much like they were walking him back and forth in a small room and firing questions at him. You know their technique: keep a man on his feet, keep him moving, keep asking questions. Change interrogation teams every few hours, so they’ll be fresh. Don’t let the subject sleep or get off his feet. Walk him delirious. Yes, that’s what it might be.”
“Do you think he’s faking?”
“I don’t know. He may have been. Then again, maybe he was asleep. Maybe he’s one of their people, and he was dreaming we were trying to shake his story.”
After a time, the man on the cot fell back. He lay still, his forearms raised stiffly from the elbows, his hands curled into rigid claws. He seemed to be looking straight up at the camera with his streamlined face, and no one could tell whether he was awake or asleep, thinking or not, afraid or in pain, or who or what he was.
Finchley shut off the projector.
4
Rogers had been awake for thirty-six hours. It was a whole day, now, since the man had come back over the line. Rogers pawed angrily at his burning eyes as he let himself into his apartment. He left his clothes in a rumpled trail across the threadbare old carpet as he crossed the floor toward the bathroom. Fumbling in the medicine cabinet for an Alka-Seltzer, he envied the little wiry men like Finchley who could stay awake for days without their stomachs backing up on them.
The clanking pipes slowly filled the tub with hot brown water while he pulled at his beard with a razor. He clawed his fingers through the crisp, cropped red hair on his scalp, and scowled at the dandruff that came flaking out.
God, he thought wearily, I’m thirty-seven and I’m coming apart.
And as he slid into the tub, feeling the hot water working into the bad hip where he’d been hit by a cobblestone in a riot, looking down under his navel at the bulge that no exercise could quite flatten out any more, the thought drove home.
A few more years, and I’ll really have a pot. When the damp weather comes, that hip’s going to give me all kinds of hell. I used to be able to stay up two and three days at a clip — I’m never going to be able to do that again. Some day I’m going to try some stunt I could do the week before, and I won’t make it.
Some day, too, I’m going to make a decision of some kind — some complex, either-or thing that’s got to be right. I’ll know I’ve got it right — and it’ll be wrong. I’ll start screwing up, and every time after that I’ll get the inside sweats remembering how I was wrong. I’ll start pressing, and worrying, and living on Dexedrine, and if they spot it in time, upstairs, they’ll give me a nice harmless job in a corner somewhere. And if they don’t spot it, one of these days Azarin’s going to put a really good one over on me, and everybody’s kids’ll talk Chinese.
He shivered. The phone rang in the living room.
He climbed out of the tub, holding carefully onto the edge, and wrapped himself in one of the huge towels that was the size of a blanket, and which he was going to take back to the States with him if he was ever assigned there. He padded out to the phone stand and picked up the headpiece. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Rogers?” He recognized one of the War Ministry operators.
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Deptford is on the line. Hold on, please.”
“Thank you.” He waited, wishing the cigarette box wasn’t across the room beside his bed.
“Shawn? Your office said you’d be home.”
“Yes, sir. My shirt was trying to walk off me.”
“I’m here, at the Ministry. I’ve been talking to the Undersecretary for Security. How are you doing on this Martino business? Have you reached any definite conclusions as yet?”
Rogers thought over the terms of his answer. “No, sir, I’m sorry. We’ve only had one day, so far.”
“Yes, I know. Do you have any notion of how much more time you’ll need?”
Rogers frowned. He had to calculate how much time they could possibly spare. “I’d say it’ll take a week.” He hoped.
“That long?”
“I’m afraid so. The team’s set up and working smoothly now, but we’re having a very rough time. He’s like a big egg.”
“I see.” Deptford took a long breath that came clearly over the phone. “Shawn — Karl Schwenn asked me if you knew how important Martino is to us.”
Rogers said quietly: “You can tell Mr. Undersecretary I know my job.”
“All right, Shawn. He wasn’t trying to rag you. He just wanted to be certain.”
“What you mean is, he’s riding you.”
Deptford hesitated. “Someone’s riding him, too, you know.,’
“I could still stand a little less Teutonic discipline in this department.”
“Have you been to sleep lately, Shawn?”
“No, sir. I’ll be filing daily reports, and when we crack this, I’ll phone.”
“Very well, Shawn. I’ll tell him. Good night.”
“Good night, sir.”
He hung up and the red scrambler bulb on the phone went out. He went back into the bathtub and lay there with his eyes closed, letting Martino’s dossier drift up into the forepart of his brain.
There was still very little in it. The man was still five feet eleven inches tall. His weight was up to two hundred sixty-eight pounds. His arches had collapsed, but the thickness of his skull plating apparently made up the height differential.
Nothing else in the I.D. chart was applicable. There were no entries for eyes, hair, or complexion. There was no entry for Date of Birth, though a physiologist had given him an age, within the usual limits of error, that corresponded with 1948. Fingerprints? Distinguishing marks and scars?
Rogers’ bitter smile was pale at the corners. He dried himself, kicked his old clothes into a corner, and dressed. He went back into the bathroom, dropped his toothbrush into his pocket, thought for a moment and added the tube of Alka-Seltzer, and went back to his office.
5
It was early in the morning of the second day. Rogers looked across his desk at Willis, the psychologist.
“If they were going to let Martino go anyway,” Rogers asked, “why would they go to so much trouble with him? He wouldn’t have needed all that hardware just to keep him alive. Why did they carefully make an exhibition piece out of him?”
Willis rubbed a hand over the stubble on his face. “Assuming he’s Martino, they may never have intended to let him go. I agree with you — if they were going to give him back to us originally, they’d probably just have patched him up any old way. Instead, they went to a great deal of trouble to rebuild him as close to a functioning human being as possible.
; “I think what happened was that they knew he’d be useful to them. They expected a great deal of him, and they wanted him to be as physically capable of delivering it as they could make him. It’s quite probable they never even considered how he’d look to us. Oh, they may have gone beyond the absolute necessary minimum in dressing him up — but perhaps it was him they wanted to impress. In any case, they probably thought he’d be grateful to them, and that might give them a wedge. And let’s not discount this idea of arousing his purely professional admiration. Particularly since he’s a physicist. That could be quite a bridge between him and their culture. If that was one of the considerations, I’d say it was excellent psychological technique.”
Rogers lit a new cigarette, grimacing at the taste. “We’ve been over this before. We can play with almost any notion we want to and make it fit some of the few facts we know. What does it prove?”
“Well, as I said, they may never have intended to let us see him again. If we work with that as an assumption, then why did they finally let him go? Aside from the pressure we exerted on them, let’s say he held out. Let’s say they finally saw he wasn’t going to be the gold mine they’d expected. Let’s say they’ve got something else planned — next month, say, or next week. Looking at it that way, it’s reasonable for them to have let him go, figuring also that if they give Martino back, maybe they can get away with their next stunt.”
“That’s too many assumptions. What’s he got to say on the subject?”
Willis shrugged. “He says they made him some offers. He decided they were just bait and turned them down. He says they interrogated him and he didn’t crack.”
“Think it’s possible?”
“Anything’s possible. He hasn’t gone insane yet. That’s something in itself. He was always a pretty firmly balanced individual.”
Rogers snorted. “Look — they cracked everybody they ever wanted to crack. Why not him?”
“I’m not saying they didn’t. But there’s a possibility he’s telling the truth. Maybe they didn’t have enough time. Maybe he had an advantage over their usual subjects. Not having mobile features and a convulsed respiratory cycle to show when they had him close to the ragged edge — that might be a big help.”
“Yes,” Rogers said. “I’m becoming aware of that possibility.”
“His heartbeat’s no indicator, either, with a good part of the load taken over by his powerplant. I’m told his entire metabolic cycle isn’t kosher.”
“I can’t figure it,” Rogers said. “I can’t figure it at all. Either he’s Martino or he isn’t. They went to all this trouble. Now we’ve got him back. If he’s Martino, I still don’t see what they hope to gain. I can’t accept the notion they don’t hope to gain anything — that’s not like them.”
“Not like us, either.”
“All right. Look — we’re two sides, each convinced we’re right and the other fellow’s wrong. This century’s thrashing out the world’s way of life for the next thousand years. When you’re playing for stakes like that, you don’t miss a step. If he isn’t Martino, they might have known we wouldn’t just take him back without checking him. If this’s their idea of a smart trick for slipping us a ringer, they’re dumber than their past performance chart reads. But if heis Martino, why did they let him go? Did he go over to them? God knows, whole countries went Soviet that we never thought would.”
He rubbed the top of his head. “They’ve got us chasing our tails over this guy.”
Willis nodded sourly. “I know. Listen — how much do you know about the Russians?”
“Russians? About as much as I do about the other Soviets. Why?”
Willis said reluctantly, “Well, it’s a trap to generalize about these things. But there’s something we had to learn to take into account, down at PsychoWar. It’s a Slav’s idea of a joke. I keep thinking…whether it started out that way or not, every one of them that knows about this fellow is laughing at us now. They go in for deadpan practical jokes, and especially the kind where somebody bleeds a little. I’ve got a vision of the boys in Novoya Moskva clustered around the vodka at night and laughing and laughing and laughing.”
“That’s nice,” Rogers said. “That’s very fine.” He wiped his palm over his jaw. “That helps.”
“I thought you’d enjoy it.”
“God damn it, Willis, I’ve got to crack that shell of his! We can’t have him running around loose and unsolved. Martino was one of the very best in his business. He was right up there, right in the thick of every new wrinkle we’re going to pleat for the next ten years. He was working on this K-Eighty-Eight thing. And the Soviets had him four months. What’d they get out of him, what’d they do to him — do they still have him?”
“I know…” Willis said slowly. “I can see he might have given away almost anything, or even become an active agent of theirs. But on this business of his not being Martino at all — I frankly can’t believe that. What about the fingerprints on his one good hand?”
Rogers cursed. “His right shoulder’s a mass of scar tissue. If they can substitute mechanical parts for eyes and ears and lungs — if they can motorize an arm and graft it right into him — where does that leave us?”
Willis turned pale. “You mean — they could fake anything. It’s definitely Martino’s right arm, but it isn’t necessarily Martino.”
“That’s right.”
6
The telephone rang. Rogers rolled over on his cot and lifted the receiver off the unit on the floor beside him. “Rogers,” he mumbled. “Yes, Mr. Deptford.” The radiant numerals on his watch were swimming before his eyes, and he blinked sharply to steady them. Eleven-thirty p.m. He’d been asleep a little under two hours.
“Hello, Shawn. I’ve got your third daily report in front of me here. I’m sorry to have awakened you, but you don’t really seem to be making much progress, do you?”
“That’s all right. About waking me up, I mean. No — no, I’m not getting far on this thing.”
The office was dark except for the seep of light under the door from the hall. Across the hall, in a larger office Rogers had commandeered, a specialist clerical staff was collating and evaluating the reports Finchley, Bannister, Willis, and the rest of them had made. Rogers could faintly hear the restless pitter-pat of keyboards.
“Would it be of any value for me to come down?”
“And take over the investigation? Come ahead. Any time.”
Deptford said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “Would I get any farther than you have?”
“No.”
“That’s what I told Karl Schwenn.”
“Still giving you the business, is he?”
“Shawn, he has to. The entire K-Eighty-Eight program has been held up for months. No other project in the world would have been permitted to hang fire this long. At the first doubt of its security, it would have been washed out as a matter of routine. You know that, and that ought to tell you how important the K-Eighty-Eight is. I think you’re aware of what’s going on in Africa at this moment. We’ve got to have something to show. We’ve got to quiet the Soviets down — at least until they’ve developed something to match it. The Ministry’s putting pressure on the Department to reach a quick decision on this man.”
“I’m sorry, sir. We’re almost literally taking this man apart like a bomb. But we don’t have anything to show whose bomb he is.”
“There must be something.”
“Mr. Deptford, when we send a man over the line, we provide him with their I.D. papers. We go further. We fill his pockets with their coins, their door keys, their cigarettes, their combs. We give him one of their billfolds, with their sales receipts and laundry tickets. We give him photographs of relatives and girls, printed on their kind of paper with their processes and chemicals — and yet every one of those items come out of our manufacturing shops and never saw the other side of the line before.”
Deptford sighed. “I know. How’s he taking it?”
&nbs
p; “I can’t tell. When one of our people goes over the line, he has a cover story. He’s an auto mechanic, or a baker, or a tramway conductor. And if he’s one of our good people — and for important jobs we only send the best — then, no matter what happens, no matter what they do to him — he stays a baker or a tramway conductor. He answers questions like a tramway conductor. He’s as bewildered at it all as a tramway conductor would be. If necessary, he bleeds and screams and dies like a tramway conductor.”
“Yes.” Deptford’s voice was quiet. “Yes, he does. Do you suppose Azarin ever wonders if perhaps this man he’s working on really is a tramway conductor?”
“Maybe he does, sir. But he can’t ever act as if he did, or he wouldn’t be doing his job.”
“All right, Shawn. But we’ve got to have our answer soon.”
“I know.”
After a time, Deptford said: “It’s been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, Shawn?”
“Some.”
“You’ve always done the job for me.” Deptford’s voice was quiet, and then Rogers heard the peculiar click a man’s drying lips make as he opens his mouth to wet them. “All right. I’ll explain the situation upstairs, and you do what you can.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Good night, Shawn. Go back to sleep, if you can.”
“Good night, sir.” Rogers hung up. He sat looking down at the darkness around his feet. It’s funny, he thought. I wanted an education, and my family lived a half block away from the docks in Brooklyn. I wanted to be able to understand what a categorical imperative was, and recognize a quote from Byron when I heard one. I wanted to wear a tweed jacket and smoke a pipe under a campus oak somewhere. And during the summers while I was going to high school, I worked for this insurance company, file clerking in the claims investigation division. So when I got the chance to try for that ANG scholarship, I took it. And when they found out I knew something about investigation work, they put me in with their Security trainees. And here I am, and I never thought about it one way or another. I’ve got a pretty good record. Pretty damned good. But I wonder, now, if I wouldn’t have done just as well at something else?