by Algis Budrys
Then he slowly put his shoes on, went to his desk, and clicked on the light.
7
The week was almost over. They were beginning to learn things, but none of them were the slightest help.
Bannister laid the first engineering drawing down on Rogers’ desk. “This is how his head works — we believe. It’s a difficult thing, not being able to get clear X-rays.”
Rogers looked down at the drawing and grunted. Bannister began pointing out specific details, using his pipestem to tap the drawing.
“There’s his eye assembly. He has binocular vision, with servo-motored focusing and tracking. The motors are powered by this miniature pile, in his chest cavity, here. So are the remainder of his artificial components. It’s interesting to note he has a complete selection of filters for his eye lenses. They did him up brown. By the by, he can see by infra-red if he wants to.”
Rogers spat a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. “That’s interesting.”
Bannister said, “Now — right here, on each side of the eyes, are two microphones. Those are his ears. They must have felt it was better design to house both functions in that one central skull opening. It’s directional, but not as effective as God intended. Here’s something else; the shutter that closes that opening is quite tough — armored to protect all those delicate components. The result is he’s deaf when his eyes’re closed. He probably sleeps more restfully for it.”
“When he isn’t faking nightmares, yeah.”
“Or having them.” Bannister shrugged. “Not my department.”
“I wish it wasn’t mine. All right, now what about that other hole?”
“His mouth? Well, there’s a false, immovable jaw over the working one — again, apparently, to protect the mechanism. His true jaws, his saliva ducts and teeth are artificial. His tongue isn’t. The inside of the mouth is plastic-lined. Teflon, probably, or one of its kin. My people’re having a little trouble breaking it down for analysis. But he’s cooperative about letting us gouge out samples.”
Rogers licked his dips. “Okay — fine,” he said brusquely. “But how’s all this hooked into his brain? How does he operate it?”
Bannister shook his head. “I don’t know. He uses it all as if he were born with it, so there’s some sort of connection into his voluntary and autonomic nervous centers. But we don’t yet know exactly how it was done. He’s cooperative, as I said, but I’m not the man to start disassembling any of this — we might not be able to put him back together again. All I know is that somewhere, behind all that machinery, there’s a functioning human brain inside that skull. How the Soviets did it is something else again. You have to remember they’ve been fiddling with this sort of thing a long time.” He laid another sheet atop the first one, paying no attention to the pallor of Rogers’ face.
“Here’s his powerplant. It’s only roughed out in the drawing, but we think it’s just a fairly ordinary pocket pile, something like the SNAP series the Americans worked out for their space program. It’s located where his lungs were, next to the blower that operates his vocal cords and the most ingenious oxygen circulator I’ve ever heard of. The delivered power’s electrical, of course, and it works his arm, his jaws, his audiovisual equipment, and everything else.”
“How well’s the pile shielded?”
Bannister let a measured amount of professional admiration show in his voice. “Well enough so we can get muddy X-rays right around it. There’s some leakage, of course. He’ll die in about fifteen years.”
“Mm.”
“Well, now, man, if they cared whether he lived or died, they’d have supplied us with blueprints.”
“They cared at one time. And fifteen years might be plenty long enough for them, if he isn’t Martino.”
“And if he is Martino?”
“Then, if he is Martino, and they got to him with some of their persuasions, fifteen years might be plenty long enough for them.”
“And if he’s Martino and they didn’t get to him? If he’s the same man he always was, behind his new armor? If he isn’t the Man from Mars? If he’s simply plain Lucas Martino, physicist?”
Rogers shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m running out of ideas for quick answers. But we have to find out. Before we’re through, we may have to find out everything he ever did or felt — everyone he talked to, everything he thought.”
CHAPTER TWO
Lucas Martino was born in the hospital of the large town nearest to his father’s farm. His mother was injured by the birth, and so he was both the eldest son and only child of Matteo and Serafina Martino, truck farmers, of Milano, near Bridgetown, New Jersey. He was named after the uncle who had paid his parents’ passage to the United States in 1947 and lent them the money for the farm.
Milano, New Jersey, was a community of tomato fields, peach orchards, and chicken farms, centering on a general store which sold household staples, stock feed, gasoline for the tractors, and was also the post office. One mile to the north, the four broad lanes of a concrete highway carried booming traffic between Camden-Philadelphia and Atlantic City. To the west, railroad tracks curved down from Camden to Cape May. To the south, forming the base of a triangle of communications, another highway ran from the Jersey shore to the Chester ferry across the mouth of the Delaware, and so connected to all the sprawling highways of the Eastern Seaboard. Bridgetown lay at the meeting of railroad and highway, but Milano was inside the triangle, never more than five minutes away from the world as most people know it, and yet far enough.
Half a century earlier, the clayey earth had been planted, acre-on-acre, in vineyard, and the Malaga Processing Corporation had imported workers by the hundreds from old Italy. Communities had grown up, farms had been cleared, and the language of the area was Italian.
When the grape blight came, the tight cultural pattern was torn. Some, like Lucas Maggiore, left the farms their fathers had built and moved to the Italian communities in other cities. To a certain extent their places were taken by people from different parts of the world. And the newcomers, too, were all farmers by birth and blood. In a few years the small communities were once again reasonably prosperous, set in a new pattern of habits and customs that was much like the old. But the outside world had touched the little towns like Milano, and in turn Milano had sent out some of its own people to the world as most of us know it.
The country was warm in the summer, with mild winters. The outlying farms were set among patches of pine and underbrush, and there were wide-Eyed deer that came into the kitchen gardens during the winter. Most of the roads were graded gravel, and the utility poles carried only one or two strands of cable. There were more pickup trucks than cars on the roads, though the cars were as likely to be new Dodges and Mercurys as not. There was a tomato-packing plant a few miles up the road, and Matteo Martino’s farm was devoted mostly to tomato vines. Except for occasional trips to Bridgetown for dress material and parts for the truck, the packing plant and general store were as far from home as Matteo ever found it necessary to go.
Young Lucas had heavy bones and an already powerful frame from Matteo’s North Italian ancestry. His eyes were brown, but his hair at that age was almost light enough to be blond. His father had a habit of occasionally rumpling his hair and calling him Tedeschino — which means “the little German” — to his mother’s faint annoyance. They lived together in a four-room farmhouse, a closely knit unit, and Lucas grew naturally into a share of the work. They were three people with three different but interdependent responsibilities, as they had to be if the work was to go properly. Serafina kept house and helped with the picking. Matteo did the heavy work, and Lucas, more and more as he grew older and stronger, did the necessary maintenance work that had to be kept up day by day. He weeded, he had charge of racking and storing the hand tools, and Matteo, who had worked in the Fiat plant before he came to America, was gradually teaching him how to repair and maintain the tractor. Lucas had a bent for mechanics.
Hav
ing no brothers or sisters, and being too busy to talk much with his parents during the day, he grew into early adolescence alone, but not lonely. For one thing, he had more than the ordinary share of work to keep him occupied. For another, he thought in terms of shaped parts that fitted into other parts to produce a whole, functioning mechanism. Having no one near his own age whose growth and development he could observe, he learned to observe himself — to stand a little to one side of the young boy and catalogue the things he did, putting each new discovery into its proper place in an already well-disciplined and instinctively systematic brain. From the outside, no doubt, he seemed to be an overly-serious, preoccupied youngster.
Through grammar school, which he attended near his home, he formed no important outside associations. He returned home for lunch and immediately after school, because there was always work to do and because he wanted to. He got high marks in all subjects but English, which he spoke fluently but not often enough or long enough to become interested in its grammatic structure. However, he did well enough at it, and when he was thirteen he was enrolled in the high school at Bridgetown, twelve road miles away by bus.
Twenty-four miles by bus, every day, in the company of twenty other people your own age-people named Morgan, Crosby, Muller, Kovacs, and Jones in addition to those named Del Bello and Scarpa can do things. In particular, they can do things to a quiet, self-sufficient young boy with constantly inquiring eyes. His trouble with grammar disappeared overnight. Morgan taught him to smoke. Kovacs talked about the structure of music, and with Del Bello he went out for football. Most important, in his sophomore year he met Edmund Starke, a short, thickset, reticent man with rimless glasses who taught the physics class. It would take a little time, a little study, and a little growth. But Lucas Martino was on his way out into the world.
CHAPTER THREE
1
It was a week after the man had come across the line. Deptford’s voice was tired and empty over the phone. Rogers, whose ears had been buzzing faintly but constantly during the past two days, had to jam the headpiece hard against his ear in order to make out what he was saying.
“I showed Karl Schwenn all your reports, Shawn, and I added a summary of my own. He agrees that nothing more could have been done.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He was a sector chief himself once, you know. He’s aware of these things.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In a sense, this sort of thing happens to us every day. If anything, it happens to the Soviets even more often. I like to think we take longer to reach these decisions than they do.”
“I suppose so.”
Deptford’s voice was oddly inconclusive in tone, now, as though he were searching his mind for something to say that would round things off. But it was a conversation born to trail away rather than end, and Deptford gave up after only a short pause.
“That’s it, then. Tomorrow you can disperse the team, and you’re to stand by until you’re notified what policy we’re going to pursue with regard to Mar — to the man.”
“All right, sir.”
“Good-bye, Shawn.”
“Good night, Mr. Deptford.” He put the receiver down and rubbed his ear.
2
Rogers and Finchley sat on the edge of the cot and looked across the tiny room at the faceless man, who was sitting in the one chair beside the small table on which he ate his meals. He had been kept in this room through most of the week, and he had gone out of it only to the laboratory rigged in the next room. He had been given new clothes. He had used the bathroom shower several times without rusting.
“Now, Mr. Martino,” the FBI man was saying politely, “I know we’ve asked before, but have you remembered anything since our last talk?”
One last try, Rogers thought. You always give it one whack for luck before you give up.
He hadn’t yet told anyone on the team that they were all through. He’d asked Finchley to come down here with him because it was always better to have more than one man in on an interrogation. If the subject started to weaken, you could ask questions alternately, bouncing him back and forth between you like a tennis ball, and his head would swing from one man to the other as though he were watching himself in flight.
No — no, Rogers thought, to hell with that. I just didn’t want to come down here alone.
The overhead light winked on polished metal. It was only after a second or two that Rogers realized the man had shaken his head in answer to Finchley’s question.
“No, I don’t remember a thing. I can remember being caught in the blast-it looked like it was coming straight at my face.” He barked a savage, throaty laugh. “I guess it was. I woke up in their hospital and put my one hand up to my head.” His right arm went up to his hard cheek as though to help him remember. It jerked back down abruptly, almost in shock, as if that were exactly what had happened the first time.
“Uh-huh,” Finchley said quickly. “Then what?”
“That night they shot a needle full of some anesthetic into my arm. When I woke up again, I had this arm.”
The motorized limb flashed up and his knuckles rang faintly against his skull. Either from the conducted sound or the memory of that first astonished moment, Martino winced visibly.
His face fascinated Rogers. The two lenses of his eyes, collecting light from all over the room, glinted darkly in their recess. The grilled shutter set flush in his mouth opening looked like a row of teeth bared in a desperate grimace.
Of course, behind that facade a man who wasn’t Martino might be smiling in thin laughter at the team’s efforts to crack past it.
“Lucas,” Rogers said as softly as he could, not looking in the man’s direction, fogging the verbal pitch low and inside.
Martino’s head turned toward him without a second’s hesitation. “Yes, Mr. Rogers?”
Ball One. If he’d been trained, he’d been well trained.
“Did they interrogate you extensively?”
The man nodded. “I don’t know what you’d consider extensive in a case like this of course. But I was up and around after two months; they were able to talk to me for several weeks before that. In all, I’d say they spent about ten weeks trying to get me to tell them something they didn’t already know.”
“Something about the K-Eighty-Eight, you mean?”
“I didn’t mention the K-Eighty-Eight. I don’t think they know about it. They just asked general questions: what lines of investigation we were pursuing — things like that.”
Ball Two.
“Well, look, Mr. Martino,” Finchley said, and Martino’s skull moved uncannily on his neck, like a tank’s turret swiveling. “They went to a lot of trouble with you. Frankly, if we’d gotten to you first there’s a chance you might be alive today, yes, but you wouldn’t like yourself very much.”
The metal arm twitched sharply against the side of the desk. There was an over-long silence. Rogers half expected some bitter answer from the man.
“Yes, I see what you mean.” Rogers was surprised at the complete detachment in the slightly muffled voice. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t expected some pretty positive return on their investment.”
Finchley looked helplessly at Rogers. Then he shrugged. “I guess you’ve said it about as specifically as possible,” he told Martino.
“They didn’t get it, Mr. Finchley. Maybe because they outdid themselves. It’s pretty tough to crack a man who doesn’t show his nerves.”
A home run, over the centerfield bleachers and still rising when last seen.
Rogers’ calves pushed the cot back with a scrape against the cement floor when he stood up. “All right, Mr. Martino. Thank you. And I’m sorry we haven’t been able to reach any conclusion.”
The man nodded. “So am I.”
Rogers watched him closely. “There’s one more thing. You know one of the reasons we pushed you so hard was because the government was anxious about the future of the K-Eighty-Eight program.”
>
“Yes?”
Rogers bit his lip. “I’m afraid that’s all over now. They couldn’t wait any longer.”
Martino looked quickly from Rogers to Finchley’s face, and back again. Rogers could have sworn his eyes glowed with a light of their own. There was a splintering crack and Rogers stared at the edge of the desk where the man’s hand had closed on it convulsively.
“I’m not ever going back to work, am I?” the man demanded.
He pushed himself away from the desk and stood as though his remaining muscles, too, had been replaced by steel cables under tension.
Rogers shook his head. “I couldn’t say, officially. But I don’t see how they’d dare let a man of your ability get near any critical work. Of course, there’s still a policy decision due on your case. So I can’t say definitely until it reaches me.”
Martino paced three steps toward the end of the room, spun, and paced back.
Rogers found himself apologizing to the man. “They couldn’t take the risk. They’re probably trying some alternate approach to the problem K-Eighty-Eight was supposed to handle.”
Martino slapped his thigh.
“Probably that monstrosity of Besser’s.” He sat down abruptly, facing away from them. His hand fumbled at his shirt pocket and he pushed the end of a cigarette through his mouth grille. A motor whined, and the split soft rubber inner gasket closed around it. He lit the cigarette with jerky motions of his good arm.
“Damn it,” he muttered savagely, “Damn it, K-Eighty-Eight was the answer! They’ll go broke trying to make that abortion of Besser’s work.” He took an angry drag on the cigarette.
Suddenly he spun his head around and looked squarely at Rogers. “What in hell are you staring at? I’ve got a throat and tongue. Why shouldn’t I smoke?”