Who?

by Algis Budrys

  “We know that, Mr. Martino,” Finchley said gently.

  Martino’s red gaze shifted. “You just think you do.” He turned back to face the wall. “Weren’t you two about to leave?”

  Rogers nodded silently before he spoke. “Yes. Yes, we were, Mr. Martino. We’ll be going. Sorry.”

  “All right.” He sat without speaking until they were almost out the door. Then he said, “Can you get me some lens tissue?”

  “I’ll send some in right away.” Rogers closed the door gently. “His eyes must get dirty, at that,” he commented to Finchley.

  The FBI man nodded absently, walking along the hall beside him.

  Rogers said uncomfortably, “That was quite a show he put on. If he is Martino, I don’t blame him.”

  Finchley grimaced. “And if he isn’t, I don’t blame him either.”

  “You know,” Rogers said, “if we’d been able to crack him today, they would have kept the K-Eighty-Eight program going. It won’t actually be scrubbed until midnight. It was more or less up to me.”

  “Oh?”

  Rogers nodded. “I told him it was washed out because I wanted to see what he’d do. I suppose I thought he might make some kind of break.”

  Rogers felt a peculiar kind of defeat. He had run down. He was empty of energy, and everything from now on would only be a falling downhill, back the way he had come.

  “Well,” Finchley said, “you can’t say he didn’t react.”

  “Yes, he did. He reacted.” Rogers found himself disliking the sound of what he would say. “But he didn’t react in any way that would help. All he did was act like a normal human being.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  The physics laboratory at Bridgetown Memorial High School was a longish room with one wall formed by the windows of the building front. It was furnished with long, varnished, masonite-topped tables running toward the end of the room where Edmund Starke’s desk was set on a raised platform. Blackboards ran along two of the remaining walls, and equipment cupboards took up the other. By and large, the room was adequate for its purpose, neither substandard nor good enough to satisfy Starke, neither originally designed to be a laboratory nor rendered hopelessly unsuited by its conversion from two ordinary classrooms. It was intended to serve as the space enclosing the usual high school physics class, and that was what it was.

  Lucas Martino saw it as something else again, though he didn’t realize it and for quite some time couldn’t have said why. But never once did he remind himself that a highly similar class might have been held in any high school in the world. This was his physics class, taught by his instructor, in his laboratory. This was the place, in its place, as everything in his universe was in its place or beginning to near it. So when he came in each day he first looked around it searchingly before he took his chair at one of the tables, with an unmistakably contented and oddly proprietary expression. Consequently, Starke marked him out for an eager student.

  Lucas Martino couldn’t ignore a fact. He judged no fact; he only filed it away, like a machine part found on a workshop bench, confident that someday he would find the part to which it fitted, knowing that some day all these parts would, by inevitable process, join together in a complete mechanism which he would put to use. Furthermore, everything he saw represented a fact to him. He made no judgments, so nothing was trivial. Everything he had ever seen or heard was put somewhere in his brain. His memory was not photographic — he wasn’t interested in a static picture of his past — but it was all-inclusive. People said his mind was a jumble of odd knowledge. And he was always trying to fit these things together, to see to what mechanism they led.

  In classes, he was quiet and answered only when asked to. He had the habit of depending on himself to fit his own facts together, and the notion of consulting someone else — even Starke — by asking an impromptu question was foreign to him. He was accustomed to a natural order of things in which few answers were supplied. Asking Starke to help him with his grasp of facts would have seemed unfair to him.

  Consequently, his marks showed unpredictable ups and downs. Like all high school science classes, the only thing Starke’s physics class was supposed to teach was the principal part of the broad theoretical base. His students were given and expected to learn by rote the various simpler laws and formulae, like so many bricks ripped whole out of a misty and possibly useful structure. They were not yet — if ever — expected to construct anything of their own out of them. Lucas Martino failed to realize this. He would have been uncomfortable with the thought. It was his notion that Starke was throwing out hints, and he was presumed capable of filling in the rest for himself.

  So there were times when he saw the inevitable direction of a lecture before its first sentences were cold, and when he leaped to the conclusion of an experiment before Starke had the apparatus fairly set up. One thing after another would fall into place for him, garnering its structure out of his storehouse of half-ideas, hints, and unrelated data. When this happened, he’d experienced what someone else would have called a flash of genius.

  But there were other times when things only seemed to fit, when actually they did not, and then he shot down a blind alley in pursuit of a hare-brained mistake, making some ridiculous error no one else would have made or could have.

  When this happened, he painfully worked his way back along the false chain of facts, taking each in turn and examining it to see why he’d been fooled, eventually returning to the right track. But, having once built a structure, he found it impossible to discard it entirely. So another part of his mind was a storehouse of interesting ideas that hadn’t worked, but were interesting — theories that were wild, but had seemed to hold together. To a certain extent, these phantom heresies stayed behind to color his thinking. He would never quite be an orthodox theory-spieler.

  Meanwhile, he went on gathering facts.

  Starke was a veteran of the high school teaching circuit. He’d seen his share of morning glories and of impassive average-mechanics working for the Valedictorian’s chair on graduation night. He’d gotten past the point of resenting them, and long before that he’d gotten past the point of wasting his conversation on them. He’d found out early in the game that their interests were not in common with his own.

  So Lucas Martino attracted him and he felt obligated to establish some kind of link with the boy. He took several weeks to find the opportunity, and even then he had to force it. He was clumsy, because sociability wasn’t his forte. He was an economical man, saw no reason to establish social relations with anyone he didn’t respect, and respected few people.

  Lucas was finishing up a report at the end of a class when Starke levered himself out of his chair, waited for the rest of the class to start filing out, and walked over to the boy.

  “Martino — ”

  Lucas looked up, surprised but not startled. “Yes, Mr. Starke?”

  “Uh — you’re not a member of the Physics Club, are you?”

  “No, sir.” The Physics Club existed as yet another excuse for a group picture in the yearbook.

  “Well — I’ve been thinking of having the club perform some special experiments. Outside of class. Might even work up some demonstrations and stage them at an assembly. I thought the rest of the student body might be interested.” All of this was sheer fabrication, arrived at on the spur of the moment, and Starke was astonished at himself. “Wondered if you’d care to join in.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Starke. I don’t have much extra time, with football practice and work at night.”

  Ordinarily, Starke wouldn’t have pressed further. Now he said, “Come on, Martino. Frank Del Bello’s on the team, too, and he’s a member of the club.”

  For some reason, Lucas felt as though Starke were probing an exposed nerve. After all, as far as Lucas Martino knew up to this moment, he had no rational basis for considering the physics class any more important than his other courses. But he reacted sharply and quickly: �
��I’m afraid I’m not interested in popular science, Mr. Starke.” He immediately passed over the fact that belonging to the club as it was and following Starke’s new program were two different things. He wasn’t interested in fine argumentative points. He clearly understood that Starke was after something else entirely, and that Starke, with his momentum gathered, would keep pushing. “I don’t think that demonstrating nuclear fission by dropping a cork into a bunch of mousetraps has anything to do with physics. I’m sorry.”

  It was suddenly a ticklish moment for both of them. Starke was unused to being stopped once he’d started something. Lucas Martino lived by facts, and the facts of the circumstances left him only one position to take, as he saw it. In a very real sense, each felt the other’s mass resisting him, and each knew that something violent could result unless they found some neutral way to disengage.

  “What is your idea of physics, Martino?”

  Lucas took the opening and turned into it gratefully. He found it led farther than he’d thought. “I think it’s the most important thing in the world, sir,” he said, and felt like a man stumbling out over a threshold.

  “You do, eh? Why?” Starke slammed the door behind him.

  Lucas fumbled for words. “The universe is a perfect structure. Everything in it is in balance. It’s complete. Nothing can be added to it or taken away.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  Bit by bit, facts were falling together in Lucas Martino’s mind. Ideas, half-thoughts, bits of formulation that he failed to recognize as fragments of a philosophy — all these things suddenly arranged themselves in a systematic and natural order as he listened to what he’d just said on impulse. For the first time since the day he’d come to this class with a fresh, blank laboratory notebook, he understood exactly what he was doing here. He understood more than that; he understood himself. His picture of himself was complete, finished for all time.

  That left him free to turn to something else.

  “Well, Martino?”

  Lucas took one deep breath, and stopped fumbling. “The universe is constructed of perfectly fitted parts. Every time you rearrange the position of one, you affect all the others. If you add something in one place, you had to take it away from somewhere else. Everything we do — everything that has ever been done — was accomplished by rearranging pieces of the universe. If we knew exactly where everything fitted, and what moving it would do to all the other pieces, we’d be able to do things more effectively. That’s what physics is doing — investigating the structure of the universe and giving us a system to handle it with. That’s the most basic thing there is. Everything else depends on it.”

  “That’s an article of faith with you, is it?”

  “That’s the way it is. Faith has nothing to do with it.” The answer came quickly. He didn’t quite understand what Starke meant. He was too full of the realization that he had just learned what he was for.

  Starke had run across carefully rehearsed speeches before. He got at least one a year from some bright boy who’d seen a movie about Young Tom Edison. He knew Martino wasn’t likely to be giving him that, but he’d been fooled before. So he took his long look at the boy before he said anything.

  He saw Lucas Martino looking back at him as though sixteen-year-old boys took their irrevocable vows every day.

  It upset Starke. It made him uncomfortable, and it made him draw back for the first time in his life.

  “Well. So that’s your idea of physics. Planning to go on to Massachusetts Tech, are you?”

  “If I can get the money together. And my grades aren’t too high, are they?”

  “The grades can be taken care of, if you’ll work at it. The semester’s not that far gone. And money’s no problem. There’re all kinds of science scholarships. If you miss on that, you can probably get one of the big outfits like GE to underwrite you.”

  Martino shook his head. “It’s a three-factor problem. My graduating average won’t be that high, no matter what I do the next two years here. And I don’t want to be tied to anybody’s company, and third, scholarships don’t cover everything. You’ve got to have decent clothes at college, and you’ve got to have some money in your pocket to relax on once in a while. I’ve heard about MIT. Nobody human can take their curriculum and earn money part-time. If you’re there, you’re there twenty-four hours a day. And I’m going for my doctorate. That’s seven years, minimum. No, I’m going to New York after I graduate here and work in my Uncle Luke’s place until I get some money put away. I’ll be a New York resident and put in a cheap year at CCNY. I’ll pile up an average there, and get my tuition scholarship to Massachusetts that way.”

  The plan unfolded easily and spontaneously. Starke couldn’t have guessed it was being created on the spot. Martino had put all the facts together, seen how they fit, and what action they indicated. It was as easy as that.

  “Talked it over with your parents, have you?”

  “Not yet.” For the first time, he showed hesitation. “It’ll be rough on them. It’ll be a long time before I can send them any money.” Also, but never to be put in words for a stranger, the life of the family would be changed forever, never to be put back in the same way again.

  2

  “I don’t understand,” his mother said. “Why should you suddenly want to go to this school in Boston? Boston is far away from here. Farther than New York.”

  He had no easy answer. He sat awkwardly at the dinner table, looking down at his plate.

  “I don’t understand it either,” his father said to his mother. “But if he wants to go, that’s his choice. He’s not leaving right away, in any case. By the time he goes, he’ll be a man. A man has a right to decide these things.”

  He looked from his mother to his father, and he could see it wasn’t something he could explain. For a moment, he almost said he’d changed his mind.

  Instead he said, “Thank you for your permission.” Move one piece of the universe, and all the others are affected. Add something to one piece, another must lose. What real choice did he have, when everything meshed together, one block of fact against another, and there was only one best way to act?

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  On the eighth day after the man had come over the line, the annunciator buzzed on Rogers’ desk.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Deptford is here to see you, sir.”

  Rogers grunted. He said, “Send him in, please,” and sat waiting.

  Deptford came into the office. He was a thin, grayfaced man in a dark suit, and he was carrying a briefcase.

  “How are you, Shawn?” he said quietly.

  Rogers stood up. “Fine, thanks,” he answered slowly. “How are you?”

  Deptford shrugged. He sat down in the chair beside the end of Rogers’ desk and laid the briefcase in his lap. “I thought I’d bring the decision on the Martino matter down with me.” He opened the briefcase and handed Rogers a manila envelope. “In there’s the usual file copy of the official policy directive, and a letter to you from Karl Schwenn’s office.”

  Rogers picked up the envelope. “Did Schwenn give you a very bad time, sir?”

  Deptford smiled thinly. “They didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t seem to be anybody’s fault. But they’d needed an answer very badly. Now, at the sacrifice of the K-Eighty-Eight program, they don’t need it so badly any more. But they still need it of course.”

  Rogers nodded slowly.

  “I’m replacing you here as sector chief. They’ve put a new man in my old job. And the letter from Schwenn reassigns you to follow up on Martino. Actually, I think Schwenn arrived at the best answer to a complicated situation.”

  Rogers felt his lips stretch in an uncomfortable grimace of surprise and embarrassment. “Well.” There was nothing else to say.

  2

  “Direct investigation won’t do it,” Rogers said to the man. “We tried, but it can’t be done. We can’t prove w
ho you are.”

  The glinting eyes looked at him impassively. There was no telling what the man might be thinking. They were alone in the small room, and Rogers suddenly understood that this had turned into a personal thing between them. It had happened gradually, he could see now, built up in small increments over the past days, but this was the first time it had struck him, and so it had also happened suddenly. Rogers found himself feeling personally responsible for the man’s being here, and for everything that had happened to him. It was an unprofessional way to feel, but the fact was that he and this man were here face to face, alone, and when it came down to the actual turn of the screw it was Rogers whose hand was on the wrench.

  “I see what you mean,” the man said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it.” He was sitting stiffly in his chair, his metal hand across his lap, and there was no telling whether he had been thinking of it coldly and dispassionately, or whether hopes and desperate ideas had gone echoing through his brain like men in prison hammering on the bars. “I thought I might be able to come up with something. What about skin pore patterns? Those couldn’t have been changed.”

  Rogers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Martino. Believe me, we had experts in physical identification thrashing this thing back and forth for days. Pore patterns were mentioned, as a matter of fact. But unfortunately, that won’t do us any good. We don’t have verified records from before the explosion. Nobody ever thought we’d have to go into details as minute as that.” He raised his hand, rubbed it wearily across the side of his head, and dropped it in resignation. “That’s true of everything in that line, I’m afraid. We have your fingerprints and retinal photographs on file. Both are useless now.”