Half a century earlier, the clayey earth had been planted, acre-on-acre of 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 fourroom 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.
Having 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 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 F.B.I. man was saying politely, “I know we’ve asked before, but have you remembered anything new 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 spine. 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 m
an 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-Eightyeight 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 a tongue. Why shouldn’t I smoke?”
“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 F.B.I. 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, and 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 halfideas, 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 theoryspieler.
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 64