American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “No,” Finchley admitted, “I can’t see any way out of it.”

  4.

  There was a ground fog at the airfield and Rogers stood outside alone, waiting for it to lift. He kept his back turned to the car parked ten feet away, beside the administration building, where the other man was sitting with Finchley. Rogers’ topcoat collar was turned up, and his hands were in his pockets. He was staring out at the dirty metal skin of the airplane waiting on the apron. He was thinking of how aircraft in flight flashed molten in the sky, dazzling as angels, and how on the ground their purity was marred by countless grease-rimmed rivet heads, by oil stains, by scuff marks where mechanics’ feet had slipped, and by droplets of water that dried away to each leave a speck of dirt behind.

  He slipped two fingers inside his shirt, like a pickpocket, and pulled out a cigarette. Closing his thin lips around it, he stood bareheaded in the fog, his hair a corona of beaded moisture, and listened to the public address system announce that the fog was dissipating and passengers were requested to board their planes. He looked through the glass wall of the administration building into the passenger lounge and saw the people there getting to their feet, closing their coats, getting their tickets ready.

  The man had to go out into the world sometime. This was an ordinary commercial civilian flight, and sixty-five people, not counting Rogers and Finchley, would be exposed to him at one blow.

  Rogers hunched his shoulders, lit his cigarette, and wondered what would happen. The fog seemed to have worked its way into his nasal passages and settled at the back of his throat. He felt cold and depressed. The gate checker came out and took up his position, and people began filing out of the passenger lounge.

  Rogers listened for the sound of the car door. When it didn’t come at once, he wondered if the man was going to wait until everyone was aboard, in hopes of being able to take the last seat and so, for a little time, avoid being noticed.

  The man waited until the passengers were collected in the inevitable knot around the ticket checker. Then he got out of the car, waited for Finchley to slide out, and slammed the door like a gunshot.

  Rogers jerked his head in that direction, realizing everyone else was, too.

  For a moment, the man stood there holding his overnight bag in one gloved hand, his hat pulled down low over his obscene skull, his topcoat buttoned to the neck, his collar up. Then he set the bag down and pulled off his gloves, raising his face to look directly at the other passengers. Then he lifted his metal hand and yanked his hat off.

  In the silence he walked forward quickly, hat and bag in his good hand, taking his ticket out of his breast pocket with the other. He stopped, bent, and picked up a woman’s handbag.

  “I believe you dropped this?” he murmured.

  The woman took her purse numbly. The man turned to Rogers and, in a deliberately cheerful voice, said, “Well, time to be getting aboard, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Six

  1.

  Young Lucas came to the city at a peculiar time.

  The summer of 1966 was uncomfortable for New York. It was usually cooler than expected, and it often rained. The people who ordinarily spent their summer evenings in the parks, walking back and forth and then sitting down to watch other people walk past, felt disappointed in the year. The grumbling old men who sold ice cream sticks from threewheeled carts rang their bells more vigorously than they would have liked. Fewer people came to the band concerts on the Mall in Central Park, and the music, instead of diffusing gently through heat-softened air, had a tinny ring to the practiced ear.

  There were hot days here and there. There were weeks at a time when it seemed that the weather had settled down at last, and the city, like a machine late in shifting gears but shifting at last, would try to fall into its true summer rhythm. But then it would rain again. The rain glazed the sidewalks instead of soaking into them, and the leaves on the trees curled rather than opened. It would have been a perfectly good enough summer for Boston, but New York had to force itself a little. Everyone was just a fraction on edge, knowing how New York summers ought to be, knowing how you ought to feel in the summer, and knowing that this year just wasn’t making it.

  Young Lucas Martino knew only that the city seemed to be a nervous, discontented place. His uncle, Lucas Maggiore, who was his mother’s older brother and who had been in the States since 1936, was glad enough to see and hire him, but he was growing old and he was moody. Espresso Maggiore, where young Lucas was to work from noon to three a.m. each day but Monday, grinding coffee, charging the noisy espresso machine, carrying armfuls of cups to the tables, had until recently been a simple neighborhood trattoria for the neighborhood Italians who didn’t care to patronize the rival Greek kaffeneikons.

  But the tourist area of Greenwich Village had spread down to include the block where Lucas Maggiore had started his coffee house when he stopped wrestling sacks of roasted beans in a restaurant supply warehouse. So now there were murals on the walls, antique tables, music by Muzak, and a new I.B.M. electric cash register. Lucas Maggiore, a big, heavy, indrawn bachelor who had always managed to have enough money, now had more. He was able to pay his only nephew more than he deserved, and still had enough left to make him wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t live more freely than he had in the past. But he had an ingrained caution against flying too far in the face of temptation, and so he was moody. He felt a vague resentment against the coffee house, hired a manager, and stayed away most of the time. He began stopping more and more often by the Park Department tables in Washington Square, where old men in black overcoats sat and played checkers with the concentration of chessmasters, and sometimes he was on the verge of asking to play.

  When young Lucas came to New York, his uncle had embraced him at Pennsylvania Station, patted him between the shoulder blades, and held him off by both arms to look at him:

  “Ah! Lucas! Bello nipotino! E la Mama, il Papa—come lei portano? ”

  “They’re fine, Uncle Lucas. They send their love. I’m glad to see you.”

  “So. All right—I like you, you like me—we’ll get along. Let’s go.” He took Lucas’ suitcase in one big hand and led the way to the subway station. “Mrs. Dormiglione—my landlady— she has a room for you. Cheap. It’s a good room. Nice place. Old lady Dormiglione, she’s not much for cleaning up. You’ll have to do that yourself. But that way, she won’t bother you much. You’re young, Lucas—you don’t want old people bothering you all the time. You want to be with young people. You’re eighteen—you want a little life.” Lucas Maggiore inclined his head in the direction of a passing girl.

  Young Lucas didn’t quite know what to say. He followed his uncle into a downtown express car and stood holding on to the overhead bar as the train jerked to a start. Finally, having nothing conclusive to say, he said nothing. When the train reached Fourth Street, he and his uncle got off, and went to the furnished rooming house just off West Broadway where Lucas Maggiore lived on the top floor and Lucas Martino was to live in the basement—with an entrance separate from the main front door. After young Lucas had been introduced to Mrs. Dormiglione, shown his room, and given a few minutes to put his suitcase away and wash his face, his uncle took him to the coffee house.

  On the way there, Lucas Maggiore turned to young Lucas.

  “Lucas and Lucas—that’s too many Lucases in one store. Does Matteo have another name for you?”

  Lucas thought back. “Well, sometimes Papa calls me Tedeschino.”

  “Good! In the store, that’s your name. All right?”

  “Fine.”

  So that was the name by which Lucas was introduced to the employees of Espresso Maggiore. His uncle told him to be at work at noon the next day, advanced him a week’s pay, and left him. They saw each other occasionally after that, and sometimes when his uncle wanted company, he asked young Lucas whether he would like to eat with him, or listen to music on the phonograph in Mrs. Dormiglione’s parlor. But Lucas Maggiore had so arranged things that y
oung Lucas had a life of his own, freedom to live it, and was still close enough so that the boy couldn’t get into serious trouble. He felt that he’d done his best for the youngster, and he was right.

  So Lucas spent his first day in New York with a firm base under his feet, but on his own. He thought that the city could have been pleasanter, but that he was being given a fair chance. He felt a little isolated, but that was something he felt was up to him to handle.

  In another year, with a soft summer, he might have found it easier to slip quickly into the pattern of the city’s life. But this year most people had not been lulled into relaxation—this year they took no vacations from the closed-up, preoccupied attitudes of winter, and so Lucas discovered that New Yorkers putting a meal in front of you in a diner, selling you a movie ticket, or rubbing against you on a crowded bus, could each of them be behind an impenetrable wall.

  With another uncle, he might have been taken up into a family much like the one he had left behind. In another house, he might have had a room somewhere where people next door soon struck up an acquaintance. But, as everything was, things so combined that what kind of life he lived for the next year and a half was entirely up to him. He recognized the situation, and in his methodical, logical way, began to consider what kind of life he needed.

  2.

  Espresso Maggiore was essentially one large room, with a counter at one end where the espresso machine was and where the clean cups were kept. There were heavy, elaborately carved tables from Venice and Florence, some with marble tops and some not, and besides the murals executed in an Italianate modern style by one of the neighborhood artists, there were thickly varnished old oil paintings in flaking gilt frames on the walls. There was a sugar bowl on each table, with a small menu card listing the various kinds of coffee served and the small selection of ices and other sweets available. The walls were painted a warm cream-yellow, and the lights were dim. The music played in the background, from speakers concealed in two genuine Cinquecento cupboards, and from time to time one of the steady patrons would find a vaguely Roman bust or statuette—French neoclassic was close enough—which he would donate to the management for the satisfaction of seeing it displayed on a wooden pedestal somewhere in a corner.

  The espresso machine dominated the room. When Lucas Maggiore first opened his trattoria, he had bought a secondhand but nearly new modern electric machine, shining in chrome, looking a good deal like the manifold of a liquidcooled aircraft engine, with ATALANTO proclaiming the maker’s name in raised block letters across the topmost tube. When the store was redecorated, the new machine was sold to a kaffeneikon and another machine—one of the old gas-fired models—was put up in its place. This was a great vertical cylinder with a bell top, nickel-plated, with the heads of cherubim bolted to its sides and an eagle rampant atop its bell. Rich with its ornamentation, its sides covered by engraved scrollwork, with spigots protruding from its base, the machine sat on the counter and screamed hisses as it forced steam through the charges of coffee. From noon to three a.m. each day except Monday, gathering thickest around midnight, Villagers and tourists crowded Espresso Maggiore, sitting in the wire-back chairs, most of them drinking capuccino in preference to true espresso, which is bitter, and interrupting their conversations whenever the machine hissed.

  Besides Lucas, there were four other employees of Espresso Maggiore.

  Carlo, the manager, was a heavy-set, almost unspeaking man of about thirty-five, cut from the same cloth as Lucas Maggiore and hired for that reason. He handled the machine, usually took cash, and supervised the work and cleaning up. He showed Lucas how to grind the coffee, told him to keep the tables wiped and the sugarbowls full, taught him how to wash cups and saucers with the greatest efficiency, and left him alone after that, since the youngster did his work well.

  There were three waitresses. Two of them were more or less typical Village girls, one from the Midwest and the other from Schenectady, who were studying drama and came in to work from eight to one. The third waitress was a neighborhood girl, Barbara Costa, who was about seventeen or eighteen and worked the full shift every day. She was a pretty, thinnish girl who did her work expertly and wasted no time talking to the Village young men, who came in during the afternoons and sat for hours over their one cup of coffee because nobody minded as long as the store wasn’t crowded. Because she was there all day, Lucas got to know her better than the other two girls. They got along well, and during the first few days she took the trouble to teach him the tricks of balancing four and five cups at a time, remembering complicated orders, and keeping a running tab in his head. Lucas liked her for her friendliness, respected her skill because it was organized in a way he understood, and was grateful for having one person he could talk to in the rare moments when he felt a desire to do so.

  In a month, Lucas had acclimated himself to the city. He memorized the complicated network of straggling, unnumbered streets below Washington Square, knew the principal subway routes, found a good, inexpensive laundry and a delicatessen where he bought what few groceries he felt he needed. He had investigated the registration system and entrance requirements at City College, sent a letter of inquiry to Massachusetts, and registered with the local Selective Service Board, where his grade in the Technical Aptitude Examination gave him his conditional deferment. He’d have to be a registered physical sciences student within a year, but that was what he was in New York for. So, by and large, he had succeeded in arranging his circumstances to fit his needs.

  But what his uncle had hinted at on his first day in the city was beginning to turn itself over in Lucas’ mind. He sat down and thought it out systematically.

  He was eighteen, and at or near his physical peak. His body was an excellently designed mechanism, with definite needs and functions. This particular year was the last even partly-free time he could expect for the next eight years.

  Yes, he decided, if he was ever going to get himself a girl, there was no better time for it than now. He had the time, the means, and even the desire. Logic pointed the way, and so he began to look around.

  Chapter Seven

  1.

  The plane went into its final downward glide over Long Island, slipping into the New York International landing pattern, and the lounge hostess asked Rogers and the man to take their seats.

  The man lifted his highball gracefully, set the edge against the lip of his mouth, and finished his drink. He put the glass down, and the grille moved back into place. He dabbed at his chin with a paper cocktail napkin. “Alcohol is very bad for high-carbon steel, you know,” he remarked to the hostess.

  He had spent most of the trip in the lounge, occasionally ordering a drink, smoking at intervals, holding glass or cigarette in his metal hand. The passengers and crew had been forced to grow accustomed to him.

  “Yes, sir,” the hostess said politely.

  Rogers shook his head to himself. As he followed the man down the aisle to their seats, he said, “Not if it’s stainless steel, Mr. Martino. I’ve seen the metallurgical analyses on you.”

  “Yes,” the man said, buckling his seatbelt and resting his hands lightly on his kneecaps. “You have. But that hostess hasn’t.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and let it dangle there, unlit, while the plane banked and steadied on its new heading. He looked out the window beside him. “Odd,” he said. “You wouldn’t expect it to still be too early for daylight.”

  The moment the plane touched the runway, slowed, and began to taxi toward the offloading ramp, the man unfastened his seatbelt and lit his cigarette. “We seem to be here,” he said conversationally, and stood up. “It’s been a pleasant trip.”

  “Pretty good,” Rogers said, unfastening his own belt. He looked toward Finchley, across the aisle, and shook his head helplessly as the F.B.I. man raised his eyebrows. There was no doubt about it—whoever this man was, Martino or not, they were going to have a bad time with him.

  “Well,” the man said, “I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting soc
ially again, Mr. Rogers. I hardly know whether it’s proper to say good-bye or not.”

  Rogers held out his hand wordlessly.

  The man’s right hand was warm and firm. “It’ll be good to see New York again. I haven’t been here in nearly twenty years. And you, Mr. Rogers?”

  “Twelve, about. I was born here.”

  “Oh, were you?” They moved slowly along the aisle toward the rear door, with the man walking ahead of Rogers. “Then you’ll be glad to get back.”

  Rogers shrugged uncomfortably.

  The man’s chuckle was rueful. “Pardon me—do you know, for a moment I actually forgot this was hardly a pleasure trip for either of us.”

  Rogers had no answer. He followed the man down the aisle to where the stewardesses gave them their coats. They stepped out on the escalator, with Rogers’ eyes on a level with the top of the man’s bare head.

  The man half-turned, as though for another casual remark.

  The first flashbulb exploded down at the foot of the escalator, and the man recoiled. He stumbled back against Rogers, and for a moment he was pressed against him. Rogers suddenly caught the stale, acrid smell of the perspiration that had been soaking the man’s shirt for hours.

  There was a cluster of photographers down on the apron, pointing their cameras at the man and firing their flashguns in a ripple of sharp light.

  The man tried to turn on the escalator. His hard hand closed on Rogers’ shoulder as he tried to get him out of the way. The gaskets behind his mouth grille were up out of sight. Rogers heard his two food-grinding blades clash together.

  Then Finchley somehow got past both of them, clattering down the escalator. He was reaching for his wallet as he went, and then the F.B.I. shield glittered briefly in the puffballs of light. The photographers stopped.

  Rogers took a deep breath and pried the man’s hand off his shoulder. “All right,” he said gently, lowering the hand carefully as though it were no longer attached to anything. “It’s all right, man, it’s under control. The damned pilot must have radioed ahead or something. Finchley’ll have a talk with the newspaper editors and the wire service chiefs. You won’t get spread all over the world.”