American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58

by Gary K. Wolfe

  5.

  When he went to work the next day, he was all mixed up. No matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t make sense out of what had happened yesterday. He went about his work in an abstracted daze, his mind so knotted that his face was completely blank. He avoided Barbara’s eyes, and tried to keep from talking to her.

  Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, she trapped him behind the counter. He stood there hopelessly, caught between the espresso machine and the cash register, an emptied cup dangling from his hand.

  Barbara smiled at him pleasantly. “Hey, there, Tedesco, thinking about your money?” There was an anxious tightness in the skin at the corners of her eyes.

  “Money?”

  “Well—you know. When somebody goes around in a fog, people usually ask him if he’s thinking about his money.”

  “Oh! No—no, it’s not anything like that.”

  “What’d you do yesterday? Fall in love?”

  His face turned hot. The cup almost dropped out of his hand, as though he were an automatic machine and Barbara had struck a button. And then he was astonished at his reaction to the word. He stood gaping, completely off-stride.

  “I’ll be damned,” Barbara said. “I hit it.”

  Lucas had no clear idea of what to say. Fall in love? No! “Look—Barbara—it’s not . . . that way . . .”

  “What way?” Her cheekbones were splotched with red.

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to explain . . .”

  “Look, I don’t care what way it is. If it’s giving you trouble, I hope you get it straightened out. But I’ve got a fellow who gives me troubles, now and then.”

  As she thought about it, she realized she was being perfectly honest. She remembered that Tommy was a very nice guy, and interesting, too. It was a shame about Lucas, because she’d always thought he’d be nice to go out with, but that was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time.

  She was already closing down her mind to any possibility that there might have been more than a few friendly dates between them. She was a girl with a great deal of common sense, and she had learned that there was nothing to be gained in life from idle second thoughts.

  “Well, rush hour’s coming up,” she said pointedly, got the sugar can out from under the counter, and went to refill the bowls on her tables. Her heels tapped rapidly on the wooden floor.

  For a long moment, Lucas was only beginning to get his thoughts in order. The whole business had happened so fast.

  He looked toward where Barbara was busy with her tables, and it was obvious to him that as far as she was concerned, the whole episode was over.

  Not for him. It was barely beginning. Now it had to be analyzed—gone over, dissected, thoroughly examined for every possible reason why things had worked out this way. Only yesterday morning he had been a man with a definite course of action in mind, based on a concrete and obvious situation.

  Now everything was changed, in such a short space of time, and it was unthinkable that anyone could simply leave it at that, without asking how, and why.

  And yet Barbara was obviously doing just that—accepting a new state of affairs without question or investigation.

  Lucas frowned at the problem. It was an interesting thing to think over.

  It was even more than that, though he was at best partially aware of it. It was a perfect problem to consider if he didn’t want to think about the way he felt toward Edith.

  He stood behind the counter, thinking that all the people he had ever known—even people fully as quick-minded as Barbara —consistently took things as they came. And it struck him that if so many people were that way, then there must be value in it. It was actually a far simpler way of living—less wasteful of time, more efficient in its use of emotional energy, more direct.

  Then, it followed that there was something inefficient and basically wrong with his whole approach to living among other people. It was no surprise he’d fallen into this emotional labyrinth with Barbara and Edith.

  Now his mind had brought him back to that. How did he feel about Edith? He couldn’t just forget about it. He’d asked for her phone number. She’d be expecting him to call. He could see her, quite plainly, waiting at night for the phone to ring. He had a responsibility there.

  And Barbara. Well—Barbara was tough-fibered. But he must have hurt her at least a little bit.

  But how had this whole business come about? In one day, he’d made a mess of everything. It might be easy to simply forget it and start fresh, but could he do that? Could he let something like this stay in the back of his mind forever, unresolved?

  I’m all fouled up, he thought.

  He had thought he understood himself, and had shaped himself to live most efficiently in his world. He had made plans on that basis, and seen no flaws in them. But now he had to re-learn almost everything before a new and better Lucas Martino could emerge.

  For one more moment before he had to get to work, he tried to decide how he could puzzle it all out and still learn not to waste his time analyzing things that couldn’t be changed. But rush hour was coming. People were already starting to trickle into the store, and his tables weren’t set up yet.

  He had to leave it at that, but not permanently. He pushed it to the back of his mind, where he could bring it out and worry at it when he had time—where it could stay forever, unchanging and waiting to be solved.

  6.

  Circumstances trapped him. Soon he was in school. There he had to learn to give precisely the answers expected of him, and no others. He learned, and there was no difficulty about the scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. But that demanded a great deal of his attention.

  He saw Edith fairly often. Whenever he called her, it was always with the hope that this time something would happen— they’d fight, or elope, or do something dramatic enough to solve things at one stroke. Their dates were always nerveracking for that reason, and they were never casual with each other. He noticed that she gradually let her hair grow out dark brown, and that she stopped living on her parents’ checks. But he had no idea of what that might mean. She found work in a store on Fourteenth Street, and moved into a nearby coldwater flat where they sometimes visited together. But he had maneuvered himself into a position where every step he made to solve one problem only made the other worse. So he wavered between them. He and Edith rarely even kissed. They never made love.

  He stayed on at Espresso Maggiore until his studies began taking up too much of his time. He often talked to Barbara through slack times in the day. But they were just two people working in the same place and helping each other fight boredom. The only things they could talk about were the work, his studies, or what would happen to her fiancé now that the Allied Nations Government had been formed and American men might well find themselves as replacements at Australian technical installations. Never, with anyone, could he talk about anything important.

  In the fall of 1968 he left New York for Boston. He had not been working since January, and had fallen out of touch with his uncle and Barbara. His relationship with Edith was such that he had nothing to write letters about. They exchanged Christmas cards for a few years.

  The work at Tech was exhausting. Fifty per cent of every freshman class was not expected to graduate, and those who intended to stay found themselves with barely enough time to sleep. Lucas rarely left the campus. He went through three years of undergraduate work, and then continued toward his Master’s and his Doctorate. For seven years he lived in exactly the same pocket universe.

  Before he ever even got his Master’s degree, he saw the begining of the logic chain that was to end in the K-88. When he received his Doctorate, he was immediately assigned to an American government research project and lived for years on one research reservation after another, none of them substantially different from an academic campus. He was consistently deferred from military service. When he
submitted his preliminary paper on the K-88 field effect, he was transferred to an identical A.N.G. installation. When his experimental results proved to be worth further work, he was given his own staff and laboratory, and, again, he was not free of schedules, routines, and restricted areas. Though he was free to think, he had only one world to grow in.

  While still at M.I.T., he had been sent Edith’s wedding announcement. He added the fact to the buried problem, and, with that one change, it lay carefully safeguarded by his perfect memory, waiting, through twenty years, for his first free time to think.

  Chapter Nine

  1.

  It was almost eight o’clock at night. Rogers put down his office phone and looked over toward Finchley. “He stopped for a hamburger and coffee at a Nedick’s on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. But he still hasn’t talked to anybody, been anywhere in particular, or looked for a place to stay. He’s still walking. Still wandering.”

  Rogers thought to himself that at least the man had eaten. Rogers and Finchley hadn’t. On the other hand, the two of them were sitting down, while, with every step the man took on the concrete sidewalks, two hundred sixty-eight pounds fell on his already ruined feet. Then, why was he walking? Why didn’t he stop? He’d been up since before dawn in Europe, and yet he kept going.

  Finchley shook his head. “I wonder why he’s doing that? What could he be after? Is he looking for somebody—hoping to run across someone?”

  Rogers sighed. “Maybe he’s trying to wear us out.” He opened the Martino dossier in front of him, turned to the proper page, and ran his finger down the scant list of names. “Martino had exactly one relative in New York, and no close friends. There’s this woman who sent him the wedding announcement. He seems to have gone with her for a while, while he was at C.C.N.Y. Maybe that’s a possibility.”

  “You’re saying this man might be Martino.”

  “I’m saying no such thing. He hasn’t made a move toward her place, and it’s no more than five blocks outside the area he’s been covering. If anything, I’m saying he’s not Martino.”

  “Would you want to visit an old girl friend that’s been married fifteen years?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It doesn’t prove anything one way or another.”

  “I believe that’s what we’ve been saying right along.”

  Finchley’s mouth quirked. His eyes were expressionless. “What about that relative?”

  “His uncle? Martino used to work in his coffee house, right down in that area. The coffee house is a barbershop now. The uncle married a widow when he was sixty-three, moved to California with her, and died ten years ago. So that cleans it up. Martino didn’t make friends, and had no relatives. He wasn’t a joiner, and he didn’t keep a diary. If there was ever anyone made for this kind of thing, Martino’s the one.” Rogers clawed at his scalp.

  “And yet,” Finchley said, “he came straight to New York, and straight down into the Village. He must have had a reason. But, whatever it was, all he’s doing is walking. Around and around. In circles. It doesn’t tie in. It doesn’t make sense—not for a man of this caliber.” Finchley’s voice was troubled, and Rogers, remembering the episode between them earlier in the afternoon, gave him a sharp look. Rogers was still ashamed of his part in it, and didn’t care to have it revived.

  He picked up his phone. “I’ll order some food sent up.”

  2.

  The drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street was small, with one narrow, twisting space of clear floor between the crowded counters. Like all small druggists, the owner had been forced to nail uprights to the counters and put shelves between them. Even so, there was barely room to display everything he had to carry in competition with the chain store up the street.

  Salesmen had piled their display racks on every inch of eyelevel surface, and tacked their advertising cards wherever they could. There was only one overhead cluster of fluorescent tubes, and the tight space behind the counters was always dark. There was one break in the wall of merchandise on the counters. There, behind an opening walled by two stands of cosmetics and roofed by a razor-blade card, the druggist sat behind his cash register, reading a newspaper.

  He looked up as he heard the door open and close. His eyes went automatically to the metal side of the display case across from him, which he used for a mirror. The case was scuffed, and a little dirty. The druggist saw the vague outlines of a man’s large silhouette, but the creaking of the floorboards had already told him as much. He peered for a look at the face, and brought one hand up to the temple bar of his glasses. He got out of his chair, still holding his paper in his other hand, and thrust his head and shoulders out over the counter.

  “Something I can do for—”

  The man who’d come in turned his glittering face toward him. “Where’re your telephone books, please?” he asked quietly.

  The druggist had no idea of what he might have done in another minute. But the matter-of-fact words gave him an easy response. “Back through there,” he said, pointing to a narrow opening between two counters.

  “Thank you.” The man squeezed himself through, and the druggist heard him turning pages. There was a faint rustle as he pulled a sheet out of the telephone company’s notepaper dispenser. The druggist heard him take out a pencil with a faint click of its clip. Then the telephone book thudded back into its slot, and the man came out, folding the note and putting it in his breast pocket. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” the druggist answered.

  The man left the store. The druggist sat back on his chair, folding the paper on his knee.

  It was a peculiar thing, the druggist thought, looking blankly down at his paper. But the man hadn’t seemed to be conscious of anything peculiar about himself. He hadn’t offered any explanations; he hadn’t done anything except ask a perfectly reasonable question. People came in here twenty times a day and asked the same thing.

  So it couldn’t really be anything worth getting excited about. Well—yes, of course it was, but the metal-headed man hadn’t seemed to think so. And it would be his business, wouldn’t it?

  The druggist decided that it was something to think about, and to mention to his wife when he got home. But it wasn’t anything to be panicked by.

  In a very brief space of time, his eyes were automatically following print. Soon he was reading again. When Rogers’ man came in a minute later, that was the way he found him.

  Rogers’ man was one of a team of two. His partner had stayed with their man, following him up the street.

  He looked around the drugstore. “Anybody here?”

  The druggist’s head and shoulders came into sight behind the counter. “Yes, mister?”

  The Security man fished in his pocket. “Got a pack of Chesterfields?”

  The druggist nodded and slipped the cigarettes out of the rack behind the counter. He picked up the half dollar the Security man put down.

  “Say,” the Security man said with a puzzled frown, “did I just see a guy wearing a tin mask walk out of here?”

  The druggist nodded. “That’s right. It didn’t seem to be a mask, though.”

  “I’ll be damned. I thought I saw this fellow, but it’s kind of a hard thing to believe.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  The Security man shook his head. “Well, I guess you see all kinds of people in this part of town. You figure he was dressed up to advertise a play, or something?”

  “Don’t ask me. He wasn’t carrying a sign or anything.”

  “What’d he do—buy a can of metal polish?” The Security man grinned.

  “Just looked in a phone book, that’s all. Didn’t even make a call.” The druggist scratched his head. “I guess he was just looking up an address.”

  “Boy, I wonder who he’s visiting! Well”—and he shrugged— “you sure do run into funny people down here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the
druggist said a little testily, “I’ve seen some crazy-looking things in other parts of town, too.”

  “Yeah, sure. I guess so. Say—speakin’ of phones, I guess I might as well call this girl. Where’s it at?”

  “Back there,” the druggist said, pointing.

  “O.K., thanks.” The Security man pushed through the space between the two counters. He stood looking sourly down at the stand of phone books. He pulled the top sheet out of the note dispenser, looked at it for impressions, and saw none that made any sense. He slipped the paper into his pocket, looked at the books again—six of them, counting the Manhattan Classified—and shook his head. Then he stepped into the booth, dropped coins into the slot, and dialed Rogers’ office.

  3.

  The clock on Rogers’ desk read a few minutes past nine. Rogers still sat behind his desk, and Finchley waited in the chair beside it.

  Rogers felt tired. He’d been up some twenty-two hours, and the fact that Finchley and their man had done the same was no help.

  It’s piled up on me, he thought. Day after day without enough sleep, and tension all the time. I should have been in bed hours ago.

  But Finchley had gone through it all with him. And their man must feel infinitely worse. And what was a little lost sleep compared to what the man had lost? Still Rogers was feeling sick to his stomach. His eyes were burning. His scalp was numb with exhaustion, and he had a vile taste in his mouth. He wondered if his sticking to the job was made any the less because Finchley was younger and could take it, or because the metal-faced man was still following his ghost up and down the city streets. He decided it was.

  “I hate to ask you to stay here so late, Finch,” he said.