American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58

by Gary K. Wolfe

  In the first place, here was the brand-new notion that a difference from other people was not necessarily bad. Then, there was the idea that somebody actually thought enough of him to observe his behavior and analyze it. That was not something he expected from people other than his parents. And, of course, the second conclusion led to a third. If Frank Heywood was thinking along lines like these, and if he could see what other people couldn’t, then Frank, too, was a person different from most.

  That could mean a great deal. It could mean that he and Frank could at least talk to each other. Certainly it meant that Frank, despite his disclaimer, was just as capable as he—perhaps more so, since Frank had seen it and he had not.

  In many ways, Lucas found this an attractive train of thought. If he accepted any part of it, it automatically meant he also accepted the idea that he was some kind of genius. That in itself made him look at the whole hypothesis suspiciously. But he had very little or no real evidence to refute it. In fact, it was the kind of hypothesis that made it possible to reinterpret his whole life, and thus reinterpret every piece of evidence that might have stood against it.

  For several more weeks, he went through a period of great emotional intoxication, convinced that he had finally come to understand himself. In those weeks, he and Frank talked about whatever interested Lucas at the moment, and carried on serious discussions long into the night. But the feeling of being two geniuses together was an essential part of it, and one night Lucas thought to ask Frank how he was doing at his studies.

  “Me? I’m doing fine. Half a point over passing grade, steady as a chalkline.”

  “Half a point?”

  Heywood grinned. “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine. I’ll get a sheepskin that says Massachusetts Institute of Technology on it, the same as yours.”

  “Yes, but it’s not the diploma—”

  “—it’s what you know? Sure, if you’re planning to go on from there. I could, to be completely honest, give even you a run for the money when it comes to that. But why the hell should I? I’m not going to sweat my caliones off at Yucca Flat for the next forty years, draw my pension, and retire. Uh-uh. I’m going to take that B.S. from M.I.T. and make it my entrance ticket into some government bureau, where I’ll spend the next forty years sitting behind a desk, freezing my caliones off in an air-conditioned office, and some day I’ll retire on a bigger pension.”

  “And—and that’s all?”

  Heywood chuckled. “That’s all, paisan.”

  “It sounds so God-damned empty I could spit. A guy with your brains, planning a life like that.”

  Heywood grinned and spread his hands. “There it is, though. So why should I kill myself here? This way I get by, and I’ve got lots of free time.” He grinned again. “I get to have long talks with my roommate, I get to run around and see other people—hell, amico, there’s no sweat this way. And it takes a guy with brains to pull it in a grind house like Tech, I might add.”

  It was the total waste of those brains that appalled Lucas. He found it impossible to understand and difficult to like. Certainly, it destroyed the mood of the past month.

  He drew back into his shell after that. He was not hostile to Heywood, or anything like it, but he let the friendship die quickly. He lost, with it, any idea of being a genius. In time he even forgot that he had ever come close to making a fool of himself over it, though occasionally, when something went especially well for him in his later life, the idle thought would crop up to be instantly, and embarrassedly, suppressed.

  He and Heywood finished their undergraduate work, still roommates. Heywood was once more the perfect person for one small room with Lucas Martino, and seemed not to mind Lucas’ long periods of complete silence. Sometimes Lucas saw him sitting and watching him.

  After they graduated, Heywood left Boston and, as far as Lucas was concerned, disappeared. And it was only some years later that one of his graduate instructors came to him and said, “This hypothesis you were talking about, Martino—it might be worth your doing a paper on it.”

  So Heywood missed the birth of the K-88 completely, and Lucas Martino, for his part, once again had something to claim all his attention and keep him from thinking about the unanswered problems in his mind.

  Chapter Eleven

  1.

  Edmund Starke had become an old man, living alone in a rented four-room bungalow on the edge of Bridegtown. He had dried to leathery hardness, his muscles turning into strings beneath his brittle skin, his veins thick and blue. The hair was gone from the top of his skull, revealing the hollows and ridges in the bone. His glasses were thick, and clumsy in their cheap frames. His jaw was set, thrust forward past his upper teeth, and his eyes were habitually narrowed. Like most old men, he slept little, resting in short naps rather than for very long at any one time. He spent his waking hours reading technical journals and working on an elementary physics textbook which, he felt suspiciously, was turning out to resemble every elementary physics text written before it.

  Today he was sitting in the front room, twisting the spine of a journal in his fingers and peering across the room at the opposite wall. He heard footsteps on the dark porch outside and waited for the sound of the bell. When it came, he got up in his night robe and slippers, walked slowly to the door and opened it.

  A big man stood in the doorway, his face bandaged bulkily, the collar of his coat pulled up and his hat low over his eyes. The light from the room glittered blankly on dark glasses.

  “Well?” Starke rasped in his high, dry-throated voice.

  The man wagged his head indecisively. The bandages over his jaw parted once, showing a dark slit, before he said anything. When he did speak, his voice was indistinct. “Professor Starke.”

  “Mister Starke. What is it?”

  “I . . . don’t know if you remember me. I was one of your students. Class of sixty-six at Bridgetown High School. I’m Lucas Martino.”

  “Yes, I remember you. Come in.” Starke moved aside and held the door, pushing it shut carefully behind the man, disgusted at having to be so careful of drafts. “Sit down. No, that’s my chair. Take the one opposite.”

  The chief impression his visitor was giving was one of embarrassment. He sat down gingerly, unsure of himself, and opened his coat with clumsy, gloved fingers.

  “Take off your hat.” Starke lowered himself back into his chair and peered at the man. “Ashamed of yourself?”

  The man pulled the hat off, dragging it slowly. His entire skull was bandaged, the white gauze running down under his collar. He gestured toward it. “An accident. An industrial accident,” he mumbled.

  “That’s none of my concern. What can I do for you?”

  “I—I don’t know,” the man said in a shocked voice, as though his plans had extended only to Starke’s front door and he had never thought, till now, of what to do after that.

  “What did you expect? Did you think I’d be surprised to see you? Or see you all wrapped up like the invisible man? I’m not. I know all about you. A man named Rogers was here and said you were on your way.” Starke cocked his head. “So now you’re caught flatfooted. Well—think. What’re you going to do now?”

  “I was afraid Rogers would find out about you. Did he bother you?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He told me you might not be who you say you are. He wanted my opinion.”

  “Didn’t he tell you not to let me know that?”

  “He did. I told him I’d do this my way.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “How would you know?”

  The man sighed. “Then you don’t think I’m Lucas Martino.”

  “I don’t care. It’s no longer important whether you used to be in my class or not. If you’re here for help of any kind, you’ve wasted your time.”

  “I see.” The man began putting his hat back on.

  “You’ll wait and hear my reasons.”

  �
�What reasons?” the man asked with dull bitterness. “You don’t trust me. That’s a good reason.”

  “If that’s what you think, you’d better listen.”

  The man sank back. “All right.” He seemed not to care. His emotional responses seemed to reach him slowly and indistinctly, as if traveling through cotton wool.

  “What would you want me to do?” Starke rasped. “Take you in here to live with me? How long would that last—a month or two, a year? You’d have a corpse on your hands, and you’d still have no place to go. I’m an old man, Martino or whoever you are, and you ought to have taken that into account if you were making plans.”

  The man shook his head.

  “And if that’s not what you wanted, then you wanted me to help you with some kind of work. Rogers said it might be that. Was that it?”

  The man raised his hands helplessly.

  Starke nodded. “What made you think I was qualified? What made you think I could work on something forty years advanced over what I was taught at school? What made you think I could have kept up with new work in the field? I don’t have access to classified publications. Where did you think we’d get the equipment? What did you think would pay for it and—”

  “I have some money.”

  “—what did you think you’d gain by it if you did think you could answer those objections? This nation is effectively at war, and wouldn’t tolerate unauthorized work for a moment. Or weren’t you planning to work on anything important? Were you planning to drop corks into mousetraps?”

  The man sat dumbly, his hands trailing over his thighs.

  “Think, man.”

  The man raised his hands and dropped them. He hunched forward. “I thought I was.”

  “You weren’t.” Starke closed the subject. “Now—where’re you going to go from here?”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know. You know, I had decided you were my last chance.”

  “Don’t your parents live near here? If you are Martino?”

  “They’re both dead.” The man looked up. “They didn’t live to be as old as you.”

  “Don’t hate me for that. I’m sorry they’re dead. Life wasn’t meant to be given up gladly.”

  “They left me the farm.”

  “All right, then you’ve got a place to stay. Do you have a car?”

  “No. I took the train down.”

  “Muffled in your winding sheet, eh? Well, if you don’t want to sleep in the hotel, take my car. It’s in the garage. You can return it tomorrow. That’ll get you there. The keys are on the mantelpiece.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Return the car, but don’t visit me again. Lucas Martino was the one student whose brains I admired.”

  2.

  “So you’re not sure,” Rogers said heavily, sitting in the chair where the man had sat the night before.

  “No.”

  “Can you take an educated guess?”

  “I think in facts. It’s not a fact that he recognized me. He might have been bluffing. I saw no purpose in laying little traps for him, so I answered to my name. My picture has appeared in the local newspaper several times. ‘Local Educator Retires After Long Service’ was the most recent caption. He had my name to begin with. Am I to judge him incapable of elementary research?”

  “He didn’t visit the newspaper office, Mr. Starke.”

  “Mr. Rogers, police work is your occupation, not mine. But if this man is a Soviet agent, he could easily have had the way prepared for him.”

  “That’s occurred to us, Mr. Starke. We’ve found no conclusive proof of anything like that.”

  “Lack of contrary proof does not establish the existence of a fact. Mr. Rogers, you sound like a man trying to push someone into a decision you want.”

  Rogers rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “All right, Mr. Starke. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

  “I was a good deal more satisfied with my life before you and this man came into it.”

  Rogers sighed. “There’s nothing very much any of us could do about that, is there?”

  He left, made sure his surveillance teams were properly located, and went back to New York, driving up the turnpike at a slow and cautious rate.

  3.

  Matteo Martino’s old farm had stood abandoned for eight years. The fences were down, and the fields overgrown. The barn had lost its doors long ago, and all the windows of the house were broken. There was no paint left on the barn, and very little on the house. What there was, was cracked, peeling, and useless. The inside of the house was littered, water-soaked, and filthy. Children had broken in often, despite the county police patrol, and scrawled messages on the walls. Someone had stolen the sinks, and someone else had hacked the few pieces of furniture left in it with a knife, at random.

  The ground was ditched by gullies and flooded with rainwashed sand. Weeds had spread their tough roots into the soil. Someone had begun a trash pile along the remains of the back fence. The apple trees along the road were gnarled and grown out, their branches broken.

  The first thing the man did was to have a telephone installed. He began ordering supplies from Bridgetown: food, clothes— overalls and work shirts, and heavy shoes—and then tools. No one questioned the legality of what he was doing—only Rogers could have raised the issue at all.

  The surveillance teams watched him work. They saw him get up before dawn each morning, cook his meal in the improvised kitchen, and go out with his hammer and saw and nails while it was still too dark for anyone else to see what he was doing. They watched him drive fence posts and unroll wire, tearing the weeds aside. They watched him set new beams into the barn, working alone, working slowly at first, and then more and more insistently, until the sound of the hammer never seemed to stop throughout the day.

  He burned the old furniture and the old linoleum from the house. He ordered a bed, a kitchen table, and a chair, put them in the house, and did nothing more with it except to gradually set new panes in the windows as he found spare moments from re-shingling the barn. When that was done, he bought a tractor and a plow. He began to clear the land again.

  He never left the farm. He spoke to none of the neighbors who tried to satisfy their curiosity. He did no trading at the general store. When the delivery trucks from Bridgetown filled his telephone orders, he gave unloading instructions with his order and never came out of the house while the trucks were in the yard.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lucas Martino stood looking up at the overhead maze of bus bars that fed power to the K-88. Down in the pit below his catwalk, he heard his technicians working around the thick, spherical, alloy tank. One of them cursed peevishly as he snagged his coveralls on a protruding bolt head. The tank bristled with them. The production models would no doubt be streamlined and neatly painted, but here in this experimental installation, no one had seen any necessity for superfluous finishing. Except perhaps that technician.

  As he watched, the technicians climbed out of the pit. The telephone rang beside him, and when he answered it the pit crew supervisor told him the tank area was cleared.

  “All right. Thank you, Will. I’m starting the coolant pumps now.”

  The outside of the tank began to frost. Martino dialed the power gang foreman. “Ready for test, Allan.”

  “I’ll wind ’em up,” the foreman answered. “You’ll have full power any time you want it after thirty seconds from . . . now. Good luck, Doctor Martino.”

  “Thank you, Allan.”

  He put the phone down and stood looking at the old brick wall across the enormous room. Plenty of space here, he thought. Not the way it was back in the States, when I was working with the undersized configurations because Kroenn’s equations showed I could. I knew he was wrong, somewhere, but I couldn’t prove it—I ought to know more mathematics, damn it. I do, but who can keep up with Kroenn? I remember, he was raving angry at himself for weeks when he found his own mistake.

  It happens. The b
est of us slip a cog now and then. Well, it took Kroenn to see Kroenn’s mistake. . . . Well, here we go . .

  He picked up the public address microphone and thumbed the button. “Test,” his voice rumbled through the building. He put the microphone down and started the tape recorder.

  “Test Number One, experimental K-Eighty-eight configuration two.” He gave the date. “Applying power at—” he looked at his watch “—twenty-one hundred hours, thirty-two minutes.” He threw the switch and leaned over the railing to look down into the pit. The tank exploded.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was, once again, a rainy summer in New York. Gray day followed gray day, and even when the sun was out, the clouds waited at the edge of the horizon. The weather seemed to have gone bad all over the world. Hot winds scoured the great mid-continental plains of the north, and below the equator there was snow, and thaw, and snow, and thaw again. The oceans were never still, and from one seaboard to another the waves cracked against breakwaters with the hard, incessant slapping of high-velocity artillery. Icebergs prowled down out of the polar caps, and migratory birds flew closer to the land. There were riots in Asia, and violent homicides in London.

  Shawn Rogers left New York on a teeming day, the tires of his car singing on wet blacktop, and for all his windscreen cleaner could do, the world seemed blurred, shifting, and impermanent. His car whined almost alone down the freeway, swaying in sharp lurches as the gusty wind struck it, and all the way down into the end of New Jersey the rain pursued him.

  The secondary road to the farm surprised him by being wide, well graded, and smoothly surfaced. He was able to drive with only half his attention.

  Five years, he thought, since I saw him last. Almost five since that night he came over the line. I wonder how he feels about things?

  Rogers had his folders of daily reports, for the surveillance team still followed the man faithfully. A.N.G. men delivered his milk, A.N.G. men brought his rolls of fencing, and A.N.G. men sweated in the fields across from his farm. And every month, Rogers’ secretary brought him a neatly typed résumé of everything the man did. But even though he always read them, Rogers had learned how little was ever accurately abstracted from a man and successfully transferred to paper.