Rogers moved his mouth into a strained smile, his face tired and growing old. But what else was anyone to go by?
I wonder how he’ll take the news I’m bringing?
Rogers swung the car around the curve, and saw the farm the surveillance team had so often photographed for him.
Set in one corner of the farm, the house was a freshly-painted white building with green shutters. There was a lawn, carefully mowed and bordered by hedges, and across the yard from the house stood a solidly built barn, with a pickup truck parked in front of it, with no name lettered on its doors. There was a kitchen garden beside the house, laid out with geometrical exactness, the earth black, freshly weeded, and without a stone, textured like chocolate cream. A row of apple trees marched beside the road, every limb pruned, the foliage glistening with spray. The fence beside them shone with new wire, each post set exactly upright, every strand stretched perfectly parallel to the others. The fields lay green in the rain, furrows deep to carry off the excess water, and at the far end of the property, shrubs marked the edge of a small brook. As Rogers drove into the yard and stopped, a dog trotted out from behind the barn and stood in the rain, barking at him.
Rogers buttoned his raincoat and turned his collar up. He jumped out of the car, giving the door a hasty push shut, and ran across the yard to the back porch. As he reached its shelter, the door directly in front of him opened, and he found himself standing less than a foot away from the overalled man in the doorway.
There was change visible in the face. The metal had acquired a patina of microscopic scratches and scuffs, softening its machine-turned lustre and fogging the sharpness with which it reflected light. The eyes were the same, but the voice was different. It was duller, drier, and seemed to come out more slowly.
“Mr. Rogers.”
“Hello, Mr. Martino.”
“Come in.” The man stepped aside, out of the doorway.
“Thank you. I should have called first, but I wanted to be sure we had a chance to talk at length.” Rogers stopped uncomfortably, just inside the door. “There’s something rather important to talk about, if you’ll spare me the time . . .”
The man nodded. “All right. I’ve got work to do, but you can come along and talk, I guess. I just cooked some lunch. There’s enough for two.”
“Thank you.” Rogers took off his raincoat, and the man hung it up on a hook beside the kitchen door. “I—how’ve you been?”
“All right. Chair over there. Sit down, and I’ll get the food.” The man walked over to a cupboard and took down two plates.
Rogers sat down at the kitchen table, looking around stiffly for lack of something else to do.
The kitchen was neat and clean. There were curtains up over the sink, and there was fresh linoleum on the floor. There were no dishes left over on the drainboard, the sink itself had been scrubbed clean, and everything was put away, carefully and systematically. Rogers tried to picture the man washing, ironing, and hanging curtains—doing it all according to a logically thought-out system, with not a move wasted, taking a minimum of time, as carefully as he’d ever set up a test series or checked the face of an oscilloscope. Day after day, for five years.
The man set a plate down in front of Rogers: boiled potatoes, beets, and a thick slice of pork tenderloin. “Coffee? Just made some fresh.”
“Thanks. I’ll take it black, please.”
“Suit yourself.” There was a faint grinding noise as the man put the cup down with his metal hand. Then he sat opposite Rogers and began to eat silently, without lifting his head or stopping. He was obviously impatient to get the necessary meal over and done with so he could get back to his work. Rogers had no choice but to eat as quickly as possible, and no opening to start talking. The meal was cooked well.
When they finished, the man stood up and silently gathered the plates and silverware, stacking them in the sink and running water over them. He handed Rogers a dish towel. “I’d appreciate your drying these. We’ll get done sooner.”
“Certainly.” They stood together at the sink, and as the man handed him each washed plate and cup, Rogers dried it carefully and put it in the drainboard rack. When they were through, the man put the dishes back in the cupboard, and Rogers started to put on his raincoat.
“Be with you in a minute,” the man said. He opened a drawer and took out a roll of bandaging. He held one end between the fingers of his metal hand and carefully wound a loose spiral up his arm, pushing his shirtsleeve out of the way. Taking safety pins out of his overall pocket, he fastened the two ends. Then he took a can of oil out of the drawer and carefully soaked the bandage before putting everything back and pushing the drawer shut. “Got to do it,” he explained to Rogers. “Dust and grit gets in there, and it wears.”
“Of course.”
“Well, let’s go.”
Rogers followed the man out into the yard, and they walked across to the barn. The dog ran up beside them, and the man reached down to pet his neck. “Get back in your house, stupe. You’ll get wet. Go on, Prince. Go on, boy.” The dog sniffed uncertainly at Rogers, trotted along with them for a few steps, and turned back.
“Prince? Is that his name? Nice-looking dog. What breed is he?”
“Mongrel. He’s got a barrel he sleeps in, back of the barn.”
“You don’t keep him in the house, then?”
“He’s a watchdog. He’s got to be outside. And he’s not housebroken.” The man looked at Rogers. “A dog’s a dog, you know. If the only friend a man had was a dog, it’d mean he couldn’t get along with his own kind, wouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that. You like the dog, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Ashamed of it?”
“You’re pushing again, Rogers.”
Rogers dropped his eyes. “I suppose I was.”
They went into the barn, and the man switched on the lights. There was a tractor sitting in the middle of the barn, with a can full of drained transmission oil beside it. The man unrolled an oily tarpaulin, pulled it over beside the tractor, and laid out the tools that had been rolled inside it. “I have to fix this transmission today,” he said. “I bought this tractor second-hand, and the fellow that had it before chipped the gears. They’ve got to be replaced today, because I’ve got a field to harrow tomorrow.” He selected a wrench and slid under the tractor, on his back. He began loosening the nuts around the rim of the gearbox cover, paying no further attention to Rogers.
Rogers stood uncertainly beside the tractor, looking down at the man working under it. Finally, he looked around for something to sit on. There was a box set against the barn wall, and he went over, got it, and sat down beside the tractor, bending forward until he could see the man’s face. But that did him little good. Even though the gearbox had been drained during the morning, there was still oil dripping out of it. The man was working by touch, his eyes and mouth tightly shuttered, deaf, with dirty oil running in narrow streaks down across his skull.
Rogers sat and waited for ten minutes, watching the man’s hands working deftly at the cover, right hand guiding left, right hand, with its wrench, breaking the nuts loose from their lugs, then left hand taking the nuts off with its hard fingers. Finally, the man put the wrench aside, locating the tool tarpaulin without difficulty, and lifted the cover down, dropping the nuts inside it. The left hand probed inside the gearbox, and a retaining slide dropped out, into the waiting right hand. The slide, too, went into the up-ended gearbox cover, and the left hand popped the gears out of their mounts. The man wriggled out from under the tractor and opened his eyes.
“I was going to ask you—” Rogers began.
“Minute.” He stood up and took the worn gears over to a workbench, where he held them up to the light, cursing bitterly. “A man has no business buying machinery if he won’t treat it right. That’s a damned good design, that transmission. No reason in the world for anybody to have trouble with it.” His voice was almost querulous. “A machine
won’t ever let you down, if you’ll only take the trouble to use it right—use it the way you’re supposed to, for the jobs it’s built to do. That’s all. All you have to do is understand it. And no machine’s that complicated an average man can’t understand it. But nobody tries. Nobody thinks a machine’s worth understanding. What’s a machine, after all? Just a few pieces of metal. One’s exactly like another, and you can always get another one just like it.
“But I’ll tell you something, Mr. Rogers—” He turned suddenly, and faced across the barn. The light was behind him, and Rogers saw only his silhouette—the body lost in the shapeless, angular drape of the overalls, the shoulders square, and the head round and featureless. “Even so, people don’t like machines. Machines don’t talk and tell you their troubles. Machines don’t do anything but what they’re made for. They sit there, doing their jobs, and one looks like another—but it may be breaking up inside. It may be getting ready to not plow your field, or not pump your water, or throw a piston into your lap. It might be getting ready to do anything—so people are afraid of them, a little bit, and won’t take the trouble to understand them, and they treat them badly. So the machines break down more quickly, and people trust them less, and mistreat them more. So the manufacturers say, ‘What’s the use of building good machines? The clucks’ll only wreck ’em anyway,’ and build flimsy stuff, so there’re very few good machines being made any more. And that’s a shame.”
He dropped the gears on the bench and picked up a box holding the replacement set. Still angry, he ripped the top off the box, took out the gears, and brought them back to the tractor.
“Mr. Martino—” Rogers said again.
“Yes?” he asked, laying the gears out in sequence on the tarpaulin.
Now that he’d come to the point of saying it, Rogers didn’t know how. He thought of the man, trapped in the casque of himself through these five years, and Rogers didn’t know how to put it.
“Mr. Martino, I’m here as the official representative of the Allied Nations Government, empowered to make you an offer.”
The man grunted, picking up the first gear and reaching up under the tractor to slip it in place.
“Frankly,” Rogers stumbled on, “I don’t think they quite knew how to say it, so they chose me to do it, thinking I knew you best.” He shrugged wryly. “But I don’t know you.”
“Nobody does,” the man said. “What’s the A.N.G. want?”
“Well, the point I was trying to make was that I probably won’t phrase this properly. I don’t want my fumbling to prejudice your decision.”
The man made an impatient sound. “Get to it, man.” Then, with infinite gentleness, he slipped the gear into place and reached for the next.
“Well—you know things all over the world’re getting tense again.”
“Yes.” He wriggled further under the tractor, reached over with his right hand, and helped his left locate the second gear exactly in place. “What’s that got to do with me?” He took the last gear, mounted it, and forced the tight retaining slide into position, moving the closely machined part only as firmly as needed and no more. He scooped the nuts out of the gearbox cover and began hand-tightening it back in place.
“Mr. Martino—the A.N.G. has re-instituted the K-Eightyeight program. They’d like you to work on it.”
The man under the tractor reached for his wrench, and his fingers slipped on the oily metal. He twisted around and reached with his left arm. There was a faint click as his fingers closed over it firmly, and then he turned back and began taking up the gearbox lugs.
Rogers waited, and after a while the man said, “So Besser failed.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Martino.”
“He must have. I’m sorry for him—he really believed he was right. It’s funny with scientists, you know—they’re supposed to be objective and detached, and formulate theories according to the evidence. But a man’s baby is a man’s baby, and sometimes they feel it very badly when an idea of theirs is proved wrong.” He finished tightening the cover, and screwed the drain plug in firmly. He crawled out from under the tractor, put the wrench down, and carefully rolled up the tarpaulin. “Well, that’s done,” he said. He put the tarpaulin under his arm, bent to pick up the can of old oil, and went over to the work bench, where he put the tools down and carefully poured the can out into a waste drum.
He took a new half-gallon can from a rack, punched a pouring spout into its top, and brought it back to the tractor, where he took off the filler cap and up-ended the can over the transmission. “Now I can get that field done tomorrow. The ground’s got to be loosened up, you know, or it’ll get crusty and cake.”
“Aren’t you going to say anything about whether you’ll accept the offer or not?”
The man lifted the pouring spout of the filler and replaced the cap. He put the empty can down and climbed up into the driver’s saddle, where he began going carefully through the gears, testing them for engagement and smoothness, without looking at Rogers until he was satisfied he’d done a good job. Then he turned his head. “They decide I was Martino?”
“I think,” Rogers said slowly, “they simply needed someone very badly. They felt, I think, that even if you weren’t Lucas Martino, you’d have been trained to replace him. It—seems to be very important to them to get the K-Eighty-eight program working again as quickly as possible. They have plenty of competent technicians. But geniuses don’t appear often.”
The man climbed down off the tractor, picked up the empty oil can, and took it over to the bench. His arm bandage was black with floor dust, and he pulled a five-gallon can out from under the bench, uncapped it, and began taking the bandage off. The sharp smell of gasoline burned into Rogers’ nostrils.
“I was wonderin’ how they’d come to decide for sure. I can’t see any way of doing it.” He dropped the bandage into the gasoline. Plunging both arms into the can, he washed the bandage clean and hung it over a nail to dry.
“You’d be watched very closely, of course. And probably kept under guard.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I don’t mind your people being around here all of the time.” He took a tin cup out of the bottom of the gasoline can and sluiced down his arm, twisting and turning it to make sure every working part was washed out thoroughly. He took a stiff, fine-bristled brush from a rack and began cleaning his arm with methodical care, following an obviously old routine. Rogers watched him, wondering, once again, just what kind of brain lived behind that mask and was neither angry, nor bitter, nor triumphant that they’d had to come to him at last. “But I can’t do it,” the man said. He picked up an oil can and began lubricating his arm.
“Why not?” Rogers thought he saw the man’s composure wavering.
The man shrugged uncomfortably. “I can’t do that stuff any more.” The bandage was dry, and he wrapped his arm again. He didn’t meet Rogers’ eyes.
“What’re you ashamed of?” Rogers asked.
The man walked over to the tractor, as though he thought it was safer there.
“What’s the matter, Martino?”
The man put his left arm over the tractor’s hood and stood facing out through the open barn doors. “It’s a pretty good life, here. I work my land, get it in shape; I fix up the place—I guess you know what it was like when I moved in. It’s been a lot of work. A lot of rebuildin’. Ten more years and I’ll have it right in the shape I want.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“I know. I don’t care. I don’t think about it. The thing is—” His hand beat lightly on the tractor’s hood. “The thing is, I’m working all the time. A farm—everything on a farm—is so close to the edge between growing and rotting. You work the land, you grow crops, and when you do that, you’re robbing the land. You’re going to fertilize, and irrigate, and lime, and drain, but the land doesn’t know that. It’s got to get back what you took out of it. Your fenceposts rot, your building foundations crumble, the rain comes down and your paint peels, y
our crops get beaten down and start to rot—you’ve got to work hard, every day, all day, just to stay a little bit better than even. You get up in the morning, and you have to make up for what’s happened during the night. You can’t do anything else. You don’t think about anything else. Now you want me to go work on the K-Eighty-eight again.” Suddenly, his hand beat down on the tractor, and the barn echoed to the clang of metal. His voice was agonized. “I’m not a physicist. I’m a farmer. I can’t do that stuff any more!”
Rogers took a slow breath. “All right—I’ll go back and tell them.”
The man was quiet again. “What’re you going to do after that? Your men going to keep watching me?”
Rogers nodded. “It has to be that way. I’ll see you to your grave. I’m sorry.”
The man shrugged. “I’m used to it. I haven’t got anything that people watching is going to hurt.”
No, Rogers thought, you’re harmless now. And I’m watching you, so I’m useless. I wonder if I’ll end up living on a farm down the road?
Or is it just that you don’t dare take the chance of going on the K-Eighty-eight project? Did they risk it, after all, with somebody who couldn’t fool us there?
Rogers’ mouth twisted. One more—once more and for the thousandth time, he’d raise the old, pointless question. Something bubbled through his blood, and he shivered slightly. I’ll be an old man, he thought, and I’ll always think I knew, but I’ll never get an answer.
“Martino,” he blurted. “Are you Martino?”
The man moved his head, and the metal glowed with a dull nimbus under its film of oil. He said nothing for a moment, his head moving from side to side as though he were looking for something lost. Then he tightened his grip on the tractor, and his shoulders came back. For a moment his voice had depth in it, as though he remembered something difficult and prideful he had done in his youth. “No.”
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 74