Who?

by Algis Budrys

  “No — no, that’s all right,” he said quickly. Damn it, she’d been expecting him to try and get rid of her. “Don’t do that.” And now he had to propose something for them to do. “Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “All right, then, let’s go find some place to eat.”

  “There’s a very good delicatessen just around the corner.”

  “All right.” For some reason, he took her hand. It was small, but not fragile. She seemed neither surprised nor shocked. Wondering what the devil had made him do that, he walked with her down to the delicatessen.

  The place was still fairly empty, and he led her to a booth in the back. They sat down facing each other, and a waiter came and took their orders. When he left Lucas realized he should have thought of what would happen when he came in here with her.

  They were cut off. The high plywood back behind him separated them from the rest of the room. On one side of them was a wall, and the other, barely leaving people clearance to slide in and out of the booth’s far seat, was an air conditioner. He had let himself and the girl be maneuvered into a pocket where they had nothing to do but sit and stare at each other while the waited for their food.

  What was there to do or say? Looking at that hairdo and the metallic pink polish on her nails, he couldn’t imagine what she could possibly talk about, or like, that he could find the faintest interest in.

  “Have you been in the city long?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”

  That seemed to be that.

  He’d thrown his cigarette away, somewhere. He knocked a fresh one out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it, wishing the waiter would hurry up so the could at least eat. He stole a glance at his watch. It was only six o’clock.

  “Could — could I have a cigarette, please?” she asked, her voice and expression uncertain, and he jumped.

  “What?” He thrust the pack out clumsily. “Oh — gee, Edith, I’m sorry! Sure — here. I didn’t…” Didn’t what? Didn’t even offer her the courtesy of a cigarette. Didn’t stop to wonder whether she smoked or not. Treated her as if she was a pet dog.

  He felt peculiarly embarrassed and guilty. Worse now, than ever before.

  She took the cigarette and he lit it for her quickly.

  She smiled a little nervously. “Thank you. I come from Connecticut, originally. Where’re you from, Luke?”

  She must’ve known how I felt about her, he was thinking. It must have been sticking out all over me. But she let me go on, because… Because why? Because I’m the man of her dreams?

  “New Jersey,” he said. “From a farm.”

  “I always wished I could live on a farm. Are you working here?”

  Because I’m probably the first guy that’s talked to her since she got here, that’s why. I may not be much, but I’m all she’s got.

  “I am for the time being. I work for an espresso house down in the Village.”

  He realized he was starting to tell her things he hadn’t intended to. But he had to talk, now, and besides, this wasn’t what he’d planned — not at all.

  “I’ve only been down there once or twice,” she said. “It must be a fascinating place.”

  “I guess it is, in a way. I’m going to be starting school next year, though, and I won’t be seeing much of it.”

  “Oh — what’re you going to study, Luke?”

  So it came out, bit by bit, more and more fluently. They talked while they ate, and words seemed to jump out of him. He told her about the farm, and about high school, and about the espresso house.

  They finished eating and went for a walk, up Central Park South and then turning uptown, and he continued to talk. She walked beside him, her feet in their slippers making soft, padding sounds on the asphalt pavement.

  After a while, it was time to take her home. She lived on the West Side, near the gas plant in the Sixties, on the third floor of a tenement. He walked her up stairs, to her door, and suddenly he was out of talk.

  He stopped, as abruptly as he’d started, and stood looking down at her, wondering what the devil had gotten into him. The roots of her hair were very dark, he saw.

  “I’ve been bending your ear,” he said uncomfortably.

  She shook her head. “No. No, you’re a very interesting person. I didn’t mind at all. It’s — ” She looked up at him, and dropped even the minimum of pretense the she had managed to keep throughout the afternoon and evening. “It’s nice to have somebody talk to me.”

  He had nothing to say to that. They stood in front of her door, and the silence grew between them.

  “I had a very good time,” she said at last.

  No, you didn’t, he thought. You had a miserable time. The worst thing that ever happened to you was when I spoke to you in front of the lion cages. And now I’m going to walk down those stairs and never call you up or see you again, and that’ll be worse, I guess. I’ve really messed things up. “Look — have you got a phone?” he found himself saying.

  She nodded quickly. “Yes, I do. Would you like the number?”

  “I’ll write it down.” He found a piece of paper in his wallet and a pencil in his shirt pocket. He wrote the number down, put his wallet and his pencil back, and once again they simply stood there.

  “Monday’s my day off,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  “All right, Luke.”

  He looked down at her, thinking, No, no, God damn it, I’m not going to try and kiss her good night. This isn’t like that. This is a crazy thing. She’s not like that.

  “Good night, Edith.”

  “Good night, Luke.”

  He reached out and touched her shoulder, feeling as though he had a stupid expression on his face. She put her hand up and covered his. Then he turned away and went quickly down the stairs, feeling like a fool, and a savage, and an idiot, and like almost anything but an eighteen-year-old boy.

  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 to him 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 quickminded 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 that 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 nerve-racking 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 cold-water 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 fiancee whose grades hadn’t stayed up and who was now in Asia. Never, with anyone, could he talk about anything important to him.

  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 beginning of the logic chain that was to end in the K-Eighty-Eight. 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. In reaction to the equivocal aftermath of the Sino-Russian incident, the ANG was formed. When he submitted his preliminary paper on the K-Eighty-Eight field effect, he was transferred to an ANG 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 MIT, 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.

  PART THREE

  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 CCNY. 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 the 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 he 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 corners. 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 eye-level 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.