Who?

by Algis Budrys

  For one second, everything stopped. The car with the crushed fender stood rocking at the mouth of the street. Rogers kept one hand on the side of the FBI car, the stench of burnt rubber swirling around him.

  Then Rogers heard the man, far down a street, still running, and wondered if the man had really understood anything he’d heard since the girl screamed at him.

  “Call in,” he snapped to the FBI driver. “Tell your headquarters to get in touch with my people. Tell them which way he’s going, and to pick up the tail on him.” Then he ran across the street to Finchley, who was dead.

  7

  The hotel on Bleecker Street had a desk on the ground floor and narrow stairs going up to the rooms. The entrance was a narrow doorway between two stores. The clerk sat behind his desk, his chair tipped back against the stairs, and sleepily drooped his chin on his chest. He was an old, worn-out man with gray stubble on his face, and he was waiting for morning so he could go to bed.

  The front door opened. The clerk did not look up. If somebody wanted a room, they’d come to him. When he heard the shuffling footsteps come to a stop in front of him, he opened his eyes.

  The clerk was used to seeing cripples. The rooms upstairs were full of one kind or another. And the clerk was used to seeing new things all the time. When he was younger, he’d followed things in the paper. It had been no surprise to him when the Third Avenue El was torn down, or cars came out with four headlights. But now that he was older, things just drifted by him. So he never was surprised at anything he hadn’t seen before. If doctors were putting metal heads on people, it wasn’t much different from the aluminum artificial legs that often stumped up and down the stairs behind him.

  The man in front of the desk was trying to talk to him. But for a long while, the only sound he made was a series of long, hollow, sucking sounds as air rushed into his mouth. He held onto the front edge of the desk for a moment. He touched the left side of his chest. Finally he said, laboring over the words, “How much for a room?”

  “Five bucks,” the clerk said, reaching behind him for a key. “Cash in advance.”

  The man fumbled with a wallet, took out a bill, and dropped it on the desk. He did not look directly at the clerk, and seemed to be trying to hide his face.

  “Room number’s on the key,” the clerk said, putting the money in the slot of a steel box bolted through the floor.

  The man nodded quickly. “All right.” He gestured self-consciously toward his face. “I had an accident,” he said. “An industrial accident. An explosion.”

  “Buddy,” the clerk said, “I don’t give a damn. No drinking in your room and be out by eight o’clock, or it’s another five bucks.”

  8

  It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. Rogers sat in his cold, blank office, listening to the telephone ring. After a time, he picked it up.

  “Rogers.”

  “This is Avery, sir. The subject is still in the hotel on Bleecker. He came down a little before eight, paid another day’s rent, and went back to his room.”

  “Thank you. Stay on it.”

  He pushed the receiver back on the cradle and bent until his face was almost touching the desk. He clasped his hands behind his neck.

  The interoffice buzzer made him straighten up again. He moved the switch over. “Yes?”

  “We have Miss DiFillipo here, sir.”

  “Would you send her in, please.”

  He waited until the girl came in, and then let his hand fall away from the switch. “Come in, please. Here’s — here’s a chair for you.”

  Angela DiFillipo was an attractive young brunette, a trifle on the thin side. Rogers judged her to be about eighteen. She came in confidently, and sat down without any trace of nervousness. Rogers imagined that in ordinary circumstances, she was a calm, self-assured type, largely lacking in the little guilts that made even the most harmless people turn a bit nervous in this building.

  “I’m Shawn Rogers,” he said, putting on a smile and holding out his hand.

  She shook it firmly, almost mannishly, and smiled back without giving him the feeling that she was trying to make an impression on him. “Hello.”

  “I know you have to get to work, so I won’t keep you here long.” He turned the recorder on. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about last night.”

  “I’ll be glad to help out.”

  “Thank you. Now — your name is Angela DiFillipo, and you live at thirty-three MacDougal Street, here in New York, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Last night — that would be the twelfth — at about ten-thirty p.m., you were at the corner of MacDougal and an alley between Bleecker and Houston Streets. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell me how you got there and what happened?”

  “Well, I’d just left the house to go to the delicatessen for some milk. The alley’s right next to the door. I didn’t particularly notice anybody, but I did know somebody was coming up MacDougal, because I could hear his footsteps.”

  “Coming toward Bleecker? On the west side of the street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, Miss DiFillipo. I may interrupt you again, to clarify the record, but you’re doing fine.” And the record’s piling up, he thought. For all the good it does.

  “Well, I knew somebody was coming, but I didn’t take any special notice of it, of course. I noticed he was walking fast. Then he changed direction, as if he was going to go into the alley. I looked at him then, because I wanted to get out of his way. There was a streetlight behind him, so all I could see was that it was a man — a big man-but I couldn’t see his face. From the way he was walking, I didn’t think he saw me at all. He was headed straight for me, though, and I guess I got a little tensed up.

  “Anyhow, I took a short step back, and he just brushed my sleeve. That made him look up, and I saw there was something odd about his face.”

  “How do you mean ‘odd,’ Miss DiFillipo?”

  “Just odd. I didn’t see what it was, then. But I got the feeling it had something wrong with it. And I guess that made me a little bit more nervous.”

  “I see.”

  “Then I saw his face. He stopped, and he opened his mouth — well, his face was metal, like one of those robot things in the Sunday paper, and it was where a mouth would be — and he looked surprised. And he said, in a very peculiar voice, ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ ”

  Rogers leaned forward in surprise. “Barbara — it’s I — the German? Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes, sir. He sounded very surprised, and — ”

  “What is it, Miss DiFillipo?”

  “I just realized what made me scream — I mean, what really did it.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said it in Italian.” She looked at Rogers with astonishment. “I just realized that.”

  Rogers frowned. “He said it in Italian. And what he said was ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ That doesn’t make sense, does it? Does it mean anything to you?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Well.” Rogers looked down at the desk, where his hands were tapping a pencil on the blotter. “How good is your Italian, Miss DiFillipo?”

  “I speak it at home all the time.”

  Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me — I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”

  “It sounded pretty usual. You might call it American Italian.”

  “As if he’d been in the country a long time?”

  “I guess so. He sounded pretty much like anybody around here. But I’m no expert. I just talk it.”

  “I see. You don’t know anyone named Barbara? I mean — a Barbara who looks a little like you, say?”

  “No…no, I’m sure I don’t.”

  “All right, Miss DiFillipo. When he spoke to you, you screamed. Did anything else happen?”

&nb
sp; “No. He turned around and ran into the alley. And then a car followed him in there. After that, one of you FBI men came up to me and asked if I was all right. I told him I was, and he took me home. I guess you know all that.”

  “Yes. And thank you, Miss DiFillipo. You’ve been very helpful. I don’t think we’ll need you again, but if we do we’ll be in touch with you.”

  “I’ll be glad to help if I can, Mr. Rogers. Goodbye.”

  “Good-bye, Miss DiFillipo.” He shook her hand again, and watched her leave.

  Damn, he thought, there’s a kind of girl who wouldn’t get upset if her man was in my kind of business.

  Then he sat frowning. “Barbara — it’s I — the German.” Well, that was one more thing to check out.

  He wondered how Martino was feeling, holed up in his room. And he wondered how soon-or long-it would be before they came upon the kind of evidence you could put on record and have stand up.

  The interoffice buzzer broke in on him again.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Rogers? This is Reed. I’ve been running down some of the people on the Martino acquaintance list.”

  “And?”

  “This man, Francis Heywood, who was Lucas Martino’s roommate at MIT.”

  “The one who got to be a big gun in the ANG Technical Personnel Allocations Bureau? He’s dead. Died in a plane crash. What about him?”

  “The FBI just got a package on him. They pulled in a net of Soviet people in Washington. A really topnotch bunch, that’d been getting away with it for years. Sleepers, mostly. When Heywood was in Washington for the American government, he was one of them.”

  “The same Francis Heywood?”

  “Fingerprints and photos check with our file, sir.”

  Rogers let the air seep out between his lips. “All right. Bring it here and let’s have a look at it.” He hung up slowly.

  When the FBI file came in, the pattern it made was perfect, with no holes anyone couldn’t fill with a little experienced conjecture, if he wanted to.

  Francis Heywood had attended MIT with Lucas Martino, sharing a room with him in one of the small dormitory apartments. Whether he was a Soviet sleeper even that far back was problematic. It made no significant difference. He was definite]y one of them by the time he was transferred out of the American government into the ANG. Working for the ANG he was hired to assign key technical personnel to the best working facilities for their specific purposes. He had been trained for this same kind of work in the American government, and was considered the best expert in the specialty. At some point near this period, he could have turned active. The natural conclusion was that he had been able to maneuver things so that the Soviets could get hold of Martino. Heywood, in effect, had been a talent scout.

  He might, or might not, have known what K-Eighty-Eight was. He was supposed to have only a rough idea of the projects he found space for, but it would certainly have been easier for him to make specific guesses than for most people. Or, if it was felt he ought to take the risk, he could have taken steps to find out. In any case, he had known what kind of man, and how important a project, he could deliver over the border.

  That, again, was secondary. What mattered most was this:

  A month after Lucas Martino had disappeared over the border, Francis Heywood had taken a transatlantic plane from Washington, where he had been on a liaison mission that might actually have been a cover for almost anything. The plane had reported engine explosions in mid-ocean, sent out a crash distress call, and fallen into the sea. Air rescue teams found some floating wreckage and recovered a few bodies, Francis Heywood’s not among them. The plane had crashed — sonar mapping found its pieces on the bottom. And, at the time, that had been that. Simple engine trouble of some kind. No report whatsoever of Soviet fighter planes sent out to create an incident, and the radio operator sending calm, well-trained messages to the last.

  But now Rogers thought of the old business of dropping a man into the water at a prearranged spot, and having a submarine stand by to pick him up.

  If you wanted to vary that so the man wouldn’t be missed, then you could crash a whole commercial flight — who’d think it strange to miss one body? — and the submarine could make sure only that one man didn’t drown. It was a little risky, but with the right kind of prearranged crash, and your man set for it, it was well within the kind of chance you took in the business.

  He looked at Heywood’s dossier statistics:

  Height: 6 feet. Weight: 220. He’d been a heavyset man, with a dark complexion. His age was almost exactly the same as Martino’s. While in Europe, he had learned to speak Italian — presumably with an American accent.

  And Rogers wondered just how much Lucas Martino had told him, through three years in the same room. How much the lonely boy from New Jersey had talked about himself. Whether he might not have had a picture of his girl, Edith, on his desk. Or even of a girl called Barbara, for Heywood to have seen every day until it was completely soaked into his memory. Maybe Heywood could have explained what Angela DiFillipo had heard last night on MacDougal Street.

  How good an actor was their man? Rogers wondered. How good an actor do you believe a man can be?

  God help us, Finch, he thought.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Young Lucas Martino came to Massachusetts Tech convinced there was something wrong with him, determined to repair it if he could. But as he went through registration, drew his classroom assignments, and struggled to fit himself into a study routine like nothing he had ever met before, he began to realize how difficult that might be.

  Tech students were already handpicked on the day they entered. Tech graduates were expected to fill positions at the top. A thousand projects were piled up on the world’s schedules, waiting for men to staff them. Once they were implemented, each project had a thousand other schedules waiting for its completion. Plans made a dozen years ahead of time were ready, each timed, each meshed to another, each dependent on the successful completion of each schedule. If a man were to some day endanger that structure in any way, his weakness had to be located as early as possible.

  So Tech instructors were people who never gave a doubtful answer the benefit of the doubt. They did not drive their classes, or waste time in giving any particular student more attention than the next. Tech students were presumed capable of digesting as much of the text as was assigned to them, and of knowing exactly what it meant. The instructors lectured quietly, competently, and ruthlessly, never going back to review a point or, in tests, to shade a mark because an otherwise good student had slipped once.

  Lucas admired it as the ideal system for its purpose. The facts were presented, and those who could not grasp them, use them, and fit themselves to the class’s progress, had to be eliminated before they slowed everyone down. It was a natural approach for him, and he had a tendency to be mildly incredulous when someone in the next chair turned to him helplessly, already far behind and with no hope of catching up. In the first few weeks of school, he established himself among his classmates as a cold, unfriendly brain, who acted as if he were somehow better than the rest of them.

  His instructors, in that first year, took no notice of him. It was the potential failures that they were paid to pay attention to.Lucas thought no more of that than he had at CCNY, where his teachers had been something close to overenthusiastic. He plunged into the work, not so much attracted to it as to the discovery that he could work — that it was expected of him, that he was given every opportunity to do so, and that the school was organized for people who could think in terms of work and nothing else.It was almost two months before he became accustomed to it enough to lose the first edge of his enthusiasm. Then he could settle down and develop a routine. Then he had time for other things.

  But be found that he was isolated. Somehow — he could not quite decide how — he had no friends. When he tried to approach some of his classmates, he found that they either resented him or were too busy. He discovered that most of t
hem took at least half again as long at their assignments as he did, and that none of them were as sure of themselves as he. He puzzled over that — these were Tech students, after all — and learned that most people could be content to know what they were doing only eighty-five per cent of the time. But that did nothing to help him. It only confused him more. He had expected, without question, that here at Tech he would meet a different breed of people. And, as a matter of fact, he had. There were plenty of students who abandoned every other concern when they came here. They slept little, ate hurriedly, and did nothing but study. In classes, they took notes at incredible length, took them back to their rooms at night, and pored over them. Letters from home went unanswered, and side trips into town at night were completely out of the question. Their conversation was a series of discussions about their work, and if any of them had personal problems, these were buried and left to take care of themselves while the grind of study went remorselessly on.

  But, Lucas discovered, this did not mean that any of them were either happy or outstandingly familiar with their subjects. It only meant that they were temporary monomaniacs.He wondered, for a while, if he might not be one, too. But that idea didn’t seem to fit the facts. So, once again, he was forced to the conclusion that he was a sort of freak — someone who had, somewhere, missed a step most people took so naturally that they never noticed it. He found himself deeply worried by it, at those odd moments when his mind would let him. Through most of the day, he was completely absorbed in work. But, at night, when he sat in his room with the day’s notes completed and the assignments read, when the current project was completed and he closed his books, then he sat staring blankly at the wall behind his desk and wondered what to do about the botch he’d made of Lucas Martino.