by Algis Budrys
“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, your 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 to 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 raised 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.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
Anastas Azarin lifted the glass of lukewarm tea, pressed the spoon out of the way with his index finger, and drank it down without stopping until the glass was empty. He thumped it down in a circle of old stains on the end of his desk, and the spoon rattled. His orderly came in from the outer office, took the glass, refilled it, and set it down on the desk in easy reach. Azarin nodded shortly. The orderly clicked his heels, about-faced, and left the room.
Azarin watched him go, his mouth hooking deeply at one corner in a grimace of amusement that wrinkled all his face before it died as abruptly as it came. During that short moment, he had been transformed — his face had been open, frank, and friendly. But when his features smoothed again, all trace of the peasant, Azarin, left them. It was possible to see what Azarin had taught himself to become during his years of rising through the system: impersonal, efficient, wooden.
He went back to reading the weekly sector situation report, his blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger following the words, his lips muttering inaudibly.
He knew they laughed at him for his old-fashioned samovar. But the orderly knew what would happen to him if the glass ever remained empty. He knew they joked about the way he read. But they knew what would happen to them if he found errors in their reports.
Anastas Azarin had never graduated from their academies: He had never scribbled on their blackboards or filled their copybooks. While they were polishing the seats of their school uniforms on classroom benches, he had been out with his father, hefting an axe and dragging the great balks of timber through the dark forest. While they took their civil service examinations, he was supervising labor gangs on the taiga. While they hunched over their desks, he was in Mandjuria, eating bad rice with the little brown men. While they sat at home with their wives, reading their newspapers and dreaming of promotion, he was in a dressing station, dying of typhus.
And now he had a desk of his own, and an office of his own, and a pink-cheeked, wide-eyed orderly who brought him tea and clicked his heels. It was not their joke — it was his. It was he who could laugh — not they. They were nothing, and he was sector commandant — Anastas Azarin, Colonel, SIB. Tovarishch Polkovnik Azarin, if you please!
He bent over the reports, muttering. Nothing new. As usual, the Allieds kept their sector tight. There was this American scientist, Martino. What was he doing in his laboratory?
The American, Heywood, could not tell. From his post with the Allied Nations Government, Heywood had managed to arrange things so that Martino’s laboratory was placed close to Azarin’s sector. But that was the best he had been able to do. He had known Martino, knew Martino was engaged in something important that required a room with a twenty-foot ceiling and eight hundred sq
uare feet of floor space, and was called Project K-Eighty-Eight.
Azarin scowled. It was all very well and good to have such faith in Martino’s importance, but what was K-Eighty-Eight? What good was an empty name? The American, Heywood, was very glib with his data, but the fact was that there was no data. The ANG internal security system was such that no one, even Heywood, could know much of what was going on. That in itself was quite normal — the Soviet system was the same. But the fact was that in the end it would not be some cloak-and-dagger secret agent, with his flabby white skin and his little cameras who would deliver the K-Eighty-Eight to them. It would be Azarin — simple Anastas Azarin, the peasant — who would pull this thing apart as a bear destroys a dead tree to find the honey.
Martino would have to be interrogated. There was no other method of doing it. But for all Novoya Moskva wasted its air on the telephone, there was no quick way of doing it. There was no getting people into Martino’s laboratory. He had to be waited for. Men had to be ready at all times, prepared to pluck him from some dark street on the day he wandered too close to the line, if that lucky accident ever did occur. Then — one, two, three, he would be here, he would be questioned, he would be released, all in a matter of a few days before the Allieds could do anything, and the Allieds would have lost the K-Eighty-Eight. And that devil, the American Rogers, no matter how clever he was, would have been taught at last that Anastas Azarin was a better man. But until that time, everyone — Azarin, Novoya Moskva — everyone — would have to wait. All in good time, if ever.
The telephone on his desk began to ring. Azarin swept up the receiver. “Polkovnik Azarin,” he growled.
“Tovarishch Polkovnik — ” It was one of his staff assistants. Azarin recognized the voice and fumbled for the name. He found it.
“Well, Yung?”
“There has been an explosion in the American scientist’s laboratory.”
“Get men in there. Get the American.”
“They are already on their way. What shall we do next?”
“Next? Bring him here. No — one moment. An explosion, you say? Take him to the military hospital.”
“Yes, sir. I very much hope he is alive, because this, of course, is the opportunity we have been waiting for.”
“Is it? Go give your orders.”
Azarin dropped the receiver on its cradle. This was bad. This was the worst possible thing. If Martino was dead, or so badly damaged as to be useless for weeks, Novoya Moskva would become intolerable.
2
As soon as his car had come to a stop in front of the hospital, Azarin jumped out and climbed quickly up the steps. He marched through the main doors and strode into the lobby, where a doctor was waiting for him.
“Colonel Azarin?” the wiry little doctor asked, bowing slightly from the waist. “I am Medical Doctor Kothu. You will forgive me — I do not speak your language fluently.”
“I do well enough in yours,” Azarin said pleasantly, anticipating the gratifying surprise on the little man’s face. When it came, it made him even more well disposed toward the doctor. “Now then — where is the man?”
“This way, please.” Kothu bowed again and led the way to the elevator. A brief smile touched Azarin’s face as he followed him. It always gave him pleasure when simple-looking Anastas Azarin proved to be as learned as anyone who had spent years in the universities. It was something to be proud of, too, that he had learned the language while burning leeches off his legs in a jungle swamp, instead of out of some professor’s book.
“How badly is the man injured?” he asked Kothu as they stepped out into another hall.
“Very badly. He was dead for a few moments.”
Azarin jerked his head toward the doctor.
Kothu nodded with a certain pride of his own. “He died in the ambulance. Fortunately, death is no longer permanent, under certain circumstances.” He led Azarin to a plate glass window set in the wall of a white-tiled room. Inside, still wearing the torn remnants of his clothes, incredibly bloodied, a man lay in the midst of a welter of apparatus.
“He is quite safe now,” Kothu explained. “You see the autojector there, pumping his blood, and the artificial kidney that purifies it. On this side are the artificial lungs.” The machines were bunched together haphazardly, where they had quickly been brought from their usual positions against the walls. Doctors and nurses were clustered around them, carefully supervising their workings, and other doctors were busy on the man himself, clamping torn blood vessels and applying compression to his armless left shoulder. As Azarin watched, orderlies began shifting the machines into systematic order. The emergency was over. Things were assuming a routine. A nurse glanced at her watch, looked over at a rack where a bottle was draining of whole blood, and substituted a fresh one.
Azarin scowled to hide his nervousness. He was having a certain amount of difficulty in keeping his glance on the monstrous scene. A man, after all, was made with his insides decently hidden under his skin. To look at a man, you did not see the slimy organs doing their revolting work of keeping him alive and real. To see a man like this, ripped open, with mysteriously knowledgeable, yes — frightening — men like this Kothu pushing and pulling at the moist things that stuffed the smooth and handsome skin…
Azarin risked a sidelong glance at the little brown doctor. Kothu could do these abominable things just as easily to him. Anastas Azarin could lie there like that, hideously exposed, with men like this Kothu desecrating him at his pleasure.
“That’s very good,” Azarin barked, “but he’s useless to me. Or can he speak?”
Kothu shook his head. “His head is crushed, and he has lost a number of sensory organs. But this is only emergency equipment, such as you will find in any accident ward. Inside of two months, he’ll be as good as new.”
“Two months?”
“Colonel Azarin, I ask you to look at what lies on that table and is barely a man.”
“Yes — yes, of course, I’m lucky to have him at all. He can’t be moved, I suppose? To the great hospital in Novoya Moskva, for example?”
“It would kill him.”
Azarin nodded. Well, with every bad, some good. There would be no question, now, of Martino being taken away from him. It would be Anastas Azarin who did it — Anastas Azarin who tore the honey from the tree.
“Very well — do your best. And quickly.”
“Of course, Colonel.”
“If there is anything you need, come to me. I will give it to you.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for. I want this man. You will do your best work to see that I get him.”
“Yes, Colonel.” Medical Doctor Kothu bowed slightly from the waist. Azarin nodded and walked away, down the hall to the elevator, his booted feet thudding against the floor.
Downstairs, he found Yung just driving up with a squad of SIB soldiers. Azarin gave detailed instructions for a guard, and ordered the accident floor of the hospital sealed off. Already, he was busy thinking of ways this story might be spreading. The ambulance crew had to be kept quiet, the hospital personnel might talk, and even some of the patients here might have gathered an idea of what was going on. All these leaks had to be plugged. Azarin went back to his car, conscious of how complex his work was, how much ability a man needed to do it properly, and of how, inevitably, the American, Rogers, would sooner or later bring it all to nothing.
Five weeks went by. Five weeks during which Azarin was unable to accomplish anything, and of which Martino knew nothing.
3
Every time Martino tried to focus his eyes, something whirred very softly in his frontal sinuses. He tried to understand that, but he felt very weak and boneless, and the sensation was so disconcerting that he was awake for an hour before he could see.
For that hour he lay motionless, listening, and noticing that his ears, too, were not serving him properly. Sounds advanced and receded much too quickly; were suddenly here and then ther
e. His face ached slightly as each new vibration struck his ears, almost as if it were resonating to the sounds he heard.
There was some kind of apparatus in his mouth. His tongue felt the hard sleekness of metal, and the slipperiness of plastic. A splint, he thought. My jaw’s broken. He tried it, and it worked very well. It must be some kind of traction splint, he thought.
Whatever it was, it kept his teeth from meeting. When he closed his jaws, he felt only pressure and resistance, instead of the mesh and grind of teeth coming together.
The sheets felt hot and rough, and his chest was constricted. The bandaging felt lumpy across his back. His right shoulder was painful when he tried to move it, but it moved. He opened and closed the fingers of his right hand. Good. He tried his left arm. Nothing. Bad.
He lay quietly for a while, and at the end of it he had accepted the fact that his arm was gone. He was right-handed, after all, and if the arm was the only thing, he was lucky. He set about testing, elevating his hips cautiously, flexing his thighs and calves, curling his toes. No paralysis.
He had been lucky, and now he felt much better. He tried his eyes again, and though the whirring came and jarred him, he kept focus this time. He looked up and saw a blue ceiling, with a blue light burning in its center. The light bothered him, and after a moment he realized he wasn’t blinking, so he blinked deliberately. The ceiling and the light turned yellow.
There had been a peculiar shifting across his field of vision. He looked down toward his feet. Yellow sheets, yellowish white bedstead, yellow walls with a brown strip from floor to shoulder height. He blinked again, and the room went dark. He looked up toward the ceiling and barely saw a faint glow where the light had been, as though he were looking through leaded glass.
He couldn’t feel the texture of the pillow against the back of his neck. He couldn’t smell the smell of a hospital. He blinked again and the room was clear. He looked from side to side, and at the edges of his vision, just barely in sight and very close to his eyes, he saw two in-curving cuts in what seemed to be metal plating. It was as though his face were pressed up to the door slit of a solitary confinement cell. He inched up his right hand to touch his face.
