American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (80 page)

Read American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Online

Authors: Gary K. Wolfe

Tags: #Science Fiction

He rubbed the top of his head. “They’ve got us chasing our tails over this guy.”

Willis nodded sourly. “I know. Listen—how much do you know about the Russians?”

“Russians? About as much as I do about the other Soviets. Why?”

Willis said reluctantly, “Well, it’s a trap to generalize about these things. But there’s something we had to learn to take into account, down at PsychoWar. It’s a Slav’s idea of a joke. Particularly the Russians’. I keep thinking . . . whether it started out that way or not, every one of them that knows about this fellow is laughing at us now. They go in for deadpan practical jokes, and especially the kind where somebody bleeds a little. I’ve got a vision of the boys in Novoya Moskva clustered around the vodka at night and laughing and laughing and laughing.”

“That’s nice,” Rogers said. “That’s very fine.” He wiped his palm over his jaw. “That helps.”

“I thought you’d enjoy it.”

“God damn it, Willis, I’ve got to crack that shell of his! We can’t have him running around loose and unsolved. Martino was one of the very best in his business. He was right up there, right in the thick of every new wrinkle we’re going to pleat for the next ten years. He was working on this K-Eighty-eight thing. And the Soviets had him four months. What’d they get out of him, what’d they do to him—do they still have him?”

“I know . . .” Willis said slowly. “I can see he might have given away almost anything, or even become an active agent of theirs. But on this business of his not being Martino at all—I frankly can’t believe that. What about the fingerprints on his one good hand?”

Rogers cursed. “His right shoulder’s a mass of scar tissue. If they can substitute mechanical parts for eyes and ears and lungs—if they can motorize an arm and graft it right into him—where does that leave us?”

Willis turned pale. “You mean—they could fake anything. It’s definitely Martino’s right arm, but it isn’t necessarily Martino.”

“That’s right.”

6.

The telephone rang. Rogers rolled over on his cot and lifted the receiver off the unit on the floor beside him. “Rogers,” he mumbled. “Yes, Mr. Deptford.” The radiant numerals on his watch were swimming before his eyes, and he blinked sharply to steady them. Eleven-thirty p.m. He’d been asleep a little under two hours.

“Hello, Shawn. I’ve got your third daily report in front of me here. I’m sorry to have awakened you, but you don’t really seem to be making much progress, do you?”

“That’s all right. About waking me up, I mean. No—no, I’m not getting far on this thing.”

The office was dark except for the seep of light under the door from the hall. Across the hall, in a larger office Rogers had commandeered, a specialist clerical staff was collating and evaluating the reports Finchley, Barrister, Willis, and the rest of them had made. Rogers could faintly hear the restless clacking of typewriters and I.B.M. machines.

“Would it be of any value for me to come down?” “And take over the investigation? Come ahead. Any time.”

Deptford said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “Would I get any farther than you have?”

“No.”

“That’s what I told Karl Schwenn.”

“Still giving you the business, is he?”

“Shawn, he has to. The entire K-Eighty-eight program has been held up for months. No other project in the world would have been permitted to hang fire this long. At the first doubt of its security, it would have been washed out as a matter of routine. You know that, and that ought to tell you how important the K-Eighty-eight is. I think you’re aware of what’s going on in Africa at this moment. We’ve got to have something to show. We’ve got to quiet the Soviets down—at least until they’ve developed something to match it. The Ministry’s putting pressure on the Department to reach a quick decision on this man.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re almost literally taking this man apart like a bomb. But we don’t have anything to show whose bomb he is.”

“There must be something.”

“Mr. Deptford, when we send a man over the line, we provide him with their I.D. papers. We go further. We fill his pockets with their coins, their door keys, their cigarettes, their combs. We give him one of their billfolds, with their sales receipts and laundry tickets. We give him photographs of relatives and girls, printed on their kind of paper with their processes and chemicals —and yet every one of those items came out of our manufacturing shops and never saw the other side of the line before.”

Deptford sighed. “I know. How’s he taking it?”

“I can’t tell. When one of our people goes over the line, he has a cover story. He’s an auto mechanic, or a baker, or a tramway conductor. And if he’s one of our good people—and for important jobs we only send the best—then, no matter what happens, no matter what they do to him—he
stays
a baker or a tramway conductor. He answers questions like a tramway conductor. He’s as bewildered at it all as a tramway conductor would be. If necessary, he bleeds and screams and dies like a tramway conductor.”

“Yes.” Deptford’s voice was quiet. “Yes, he does. Do you suppose Azarin ever wonders if perhaps this man he’s working on really
is
a tramway conductor?”

“Maybe he does, sir. But he can’t ever act as if he did, or he wouldn’t be doing his job.”

“All right, Shawn. But we’ve got to have our answer soon.”

“I know.”

After a time, Deptford said: “It’s been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, Shawn?”

“Some.”

“You’ve always done the job for me.” Deptford’s voice was quiet, and then Rogers heard the peculiar click a man’s drying lips make as he opens his mouth to wet them. “All right. I’ll explain the situation upstairs, and you do what you can.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Good night, Shawn. Go back to sleep, if you can.”

“Good night, sir.” Rogers hung up. He sat looking down at the darkness around his feet. It’s funny, he thought. I wanted an education, and my family lived a half block away from the docks in Brooklyn. I wanted to be able to understand what a categorical imperative was, and recognize a quote from Byron when I heard one. I wanted to wear a tweed jacket and smoke a pipe under a campus oak somewhere. And during the summers while I was going to high school, I worked for this insurance company, file clerking in the claims investigation division. So when I got the chance to try for that A.N.G. scholarship, I took it. And when they found out I knew something about investigation work, they put me in with their Security trainees. And here I am, and I never thought about it one way or another. I’ve got a pretty good record. Pretty damned good. But I wonder, now, if I wouldn’t have done just as well at something else?

Then he slowly put his shoes on, went to his desk, and clicked on the light.

7.

The week was almost over. They were beginning to learn things, but none of them were the slightest help.

Barrister laid the first engineering drawing down on Rogers’ desk. “This is how his head works—we believe. It’s a difficult thing, not being able to get clear X-rays.”

Rogers looked down at the drawing and grunted. Barrister began pointing out specific details, using his pipestem to tap the drawing.

“There’s his eye assembly. He has binocular vision, with servo-motored focusing and tracking. The motors are powered by this miniature pile, in his chest cavity, here. So are the remainder of his artificial components. It’s interesting to note he’s a complete selection of filters for his eye lenses. They did him up brown. By the by, he
can
see by infra-red if he wants to.”

Rogers spat a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. “That’s interesting.”

Barrister said, “Now—right here, on each side of the eyes, are two acoustical pickups. Those are his ears. They must have felt it was better design to house both functions in that one central skull opening. It’s directional, but not as effective as God intended. Here’s something else; the shutter that closes that opening is quite tough—armored to protect all those delicate components. The result is he’s deaf when his eyes’re closed. He probably sleeps more restfully for it.”

“When he isn’t faking nightmares, yeah.”

“Or having them.” Barrister shrugged. “Not my department.”

“I wish it wasn’t mine. All right, now what about that other hole?”

“His mouth? Well, there’s a false, immovable jaw over the working one—again, apparently, to protect the mechanism. His true jaws, his saliva ducts and teeth are artificial. His tongue isn’t. The inside of the mouth is plastic-lined. Teflon, probably, or one of its kin. My people’re having a little trouble breaking it down for analysis. But he’s cooperative about letting us gouge out samples.”

Rogers licked his lips. “Okay—fine,” he said brusquely. “But how’s all this hooked into his brain? How does he operate it?”

Barrister shook his head. “I don’t know. He uses it all as if he were born with it, so there’s some sort of connection into his voluntary and autonomic nervous centers. But we don’t yet know exactly how it was done. He’s cooperative, as I said, but I’m not the man to start disassembling any of this—we might not be able to put him back together again. All I know is that somewhere, behind all that machinery, there’s a functioning human brain inside that skull. How the Soviets did it is something else again. You have to remember they’ve been fiddling with this sort of thing a long time.” He laid another sheet atop the first one, paying no attention to the pallor of Rogers’ face.

“Here’s his powerplant. It’s only roughed out in the drawing, but we think it’s just a fairly ordinary pocket pile. It’s located where his lungs were, next to the blower that operates his vocal cords and the most ingenious oxygen circulator I’ve ever heard of. The delivered power’s electrical, of course, and it works his arm, his jaws, his audiovisual equipment, and everything else.”

“How well’s the pile shielded?”

Barrister let a measured amount of professional admiration show in his voice. “Well enough so we can get muddy X-rays right around it. There’s
some
leakage, of course. He’ll die in about fifteen years.”

“Mm.”

“Well, now, man, if they cared whether he lived or died, they’d have supplied us with blueprints.”

“They cared at one time. And fifteen years might be plenty long enough for them, if he isn’t Martino.”

“And if he is Martino?”

“Then, if he is Martino, and they got to him with some of their persuasions, fifteen years might be plenty long enough for them.”

“And if he’s Martino and they didn’t get to him? If he’s the same man he always was, behind his new armor? If he isn’t the Man from Mars? If he’s simply plain Lucas Martino, physicist?”

Rogers shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m running out of ideas for quick answers. But we have to find out. Before we’re through, we may have to find out everything he ever did or felt—everyone he talked to, everything he thought.”

Chapter Two

Lucas Martino was born in the hospital of the large town nearest to his father’s farm. His mother was injured by the birth, and so he was both the eldest son and only child of Matteo and Serafina Martino, truck farmers, of Milano, near Bridgetown, New Jersey. He was named after the uncle who had paid his parents’ passage to the United States in 1947 and lent them the money for the farm.

Milano, New Jersey, was a community of tomato fields, peach orchards, and chicken farms, centering on a general store which sold household staples, stock feed, gasoline for the tractors, and was also the post office. One mile to the north, the four broad lanes of a concrete highway carried booming traffic between Camden-Philadelphia and Atlantic City. To the west, railroad tracks curved down from Camden to Cape May. To the south, forming the base of a triangle of communications, another highway ran from the Jersey shore to the Chester ferry across the mouth of the Delaware, and so connected to all the sprawling highways of the Eastern Seaboard. Bridgetown lay at the meeting of railroad and highway, but Milano was inside the triangle, never more than five minutes away from the world as most people know it, and yet far enough.

Half a century earlier, the clayey earth had been planted, acre-on-acre of vineyard, and the Malaga Processing Corporation had imported workers by the hundreds from old Italy. Communities had grown up, farms had been cleared, and the language of the area was Italian.

When the grape blight came, the tight cultural pattern was torn. Some, like Lucas Maggiore, left the farms their fathers had built and moved to the Italian communities in other cities. To a certain extent their places were taken by people from different parts of the world. And the newcomers, too, were all farmers by birth and blood. In a few years the small communities were once again reasonably prosperous, set in a new pattern of habits and customs that was much like the old. But the outside world had touched the little towns like Milano, and in turn Milano had sent out some of its own people to the world as most of us know it.

The country was warm in the summer, with mild winters. The outlying farms were set among patches of pine and underbrush, and there were wide-eyed deer that came into the kitchen gardens during the winter. Most of the roads were graded gravel, and the utility poles carried only one or two strands of cable. There were more pickup trucks than cars on the roads, though the cars were as likely to be new Dodges and Mercurys as not. There was a tomato-packing plant a few miles up the road, and Matteo Martino’s farm was devoted mostly to tomato vines. Except for occasional trips to Bridgetown for dress material and parts for the truck, the packing plant and general store were as far from home as Matteo ever found it necessary to go.

Young Lucas had heavy bones and an already powerful frame from Matteo’s North Italian ancestry. His eyes were brown, but his hair at that age was almost light enough to be blond. His father had a habit of occasionally rumpling his hair and calling him Tedeschino—which means “the little German”— to his mother’s faint annoyance. They lived together in a fourroom farmhouse, a closely knit unit, and Lucas grew naturally into a share of the work. They were three people with three different but interdependent responsibilities, as they had to be if the work was to go properly. Serafina kept house and helped with the picking. Matteo did the heavy work, and Lucas, more and more as he grew older and stronger, did the necessary maintenance work that had to be kept up day by day. He weeded, he had charge of racking and storing the hand tools, and Matteo, who had worked in the Fiat plant before he came to America, was gradually teaching him how to repair and maintain the tractor. Lucas had a bent for mechanics.

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