American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (94 page)

“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, 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 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.”

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, S.I.B. Gospodin 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 square feet of floor space, and was called Project K-88.

Azarin scowled. It was all very well and good to have such faith in Martino’s importance, but
what
was K-88? 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 A.N.G. 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-anddagger secret agent, with his flabby white skin and his little cameras who would deliver the K-88 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-88. 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.

“Gospodin 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.

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.