American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (97 page)

He lay in the bed, searching his mind for evidence, pro or con.

It was now two months, and still Azarin did not even know whether the K-88 was a bomb, a death ray, or a new means of sharpening bayonets.

He had had several totally unsatisfactory talks with that thing, Martino, who would not give in. It was all very polite, and it told him nothing. A man—any man—he could have fought. But a blank-faced nothing like some nightmare in the dark forests, that sat in its wheelchair looking like the gods they worshiped in jungle temples, that knew if it waited long enough Azarin would be beaten—that was more than could be tolerated.

Azarin remembered this morning’s call from Novoya Moskva, and suddenly he crashed his fist down upon his desk.

Their best man. They knew he was their best man, they knew he was Anastas Azarin, and yet they talked to him like that!
Clerks
talked to him like
that!

It was all because they wanted to give Martino back to the Allieds as quickly as they could. If they would give Azarin time, it would be another matter. If Martino did not have to be returned at all, if certain methods could be used, then something might really be done.

Azarin sat behind his desk, searching for the answer. Something must be thought of to satisfy Novoya Moskva—to delay things until, inevitably, a way was found to handle this Martino. But nothing would satisfy Central Headquarters unless they could in turn satisfy the Allieds. And the Allieds would be satisfied with nothing less than Martino.

Azarin’s eyes opened wide. His thick eyebrows rose into perfect semicircles. Then he reached for his telephone and called Doctor Kothu’s number. He sat listening to the telephone ring. He made one, Azarin thought. Perhaps he can make two.

His upper lip drew back from his teeth at the thought that the American, Heywood, was the best choice for the assignment. He would have much preferred to send someone solid— one of his own people, whose capabilities he knew and whose weaknesses he could allow for. But Heywood was the only choice. Probably he would fail sooner or later. But the important thing was that Novoya Moskva would not think so. They were very proud of their foreigners at Central Headquarters, and of the whole overcomplicated and inefficient system that supported them. They had it in their heads that a man could be a traitor to his own people and still not be crippled by the weaknesses that had driven him to treachery. Their repeated failures had done nothing to enlighten them, and for once Azarin was glad of it.

“Medical Doctor Kothu? This is Azarin. If I were to send you a suitable man—a whole man this time—could you do with him what you did with Martino?” He slapped the ends of his fingers against the edge of his desk, listening. “That is correct. A whole man. I wish you to make me a brother for the monster. A twin.”

When he was through speaking to Kothu, Azarin called Novoya Moskva, hunching forward over his desk, his papyros jutting straight out from his hand. His jaw was firmly set, his lower teeth thrust forward past his upper jaw. His lips were stretched. His face lost its wooden blankness. It was a different sort of a grin, this, from the one he usually showed the world. Like his habitual reticent mask, it had been forged in the years since he left his father’s forest. Its lines on his face had been baked in by foreign suns and scoured by the sand of alien deserts. It came to him as easily, now, as the somewhat boyish smile he’d always had. The difference was that Azarin was not aware he possessed this third expression.

It took some little time to convince Central Headquarters, but Azarin felt no impatience. He hammered his plan forward like a man hewing through a tree, steadily and with measured blows, knowing that he has only to swing often enough and the tree must fall.

He hung up, finally, and drained his tea glass in a few gulps. The orderly brought more. Azarin’s eyes crinkled pleasantly at the corners as he thought that once again it had been Anastas Azarin who found solutions while the clerks at Central Headquarters twittered with indecision.

He put his hands on the edge of his desk and unhurriedly pushed himself to his feet. He walked into his outer office. “I am on my way downstairs. You will have the car waiting for me,” he told his chief clerk.

It would take the courier several days to reach Washington with Heywood’s orders, but that part of the system, at least, was foolproof. Heywood would arrive here in a week. Meanwhile, there was no reason to wait for him. The cover plan was functioning automatically as of this moment. The Allieds would find Novoya Moskva much different to deal with, now that Azarin had stiffened some of the pliant spines at Central Headquarters. And, in consequence, Azarin would find his telephone much more silent, and much less peremptory.

So. Everything was arranged. By the simple, uneducated peasant, Anastas Azarin. By the dolt who moved his lips when he read. By the tea drinker. By the ignorant man from the dark forest, who worked while Novoya Moskva talked.

Azarin’s eyes twinkled as he came into Martino’s room, stopped, and looked at the man. “We will talk more,” he said. “Now we have plenty of time to find out about the K-Eightyeight.” It was the first time he had been able to bring the term out into the open. He saw the man’s body twitch.

The first thing lost under these conditions, Martino discovered, was the sense of time. He was not particularly surprised, since a completely foreign experience could not possibly contain any of the usual cues by which a human being learned his chronology. The room had no windows, and no clocks or calendars. These were the simplest and most obvious lacks. Then, there was no change in his routine. There was no stopping to sit down to a meal, or lying down to rest, and hunger or sleepiness furnish no help when they are constant. This room itself, somewhere in Azarin’s sector headquarters, was so constructed as to offer no signposts. It was rectangular, cast in unpainted cement from floor to ceiling. Martino’s route of passage was from one end to the other, and one of the walls toward which he walked was almost exactly the same as the other, even in such details as the grain of the gray surface. As he walked, he passed between two identical oak desks, facing each other, and each desk had a man in a gray-green uniform behind it. The men contrived to look alike, and a similar door entered the room behind each of them. The light fixture was exactly in the center of the ceiling. Martino had no idea of which door he had originally used to come into the room, or toward which wall he had first marched.

As he passed the desks, it was always the man on his right who asked the first question. It might be anything: “What is your middle name?” or “How many inches in a foot?” The questions were meaningless, and no record was kept of his answers. The men behind the desks, who changed shifts at what might have been irregular intervals but who nevertheless always looked somehow alike, did not even care if he answered or not. If he remembered correctly, for some time at the beginning he had not answered. Somewhat later, he had irritatedly taken to giving nonsense replies: “Newton,” or “eight.” But now it was much less exhausting to simply tell the truth.

He knew what was happening to him. In the end, the brain in effect began manufacturing its own truth drugs in self defense against the fatigue poisons that were flooding it. The equation was: Correct replies = relief. There was none of the saving adrenalin of pain. There was only this walking through a meaningless world.

It was that last which was affecting him most strongly. The men behind the desks paid him no attention, unless he tried to stop walking. The remainder of the time they simply asked their questions, looking not at him but at each other. He suspected they neither knew who he was nor cared why he was here. Lately, he had become certain of it. They were practicing their trade on each other, not on him. They used him only because most two-handed games require a ball. It meant nothing to them when he began giving correct answers, because they were not here to pass judgment on his answers.

He knew they were here simply to soften him up, and that eventually Azarin would take over. But meanwhile he felt a mounting, querulous sense of terrible injustice. He was near to pouting as he walked.

He knew why that was, too. His brain, after all, had solved the problem. He was fulfilling the equation—he was doing what they wanted him to. He was giving correct answers, and by all that was reasonable, they ought to respond by giving him relief. But they ignored him; they showed no sign of understanding that he was doing what they wanted. And if he was doing what they wanted, and they ignored him, the brain could only decide somehow it was not transmitting its signals through his actions to them. If there had been only one of them, the brain could have decided that one was deaf and blind, reciting his questions by idiotic rote. But there were two of them, always, and there must be a dozen in all. So the brain could only decide that it was he who was incapable of making himself heard—that it was Lucas Martino who was nothing.

At the same time, he knew what was happening to him.

Azarin sat patiently behind his desk, waiting for word to come from the interrogation room. It was three days, now, since Martino had been brought from the hospital, and Azarin knew, as a man knows his trade, that the word would come sometime today.

It was quite a simple business, Azarin thought. One took a man and peeled things away from him—more vital things than skin, though he had seen that technique work at the hands of men who had not learned the subtler phases of their trade. In effect, it was much the same, though the result was cleaner. A man carries very little excess baggage in his head. Even a clerk, and a man like Martino was not a clerk. The more intelligent the man, the less excess baggage and the quicker the results. For once you exposed the man underneath, he was raw and tender—a touch here and there, and he gave up what he knew.

Of course, having done that and knowing he had done that, the man was empty thereafter. He had found himself to be pliable, and after that anyone could use him—could do anything he wanted with him. He bore the mark of whoever touched him last. He did what you wanted of him. He was a living nothing.

Ordinarily, Azarin drew only a normal measure of satisfaction from having done this to a man while he himself remained, forever and imperishable, Anastas Azarin. But in this case—

Azarin growled at something invisible across the room.

Eddie Bates was a sleeper. He was a wiry, flat-bellied, ugly man with a face that had been grotesquely scarred by acne. His youth had been miserable, for all that he faithfully lifted weights a half-hour every day in his bedroom. Toward the end of his teens he had spent six months in a reformatory for assault and battery. It should have been assault with intent to kill, but only Eddie knew how far he had planned to go when he first began hitting the other boy—a flashily goodlooking youngster who had made a remark about a girl Eddie never had found the courage to speak to.

When he was twenty, he found a job in a garage. He worked in a mood of perpetual sullen resentment that made most of the customers dislike him. Only one of them—a casually likeable man who drove an expensive car—had taken pains to cultivate his friendship. Eddie ran a few errands for him after work, and assumed he was a criminal of some kind, since he paid quite well and had Eddie deliver his cryptic messages by roundabout methods.

Eddie did his work well and faithfully, tied to the man by something more than money. The man was the only respectable friend he had in the world, and when the man made him another offer, Eddie accepted.

So, Eddie Bates had become a sleeper. His friend now paid him not to run messages, and to stay out of trouble. He found him a job as an airlines mechanic. Every month that Eddie continued to be a respectable citizen, and drew his pay from the airline, an envelope with additional pay reached him by means as devious as those in which Eddie had once been employed. By now, Eddie knew who his friend was working for. But the man was his friend, and he was never asked to do anything else to earn the extra money.

Eddie avoided considering the realities of his position. As time went by, this became progressively easier.

He grew older, and continued to work for the airline. Several things happened to him. For one thing, he had a natural talent for machinery. He understood it, respected it, and was willing to work with infinite patience until it was functioning properly. He found that very few of the people he worked with turned away from his face once they had seen him work on an engine. For another, he had found a girl.

Alice worked in the diner where Eddie ate his lunch every day. She was a hard-working girl who knew that the only kind of man worth bothering with was a steady man with a good trade. Looks were not particularly important to her—she distrusted handsome men on principle. It was an accepted thing between her and Eddie that they would be married as soon as they had enough money saved for the down payment on a house near the airport.

But now Eddie Bates, the sleeper, had been activated. He crouched near the plane’s inboard engine nacelle, up on the high wing far above the dark hangar floor, and wondered what he was going to do.

He had his orders. He had more—he had the thing his friend had given him. It was a metal cartridge the size of a pint milk bottle, one end of which was a knob with time calibrations marked off on it. His friend had preset it and given it to him, and told him to put it in an engine. He had not explained that it was only intended to force the plane down into the water at a pre-calculated point. Eddie assumed it was meant to blow the wing off in flight. He was a mechanic, not an explosives expert. Like most people, he had no accurate idea of the power of a given weight of charge, and no idea how much of the cartridge’s actual bulk was taken up by timing mechanisms.

He wavered for a long time, hidden by himself in the darkness near the hangar roof. He added things up time after time, growing more desperate and more indecisive.