Who?

1

It was near the middle of the night. The wind came up from the river, moaning under the filigreed iron bridges, and the weathercocks on the dark old buildings pointed their heads north.

The Military Police sergeant in charge had lined up his receiving squad on either side of the cobbled street. Blocking the street was a weathered concrete gateway with a black-and-white-striped wooden rail. The headlights of the MP super-Jeeps and of the waiting Allied Nations Government sedan glinted from the raised shatterproof riot visors on the squad’s varnished helmets. Over their heads was a sign, fluorescing in the lights:

In the parked sedan, Shawn Rogers sat waiting with a man from the ANG Foreign Ministry beside him. Rogers was Security Chief for this sector of the ANG administered Central European Frontier District. He waited patiently, his light green eyes brooding in the dark.

The Foreign Ministry representative looked at his thin gold wristwatch. “They’ll be here with him in a minute.” He drummed his fingertips on his briefcase. “If they keep to their schedule.”

“They’ll be on time,” Rogers said. “That’s the way they are. They held him four months, but now they’ll be on time to prove their good faith all along.” He looked out through the windscreen, past the silent driver’s shoulders, at the gateway. The Soviet border guards on the other side — Slavs and stumpy Asiatics in shapeless quilted jackets — were ignoring the Allied squad. They were clustered around a fire in an oil drum in front of their checkpoint shack, holding their hands out to the warmth. Their shroud-barreled submachine guns were slung over their shoulders, hanging clumsily and unhandily. They were talking and joking, and none of them were bothering to watch the frontier.

“Look at them,” the Foreign Ministry man said peevishly. “They don’t care what we do. They’re not concerned if we drive up with an armed squad.”

The Foreign Ministry man was from Geneva, five hundred kilometers away. Rogers had been here, in this sector, for seven years. He shrugged. “We’re all old acquaintances by now. This frontier’s been here forty years. They know we’re not going to start shooting, any more than they are. This isn’t where the war is.”

He looked at the clustered Soviets again, remembering a song he’d heard years ago: “Give the Comrade With the Machine Gun the Right to Speak.” He wondered if they knew of that song, over on their side of the line. There were many things on the other side of the line that he wanted to know. But there was little hope for it.

The war was in all the world’s filing cabinets. The weapon was information: things you knew, things you’d found out about them, things they knew about you. You sent people over the line, or you had them planted from years ago, and you probed. Not many of your people got through. Some of them might. So you put together the little scraps of what you’d found out, hoping it wasn’t too garbled, and in the end, if you were clever, you knew what the Soviets were going to do next.

And they probed back. Not many of their people got through — at least, you could be reasonably sure they didn’t — but, in the end, they found out what you were going to do next. So neither side did anything. You probed, back and forth, and the deeper you tried to go, the harder it was. For a little distance on either side of the line, there was some light. Farther on, there was only a dark fog. And some day, you had to hope, the balance would break in your favor.

The Foreign Ministry man was taking out his impatience in talk. “Why the devil did we give Martino a laboratory so near the border in the first place?”

Rogers shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t handle strategy.”

“Well, why couldn’t we get a rescue team of our own in there after the explosion?”

“We did. Theirs just got in first. They moved fast and took him away.” And he wondered if that had been a simple piece of luck.

“Why couldn’t we take him back from them?”

“I don’t handle tactics on that level. I imagine we might have had trouble, though, kidnapping a seriously hurt man out of a hospital.” And the man was an American national. Suppose he’d died? The Soviet propaganda teams would have gone to work on the Americans, and when the next ANG bill came up in their Congress, they might not be so quick with their share of next year’s budget. Rogers grunted to himself. It was that kind of war.

“I think it’s a ridiculous situation. An important man like Martino in their hands, and we’re helpless. It’s absurd.”

“That’s the kind of thing that gives you your work to do, isn’t it?”

The Foreign Ministry representative changed his tack. “I wonder how he’s taking it? He was rather badly knocked about in the explosion, I understand.”

“Well, he’s convalescent now.”

“I’m told he lost an arm. But I imagine they’ll have taken care of that. They’re quite good at prosthetics, you know. Why, as far back as the nineteen forties, they were keeping dogs’ heads alive with mechanical hearts and so forth.”

“Mm.” A man disappears over the line, Rogers was thinking, and you send out people to find him. Little by little, the reports come trickling in. He’s dead, they say. He’s lost an arm, but he’s alive. He’s dying; We don’t know where he is. He’s been shipped to Novoya Moskva. He’s right here, in this city, in a hospital. At least, they’ve got somebody in a hospital here. What hospital?

Nobody knows. You’re not going to find out any more. You give what you have to the Foreign Ministry, and the negotiations start. Your side closes down a highway across the line. Their side almost shoots down a plane. Your side impounds some fishing boats. And finally, not so much because of anything your side had done but for some reason of their own, their side gives in.

And all this time, a man from your side has been lying in one of their hospitals, broken and hurt, waiting for you to do something.

“There’s a rumor he was quite close to completing something called a K-Eighty-E-Eight,” the Foreign Ministry man went on. “We had orders not to press too hard, for fear they’d realize how important he was. That is, in the event they didn’t already know. But, of course, we were to get him back, so we couldn’t go too soft. Delicate business.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you think they got the K-Eighty-Eight out of him?”

“They have a man on their side called Azarin. He’s very good.” How can I possibly know until I’ve talked to Martino? But Azarin’s damned good.

He wished he knew more about Azarin. He wished he knew more about the Soviets. Everything he knew about the Russo-Chinese “Incident” of a decade ago, for instance, told him it had been a war, and that the Russians had lost it. But, if so, then why was the capital city New Moscow and not New Peking? Why was the army half Chinese but the government Caucasian? If there had still been Western embassies and trade missions behind the Curtain, it might be possible to know. But there was none of that. There was nothing but opacity in that land.

Out beyond the gateway, two headlights bloomed up, turned sideward, and stopped. The rear door of a Tatra limousine snapped open, and at the same time one of the Soviet guards went over to the gate and flipped the rail up. The Allied MP sergeant called his men to attention.

Rogers and the Foreign Ministry representative got out of their car.

A man stepped out of the Tatra and came to the gateway. He hesitated at the border and then walked forward quickly between the two rows of MP’s.

“Good God!” the Foreign Ministry man whispered.

The lights glittered in a spray of bluish reflection from the man in the gateway. He was mostly metal.

2

He was wearing one of their shapeless, drab civilian suits, with lumpy shoes and a striped brown shirt. His sleeves were too short, and his hands hung far out. One was flesh and one was not. His skull was a polished metal ovoid, completely featureless except for a grille where his mouth ought to be, and a half-moon recess, curving upward at the ends, where his eyes lurked. He stood, looking ill at ease, at the end of the two rows of soldiers. Rogers came up to him, holding out his hand. “Lucas Martino?”

The man nodded. “Yes.” It was his right hand that was still good. He reached up and took Rogers’ hand. His grip was strong and anxious. “I’m very glad to be here.”

“My name’s Rogers. This is Mr. Haller, of the Foreign Ministry.”

Haller shook Martino’s hand automatically, staring.

“How do you do?” Martino said.

“Very well, thank you,” the Foreign Ministry man mumbled. “And you?”

“The car’s over here, Mr. Martino,” Rogers cut in. “I’m with the sector Security office. I’d appreciate it if you came with me. The sooner I interview you, the sooner this’ll be completely over.” Rogers touched Martino’s shoulder and urged him lightly toward the sedan.

“Yes, of course. There’s no need delaying.” The man matched Rogers’ quick pace and slipped in ahead of him at his gesture. Haller climbed in on the other side of Martino, and then the driver wheeled the car around and started them rolling for Rogers’ office. Behind them, the MP’s got into their Jeeps and followed. Rogers looked back through the car’s rear window. The Soviet border guards were staring after them.

Martino sat stiffly against the upholstery, his hands in his lap. “It feels wonderful to be back,” he said in a strained voice.

“I should think so,” Haller said. “After what they — ”

“I think Mr. Martino’s only saying what he feels is expected of people in these situations, Mr. Haller. I doubt if he feels wonderful about anything.”

Haller looked at Rogers with a certain shock. “You’re blunt, Mr. Rogers.”

“I feel blunt.”

Martino looked from one to the other. “Please don’t let me unsettle you,” he said. “I’m sorry to be a source of upset. Perhaps it would help if I said I am used to what I look like?”

“Sorry,” Rogers said. “I didn’t mean to start a squabble.”

“Please accept my apologies, as well,” Haller added. “I realize that I was being just as rude as Mr. Rogers.”

Martino said, “And so now we’ve all apologized to each other.”

So we have, Rogers thought. Everybody’s sorry.

They pulled into the ramp which served the side door of Rogers’ office building, and the driver stopped the car. “All right, Mr. Martino, this is where we get out,” Rogers told the man. “Haller, you’ll be checking into your office right away?”

“Immediately, Mr. Rogers.”

“O.K. I guess your boss and my boss can start getting together on policy toward this.”

“I’m quite sure my Ministry’s role in this case was concluded with Mr. Martino’s safe return,” Haller said delicately. “I intend to go to bed after I make my report. Good night, Rogers. Pleasure working with you.”

“Of course.” They shook hands briefly, and Rogers followed Martino out of the car and through the side door.

“He washed his hands of me rather quickly, didn’t he?” Martino commented as Rogers directed him down a flight of steps into the basement.

Rogers grunted. “Through this door, please, Mr. Martino.”

They came out into a narrow, door-lined corridor with painted concrete walls and a gray linoleum tile floor. Rogers stopped and looked at the doors for a moment. “That one’ll do, I guess. Please come in here with me, Mr. Martino.” He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door.

The room inside was small. It had a cot pushed against one wall, neatly made up with a white pillow and a tightly stretched army blanket. There was a small table, and one chair. An overhead bulb lit the room, and in a side wall there were two doors, one leading to a small closet and the other opening on a compact bathroom.

Martino looked around. “Is this where you always conduct your interviews with returnees?” he asked mildly.

Rogers shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I’ll have to ask you to stay here for the time being.” He stepped out of the room without giving Martino an opportunity to react. He closed and locked the door.

He relaxed a little. He leaned against the door’s solid metal and lit a cigarette with only a faint tremor in his fingertips. Then he walked quickly down the corridor to the automatic elevator and up to the floor where his office was. As he snapped on the lights, his mouth twisted at the thought of what his staff would say when he started calling them out of their beds.

He picked up the telephone on his desk. But first, he had to talk to Deptford, the District Chief. He dialed the number.

Deptford answered almost immediately. “Hello?” Rogers had expected him to be awake.

“Rogers, Mr. Deptford.”

“Hello, Shawn. I’ve been waiting for your call. Everything go all right with Martino?”

“No, sir. I need an emergency team down here as fast as possible. I want a whatdyoucallit — a man who knows about miniature mechanical devices — with as many assistants authorized as he needs. I want a surveillance device expert. And a psychologist. With the same additional staff authorizations for the last two. I want the three key men tonight or tomorrow morning. How much of a staff they’ll need’ll be up to them, but I want the authorizations in so there won’t be any red tape to hold them up. I wish to hell nobody had ever thought of pumping key personnel full of truth-drug allergens.”

“Rogers, what is this? What went wrong? Your offices aren’t equipped for any such project as that.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t dare move him. There’re too many sensitive places in this city. I got him over here and into a cell, and I made damned sure he didn’t even get near my office. God knows what he might be after, or can do.”

“Rogers — did Martino come over the line tonight or didn’t he?”

Rogers hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said.

3

Rogers ignored the room full of waiting men and sat looking down at the two dossiers, not so much thinking as gathering his energy.

Both dossiers were open to the first page. One was thick, full of security check breakdowns, reports, career progress resumes, and all the other data that accumulate around a government employee through the years. It was labeled Martino, Lucas Anthony. The first page was made up of the usual identification statistics: height, weight, color of eyes, color of hair, date of birth, fingerprints, dental chart, distinguishing marks and scars. There was a set of standard nude photographs; front, back, and both profiles of a heavyset, muscular man with controlled, pleasantly intelligent features and a slightly thickened nose.

The second dossier was much thinner. As yet, there was nothing in the folder but the photographs, and it was unlabeled beyond a note: See Martino, L.A.(?) The photographs showed a heavyset, muscular man with broad scars running diagonally up from his left side, across his chest and around his back and both shoulders, like a ropey shawl. His left arm was mechanical up to the top of the shoulder, and seemed to have been grafted directly into his pectoral and dorsal musculature. He had thick scars around the base of his throat, and that metal head.

Rogers stood up behind his desk and looked at the waiting special team. “Well?”

Bannister, the English servomechanisms engineer, took the bit of his pipe out of his teeth. “I don’t know. It’s quite hard to tell on the basis of a few hours’ tests.” He took a deep breath. “As a matter of exact fact, I’m running tests but I’ve no idea what they’ll show, if anything, or how soon.” He gestured helplessly. “There’s no getting at someone in his condition. There’s no penetrating his surface, as it were. Half our instruments’re worthless. There’re so many electrical components in his mechanical parts that any readings we take are hopelessly blurred. We can’t even do so simple a thing as determine the amperage they used. It hurts him to have us try.” He dropped his voice apologetically. “It makes him scream.”

Rogers grimaced. “But he is Martino?”

Bannister shrugged.

Rogers suddenly slammed his fist against the top of his desk. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“Get a can opener,” Bannister suggested.

In the silence, Finchley, who was on loan to Rogers from the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, said, “Look at this.”

He touched a switch and the film projector he’d brought began to hum while he went over and dimmed the office lights. He pointed the projector toward a blank wall and started the film running. “Overhead pickup,” he explained. “Infra-red lighting. We believe he can’t see it. We think he was asleep.”

Martino — Rogers had to think of him by that name against his better judgment — was lying on his cot. The upturned crescent in his face was shuttered from the inside, with only the edges of a flexible gasket to mark its outline. Below it, the grille, centered just above the blunt curve of his jaw, was ajar. The impression created was vaguely that of a hairless man with his eyes shut, breathing through his mouth. Rogers had to remind himself that this man did not breathe.

“This was taken about two a.m. today,” Finchley said. “He’d been lying there for a little over an hour and a half.”

Rogers frowned at the tinge of bafflement in Finchley’s voice. Yes, it was uncanny not being able to tell whether a man was asleep or not. But it was no use doing anything if they were all going to let their nerves go ragged. He almost said something about it until he realized his chest was aching. He relaxed his shoulders, shaking his head at himself.

A cue spot flickered on the film. “All right,” Finchley said, “now listen.” The tiny speaker in the projector began to crackle.

Martino had begun to thrash on his cot, his metal arm striking sparks from the wall.

Rogers winced.

Abruptly, the man started to babble in his sleep. The words poured out, each syllable distinct. But the speech was wildly faster than normal, and the voice was desperate:

“Name! Name! Name!

“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight, about…face! Detail…forward…march!

“Name! Name! Detail…Halt!

“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight!”

Rogers felt Finchley touch his arm. “Think they were walking him?”

Rogers shrugged. “If that’s a genuine nightmare, and if that’s Martino, then, yes — it sounds very much like they were walking him back and forth in a small room and firing questions at him. You know their technique: keep a man on his feet, keep him moving, keep asking questions. Change interrogation teams every few hours, so they’ll be fresh. Don’t let the subject sleep or get off his feet. Walk him delirious. Yes, that’s what it might be.”

“Do you think he’s faking?”

“I don’t know. He may have been. Then again, maybe he was asleep. Maybe he’s one of their people, and he was dreaming we were trying to shake his story.”

After a time, the man on the cot fell back. He lay still, his forearms raised stiffly from the elbows, his hands curled into rigid claws. He seemed to be looking straight up at the camera with his streamlined face, and no one could tell whether he was awake or asleep, thinking or not, afraid or in pain, or who or what he was.

Finchley shut off the projector.

4

Rogers had been awake for thirty-six hours. It was a whole day, now, since the man had come back over the line. Rogers pawed angrily at his burning eyes as he let himself into his apartment. He left his clothes in a rumpled trail across the threadbare old carpet as he crossed the floor toward the bathroom. Fumbling in the medicine cabinet for an Alka-Seltzer, he envied the little wiry men like Finchley who could stay awake for days without their stomachs backing up on them.

The clanking pipes slowly filled the tub with hot brown water while he pulled at his beard with a razor. He clawed his fingers through the crisp, cropped red hair on his scalp, and scowled at the dandruff that came flaking out.

God, he thought wearily, I’m thirty-seven and I’m coming apart.

And as he slid into the tub, feeling the hot water working into the bad hip where he’d been hit by a cobblestone in a riot, looking down under his navel at the bulge that no exercise could quite flatten out any more, the thought drove home.

A few more years, and I’ll really have a pot. When the damp weather comes, that hip’s going to give me all kinds of hell. I used to be able to stay up two and three days at a clip — I’m never going to be able to do that again. Some day I’m going to try some stunt I could do the week before, and I won’t make it.

Some day, too, I’m going to make a decision of some kind — some complex, either-or thing that’s got to be right. I’ll know I’ve got it right — and it’ll be wrong. I’ll start screwing up, and every time after that I’ll get the inside sweats remembering how I was wrong. I’ll start pressing, and worrying, and living on Dexedrine, and if they spot it in time, upstairs, they’ll give me a nice harmless job in a corner somewhere. And if they don’t spot it, one of these days Azarin’s going to put a really good one over on me, and everybody’s kids’ll talk Chinese.

He shivered. The phone rang in the living room.

He climbed out of the tub, holding carefully onto the edge, and wrapped himself in one of the huge towels that was the size of a blanket, and which he was going to take back to the States with him if he was ever assigned there. He padded out to the phone stand and picked up the headpiece. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Rogers?” He recognized one of the War Ministry operators.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Deptford is on the line. Hold on, please.”

“Thank you.” He waited, wishing the cigarette box wasn’t across the room beside his bed.

“Shawn? Your office said you’d be home.”

“Yes, sir. My shirt was trying to walk off me.”

“I’m here, at the Ministry. I’ve been talking to the Undersecretary for Security. How are you doing on this Martino business? Have you reached any definite conclusions as yet?”

Rogers thought over the terms of his answer. “No, sir, I’m sorry. We’ve only had one day, so far.”

“Yes, I know. Do you have any notion of how much more time you’ll need?”

Rogers frowned. He had to calculate how much time they could possibly spare. “I’d say it’ll take a week.” He hoped.

“That long?”

“I’m afraid so. The team’s set up and working smoothly now, but we’re having a very rough time. He’s like a big egg.”

“I see.” Deptford took a long breath that came clearly over the phone. “Shawn — Karl Schwenn asked me if you knew how important Martino is to us.”

Rogers said quietly: “You can tell Mr. Undersecretary I know my job.”

“All right, Shawn. He wasn’t trying to rag you. He just wanted to be certain.”

“What you mean is, he’s riding you.”

Deptford hesitated. “Someone’s riding him, too, you know.,’

“I could still stand a little less Teutonic discipline in this department.”

“Have you been to sleep lately, Shawn?”

“No, sir. I’ll be filing daily reports, and when we crack this, I’ll phone.”

“Very well, Shawn. I’ll tell him. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

He hung up and the red scrambler bulb on the phone went out. He went back into the bathtub and lay there with his eyes closed, letting Martino’s dossier drift up into the forepart of his brain.

There was still very little in it. The man was still five feet eleven inches tall. His weight was up to two hundred sixty-eight pounds. His arches had collapsed, but the thickness of his skull plating apparently made up the height differential.

Nothing else in the I.D. chart was applicable. There were no entries for eyes, hair, or complexion. There was no entry for Date of Birth, though a physiologist had given him an age, within the usual limits of error, that corresponded with 1948. Fingerprints? Distinguishing marks and scars?

Rogers’ bitter smile was pale at the corners. He dried himself, kicked his old clothes into a corner, and dressed. He went back into the bathroom, dropped his toothbrush into his pocket, thought for a moment and added the tube of Alka-Seltzer, and went back to his office.

5

It was early in the morning of the second day. Rogers looked across his desk at Willis, the psychologist.

“If they were going to let Martino go anyway,” Rogers asked, “why would they go to so much trouble with him? He wouldn’t have needed all that hardware just to keep him alive. Why did they carefully make an exhibition piece out of him?”

Willis rubbed a hand over the stubble on his face. “Assuming he’s Martino, they may never have intended to let him go. I agree with you — if they were going to give him back to us originally, they’d probably just have patched him up any old way. Instead, they went to a great deal of trouble to rebuild him as close to a functioning human being as possible.

“I think what happened was that they knew he’d be useful to them. They expected a great deal of him, and they wanted him to be as physically capable of delivering it as they could make him. It’s quite probable they never even considered how he’d look to us. Oh, they may have gone beyond the absolute necessary minimum in dressing him up — but perhaps it was him they wanted to impress. In any case, they probably thought he’d be grateful to them, and that might give them a wedge. And let’s not discount this idea of arousing his purely professional admiration. Particularly since he’s a physicist. That could be quite a bridge between him and their culture. If that was one of the considerations, I’d say it was excellent psychological technique.”

Rogers lit a new cigarette, grimacing at the taste. “We’ve been over this before. We can play with almost any notion we want to and make it fit some of the few facts we know. What does it prove?”

“Well, as I said, they may never have intended to let us see him again. If we work with that as an assumption, then why did they finally let him go? Aside from the pressure we exerted on them, let’s say he held out. Let’s say they finally saw he wasn’t going to be the gold mine they’d expected. Let’s say they’ve got something else planned — next month, say, or next week. Looking at it that way, it’s reasonable for them to have let him go, figuring also that if they give Martino back, maybe they can get away with their next stunt.”

“That’s too many assumptions. What’s he got to say on the subject?”

Willis shrugged. “He says they made him some offers. He decided they were just bait and turned them down. He says they interrogated him and he didn’t crack.”

“Think it’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible. He hasn’t gone insane yet. That’s something in itself. He was always a pretty firmly balanced individual.”

Rogers snorted. “Look — they cracked everybody they ever wanted to crack. Why not him?”

“I’m not saying they didn’t. But there’s a possibility he’s telling the truth. Maybe they didn’t have enough time. Maybe he had an advantage over their usual subjects. Not having mobile features and a convulsed respiratory cycle to show when they had him close to the ragged edge — that might be a big help.”

“Yes,” Rogers said. “I’m becoming aware of that possibility.”

“His heartbeat’s no indicator, either, with a good part of the load taken over by his powerplant. I’m told his entire metabolic cycle isn’t kosher.”

“I can’t figure it,” Rogers said. “I can’t figure it at all. Either he’s Martino or he isn’t. They went to all this trouble. Now we’ve got him back. If he’s Martino, I still don’t see what they hope to gain. I can’t accept the notion they don’t hope to gain anything — that’s not like them.”

“Not like us, either.”

“All right. Look — we’re two sides, each convinced we’re right and the other fellow’s wrong. This century’s thrashing out the world’s way of life for the next thousand years. When you’re playing for stakes like that, you don’t miss a step. If he isn’t Martino, they might have known we wouldn’t just take him back without checking him. If this’s their idea of a smart trick for slipping us a ringer, they’re dumber than their past performance chart reads. But if heis Martino, why did they let him go? Did he go over to them? God knows, whole countries went Soviet that we never thought would.”

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. 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, Bannister, Willis, and the rest of them had made. Rogers could faintly hear the restless pitter-pat of keyboards.

“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 come 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 ANG 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.

Bannister 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. Bannister 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 has 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.”

Bannister said, “Now — right here, on each side of the eyes, are two microphones. 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.” Bannister 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 dips. “Okay — fine,” he said brusquely. “But how’s all this hooked into his brain? How does he operate it?”

Bannister 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, something like the SNAP series the Americans worked out for their space program. 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?”

Bannister 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.”

1

It was a week after the man had come across the line. Deptford’s voice was tired and empty over the phone. Rogers, whose ears had been buzzing faintly but constantly during the past two days, had to jam the headpiece hard against his ear in order to make out what he was saying.

“I showed Karl Schwenn all your reports, Shawn, and I added a summary of my own. He agrees that nothing more could have been done.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He was a sector chief himself once, you know. He’s aware of these things.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In a sense, this sort of thing happens to us every day. If anything, it happens to the Soviets even more often. I like to think we take longer to reach these decisions than they do.”

“I suppose so.”

Deptford’s voice was oddly inconclusive in tone, now, as though he were searching his mind for something to say that would round things off. But it was a conversation born to trail away rather than end, and Deptford gave up after only a short pause.

“That’s it, then. Tomorrow you can disperse the team, and you’re to stand by until you’re notified what policy we’re going to pursue with regard to Mar — to the man.”

“All right, sir.”

“Good-bye, Shawn.”

“Good night, Mr. Deptford.” He put the receiver down and rubbed his ear.

2

Rogers and Finchley sat on the edge of the cot and looked across the tiny room at the faceless man, who was sitting in the one chair beside the small table on which he ate his meals. He had been kept in this room through most of the week, and he had gone out of it only to the laboratory rigged in the next room. He had been given new clothes. He had used the bathroom shower several times without rusting.

“Now, Mr. Martino,” the FBI man was saying politely, “I know we’ve asked before, but have you remembered anything since our last talk?”

One last try, Rogers thought. You always give it one whack for luck before you give up.

He hadn’t yet told anyone on the team that they were all through. He’d asked Finchley to come down here with him because it was always better to have more than one man in on an interrogation. If the subject started to weaken, you could ask questions alternately, bouncing him back and forth between you like a tennis ball, and his head would swing from one man to the other as though he were watching himself in flight.

No — no, Rogers thought, to hell with that. I just didn’t want to come down here alone.

The overhead light winked on polished metal. It was only after a second or two that Rogers realized the man had shaken his head in answer to Finchley’s question.

“No, I don’t remember a thing. I can remember being caught in the blast-it looked like it was coming straight at my face.” He barked a savage, throaty laugh. “I guess it was. I woke up in their hospital and put my one hand up to my head.” His right arm went up to his hard cheek as though to help him remember. It jerked back down abruptly, almost in shock, as if that were exactly what had happened the first time.

“Uh-huh,” Finchley said quickly. “Then what?”

“That night they shot a needle full of some anesthetic into my arm. When I woke up again, I had this arm.”

The motorized limb flashed up and his knuckles rang faintly against his skull. Either from the conducted sound or the memory of that first astonished moment, Martino winced visibly.

His face fascinated Rogers. The two lenses of his eyes, collecting light from all over the room, glinted darkly in their recess. The grilled shutter set flush in his mouth opening looked like a row of teeth bared in a desperate grimace.

Of course, behind that facade a man who wasn’t Martino might be smiling in thin laughter at the team’s efforts to crack past it.

“Lucas,” Rogers said as softly as he could, not looking in the man’s direction, fogging the verbal pitch low and inside.

Martino’s head turned toward him without a second’s hesitation. “Yes, Mr. Rogers?”

Ball One. If he’d been trained, he’d been well trained.

“Did they interrogate you extensively?”

The man nodded. “I don’t know what you’d consider extensive in a case like this of course. But I was up and around after two months; they were able to talk to me for several weeks before that. In all, I’d say they spent about ten weeks trying to get me to tell them something they didn’t already know.”

“Something about the K-Eighty-Eight, you mean?”

“I didn’t mention the K-Eighty-Eight. I don’t think they know about it. They just asked general questions: what lines of investigation we were pursuing — things like that.”

Ball Two.

“Well, look, Mr. Martino,” Finchley said, and Martino’s skull moved uncannily on his neck, like a tank’s turret swiveling. “They went to a lot of trouble with you. Frankly, if we’d gotten to you first there’s a chance you might be alive today, yes, but you wouldn’t like yourself very much.”

The metal arm twitched sharply against the side of the desk. There was an over-long silence. Rogers half expected some bitter answer from the man.

“Yes, I see what you mean.” Rogers was surprised at the complete detachment in the slightly muffled voice. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t expected some pretty positive return on their investment.”

Finchley looked helplessly at Rogers. Then he shrugged. “I guess you’ve said it about as specifically as possible,” he told Martino.

“They didn’t get it, Mr. Finchley. Maybe because they outdid themselves. It’s pretty tough to crack a man who doesn’t show his nerves.”

A home run, over the centerfield bleachers and still rising when last seen.

Rogers’ calves pushed the cot back with a scrape against the cement floor when he stood up. “All right, Mr. Martino. Thank you. And I’m sorry we haven’t been able to reach any conclusion.”

The man nodded. “So am I.”

Rogers watched him closely. “There’s one more thing. You know one of the reasons we pushed you so hard was because the government was anxious about the future of the K-Eighty-Eight program.”

“Yes?”

Rogers bit his lip. “I’m afraid that’s all over now. They couldn’t wait any longer.”

Martino looked quickly from Rogers to Finchley’s face, and back again. Rogers could have sworn his eyes glowed with a light of their own. There was a splintering crack and Rogers stared at the edge of the desk where the man’s hand had closed on it convulsively.

“I’m not ever going back to work, am I?” the man demanded.

He pushed himself away from the desk and stood as though his remaining muscles, too, had been replaced by steel cables under tension.

Rogers shook his head. “I couldn’t say, officially. But I don’t see how they’d dare let a man of your ability get near any critical work. Of course, there’s still a policy decision due on your case. So I can’t say definitely until it reaches me.”

Martino paced three steps toward the end of the room, spun, and paced back.

Rogers found himself apologizing to the man. “They couldn’t take the risk. They’re probably trying some alternate approach to the problem K-Eighty-Eight was supposed to handle.”

Martino slapped his thigh.

“Probably that monstrosity of Besser’s.” He sat down abruptly, facing away from them. His hand fumbled at his shirt pocket and he pushed the end of a cigarette through his mouth grille. A motor whined, and the split soft rubber inner gasket closed around it. He lit the cigarette with jerky motions of his good arm.

“Damn it,” he muttered savagely, “Damn it, K-Eighty-Eight was the answer! They’ll go broke trying to make that abortion of Besser’s work.” He took an angry drag on the cigarette.

Suddenly he spun his head around and looked squarely at Rogers. “What in hell are you staring at? I’ve got a throat and tongue. Why shouldn’t I smoke?”

“We know that, Mr. Martino,” Finchley said gently.

Martino’s red gaze shifted. “You just think you do.” He turned back to face the wall. “Weren’t you two about to leave?”

Rogers nodded silently before he spoke. “Yes. Yes, we were, Mr. Martino. We’ll be going. Sorry.”

“All right.” He sat without speaking until they were almost out the door. Then he said, “Can you get me some lens tissue?”

“I’ll send some in right away.” Rogers closed the door gently. “His eyes must get dirty, at that,” he commented to Finchley.

The FBI man nodded absently, walking along the hall beside him.

Rogers said uncomfortably, “That was quite a show he put on. If he is Martino, I don’t blame him.”

Finchley grimaced. “And if he isn’t, I don’t blame him either.”

“You know,” Rogers said, “if we’d been able to crack him today, they would have kept the K-Eighty-Eight program going. It won’t actually be scrubbed until midnight. It was more or less up to me.”

“Oh?”

Rogers nodded. “I told him it was washed out because I wanted to see what he’d do. I suppose I thought he might make some kind of break.”

Rogers felt a peculiar kind of defeat. He had run down. He was empty of energy, and everything from now on would only be a falling downhill, back the way he had come.

“Well,” Finchley said, “you can’t say he didn’t react.”

“Yes, he did. He reacted.” Rogers found himself disliking the sound of what he would say. “But he didn’t react in any way that would help. All he did was act like a normal human being.”

1

The physics laboratory at Bridgetown Memorial High School was a longish room with one wall formed by the windows of the building front. It was furnished with long, varnished, masonite-topped tables running toward the end of the room where Edmund Starke’s desk was set on a raised platform. Blackboards ran along two of the remaining walls, and equipment cupboards took up the other. By and large, the room was adequate for its purpose, neither substandard nor good enough to satisfy Starke, neither originally designed to be a laboratory nor rendered hopelessly unsuited by its conversion from two ordinary classrooms. It was intended to serve as the space enclosing the usual high school physics class, and that was what it was.

Lucas Martino saw it as something else again, though he didn’t realize it and for quite some time couldn’t have said why. But never once did he remind himself that a highly similar class might have been held in any high school in the world. This was his physics class, taught by his instructor, in his laboratory. This was the place, in its place, as everything in his universe was in its place or beginning to near it. So when he came in each day he first looked around it searchingly before he took his chair at one of the tables, with an unmistakably contented and oddly proprietary expression. Consequently, Starke marked him out for an eager student.

Lucas Martino couldn’t ignore a fact. He judged no fact; he only filed it away, like a machine part found on a workshop bench, confident that someday he would find the part to which it fitted, knowing that some day all these parts would, by inevitable process, join together in a complete mechanism which he would put to use. Furthermore, everything he saw represented a fact to him. He made no judgments, so nothing was trivial. Everything he had ever seen or heard was put somewhere in his brain. His memory was not photographic — he wasn’t interested in a static picture of his past — but it was all-inclusive. People said his mind was a jumble of odd knowledge. And he was always trying to fit these things together, to see to what mechanism they led.

In classes, he was quiet and answered only when asked to. He had the habit of depending on himself to fit his own facts together, and the notion of consulting someone else — even Starke — by asking an impromptu question was foreign to him. He was accustomed to a natural order of things in which few answers were supplied. Asking Starke to help him with his grasp of facts would have seemed unfair to him.

Consequently, his marks showed unpredictable ups and downs. Like all high school science classes, the only thing Starke’s physics class was supposed to teach was the principal part of the broad theoretical base. His students were given and expected to learn by rote the various simpler laws and formulae, like so many bricks ripped whole out of a misty and possibly useful structure. They were not yet — if ever — expected to construct anything of their own out of them. Lucas Martino failed to realize this. He would have been uncomfortable with the thought. It was his notion that Starke was throwing out hints, and he was presumed capable of filling in the rest for himself.

So there were times when he saw the inevitable direction of a lecture before its first sentences were cold, and when he leaped to the conclusion of an experiment before Starke had the apparatus fairly set up. One thing after another would fall into place for him, garnering its structure out of his storehouse of half-ideas, hints, and unrelated data. When this happened, he’d experienced what someone else would have called a flash of genius.

But there were other times when things only seemed to fit, when actually they did not, and then he shot down a blind alley in pursuit of a hare-brained mistake, making some ridiculous error no one else would have made or could have.

When this happened, he painfully worked his way back along the false chain of facts, taking each in turn and examining it to see why he’d been fooled, eventually returning to the right track. But, having once built a structure, he found it impossible to discard it entirely. So another part of his mind was a storehouse of interesting ideas that hadn’t worked, but were interesting — theories that were wild, but had seemed to hold together. To a certain extent, these phantom heresies stayed behind to color his thinking. He would never quite be an orthodox theory-spieler.

Meanwhile, he went on gathering facts.

Starke was a veteran of the high school teaching circuit. He’d seen his share of morning glories and of impassive average-mechanics working for the Valedictorian’s chair on graduation night. He’d gotten past the point of resenting them, and long before that he’d gotten past the point of wasting his conversation on them. He’d found out early in the game that their interests were not in common with his own.

So Lucas Martino attracted him and he felt obligated to establish some kind of link with the boy. He took several weeks to find the opportunity, and even then he had to force it. He was clumsy, because sociability wasn’t his forte. He was an economical man, saw no reason to establish social relations with anyone he didn’t respect, and respected few people.

Lucas was finishing up a report at the end of a class when Starke levered himself out of his chair, waited for the rest of the class to start filing out, and walked over to the boy.

“Martino — ”

Lucas looked up, surprised but not startled. “Yes, Mr. Starke?”

“Uh — you’re not a member of the Physics Club, are you?”

“No, sir.” The Physics Club existed as yet another excuse for a group picture in the yearbook.

“Well — I’ve been thinking of having the club perform some special experiments. Outside of class. Might even work up some demonstrations and stage them at an assembly. I thought the rest of the student body might be interested.” All of this was sheer fabrication, arrived at on the spur of the moment, and Starke was astonished at himself. “Wondered if you’d care to join in.”

Lucas shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Starke. I don’t have much extra time, with football practice and work at night.”

Ordinarily, Starke wouldn’t have pressed further. Now he said, “Come on, Martino. Frank Del Bello’s on the team, too, and he’s a member of the club.”

For some reason, Lucas felt as though Starke were probing an exposed nerve. After all, as far as Lucas Martino knew up to this moment, he had no rational basis for considering the physics class any more important than his other courses. But he reacted sharply and quickly: “I’m afraid I’m not interested in popular science, Mr. Starke.” He immediately passed over the fact that belonging to the club as it was and following Starke’s new program were two different things. He wasn’t interested in fine argumentative points. He clearly understood that Starke was after something else entirely, and that Starke, with his momentum gathered, would keep pushing. “I don’t think that demonstrating nuclear fission by dropping a cork into a bunch of mousetraps has anything to do with physics. I’m sorry.”

It was suddenly a ticklish moment for both of them. Starke was unused to being stopped once he’d started something. Lucas Martino lived by facts, and the facts of the circumstances left him only one position to take, as he saw it. In a very real sense, each felt the other’s mass resisting him, and each knew that something violent could result unless they found some neutral way to disengage.

“What is your idea of physics, Martino?”

Lucas took the opening and turned into it gratefully. He found it led farther than he’d thought. “I think it’s the most important thing in the world, sir,” he said, and felt like a man stumbling out over a threshold.

“You do, eh? Why?” Starke slammed the door behind him.

Lucas fumbled for words. “The universe is a perfect structure. Everything in it is in balance. It’s complete. Nothing can be added to it or taken away.”

“And what does that mean?”

Bit by bit, facts were falling together in Lucas Martino’s mind. Ideas, half-thoughts, bits of formulation that he failed to recognize as fragments of a philosophy — all these things suddenly arranged themselves in a systematic and natural order as he listened to what he’d just said on impulse. For the first time since the day he’d come to this class with a fresh, blank laboratory notebook, he understood exactly what he was doing here. He understood more than that; he understood himself. His picture of himself was complete, finished for all time.

That left him free to turn to something else.

“Well, Martino?”

Lucas took one deep breath, and stopped fumbling. “The universe is constructed of perfectly fitted parts. Every time you rearrange the position of one, you affect all the others. If you add something in one place, you had to take it away from somewhere else. Everything we do — everything that has ever been done — was accomplished by rearranging pieces of the universe. If we knew exactly where everything fitted, and what moving it would do to all the other pieces, we’d be able to do things more effectively. That’s what physics is doing — investigating the structure of the universe and giving us a system to handle it with. That’s the most basic thing there is. Everything else depends on it.”

“That’s an article of faith with you, is it?”

“That’s the way it is. Faith has nothing to do with it.” The answer came quickly. He didn’t quite understand what Starke meant. He was too full of the realization that he had just learned what he was for.

Starke had run across carefully rehearsed speeches before. He got at least one a year from some bright boy who’d seen a movie about Young Tom Edison. He knew Martino wasn’t likely to be giving him that, but he’d been fooled before. So he took his long look at the boy before he said anything.

He saw Lucas Martino looking back at him as though sixteen-year-old boys took their irrevocable vows every day.

It upset Starke. It made him uncomfortable, and it made him draw back for the first time in his life.

“Well. So that’s your idea of physics. Planning to go on to Massachusetts Tech, are you?”

“If I can get the money together. And my grades aren’t too high, are they?”

“The grades can be taken care of, if you’ll work at it. The semester’s not that far gone. And money’s no problem. There’re all kinds of science scholarships. If you miss on that, you can probably get one of the big outfits like GE to underwrite you.”

Martino shook his head. “It’s a three-factor problem. My graduating average won’t be that high, no matter what I do the next two years here. And I don’t want to be tied to anybody’s company, and third, scholarships don’t cover everything. You’ve got to have decent clothes at college, and you’ve got to have some money in your pocket to relax on once in a while. I’ve heard about MIT. Nobody human can take their curriculum and earn money part-time. If you’re there, you’re there twenty-four hours a day. And I’m going for my doctorate. That’s seven years, minimum. No, I’m going to New York after I graduate here and work in my Uncle Luke’s place until I get some money put away. I’ll be a New York resident and put in a cheap year at CCNY. I’ll pile up an average there, and get my tuition scholarship to Massachusetts that way.”

The plan unfolded easily and spontaneously. Starke couldn’t have guessed it was being created on the spot. Martino had put all the facts together, seen how they fit, and what action they indicated. It was as easy as that.

“Talked it over with your parents, have you?”

“Not yet.” For the first time, he showed hesitation. “It’ll be rough on them. It’ll be a long time before I can send them any money.” Also, but never to be put in words for a stranger, the life of the family would be changed forever, never to be put back in the same way again.

2

“I don’t understand,” his mother said. “Why should you suddenly want to go to this school in Boston? Boston is far away from here. Farther than New York.”

He had no easy answer. He sat awkwardly at the dinner table, looking down at his plate.

“I don’t understand it either,” his father said to his mother. “But if he wants to go, that’s his choice. He’s not leaving right away, in any case. By the time he goes, he’ll be a man. A man has a right to decide these things.”

He looked from his mother to his father, and he could see it wasn’t something he could explain. For a moment, he almost said he’d changed his mind.

Instead he said, “Thank you for your permission.” Move one piece of the universe, and all the others are affected. Add something to one piece, another must lose. What real choice did he have, when everything meshed together, one block of fact against another, and there was only one best way to act?