Who?

1

On the eighth day after the man had come over the line, the annunciator buzzed on Rogers’ desk.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Deptford is here to see you, sir.”

Rogers grunted. He said, “Send him in, please,” and sat waiting.

Deptford came into the office. He was a thin, grayfaced man in a dark suit, and he was carrying a briefcase.

“How are you, Shawn?” he said quietly.

Rogers stood up. “Fine, thanks,” he answered slowly. “How are you?”

Deptford shrugged. He sat down in the chair beside the end of Rogers’ desk and laid the briefcase in his lap. “I thought I’d bring the decision on the Martino matter down with me.” He opened the briefcase and handed Rogers a manila envelope. “In there’s the usual file copy of the official policy directive, and a letter to you from Karl Schwenn’s office.”

Rogers picked up the envelope. “Did Schwenn give you a very bad time, sir?”

Deptford smiled thinly. “They didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t seem to be anybody’s fault. But they’d needed an answer very badly. Now, at the sacrifice of the K-Eighty-Eight program, they don’t need it so badly any more. But they still need it of course.”

Rogers nodded slowly.

“I’m replacing you here as sector chief. They’ve put a new man in my old job. And the letter from Schwenn reassigns you to follow up on Martino. Actually, I think Schwenn arrived at the best answer to a complicated situation.”

Rogers felt his lips stretch in an uncomfortable grimace of surprise and embarrassment. “Well.” There was nothing else to say.

2

“Direct investigation won’t do it,” Rogers said to the man. “We tried, but it can’t be done. We can’t prove who you are.”

The glinting eyes looked at him impassively. There was no telling what the man might be thinking. They were alone in the small room, and Rogers suddenly understood that this had turned into a personal thing between them. It had happened gradually, he could see now, built up in small increments over the past days, but this was the first time it had struck him, and so it had also happened suddenly. Rogers found himself feeling personally responsible for the man’s being here, and for everything that had happened to him. It was an unprofessional way to feel, but the fact was that he and this man were here face to face, alone, and when it came down to the actual turn of the screw it was Rogers whose hand was on the wrench.

“I see what you mean,” the man said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it.” He was sitting stiffly in his chair, his metal hand across his lap, and there was no telling whether he had been thinking of it coldly and dispassionately, or whether hopes and desperate ideas had gone echoing through his brain like men in prison hammering on the bars. “I thought I might be able to come up with something. What about skin pore patterns? Those couldn’t have been changed.”

Rogers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Martino. Believe me, we had experts in physical identification thrashing this thing back and forth for days. Pore patterns were mentioned, as a matter of fact. But unfortunately, that won’t do us any good. We don’t have verified records from before the explosion. Nobody ever thought we’d have to go into details as minute as that.” He raised his hand, rubbed it wearily across the side of his head, and dropped it in resignation. “That’s true of everything in that line, I’m afraid. We have your fingerprints and retinal photographs on file. Both are useless now.”

And here we are, he thought, fencing around the entire question of whether you’re really Martino but went over to them. There’re limits to what civilized people can bring out into the open, no matter how savagely they can speculate. So it doesn’t matter. There’s no easy escape for either of us, no matter what we say or do now. We’ve had our try at the easy answers, and there aren’t any. It’s the long haul for both of us now.

“Isn’t there anything to work on at all?”

“I’m afraid not. No distinguishing marks or scars that couldn’t be faked, no tattoos, no anything. We’ve tried, Mr. Martino. We’ve thought of every possibility. We accumulated quite a team of specialists. The consensus is there’s no fast answer.”

“That’s hard to believe,” the man said.

“Mr. Martino, you’re more deeply involved in the problem than any of us. You’ve been unable to offer anything useful. And you’re a pretty smart man.”

“If I’m Lucas Martino,” the man said dryly.

“Even if you’re not.” Rogers brought his palms down on his knees. “Let’s look at it logically. Anything we can think of, they could have thought of first. In trying to establish anything about you, normal approaches are useless. We’re the specialists in charge of taking you apart, and a great many of us have been in this kind of work a long time. I was head of ANG Security in this sector for seven years. I’m the fellow responsible for the agents we drop into their organizations. But when I try to crack you, I’ve got to face the possibility that just as many experts on the other side worked at putting you together — and you yourself can most likely match my own experience in spades. What’s opposed here are the total efforts of two efficient organizations, each with the resources of half the world. That’s the situation, and we’re all stuck with it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“That’s what I’m here to tell you. We couldn’t keep you here indefinitely. We don’t do things that way. So you’re free to go.”

The man raised his head sharply. “There’s a catch to it.”

Rogers nodded. “Yes, there is. We can’t let you go back to sensitive work. That’s the catch, and you already knew it. Now it’s official. You’re free to go and do anything you like, as long as it isn’t physics.”

“Yes.” The man’s voice was quiet. “You want to see me run. How long does that injunction apply? How long’re you going to keep watching me?”

“Until we find out who you are.”

The man began to laugh, quietly and bitterly.

3

“So he’s leaving here today?” Finchley asked.

“Tomorrow morning. He wants to go to New York. We’re paying his flight transportation, we’ve assigned him a one-hundred-per cent disability pension, and given him four months back pay at Martino’s scale.”

“Are you going to put a surveillance team on him in New York?”

“Yes. And I’ll be on the plane with him.”

“You will? You’re dropping your job here?”

“Yes. Orders. He’s my personal baby. I’ll head up the New York ANG surveillance unit.”

Finchley looked at him curiously. Rogers kept his eyes level. After a moment, the FBI man made an odd sucking noise between his two upper front teeth and let it go at that. But Rogers saw his mouth stretch into the peculiar grimace a man shows when a fellow professional falls from grace.

“What’s your procedure going to be?” Finchley asked carefully. “Just keep him under constant watch until he makes a wrong move?”

Rogers shook his head. “No. We’ve got to screw it down tighter than that. There’s only one possible means of identification left. We’ve got to build up a psychological profile on Lucas Martino. Then we’ll match it against this fellow’s pattern of actions and responses, in situations where we’d be able to tell exactly how the real Martino’d react. We’re going to dig — deeper than any security clearance, deeper than the Recording Angel, if we have to. We’re going to reduce Lucas Martino to so many points on a graph, and then we’re going to chart this fellow against him. Once he does something Lucas Martino would never have done, we’ll know. Once he expresses an attitude the old, loyal Lucas Martino didn’t have, we’ll come down on him like a ton of bricks.”

“Yes — but…” Finchley looked uncomfortable. His specific assignment to Rogers’ team was over. From now on he’d be only a liaison man between Rogers’ ANG surveillance unit and the FBI. As a member of a different organization, he’d be expected to give help when needed, but no unasked-for suggestions. And particularly now, with Rogers bound to be sensitive about rank, he was wary of overstepping.

“Well?” Rogers asked.

“Well, what you’re going to do is wait for this man to make his mistake. He’s a clever man, so he won’t make it soon, and it won’t be a big one. It’ll be some little thing, and it may be years before he makes it. It may be fifteen years. He may die without making it. And all that time he’ll be on the spot. All that time he may be Lucas Martino — and if he is, this system’s never going to prove it.”

Rogers’ voice was soft. “Can you think of anything better? Anything at all?” It wasn’t Finchley’s fault they were in this mess. It wasn’t the ANG’s fault he’d had to be demoted. It wasn’t Martino’s fault this whole thing had started. It wasn’t Rogers’ fault — still, wasn’t it?, he thought — that Mr. Deptford had been demoted. They were caught up in a structure of circumstances that were each fitted to one another in an inevitable pattern, each so shaped and so placed that they fell naturally into a trackless maze, and there was nothing for anyone to do but follow along.

“No,” Finchley admitted, “I can’t see any way out of it.”

4

There was a ground fog at the airfield and Rogers stood outside alone, waiting for it to lift. He kept his back turned to the car parked ten feet away, beside the administration building, where the other man was sitting with Finchley. Rogers’ topcoat collar was turned up, and his hands were in his pockets. He was staring out at the dirty metal skin of the airplane waiting on the apron. He was thinking of how aircraft in flight flashed molten in the sky, dazzling as angels, and how on the ground their purity was marred by countless grease-rimmed rivet heads, by oil stains, by scuff marks where mechanics’ feet had slipped, and by droplets of water that dried away to each leave a speck of dirt behind.

He slipped two fingers inside his shirt, like a pickpocket, and pulled out a cigarette. Closing his thin lips around it, he stood bareheaded in the fog, his hair a corona of beaded moisture, and listened to the public address system announce that the fog was dissipating and passengers were requested to board their planes. He looked through the glass wall of the administration building into the passenger lounge and saw the people there getting to their feet, closing their coats, getting their tickets ready.

The man had to go out into the world sometime. This was an ordinary commercial civilian flight, and two hundred sixty-five people, not counting Rogers and Finchley, would be exposed to him at one blow.

Rogers hunched his shoulders, lit his cigarette, and wondered what would happen. The fog seemed to have worked its way into his nasal passages and settled at the back of his throat. He felt cold and depressed. The gate checker came out and took up his position, and people began filing out of the passenger lounge.

Rogers listened for the sound of the car door. When it didn’t come at once, he wondered if the man was going to wait until everyone was aboard, in hopes of being able to take the last seat and so, for a little time, avoid being noticed.

The man waited until the passengers were collected in the inevitable knot around the ticket checker. Then he got out of the car, waited for Finchley to slide out, and slammed the door like a gunshot.

Rogers jerked his head in that direction, realizing everyone else was, too.

For a moment, the man stood there holding his overnight bag in one gloved hand, his hat pulled down low over his obscene skull, his topcoat buttoned to the neck, his collar up. Then he set the bag down and pulled off his gloves, raising his face to look directly at the other passengers. Then he lifted his metal hand and yanked his hat off.

In the silence he walked forward quickly, hat and bag in his good hand, taking his ticket out of his breast pocket with the other. He stopped, bent, and picked up a woman’s handbag.

“I believe you dropped this?” he murmured.

The woman took her purse numbly. The man turned to Rogers and in a deliberately cheerful voice, said, “Well, time to be getting aboard, isn’t it?”

1

Young Lucas came to the city at a peculiar time.

The summer of 1966 was uncomfortable for New York. It was usually cooler than expected, and it often rained. The people who ordinarily spent their summer evenings in the parks, walking back and forth and then sitting down to watch other people walk past, felt disappointed in the year. The grumbling old men who sold ice cream sticks from three-wheeled carts rang their bells more vigorously than they would have liked. Fewer people came to the band concerts on the Mall in Central Park, and the music, instead of diffusing gently through heat-softened air, had a tinny ring to the practiced ear.

There were hot days here and there. There were weeks at a time when it seemed that the weather had settled down at last, and the city, like a machine late in shifting gears but shifting at last, would try to fall into its true summer rhythm. But then it would rain again. The rain glazed the sidewalks instead of soaking into them, and the leaves on the trees curled rather than opened. It would have been a perfectly good enough summer for Boston, but New York had to force itself a little. Everyone was just a fraction on edge, knowing how New York summers ought to be, knowing how you ought to feel in the summer, and knowing that this year just wasn’t making it.

Young Lucas Martino knew only that the city seemed to be a nervous, discontented place. His uncle, Lucas Maggiore, who was his mother’s older brother and who had been in the States since 1936, was glad enough to see and hire him, but he was growing old and he was moody. Espresso Maggiore, where young Lucas was to work from noon to three A.M. each day but Monday, grinding coffee, charging the noisy espresso machine, carrying armfuls of cups to the tables, had until recently been a simple neighborhood trattoria for the neighborhood Italians who didn’t care to patronize the rival Greek kaffeneikons.

But the tourist area of Greenwich Village had spread down to include the block where Lucas Maggiore had started his coffee house when he stopped wrestling sacks of roasted beans in a restaurant supply warehouse. So now there were murals on the walls, antique tables, music by Muzak, and a new electric cash register. Lucas Maggiore, a big, heavy, indrawn bachelor who had always managed to have enough money, now had more. He was able to pay his only nephew more than he deserved, and still had enough left to make him wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t live more freely than he had in the past. But he had an ingrained caution against flying too far in the face of temptation, and so he was moody. He felt a vague resentment against the coffee house, hired a manager, and stayed away most of the time. He began stopping more and more often by the Parks Department tables in Washington Square, where old men in black overcoats sat and played checkers with the concentration of chessmasters, and sometimes he was on the verge of asking to play.

When young Lucas came to New York, his uncle embraced him at Pennsylvania Station, patted him between the shoulder blades, and held him off by both arms to look at him:

“Ah! Lucas! Bello nipotinol E la Mama, il Papa — come lei portano?”

“They’re fine, Uncle Lucas. They send their love. I’m glad to see you.”

“So. All right — I like you, you like me — we’ll get along. Let’s go.” He took Lucas’ suitcase in one big hand and led the way to the subway station. “Mrs. Dormiglione — my landlady — she has a room for you. Cheap. It’s a good room. Nice place. Old lady Dormiglione, she’s not much for cleaning up. You’ll have to do that yourself. But that way, she won’t bother you much. You’re young, Lucas — you don’t want old people bothering you all the time. You want to be. with young people. You’re eighteen — you want a little life.” Lucas Maggiore inclined his head in the direction of a passing girl.

Young Lucas didn’t quite know what to say. He followed his uncle into a downtown express car and stood holding on to the overhead bar as the train jerked to a start. Finally, having nothing conclusive to say, he said nothing. When the train reached Fourth Street, he and his uncle got off, and went to the furnished rooming house just off West Broadway where Lucas Maggiore lived on the top Door and Lucas Martino was to live in the basement — with an entrance separate from the main front door. After young Lucas had been introduced to Mrs. Dormiglione, shown his room, and given a few minutes to put his suitcase away and wash his face, his uncle took him to the coffee house.

On the way there, Lucas Maggiore turned to young Lucas.

“Lucas and Lucas — that’s too many Lucases In one store. Does Matteo have another name for you?”

Lucas thought back. “Well, sometimes Papa calls me Tedeschino.”

“Good! In the store, that’s your name. All right?”

“Fine.”

So that was the name by which Lucas was introduced to the employees of Espresso Maggiore. His uncle told him to be at work at noon the next day, advanced him a week’s pay, and left him. They saw each other occasionally after that, and sometimes when his uncle wanted company, he asked young Lucas whether he would like to eat with him, or listen to music on the phonograph in Mrs. Dormiglione’s parlor. But Lucas Maggiore had so arranged things that young Lucas had a life of his own, freedom to live it, and was still close enough so that the boy couldn’t get into serious trouble. He felt that he’d done his best for the youngster, and he was right.

So Lucas spent his first day in New York with a firm base under his feet, but on his own. He thought that the city could have been pleasanter, but that he was being given a fair chance. He felt a little isolated, but that was something he felt was up to him to handle.

In another year, with a soft summer, he might have found it easier to slip quickly into the pattern of the city’s life. But this year most people had not been lulled into relaxation — this year they took no vacations from the closed-up, preoccupied attitudes of winter, and so Lucas discovered that New Yorkers putting a meal in front of you in a diner, selling you a movie ticket, or rubbing against you on a crowded bus, could each of them be behind an impenetrable wall.

With another uncle, he might have been taken up into a family much like the one he had left behind. In another house, he might have had a room somewhere where people next door soon struck up an acquaintance. But, as everything was, things so combined that what kind of life he lived for the next year and a half was entirely up to him. He recognized the situation, and in his methodical, logical way, began to consider what kind of life he needed.

2

Espresso Maggiore was essentially one large room, with a counter at one end where the espresso machine was and where the clean cups were kept. There were heavy, elaborately carved tables from Venice and Florence, some with marble tops and some not, and besides the murals, executed in an Italianate modern style by one of the neighborhood artists, there were thickly varnished old oil paintings in flaking gilt frames on the walls. There was a sugar bowl on each table, with a small menu card listing the various kinds of coffee served and the small selection of ices and other sweets available. The walls were painted a warm cream-yellow, and the lights were dim. The music played in the background, from speakers concealed in two genuine Cinquecento cupboards, and from time to time one of the steady patrons would find a vaguely Roman bust or statuette — French neoclassic was close enough — which he would donate to the management for the satisfaction of seeing it displayed on a wooden pedestal somewhere in a corner.

The espresso machine dominated the room. When Lucas Maggiore first opened his trattoria, he had bought a second-hand but nearly new modern electric machine, shining in chrome, looking a good deal like a liquid-cooled aircraft engine, with ATALANTO proclaiming the maker’s name in raised block letters across the topmost tube. When the store was redecorated, the new machine was sold to a kaffeneikon and another machine — one of the old gas-fired models — was put up in its place. This was a great vertical cylinder with a bell top, nickel-plated, with the heads of cherubim bolted to its sides and an eagle rampant atop its bell. Rich with its ornamentation, its sides covered by engraved scrollwork, with spigots protruding from its base, the machine sat on the counter and screamed hisses as it forced steam through the charges of coffee. From noon to three a.m. each day except Monday, gathering thickest around midnight, Villagers and tourists crowded Espresso Maggiore, sitting in the wire-back chairs, most of them drinking cappuccino in preference to true espresso, which is bitter, and interrupting their conversations whenever the machine hissed.

Besides Lucas, there were four other employees of Espresso Maggiore.

Carlo, the manager, was a heavyset, almost unspeaking man of about thirty-five, cut from the same cloth as Lucas Maggiore and hired for that reason. He handled the machine, usually took cash, and supervised the work and cleaning up. He showed Lucas how to grind the coffee, told him to keep the tables wiped and the sugarbowls full, taught him how to wash cups and saucers with the greatest efficiency, and left him alone after that, since the youngster did his work well.

There were three waitresses. Two of them were more or less typical Village girls, one from the Midwest and the other from Schenectady, who were studying drama and came in to work from eight to one. The third waitress was a neighborhood girl, Barbara Costa, who was about seventeen or eighteen and worked the full shift every day. She was a pretty, thinnish girl who did her work expertly and wasted no time talking to the Village young men, who came in during the afternoons and sat for hours over their one cup of coffee because nobody minded as long as the store wasn’t crowded. Because she was there all day, Lucas got to know her better than the other two girls. They got along well, and during the first few days she took the trouble to teach him the tricks of balancing four and five cups at a time, remembering complicated orders, and keeping a running tab in his head. Lucas liked her for her friendliness, respected her skill because it was organized in a way he understood, and was grateful for having one person he could talk to in the rare moments when he felt a desire to do so.

In a month, Lucas had acclimated himself to the city. He memorized the complicated network of straggling, unnumbered streets below Washington Square, knew the principal subway routes, found a good, inexpensive laundry and a delicatessen where he bought what few groceries he felt he needed. He had investigated the registration system and entrance requirements at City College and sent a letter of inquiry to Massachusetts. So, by and large, he had succeeded in arranging his circumstances to fit his needs.

But what his uncle had hinted at on his first day in the city was beginning to turn itself over in Lucas’ mind. He sat down and thought it out systematically.

He was eighteen, and at or near his physical peak. His body was an excellently designed mechanism, with definite needs and functions. This particular year was the last even partly-free time he could expect for the next eight years.

Yes, he decided, if he was ever going to get himself a girl, there was no better time for it than now. He had the time, the means, and even the desire. Logic pointed the way, and so he began to look around.

1

The plane went into its final downward glide over Long Island, slipping into the JFK landing pattern, and the lounge hostess asked Rogers and the man to take their seats.

The man lifted his highball gracefully, set the edge against the lip of his mouth, and finished his drink. He put the glass down, and the grille moved back into place. He dabbed at his chin with a paper cocktail napkin. “Alcohol is very bad for high-carbon steel, you know,” he remarked to the hostess.

He had spent most of the trip in the lounge, occasionally ordering a drink, smoking at intervals, holding glass or cigarette in his metal hand. The passengers and crew had been forced to grow accustomed to him.

“Yes, sir,” the hostess said politely.

Rogers shook his head to himself. As he followed the man down the aisle to their seats, he said, “Not if it’s stainless steel, Mr. Martino. I’ve seen the metallurgical analyses on you.”

“Yes,” the man said, buckling his seatbelt and resting his hands lightly on his kneecaps. “You have. But that hostess hasn’t.” He put a cigarette in his mouth and let it dangle there, unlit, while the plane banked and steadied on its new heading. He looked out the window beside him. “Odd,” he said. “You wouldn’t expect it to still be too early for daylight.”

The moment the plane touched the runway, slowed, and began to taxi toward the gate, the man unfastened his seatbelt and lit his cigarette. “We seem to be here,” he said conversationally, and stood up. “It’s been a pleasant trip.”

“Pretty good,” Rogers said, unfastening his own belt. He looked toward Finchley, across the aisle, and shook his head helplessly as the FBI man raised his eyebrows. There was no doubt about it — whoever this man was, Martino or not, they were going to have a bad time with him.

“Well,” the man said, “I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting socially again, Mr. Rogers. I hardly know whether it’s proper to say good-bye or not.”

Rogers held out his hand wordlessly.

The man’s right hand was warm and firm. “It’ll be good to see New York again. I haven’t been here in nearly twenty years. And you, Mr. Rogers?”

“Twelve, about. I was born here.”

“Oh, were you?” They moved slowly along the aisle toward the rear door, with the man walking ahead of Rogers. “Then you’ll be glad to get back.”

Rogers shrugged uncomfortably.

The man’s chuckle was rueful. “Pardon me — do you know, for a moment I actually forgot this was hardly a pleasure trip for either of us?”

Rogers had no answer. He followed the man down the aisle to where the stewardesses gave them their coats. They stepped out on the ramp, with Rogers’ eyes on a level with the back of the man’s bare head.

The man half-turned, as though for another casual remark.

The first flashbulb exploded down at the end of the ramp, and the man recoiled. He stumbled back against Rogers, and for a moment he was pressed against him. Rogers suddenly caught the stale, acrid smell of the perspiration that had been soaking the man’s shirt for hours.

There was a cluster of photographers down there, pointing their cameras at the man and firing their flashguns in a ripple of sharp light that annoyed the other passengers.

The man tried to turn. His hard hand closed on Rogers’ shoulder as he tried to get him out of the way. The gaskets behind his mouth grille were up out of sight. Rogers heard his two food-grinding blades clash together.

Then Finchley somehow got past both of them, pushing through to the end of the ramp. He was reaching for his wallet as he went, and then the FBI shield glittered briefly in the puffballs of light. The photographers stopped.

Rogers took a deep breath and pried the man’s hand off his shoulder. “All right,” he said gently, lowering the hand carefully as though it were no longer attached to anything. “It’s all right, man, it’s under control. The damned pilot must have radioed ahead or something. Finchley’ll have a talk with the newspaper editors and the wire service chiefs. You won’t get spread all over the world.”

The man got his footing back, and stepped unsteadily into the debarking area. He mumbled something that had to be either thanks or a stumbling apology. Rogers was just as glad not to have heard it.

“We’ll take care of the news media. The only thing you’ll have left to worry about is the people you meet, but from what I’ve seen you can do a damn fine job of handling those.”

The man’s glittering eyes swung on Rogers savagely. “Just don’t watch me too closely,” he growled.

2

Rogers stood in the local ANG Security office that afternoon, massaging his shoulder from time to time while he talked. Twenty-two men sat in orderly rows of classroom chairs facing him, taking notes on standard pads rested on the broad right arms of the chairs.

“All right,” Rogers said in a tired voice, “You’ve all got offset copies of the dossier on Martino. It’s pretty complete, but that’s only where we start. You’ll get your individual assignments as you file out, but I want you all to know what the team’s supposed to be doing as a whole. Any one of you may come up with something that’ll seem unimportant unless we have the whole picture.

“Now — what we want is a diagram of a man, down to the last capillary and” — his lips twitched — “rivet. Out of your individual reports, we’re going to put together a master description of him that’ll tell us everything from the day he was born to the day the lab went up. We want to know what foods he liked, what cigarettes he smoked, what vices he had, what kind of women he favored — and why. We want a list of the books he’s read — and what he agreed with in them. Almost all of you are going to do nothing but intensive research on him. When we’re through, we want to have read a man’s mind.” Rogers let his hand fall to his side. “Because his mind is all we have left to recognize him by.

“Some of you are going to be assigned to direct surveillance. It’ll be your reports we’ll check against the research. They’ll have to be just as detailed, just as precise. Remember that he knows you’re watching. That means his gross actions may very well be intended to mislead you. It’ll be the small things that might trip him up. Watch who he talks to — but pay just as much attention to the way he lights his cigarettes.

“But remember you’re dealing with a genius. He’s either Lucas Martino or a Soviet ringer, but, whichever it is, he’s sharper than any one of us. You’ll have to face that, keep it in mind, and just remember there’re more of us and we’ve got the system. Of course” — Rogers heard the frustrated undertone in his voice — “he may be part of a system, too. But it’d be much smarter of them to let him go it alone.

“As to what he’s here for if he is a ringer: it might be anything. They might seriously have expected him to get back into the technological development program. If so, he’s in a hole right now, with no place to go. He may make a break to get out of the Allied Sphere. Watch out for that. Again, be may be here for something else, figuring the Soviets expected us to handle him just the way we have. If so, there’re all kinds of rabbits he could start pulling out of his hat. We’re positive he isn’t a human bomb or a walking arsenal full of other stuff out of the funnies. We’re positive, but, Lord knows, we could we wrong. Watch out for him if he starts trying to buy electronic parts, or anything he could build something out of.

“Those of you who’re going to dig into his history — if he ever fiddled with things in his cellar, or tossed an idea for some kind of nasty gimmick into a discussion, I want to hear about it quick. I don’t know what this K-Eighty-Eight thing he worked up was — I do know it must have had an awful punch. I think we’d all appreciate it if he didn’t put one together in a back room somewhere.”

Rogers sighed. “All right. Questions.”

A man raised his hand. “Mr. Rogers?”

“Yes.”

“How about the other end of this problem? I presume there’re teams in Europe trying to penetrate the Soviet organization that worked on him?”

“There are. But they’re only doing it because we’re supposed to cover all loose ends for the record. They’re not getting anywhere. The Soviets have a fellow named Azarin who’s their equivalent to a sector security chief. He’s good at his work. He’s a stone wall. If we get anything out past him, it’ll be pure luck. If I know him, everybody connected in any way with whatever happened is in Uzbekistan by now, and the records have been destroyed — if they were ever kept. I know one thing — we had some people I thought I’d planted over there. They’re gone. Other questions?”

“Yes, sir. How long do you think it’ll be before we can say for sure about this fellow?”

Rogers simply looked at the man.

3

Rogers was sitting alone in his office when Finchley came in. It was growing dark again outside, and the room was gloomy in spite of the lamp on Rogers’ desk. Finchley took a chair and waited while Rogers folded his reading glasses and put them back in his breast pocket.

“How’d you make out?” Rogers asked.

“I covered them all. Print, press association, and TV. He’s not going to get publicity.”

Rogers nodded. “Good. If we’d let him become a seven days’ wonder, we’d have lost our chance. It’ll be tough enough as it is. Thanks for doing all the work, Finchley. We’d never have gotten any accurate observations on him.”

“I don’t think he’d have enjoyed it, either,” Finchley said.

Rogers looked at him for a moment, and then let it pass. “So as far as anyone connected with the news media is concerned, this isn’t any higher up than FBI level?”

“That’s right. I kept the ANG out of it.”

“Fine. Thanks.”

“That’s one of the things I’m here for. What did Martino do after what happened at the airport?”

“He took a cab downtown and got off at the corner of Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue. There’s a luncheonette there. He had a hamburger and a glass of milk. Then he walked down to Greenwich Avenue, and down Greenwich to Sixth Avenue. He went down Sixth to Fourth Street. As of a few hours ago, he was walking back and forth on those streets down there.”

“He went right out in public again. Just to prove he hadn’t lost his nerve.”

“It looks that way. He stirred up a mild fuss — people turning around to look at him, and a few people pointing. That was all there was to that. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t ignore. Of course, he hasn’t looked for a place to stay yet, either. I’d say he was feeling a little lost right now. The next report’s due within the next half hour — sooner if something drastic happens. We’ll see. We’re checking out the luncheonette.”

Finchley looked up from his chair. “You know this whole business stinks, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Rogers frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“You saw him on the plane. He was dying by inches, and it never showed. He put himself up in front of those people and rubbed their faces in what he was, just to prove to himself and to us, and to them, too, that he wasn’t going to crawl into a hole. He fooled them, and he fooled us. He looks like nothing that ever walked this earth, and he proved he was as good a man as any of us.”

“We knew that all along.”

“And then, just when he’d done it, the world came up and hit him too hard. He saw himself being spread all over the whole Allied world in full-page color, and he saw himself being branded a freak for good and all. Well, who hasn’t been hit too hard to stand? It’s happened to me in my life, and I guess it’s happened to you.”

“I imagine it has.”

“But he got up from it. He put himself on the sidewalk for everybody in New York to look at, and he got away with it. He knew what being hit felt like, and he went back for more. That’s a man, Rogers — God damn it, that’s a man!”

“What man?”

“Damn it, Rogers, give them a little time and the right chance, and there isn’t an I.D. the Soviets couldn’t fake! We don’t have a man they couldn’t replace with a ringer if they really wanted to. Nobody — nobody in this whole world — can prove who he is, but we’re expecting this one man to do it.”

“We have to. You can’t do anything about it. This one man has to prove who he is.”

“He could have just been put somewhere where he’d be harmless.”

Rogers stood up and walked over to the window. His fingers played with the blind cord. “No man is harmless anywhere in this world. He may sit and do nothing, but he’s there, and every other man has to solve the problem of who he is and what he’s thinking, because until that problem’s solved, that man is dangerous.

“The ANG could have decided to put this man on a desert island, yes. And he might never have done anything. But the Soviets may have the K-Eighty-Eight. And the real Martino might still be on their side of the line. By that much, this man on his desert island might be the most dangerous man in the world. And until we get evidence, that’s exactly what he is, and equally so no matter where he is. If we’re ever going to get evidence, it’s going to be here. If we don’t get it, then we’ll stay close enough to stop him if he turns out not to be our Martino. That’s the job, Finchley, and neither you nor I can get out of it. Neither of us’ll be old enough for retirement before he dies.”

“Look, damn it, Rogers, I know all that! I’m not trying to crawl out of the job. But we’ve been watching this man ever since he came back over the line. We’ve watched him, we’ve seen what he’s going through — damn it, it’s not going to make any difference in my work, but as far as I’m concerned-”

“You think he’s Martino?”

Finchley stopped. “I don’t have any evidence for it.”

“But you can’t help thinking he’s Martino. Because he bleeds? Because he’d cry if he had tears? Because he’s afraid, and desperate, and knows he has no place to go?” Rogers’ hands jerked at the blind cord. “Don’t we all? Aren’t we all human beings?

1

Young Lucas Martino turned away from the freshly-cleaned table, holding four dirty cups and saucers in his left hand, each cup in its saucer the way Barbara had taught him, with two saucers held overlapping between his fingers and the other two sets stacked on top. He carried his wiping sponge in his right hand, ready to clean up any dirty spots on tables he passed on the way to the counter. He liked working this way — it was efficient, it wasted no time, and it made no real difference that there was plenty of time, now that the late afternoon rush was over.

He wondered what created these freak rushes, as he let the cups and saucers down in the basket under the counter, first flipping the spoons into a smaller tray. There was no overt reason why, on indeterminate days, Espresso Maggiore should suddenly become crowded at four o’clock. Logically, people ought to have been working, or looking forward to supper, or walking in the park on a beautiful day like this. But, instead, they came here — all of them at almost the same time — and for half an hour, the store was crowded. Now, at a quarter of five, it was empty again, and the chairs were once more set in order against the clean tables. But it had been a busy time — so busy, with only Barbara and himself on shift, that Carlo had waited on some tables himself.

He looked at the stacks of dirty cups in the basket. There was a strong possibility, it seemed to him, that most of the customers had ordered the same thing, as well. Not cappuccino, for a change, but plain espresso, and that was curious too, as though a majority of people in the neighborhood had felt a need for a stimulant, rather than something sweet to drink.

But they all did different things — some were tavernkeepers, some were their employees, some were artists, some were idlers, some were tourists. Were there days when everyone simply grew tired, no matter what they did? Lucas frowned to himself. He tried to recall if he’d ever felt anything of the sort in himself. But one case provided no conclusive evidence. He’d have to file it away and think about it — check back when it happened again.

He let the thought drift to the back of his mind as Barbara cleaned up the last of her tables and came to the counter. She smiled ruefully, shook her head, and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Whew! Be glad when this day’s over, Tedeschino?”

Lucas grinned. “Wait’ll the night rush.” He watched her bend to add her cups to the basket, and he blushed faintly as her uniform skirt tightened over her slight hips. He caught himself, and hastily pulled out the silverware tray to take into the small back room where the sink was.

“Night rush me no night rushes, Ted. Alice and Gloria’ll be here — it won’t be half as bad.” Barbara winked at him. “I bet you’ll be glad to see that Alice.”

“Alice? Why?” Alice was an intense, sharp-faced girl who barely paid attention to her work and none at all to either the customers or the people she worked with.

Barbara put the tip of her tongue in her cheek and looked down at the floor. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, pursing her lips. “But she was telling me just yesterday how much she liked you.”

Lucas frowned over that. “I didn’t know you and Alice talked to each other that much.” It didn’t sound like Alice at all. But he’d have to think about it. If it was true, it meant trouble. Getting involved with a girl where you worked never made sense — or so he’d heard, and he could plainly see the logic of it. Besides, he knew exactly what kind of girl he wanted for his present purposes. It couldn’t be anybody he’d fall in love with — Alice fit that part of it well enough-but she also had to be fairly easy, because his time was limited, and she had to live far enough away so he’d never see her during the ordinary course of the day, when he’d be working or studying.

“You don’t like Alice, huh?”

“What makes you say that?” He kept his eyes off Barbara’s face.

“You got a look. Your eyes looked like you were thinking of something complicated, and your mouth got an expression that showed you didn’t like it.”

“You watch me pretty close, don’t you?”

“Maybe. All right, if Alice doesn’t suit, how about Gloria? Gloria’s pretty.”

“And not very bright.” His girl would at least have to be somebody he could talk to sometimes.

“Well. You don’t like Alice, you don’t like Gloria — who do you like? Got a girl tucked away somewhere? Going to take her out tomorrow? Tomorrow’s the big day to howl, you know. Monday.”

Lucas shrugged. He knew. For the past three Mondays, he’d been cruising the city. “No. I hadn’t even thought about the store being closed tomorrow, to tell you the truth.”

“We got paid today, didn’t we? Don’t think I didn’t know it. Mmm, boy — big date tomorrow, and everything.”

Lucas felt his mouth twitch. “Steady boy?”

“Not yet. But he may be — he just may. Tell you what it is — he’s the nicest fellow I ever had take me out. Smooth, good dancer, polite, and grown up. A girl doesn’t meet very many fellows like that. When one comes along, she kind of gets taken up with him. But maybe somebody nicer would come along — if you gave him a chance.” She looked squarely at Lucas. “I guess you can imagine how it is.”

“Yes — well, I guess I can.” He gnawed his upper lip, looking down, and then blurted out, “I have to wash these now.” He turned, carrying the silverware tray, and walked quickly into the back room. He spilled the silverware into the sink, slammed the hot water handle over, and stood staring down, his hands curled over the edge of the sink. But after a little while he felt better, even though he could not bring himself to ignore the thought of Barbara’s having a steady.

By all logic, Barbara was the wrong girl.

2

On that particular Monday, the weather held good. The sun shone down just warmly enough to make the streets comfortable, and the narrow Village sidewalks were crowded by the chairs that the old people sat on beside their front stoops, talking to each other and their old friends passing by. The younger men who did not have to go to work leaned against parked cars and sat on their fenders, and the Village girls walked by selfconsciously. People brought their dogs out on the grass of Washington Square Park, and on the back streets there was laundry drying on the lines strung between fire escapes. The handball and tennis courts in the Parks Department enclosure were busy.

Lucas Martino came up to the street from his apartment a little past two-thirty, wearing a light shirt and trousers, and stepped into the midst of this life. He walked head-down to the subway station, not looking to either side, feeling restless and troubled. He hoped he’d find the right girl today, and at the same time he was nervous about how he’d approach her. He’d observed the manner in which the high school operators had handled the problem, and he was fairly confident of his ability to do as well. Furthermore, he had once or twice taken a girl to the movies, so he was not a complete novice at the particular social code that applied to girls and young men. But it was not a social partner he was looking for.

There was the matter of Barbara, as well, and it seemed that only self-discipline would be of any use there. He could not afford to become involved with any sort of long-term thing. He could not afford to leave a girl waiting while he went through all the years of training that were ahead of him. And after that, with this business going on in Asia, it looked very much as though, more than ever, any physical sciences specialist would go into government work. It meant a long time of living on a project base somewhere, with limited housing facilities and very little time for anything but work. He knew himself — once started working, he would plunge into it to the exclusion of everything else.

No, he thought, remembering his mother’s look when he told her he was going to New York. No, a man with people depending on him had no choice, often, but to hurt either them or himself — and many times, both. Barbara couldn’t be asked to place herself in a situation like that.

Besides, he reminded himself, that wasn’t what he was looking for now. That wasn’t what he needed.

He reached the subway station and took an uptown train to Columbus Circle, and not until he reached there did he raise his head and begin looking at girls.

He walked slowly into Central Park, moving in the general direction of Fifth Avenue. He walked a little self-consciously, sure that at least some of the people sitting on the benches must wonder what he was doing.

There were quite a few girls out in the park, mostly in pairs, and they paid him no attention. Most of them were walking toward the roller-skating rink, where he imagined they would have prearranged dates, or else were hoping to meet a pair of young men. He toyed with the notion of going down to the rink himself, but there was something so desperately purposeless in skating around and around in a circle to sticky organ music that he dropped the idea almost immediately. Instead, he cut up another path and skirted the bird sanctuary, without knowing what it was or what the high fence was for. When he suddenly saw a peacock step out into a glade, spreading its plumes like an unfolding dream, he stopped, entranced. He stood motionless for ten minutes before the bird walked away. Then he unhooked his fingers from the steel mesh and resumed his slow walk, still moving east.

The park was full of people in the clear sunshine. Every row of benches he passed was crowded, baby carriages jutting out into the path and small children trotting after the pigeons. Nursemaids sat talking together in white huddles, and old men read newspapers. Old women in black sat with their purses in their laps, looking out across the lake and working their empty fingers as though they were sewing.

There were a few girls out walking alone. He looked at them cautiously, out of the corners of his eyes, but there wasn’t one who looked right for him. He always turned his head to the side of the path and walked by them quickly, or else he stopped and looked carefully at his wristwatch while they passed him in the other direction.

He felt that the right kind of girl for him ought to have a look about her — a way of dressing, or walking, or looking around, that would be different from most girls’. It seemed logical to him that a girl who would let strange young men speak to her in the park would have a special kind of attitude, a mark of identification that he couldn’t describe but would certainly recognize. And, once or twice in his wanderings around the city, he had thought he’d found a girl like that. But when he walked closer to one of these girls, she was always chewing gum, or had thick orange lipstick, or in some other way gave him a peculiar feeling in the pit of the stomach that made him walk by her as quickly as he could without attracting attention.

Finally, he reached the zoo. He walked back and forth in front of the lion cages for a time. Then he went into the cafeteria and had a glass of milk, taking it outside and sitting at one of the tables on the terrace while he looked down at the seals in their pool. He was feeling increasingly awkward, as he usually did on one of these expeditions, and he took a long time over his milk. He looked at his watch again, and this time it was three-thirty. He had to look at his watch twice, because it seemed to him that he’d been in the park much longer than that. He lit a cigarette, smoked it down to the end, and found that this had taken only five minutes.

He stirred restlessly on the metal chair. He ought to get up and start moving around again, but he was haunted by the certainty that if he did that, his feet would carry him right out of the park and back to the downtown subway.

He ran his fingers over his forehead. He was sweating. There was a woman sitting at the next table, drinking iced tea. She was about thirty-five, he would have judged, dressed in expensive-looking clothes. She looked at him peculiarly, and he dropped his glance. He stood up, pushing his chair back with a harsh rattle of its legs on the terrace stones, and walked quickly down into the plaza where the seal tank was.

He watched the seals for a few minutes, his hands closed over the fence rail. The thought that he was on the verge of giving the whole thing up bothered him tremendously.

He had thought this business out, after all, and come to a logical decision. He had always abided by his decisions before, and they had invariably worked out well.

It was this Barbara business, he decided. There was nothing wrong with being in love with her — there was plenty of room for illogic in his logic — but it was bound to complicate his immediate plan. Yet, it was obvious that there was nothing he could do but go ahead in spite of it. Barbara, or a girl like Barbara, would come later, when he had settled his life down. That all belonged in a different compartment of his mind, and ought not to be crossing over into this one.

It was the first time in his life that he found himself unable to do what he ought to do, and it bothered him deeply. It made him angry. He turned abruptly away from the seal tank and marched up the steps back toward the exit beyond the lion cages.

While he’d been drinking his milk, apparently, a girl had set up a camp stool in front of the cages and was sitting on it, sketching. He noticed her out of the corner of his eye, walked up to her, and without even having bothered to particularly look at her, said challengingly, “Haven’t I seen you someplace before?”

3

The girl was about his own age, with very pale blond hair that was straight, cut close to her skull, and tapered at the back of the neck. She had high cheekbones with hollows under them, a thin nose, and a broad, full mouth which she did not lipstick to the corners. Her eyebrows were very thick and black, painted in with some gummy black cosmetic that looked like stage makeup more than eyebrow pencil. She was wearing flat ballet-ish slippers, a full printed skirt, and a peasant blouse. Her eyes were brown and a little startled.

Lucas realized that it was almost impossible to know what she really looked like, that she was probably quite plain, and, furthermore, that she was far from a girl he could even like. He saw that the sketch she was working on was completely lifeless. It was a fair enough rendering of a lioness, but it felt like a picture of something stuffed and carefully arranged in a window.

He felt angry at her for her looks, for her lack of talent, and for being there. “No, I suppose not,” he said, and turned to walk away.

“You may have,” the girl said. “My name’s Edith Chester. What’s yours?”

He stopped. Her voice was surprisingly gentle, and the very fact that she had reacted in any calm way at all was enough to make him feel like an idiot. “Luke,” he said, and, for some reason, shrugged.

“Are you at the Art Students’ League?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. I’m not.” He stopped, and then, just as she was opening her mouth to say something else, he blurted, “As a matter of fact, I don’t know you at all. I was just — ” He stopped again, feeling more foolish than ever, and getting angry again.

Surprisingly, now, she had a nervous laugh. “Well, that’s all right, I guess. You’re not going to bite my head off, are you?”

The association of ideas was fairly obvious. He looked down at her sketch pad and said, “That’s not much of a lioness.”

She looked at the drawing too, and said, “Well, no, I suppose it isn’t.”

He had wanted to draw a hostile reaction out of her — to start an argument he could walk away on. Now he was in deeper than ever, and he had no idea of what to do. “Look — I was going to the movies. You want to come along?”

“All right,” she said, and once again he was trapped.

“I was going to see Queen of Egypt,” he declared, picking a picture as far as possible from the taste of anyone with pretensions to intelligence.

“I haven’t seen that,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind.” She dropped her pencils into her purse, put the sketch pad under her arm, and folded the camp stool. “We can leave all this stuff at the League,” she said. “Would you mind carrying the stool for me? It’s only a couple of blocks from here.”

He took it without a word, and the two of them walked out of the park together. As they crossed the plaza, going toward the Fifth Avenue exit, he looked over toward the terrace in front of the cafeteria, but the stylishly dressed woman who’d sat at the next table was gone.

4

He stood in front of the League building, smoking, and waiting for the girl to come out. He didn’t know what to do.

The thought of walking around the corner and taking a downtown bus had occurred to him. His hand in his pocket had already found the quarter for the farebox. But it was obvious by now that he’d picked on a girl not very many boys could be interested in, and that if he walked out on her now, he’d be hurting her badly. This whole thing wasn’t her fault — he wished it was — and the only thing to do was to go through with it. So he waited for her, Gripping the quarter angrily in his pocket. In due course she came out.

By now he was feeling ashamed of himself. She came out quickly, and when she saw him, she smiled for the first time since he’d met her — a smile that transformed her face for a moment before she remembered not to show relief at his still being there. Then she dropped her eyes in quick decorum. “I’m ready.”

“All right.” Now he was annoyed again. She was so easy to read that he resented the lack of effort. He wanted someone with depth — someone he could come to know over a long period of time, someone whose total self could be unfolded gradually, would be always interesting and never quite completely explored. Instead, he had Edith Chester.

And yet it wasn’t her fault. It was his, and he ought to be shot.

“Look — ” he said, “you don’t want to see that phony Egyptian thing.” He nodded across the street to where one of the expensive, quality movie houses was showing a European picture. “How about going to see that, instead?”

“If you want to, I’d like that.”

And she was so damned ready to follow his lead! He almost tested her by changing his mind again, but all he did was to say “Let’s go, then,” and start across the street. She followed him immediately, as though she hadn’t expected him to wait for her.

She waited at the lobby doors as he bought the tickets, and sat quietly beside him throughout the picture. He made no move to hold her hand or put his arm on the back of her seat, and halfway through the picture he suddenly realized that he wouldn’t know what to do with her after it was over. It would be too early to take her home and thank her for the lovely evening, and yet too late to simply leave her adrift, even if he could think of some graceful way of doing it. He was tempted to simply excuse himself, get up, and walk out of the theater. Somehow, for all its clumsiness and cruelty, that seemed like the best thing to do. But he held the thought for only a few seconds before he realized he couldn’t do it.

Why not? he thought. Am I such a wonderful fellow that it’d blight her life forever?

But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t what he was, it was what she was. He could have been the hunchback of Notre Dame and this same situation would still exist. He had put her in it, and it was up to him to see she wasn’t hurt as the result of something he’d done.

But what was he going to do with her? He chainsmoked angrily through the rest of the picture, shifting back and forth in his seat.

The picture reached the scene where they’d come in, and she leaned over. “Do you want to go now?”

Her voice, after ninety minutes of silence, startled him. It was as gentle as it had been when he first spoke to her — before the realization of what was happening had quite come home to her. Now, he supposed, she’d had time to grow calm again.

“All right.” He found himself reluctant to leave. Once out on the street, the awkward, inevitable “What’ll we do now?” would come, and he had no answer. But he stood up and they left the theater.

Standing under the marquee, she said, “It was a good picture, wasn’t it?”

He pushed the end of a cigarette into his mouth, preoccupied. “Do you have to go home now, or anything?” he mumbled around it.

She shook her head. “No, I live by myself. But you’ve probably got something to do tonight. I’ll just catch a bus here. Thank you for taking me to the movie.”

“No — no, that’s all right,” he said quickly. Damn it, she’d been expecting him to try and get rid of her. “Don’t do that.” And now he had to propose something for them to do. “Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

“All right, then, let’s go find some place to eat.”

“There’s a very good delicatessen just around the corner.”

“All right.” For some reason, he took her hand. It was small, but not fragile. She seemed neither surprised nor shocked. Wondering what the devil had made him do that, he walked with her down to the delicatessen.

The place was still fairly empty, and he led her to a booth in the back. They sat down facing each other, and a waiter came and took their orders. When he left Lucas realized he should have thought of what would happen when he came in here with her.

They were cut off. The high plywood back behind him separated them from the rest of the room. On one side of them was a wall, and the other, barely leaving people clearance to slide in and out of the booth’s far seat, was an air conditioner. He had let himself and the girl be maneuvered into a pocket where they had nothing to do but sit and stare at each other while the waited for their food.

What was there to do or say? Looking at that hairdo and the metallic pink polish on her nails, he couldn’t imagine what she could possibly talk about, or like, that he could find the faintest interest in.

“Have you been in the city long?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”

That seemed to be that.

He’d thrown his cigarette away, somewhere. He knocked a fresh one out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it, wishing the waiter would hurry up so the could at least eat. He stole a glance at his watch. It was only six o’clock.

“Could — could I have a cigarette, please?” she asked, her voice and expression uncertain, and he jumped.

“What?” He thrust the pack out clumsily. “Oh — gee, Edith, I’m sorry! Sure — here. I didn’t…” Didn’t what? Didn’t even offer her the courtesy of a cigarette. Didn’t stop to wonder whether she smoked or not. Treated her as if she was a pet dog.

He felt peculiarly embarrassed and guilty. Worse now, than ever before.

She took the cigarette and he lit it for her quickly.

She smiled a little nervously. “Thank you. I come from Connecticut, originally. Where’re you from, Luke?”

She must’ve known how I felt about her, he was thinking. It must have been sticking out all over me. But she let me go on, because… Because why? Because I’m the man of her dreams?

“New Jersey,” he said. “From a farm.”

“I always wished I could live on a farm. Are you working here?”

Because I’m probably the first guy that’s talked to her since she got here, that’s why. I may not be much, but I’m all she’s got.

“I am for the time being. I work for an espresso house down in the Village.”

He realized he was starting to tell her things he hadn’t intended to. But he had to talk, now, and besides, this wasn’t what he’d planned — not at all.

“I’ve only been down there once or twice,” she said. “It must be a fascinating place.”

“I guess it is, in a way. I’m going to be starting school next year, though, and I won’t be seeing much of it.”

“Oh — what’re you going to study, Luke?”

So it came out, bit by bit, more and more fluently. They talked while they ate, and words seemed to jump out of him. He told her about the farm, and about high school, and about the espresso house.

They finished eating and went for a walk, up Central Park South and then turning uptown, and he continued to talk. She walked beside him, her feet in their slippers making soft, padding sounds on the asphalt pavement.

After a while, it was time to take her home. She lived on the West Side, near the gas plant in the Sixties, on the third floor of a tenement. He walked her up stairs, to her door, and suddenly he was out of talk.

He stopped, as abruptly as he’d started, and stood looking down at her, wondering what the devil had gotten into him. The roots of her hair were very dark, he saw.

“I’ve been bending your ear,” he said uncomfortably.

She shook her head. “No. No, you’re a very interesting person. I didn’t mind at all. It’s — ” She looked up at him, and dropped even the minimum of pretense the she had managed to keep throughout the afternoon and evening. “It’s nice to have somebody talk to me.”

He had nothing to say to that. They stood in front of her door, and the silence grew between them.

“I had a very good time,” she said at last.

No, you didn’t, he thought. You had a miserable time. The worst thing that ever happened to you was when I spoke to you in front of the lion cages. And now I’m going to walk down those stairs and never call you up or see you again, and that’ll be worse, I guess. I’ve really messed things up. “Look — have you got a phone?” he found himself saying.

She nodded quickly. “Yes, I do. Would you like the number?”

“I’ll write it down.” He found a piece of paper in his wallet and a pencil in his shirt pocket. He wrote the number down, put his wallet and his pencil back, and once again they simply stood there.

“Monday’s my day off,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

“All right, Luke.”

He looked down at her, thinking, No, no, God damn it, I’m not going to try and kiss her good night. This isn’t like that. This is a crazy thing. She’s not like that.

“Good night, Edith.”

“Good night, Luke.”

He reached out and touched her shoulder, feeling as though he had a stupid expression on his face. She put her hand up and covered his. Then he turned away and went quickly down the stairs, feeling like a fool, and a savage, and an idiot, and like almost anything but an eighteen-year-old boy.

5

When he went to work the next day, he was all mixed up. No matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t make sense out of what had happened to him yesterday. He went about his work in an abstracted daze, his mind so knotted that his face was completely blank. He avoided Barbara’s eyes, and tried to keep from talking to her.

Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, she trapped him behind the counter. He stood there hopelessly, caught between the espresso machine and the cash register, an emptied cup dangling from his hand.

Barbara smiled at him pleasantly. “Hey, there, Tedesco, thinking about your money?” There was an anxious tightness in the skin at the corners of her eyes.

“Money?”

“Well — you know. When somebody goes around in a fog, people usually ask him if he’s thinking about his money.”

“Oh! No — no, it’s not anything like that.”

“What’d you do yesterday? Fall in love?”

His face turned hot. The cup almost dropped out of his hand, as though he were an automatic machine and Barbara had struck a button. And then he was astonished at his reaction to the word. He stood gaping, completely off-stride.

“I’ll be damned,” Barbara said. “I hit it.”

Lucas had no clear idea of what to say. Fall in love? No! “Look — Barbara — it’s not…that way…”

“What way?” Her cheekbones were splotched with red.

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to explain…”

“Look, I don’t care what way it is. If it’s giving you trouble, I hope you get it straightened out. But I’ve got a fellow who gives me troubles, now and then.”

As she thought about it, she realized she was being perfectly honest. She remembered that Tommy was a very nice guy, and interesting too. It was a shame about Lucas, because she’d always thought he’d be nice to go out with, but that was the way things worked out: you got a certain fair share of good breaks from life, and you had no right to expect things your way every time.

She was already closing down her mind to any possibility that there might have been more than a few friendly dates between them. She was a girl with a great deal of common sense, and she had learned that there was nothing to be gained in life from idle second thoughts.

“Well, rush hour’s coming up,” she said pointedly, got the sugar can out from under the counter, and went to refill the bowls on her tables. Her heels tapped rapidly on the wooden floor.

For a long moment, Lucas was only beginning to get his thoughts in order. The whole business had happened so fast.

He looked toward where Barbara was busy with her tables, and it was obvious to him that as far as she was concerned, the whole episode was over.

Not for him. It was barely beginning. Now it had to be analyzed — gone over, dissected, thoroughly examined for every possible reason why things had worked out this way. Only yesterday morning he had been a man with a definite course of action in mind, based on a concrete and obvious situation.

Now everything was changed, in such a short space of time, and it was unthinkable that anyone could simply leave it at that, without asking how, and why.

And yet Barbara was obviously doing just that-accepting a new state of affairs without question or investigation.

Lucas frowned at the problem. It was an interesting thing to think over.

It was even more than that, though he was at best partially aware of it. It was a perfect problem to consider if he didn’t want to think about the way he felt toward Edith.

He stood behind the counter, thinking that all the people he had ever known — even people fully as quickminded as Barbara — consistently took things as they came. And it struck him that if so many people were that way, then there must be value in it. It was actually a far simpler way of living — less wasteful of time, more efficient in its use of emotional energy, more direct.

Then, it followed that there was something inefficient and basically wrong with his whole approach to living among other people. It was no surprise that he’d fallen into this emotional labyrinth with Barbara and Edith.

Now his mind had brought him back to that. How did he feel about Edith? He couldn’t just forget about it. He’d asked for her phone number. She’d be expecting him to call. He could see her, quite plainly, waiting at night for the phone to ring. He had a responsibility there.

And Barbara. Well — Barbara was tough-fibered. But he must have hurt her at least a little bit.

But how had this whole business come about? In one day, he’d made a mess of everything. It might be easy to simply forget it and start fresh, but could he do that? Could he let something like this stay in the back of his mind forever, unresolved?

I’m all fouled up, he thought.

He had thought he understood himself, and had shaped himself to live most efficiently in his world. He had made plans on that basis, and seen no flaws in them. But now he had to re-learn almost everything before a new and better Lucas Martino could emerge.

For one more moment before he had to get to work, he tried to decide how he could puzzle it all out and still learn not to waste his time analyzing things that couldn’t be changed. But rush hour was coming. People were already starting to trickle into the store, and his tables weren’t set up yet.

He had to leave it at that, but not permanently. He pushed it to the back of his mind, where he could bring it out and worry at it when he had time — where it could stay forever, unchanging and waiting to be solved.

6

Circumstances trapped him. Soon he was in school. There he had to learn to give precisely the answers expected of him, and no others. He learned, and there was no difficulty about the scholarship to Massachusetts Tech. But that demanded a great deal of his attention.

He saw Edith fairly often. Whenever he called her, it was always with the hope that this time something would happen — they’d fight, or elope, or do something dramatic enough to solve things at one stroke. Their dates were always nerve-racking for that reason, and they were never casual with each other. He noticed that she gradually let her hair grow out dark brown, and that she stopped living on her parents’ checks. But he had no idea of what that might mean. She found work in a store on Fourteenth Street, and moved into a nearby cold-water flat where they sometimes visited together. But he had maneuvered himself into a position where every step he made to solve one problem only made the other worse. So he wavered between them. He and Edith rarely even kissed. They never made love.

He stayed on at Espresso Maggiore until his studies began taking up too much of his time. He often talked to Barbara through slack times in the day. But they were just two people working in the same place and helping each other fight boredom. The only things they could talk about were the work, his studies, or what would happen to her fiancee whose grades hadn’t stayed up and who was now in Asia. Never, with anyone, could he talk about anything important to him.

In the fall of 1968 he left New York for Boston. He had not been working since January, and had fallen out of touch with his uncle and Barbara. His relationship with Edith was such that he had nothing to write letters about. They exchanged Christmas cards for a few years.

The work at Tech was exhausting. Fifty per cent of every freshman class was not expected to graduate, and those who intended to stay found themselves with barely enough time to sleep. Lucas rarely left the campus. He went through three years of undergraduate work, and then continued toward his Master’s and his Doctorate. For seven years he lived in exactly the same pocket universe.

Before he ever even got his Master’s degree, he saw the beginning of the logic chain that was to end in the K-Eighty-Eight. When he received his doctorate, he was immediately assigned to an American government research project and lived for years on one research reservation after another, none of them substantially different from an academic campus. In reaction to the equivocal aftermath of the Sino-Russian incident, the ANG was formed. When he submitted his preliminary paper on the K-Eighty-Eight field effect, he was transferred to an ANG installation. When his experimental results proved to be worth further work, he was given his own staff and laboratory, and, again, he was not free of schedules, routines, and restricted areas. Though he was free to think, he had only one world to grow in.

While still at MIT, he had been sent Edith’s wedding announcement. He added the fact to the buried problem, and, with that one change, it lay carefully safeguarded by his perfect memory, waiting, through twenty years, for his first free time to think.