Who?

1

Anastas Azarin lifted the glass of lukewarm tea, pressed the spoon out of the way with his index finger, and drank it down without stopping until the glass was empty. He thumped it down in a circle of old stains on the end of his desk, and the spoon rattled. His orderly came in from the outer office, took the glass, refilled it, and set it down on the desk in easy reach. Azarin nodded shortly. The orderly clicked his heels, about-faced, and left the room.

Azarin watched him go, his mouth hooking deeply at one corner in a grimace of amusement that wrinkled all his face before it died as abruptly as it came. During that short moment, he had been transformed — his face had been open, frank, and friendly. But when his features smoothed again, all trace of the peasant, Azarin, left them. It was possible to see what Azarin had taught himself to become during his years of rising through the system: impersonal, efficient, wooden.

He went back to reading the weekly sector situation report, his blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger following the words, his lips muttering inaudibly.

He knew they laughed at him for his old-fashioned samovar. But the orderly knew what would happen to him if the glass ever remained empty. He knew they joked about the way he read. But they knew what would happen to them if he found errors in their reports.

Anastas Azarin had never graduated from their academies: He had never scribbled on their blackboards or filled their copybooks. While they were polishing the seats of their school uniforms on classroom benches, he had been out with his father, hefting an axe and dragging the great balks of timber through the dark forest. While they took their civil service examinations, he was supervising labor gangs on the taiga. While they hunched over their desks, he was in Mandjuria, eating bad rice with the little brown men. While they sat at home with their wives, reading their newspapers and dreaming of promotion, he was in a dressing station, dying of typhus.

And now he had a desk of his own, and an office of his own, and a pink-cheeked, wide-eyed orderly who brought him tea and clicked his heels. It was not their joke — it was his. It was he who could laugh — not they. They were nothing, and he was sector commandant — Anastas Azarin, Colonel, SIB. Tovarishch Polkovnik Azarin, if you please!

He bent over the reports, muttering. Nothing new. As usual, the Allieds kept their sector tight. There was this American scientist, Martino. What was he doing in his laboratory?

The American, Heywood, could not tell. From his post with the Allied Nations Government, Heywood had managed to arrange things so that Martino’s laboratory was placed close to Azarin’s sector. But that was the best he had been able to do. He had known Martino, knew Martino was engaged in something important that required a room with a twenty-foot ceiling and eight hundred square feet of floor space, and was called Project K-Eighty-Eight.

Azarin scowled. It was all very well and good to have such faith in Martino’s importance, but what was K-Eighty-Eight? What good was an empty name? The American, Heywood, was very glib with his data, but the fact was that there was no data. The ANG internal security system was such that no one, even Heywood, could know much of what was going on. That in itself was quite normal — the Soviet system was the same. But the fact was that in the end it would not be some cloak-and-dagger secret agent, with his flabby white skin and his little cameras who would deliver the K-Eighty-Eight to them. It would be Azarin — simple Anastas Azarin, the peasant — who would pull this thing apart as a bear destroys a dead tree to find the honey.

Martino would have to be interrogated. There was no other method of doing it. But for all Novoya Moskva wasted its air on the telephone, there was no quick way of doing it. There was no getting people into Martino’s laboratory. He had to be waited for. Men had to be ready at all times, prepared to pluck him from some dark street on the day he wandered too close to the line, if that lucky accident ever did occur. Then — one, two, three, he would be here, he would be questioned, he would be released, all in a matter of a few days before the Allieds could do anything, and the Allieds would have lost the K-Eighty-Eight. And that devil, the American Rogers, no matter how clever he was, would have been taught at last that Anastas Azarin was a better man. But until that time, everyone — Azarin, Novoya Moskva — everyone — would have to wait. All in good time, if ever.

The telephone on his desk began to ring. Azarin swept up the receiver. “Polkovnik Azarin,” he growled.

“Tovarishch Polkovnik — ” It was one of his staff assistants. Azarin recognized the voice and fumbled for the name. He found it.

“Well, Yung?”

“There has been an explosion in the American scientist’s laboratory.”

“Get men in there. Get the American.”

“They are already on their way. What shall we do next?”

“Next? Bring him here. No — one moment. An explosion, you say? Take him to the military hospital.”

“Yes, sir. I very much hope he is alive, because this, of course, is the opportunity we have been waiting for.”

“Is it? Go give your orders.”

Azarin dropped the receiver on its cradle. This was bad. This was the worst possible thing. If Martino was dead, or so badly damaged as to be useless for weeks, Novoya Moskva would become intolerable.

2

As soon as his car had come to a stop in front of the hospital, Azarin jumped out and climbed quickly up the steps. He marched through the main doors and strode into the lobby, where a doctor was waiting for him.

“Colonel Azarin?” the wiry little doctor asked, bowing slightly from the waist. “I am Medical Doctor Kothu. You will forgive me — I do not speak your language fluently.”

“I do well enough in yours,” Azarin said pleasantly, anticipating the gratifying surprise on the little man’s face. When it came, it made him even more well disposed toward the doctor. “Now then — where is the man?”

“This way, please.” Kothu bowed again and led the way to the elevator. A brief smile touched Azarin’s face as he followed him. It always gave him pleasure when simple-looking Anastas Azarin proved to be as learned as anyone who had spent years in the universities. It was something to be proud of, too, that he had learned the language while burning leeches off his legs in a jungle swamp, instead of out of some professor’s book.

“How badly is the man injured?” he asked Kothu as they stepped out into another hall.

“Very badly. He was dead for a few moments.”

Azarin jerked his head toward the doctor.

Kothu nodded with a certain pride of his own. “He died in the ambulance. Fortunately, death is no longer permanent, under certain circumstances.” He led Azarin to a plate glass window set in the wall of a white-tiled room. Inside, still wearing the torn remnants of his clothes, incredibly bloodied, a man lay in the midst of a welter of apparatus.

“He is quite safe now,” Kothu explained. “You see the autojector there, pumping his blood, and the artificial kidney that purifies it. On this side are the artificial lungs.” The machines were bunched together haphazardly, where they had quickly been brought from their usual positions against the walls. Doctors and nurses were clustered around them, carefully supervising their workings, and other doctors were busy on the man himself, clamping torn blood vessels and applying compression to his armless left shoulder. As Azarin watched, orderlies began shifting the machines into systematic order. The emergency was over. Things were assuming a routine. A nurse glanced at her watch, looked over at a rack where a bottle was draining of whole blood, and substituted a fresh one.

Azarin scowled to hide his nervousness. He was having a certain amount of difficulty in keeping his glance on the monstrous scene. A man, after all, was made with his insides decently hidden under his skin. To look at a man, you did not see the slimy organs doing their revolting work of keeping him alive and real. To see a man like this, ripped open, with mysteriously knowledgeable, yes — frightening — men like this Kothu pushing and pulling at the moist things that stuffed the smooth and handsome skin…

Azarin risked a sidelong glance at the little brown doctor. Kothu could do these abominable things just as easily to him. Anastas Azarin could lie there like that, hideously exposed, with men like this Kothu desecrating him at his pleasure.

“That’s very good,” Azarin barked, “but he’s useless to me. Or can he speak?”

Kothu shook his head. “His head is crushed, and he has lost a number of sensory organs. But this is only emergency equipment, such as you will find in any accident ward. Inside of two months, he’ll be as good as new.”

“Two months?”

“Colonel Azarin, I ask you to look at what lies on that table and is barely a man.”

“Yes — yes, of course, I’m lucky to have him at all. He can’t be moved, I suppose? To the great hospital in Novoya Moskva, for example?”

“It would kill him.”

Azarin nodded. Well, with every bad, some good. There would be no question, now, of Martino being taken away from him. It would be Anastas Azarin who did it — Anastas Azarin who tore the honey from the tree.

“Very well — do your best. And quickly.”

“Of course, Colonel.”

“If there is anything you need, come to me. I will give it to you.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. I want this man. You will do your best work to see that I get him.”

“Yes, Colonel.” Medical Doctor Kothu bowed slightly from the waist. Azarin nodded and walked away, down the hall to the elevator, his booted feet thudding against the floor.

Downstairs, he found Yung just driving up with a squad of SIB soldiers. Azarin gave detailed instructions for a guard, and ordered the accident floor of the hospital sealed off. Already, he was busy thinking of ways this story might be spreading. The ambulance crew had to be kept quiet, the hospital personnel might talk, and even some of the patients here might have gathered an idea of what was going on. All these leaks had to be plugged. Azarin went back to his car, conscious of how complex his work was, how much ability a man needed to do it properly, and of how, inevitably, the American, Rogers, would sooner or later bring it all to nothing.

Five weeks went by. Five weeks during which Azarin was unable to accomplish anything, and of which Martino knew nothing.

3

Every time Martino tried to focus his eyes, something whirred very softly in his frontal sinuses. He tried to understand that, but he felt very weak and boneless, and the sensation was so disconcerting that he was awake for an hour before he could see.

For that hour he lay motionless, listening, and noticing that his ears, too, were not serving him properly. Sounds advanced and receded much too quickly; were suddenly here and then there. His face ached slightly as each new vibration struck his ears, almost as if it were resonating to the sounds he heard.

There was some kind of apparatus in his mouth. His tongue felt the hard sleekness of metal, and the slipperiness of plastic. A splint, he thought. My jaw’s broken. He tried it, and it worked very well. It must be some kind of traction splint, he thought.

Whatever it was, it kept his teeth from meeting. When he closed his jaws, he felt only pressure and resistance, instead of the mesh and grind of teeth coming together.

The sheets felt hot and rough, and his chest was constricted. The bandaging felt lumpy across his back. His right shoulder was painful when he tried to move it, but it moved. He opened and closed the fingers of his right hand. Good. He tried his left arm. Nothing. Bad.

He lay quietly for a while, and at the end of it he had accepted the fact that his arm was gone. He was right-handed, after all, and if the arm was the only thing, he was lucky. He set about testing, elevating his hips cautiously, flexing his thighs and calves, curling his toes. No paralysis.

He had been lucky, and now he felt much better. He tried his eyes again, and though the whirring came and jarred him, he kept focus this time. He looked up and saw a blue ceiling, with a blue light burning in its center. The light bothered him, and after a moment he realized he wasn’t blinking, so he blinked deliberately. The ceiling and the light turned yellow.

There had been a peculiar shifting across his field of vision. He looked down toward his feet. Yellow sheets, yellowish white bedstead, yellow walls with a brown strip from floor to shoulder height. He blinked again, and the room went dark. He looked up toward the ceiling and barely saw a faint glow where the light had been, as though he were looking through leaded glass.

He couldn’t feel the texture of the pillow against the back of his neck. He couldn’t smell the smell of a hospital. He blinked again and the room was clear. He looked from side to side, and at the edges of his vision, just barely in sight and very close to his eyes, he saw two in-curving cuts in what seemed to be metal plating. It was as though his face were pressed up to the door slit of a solitary confinement cell. He inched up his right hand to touch his face.

4

Five weeks — of which Martino knew nothing and during which Azarin had been unable to accomplish anything. Azarin held the telephone headpiece in one hand and opened the inlaid sandalwood box on his desk with the other. He selected a gold-tipped papyros and put the tip in one corner of his mouth where it would be out of the way. There was a perpetual match-box on his desk, and he jerked at the protruding match. It came free, but the pull had been too uneven to draw a proper spark out of the flint in the box. The match wick failed to catch light, and he thrust the match back into the box, jerked the matchbox off his desk and into the wastebasket, pulled open his desk drawer, found real matches, and lit the papyros. His lip curled tightly to hold the cigarette and let him talk at the same time.

“Yes, sir. I appreciate that the Allieds are putting great pressure on us for the return of this man.” The connection from Novoya Moskva was thin, but he did not raise his voice. Instead, he tightened it, giving it a hard, mechanical quality, as though he were driving it over the wires by force of will. He cursed silently at the speed with which Rogers had located Martino. It was one thing, negotiating with the Allieds when it was possible to say there was no knowledge of such a man. It was quite another when they could reply with the name of a specific hospital. It meant time lost that might have been stolen, and they were short of time to begin with. But there had never been any hiding anything important from Rogers for very long.

Very well, then that was the way it was. Meanwhile, however, there were these telephone calls.

“The surgeons will not have completed their final operation until tomorrow, at the earliest. I shall not be able to interrogate the man for perhaps two days thereafter. Yes, sir. I suggest the delay is the surgeons’ responsibility. They say we are lucky to have the man alive at all, and that everything they are doing is absolutely necessary. Martino’s condition was most serious. Every one of the operations was extremely delicate, and I am informed that nervous tissue regenerates very slowly, even with the most modern methods. Yes, sir. In my opinion, Medical Doctor Kothu is highly skilled. I am confirmed in this by my file copy of his certification from your headquarters.”

Azarin was gambling a little there, he knew. Central Headquarters might decide to step in whether it had an ostensible reason or not. But he thought they would wait for a time. Their own staff had passed on Kothu and the rest of the medical team in the local hospital, since it was a military establishment. They would hesitate to belie themselves. And they knew Azarin was one of their best men. At Central Headquarters, they did not laugh at him. They knew his record.

No, he could afford to gamble with his superiors. It was a valuable thing to practice, for a man who would some day be among the superiors and was readying himself for it.

“Yes, sir. Two weeks more.” Azarin bit down on the end of the papyros, and the hollow filter tube of giltwrapped pasteboard crumpled. He began chewing it lightly, sucking the smoke in between his teeth. “Yes, sir. I am aware of the already long delay. I will bear the international situation in mind.”

Good. They were going to let him go ahead. For a moment, Azarin was happy.

Then the edge of his mind nibbled at the fact that he still had no idea of where to begin his interrogation — that not the first shred of the earliest groundwork had been done.

Azarin scowled. Preoccupied, he said, “Good-bye, sir,” put the telephone down, and sat with his elbows on the desk, leaning forward, the papyros held between the thumb and the forefinger of his right hand.

He was very good at his work, he knew. But he had never before encountered precisely these conditions. Neither had Novoya Moskva, and that was a help, but it was no help on the direct problem.

These temporary detentions were normally quite cut-and-dried. The man was diplomatically pumped of whatever he would yield in a short space of time. Usually, this was little. Occasionally, it was more. But always the man was returned as quickly as possible. Except in cases where it was desirable to stir the Allieds up, for some larger purpose, it was always best not to annoy them. The Allieds, upset by something like this, could go to quite extraordinary lengths of retaliation, and no one could tell what other strategies they might not cripple with their countermoves. Similarly, there were certain methods it was best not to use on their people. Returning a man in bad condition invariably made things difficult for months afterward.

So, usually it was a day or two at most before a man was returned to the Allieds. There, Rogers would take a day or two in discovering how much Azarin had found out. And that was the sum of it. If, at times, Azarin learned something useful, Rogers neutralized it at once. In Azarin’s opinion, the entire business was a pitiful waste of time and energy.

But now, with this Martino, what did he have? He had a man who had invented something called a K-Eighty-Eight, a man of high but undocumented reputation. Once more, Azarin cursed the circumstances of the times in which he lived. Once more he was angrily conscious of the fact that it was being left for the working professional-for Anastas Azarin-to clean up the work done by such fumbling amateurs as Heywood.

Azarin stared down at his desk in blank fury. And, of course, Novoya Moskva refused to act as though such a thing was basically its own fault. They simply pressed Azarin for results. Was he not an intelligence officer, after all? What could possibly be so difficult? What could possibly have taken him five weeks?

It was always this way in dealing with clerks. They had books, after all. The books had taught them how things were done. So things were done as they had been done in 1941 and in 1963, when the books were written.

No one knew anything about this man, except that he’d invented something. They had no file on him except for his undergraduate period at the technical academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cursing, Azarin wished that the SIB had, in actuality, some of the super-ferrets with which it was credited by the kind studios-the daring and supernally intelligent operatives who somehow passed through concrete walls and into vaults stuffed with alphabetically arranged Allied secrets conveniently shapirographed in Cyrillic print. He would have enjoyed having one or two of these on his staff, knowing that any information they brought, back was completely accurate, correctly interpreted, did not have to be confirmed by other operatives, was up to date, had not been planted, and, furthermore, that these operatives had not meanwhile been subverted by Rogers. Such people did occur, of course. They immediately became instructors and staff officers, because they were altogether too few.

So there he had been, this Martino, protected by the usual security safeguards common to both sides. Azarin had planned to some day add the K-Eighty-Eight to the always incomplete and usually obsolescent jigsaw puzzle of information that was the best anyone could do. But he had not planned to have it happen like this.

Now he had him. He’d had him five useless weeks already. He had him almost fatally injured, bedridden, the makings of a good cause celebre if he wasn’t back in Allied hands soon-a man who looked extremely valuable, though he might turn out not to be-a man who, therefore, ought to be returned as soon as possible and kept as long as possible, and with whom, peculiarly, neither thing could be done at once.

It was a situation which verged on the comic in some of its aspects.

Azarin finished his papyros and shredded it to bits in the ashtray. It was all far from hopeless. He already had the rough outline of a plan, and he was acting on it. He would get results.

But Azarin knew Rogers was almost inhumanly clever. He knew Rogers must be fully aware of the situation here. And Azarin did not like the thought that Rogers must be laughing at him.

5

A nurse put her head in the door of Martino’s room. He slowly lowered his hand back to his side. The nurse disappeared, and in a moment a man in a white smock and skullcap came in.

He was a wiry, curly-haired little man with olive skin, broad, chisel-shaped teeth and a knobby jaw, who smiled down cheerfully as he took Martino’s pulse.

“I’m very glad to see you awake. My name is Kothu, I am a medical doctor, how do you feel?”

Martino moved his head slowly from side to side.

“I see. There was no help for it, it had to be done. There was very little cranial structure remaining, the sensory organs were largely obliterated. Fortunately, the nature of the damage-inflicting agency was severe flashburns which did not expose your brain tissue to prolonged heat, and followed by a slow concussive shockwave crushing your cranium without splintering. Not pleasant to hear, I know, but of all possible damages the best. The arm, I am afraid, was severed by a metallic fragment. Would you speak, please?”

Martino looked at him. He was still ashamed of the scream that had brought the nurse. He tried to picture what he must look like — to visualize the mechanisms that evidently were replacing so many of his organs — and he could not recall exactly how he had produced the scream. He tried to gather air in his lungs for the expected effort of speech, but there was only a rolling sensation under his ribs, as though a wheel or turbine impeller were spinning there.

“Effort is unnecessary,” Dr. Kothu said. “Simply speak.”

“I — ” It felt no different in his throat. He had thought to find his words trembling through the vibrator of an artificial larynx. Instead, it was his old voice. But his rib cage did not sink over deflating lungs, and his diaphragm did not push out air. It was effortless, as speech in a dream can be, and he had the feeling he could babble on and on without stopping, for paragraphs, for days, for ever. “I — One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.”

“Thank you, that is very helpful. Tell me, do you see me clearly? As I step back and move about, do your eyes follow and focus easily?”

“Yes.” But the servomotors hummed in his face, and he wanted to reach up and massage the bridge of his nose.

“Very good. Well do you know you have been here over a month?”

Martino shook his head. Wasn’t anyone trying to get him back? Or did they think he was dead?

“It was necessary to keep you under sedation. You realize, I hope, the extent of the work we had to do?”

Martino moved his chest and shoulders. He felt clumsy and unbalanced, and somehow awkward inside, as though his chest were a bag that had been filled with stones.

“A great deal was done,” Dr. Kothu seemed justifiably proud. “I would say that Medical Doctor Verstoff did very well in substituting the prosthetic cranium. And of course, Medical Doctors Ho and Jansky were responsible for the connection of the prosthetic sensory organs to the proper brain centers, as Medical Technicians Debrett, Fonten, and Wassil were for the renal and respiratory complexes. I, myself, am in charge, having the honor to have developed the method of nervous tissue regeneration.” His voice dropped a bit. “You would do us the kindness, perhaps, to mention our names when you return to the other side? I do not know your name,” he added quickly, “nor am I intended to know your origin, but, you see, there are certain things a medical professional can perceive. On our side, we give three smallpox inoculations on the right arm. In any case — ” Kothu seemed definitely embarrassed now. “What we have done here is quite new, and quite outstanding. And on our side, in these days, they do not publish such things.”

“I’ll try.”

“Thank you. There are so many great things being done on our side, by so many people. And your side does not know. If you knew, your people would so much more quickly come to us.”

Martino said nothing An uncomfortable moment dragged by, and then Dr. Kothu said, “We must get you ready. One thing remains to be done, and we will have accomplished our best. That is the arm.” He smiled as he had when he first came in. “I will see you again in the operating theater, and when we are finished, you will be as good as new.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Kothu left, and the nurses came in. They were two women dressed in heavily starched, thick white uniforms with headdresses that were banded tightly across their foreheads and draped back to their shoulders, completely covering their hair. Their faces were a little rough-skinned, but clear, and expressionless. Their lips were compressed, as they had been taught to keep them by the traditions of their nursing academies, and they wore no cosmetics. Because none of the standard cues common to women of the Allied cultures were present, it was impossible to guess at their ages and arrive at an accurate answer. They undressed him and washed him without speaking to each other or to him. They removed the pad from his shoulder, painted the area with a colored germicide, loosely taped a new sterile pad in place, and moved him to an operating cart which one of them brought into the room.

They worked with complete competence, wasting no motion and dividing the work perfectly; they were a team that had risen above the flesh and beyond all skills but their one, completely mastered own, who had so far advanced in the perfect practice of their art that it did not matter whether Martino was there or not.

Martino remained passively silent, watching them without getting in their way, and they handled him as though he were a practice mannequin.

6

Azarin strode down the corridor toward Martino’s room, with Kothu chattering beside him.

“Yes, Colonel, although he is not yet really strong, it is only a matter now of sufficient rest. All the operations were a great success.”

“He can talk at length?”

“Not today, perhaps. It depends on the subject of discussion, of course. Too much strain would be bad.”

“That will be largely his choice. He is in here?”

“Yes, Colonel.” The little doctor opened the door wide, and Azarin marched through.

He stopped as though someone had sunk a bayonet in his belly. He stared at the unholy thing in the bed.

Martino was looking at him, with the sheets around his chest. Azarin could see the dark hole where his eyes were, lurking out from the metal. The good arm was under the covers. The left lay across his lap, like the claw of something from Mars. The creature said nothing, did nothing. It lay on its bed and looked at him.

Azarin glared at Kothu. “You did not tell me he would look like this.”

The doctor was thunderstruck. “But I did! I very carefully described the prosthetic appliances. I assured you they were perfectly functional — engineering marvels — if, regrettably, not especially cosmetic. You approved!”

“You did not tell me he would look like this,” Azarin growled. “You will now introduce me.”

“Of course,” Doctor Kothu said nervously. He turned hastily toward Martino. “Sir, this is Colonel Azarin. He has come to see about your condition.”

Azarin forced himself to go over to the bed. His face crinkled into its smile. “How do you do?” he said in English, holding out his hand.

The thing in the bed reached out its good hand. “I’m feeling better, thank you,” it said neutrally. “How do you do?” Its hand, at least, was human. Azarin gripped it warmly.

“I am well, thank you. Would you like to talk? Doctor Kothu, you will bring me a chair, please. I will sit here, and we will talk.” He waited for Kothu to place the chair. “Thank you. You will go now. I will call you when I wish to leave.”

“Of course, Colonel. Good afternoon, sir,” Kothu said to the thing in the bed, and left.

“Now, Doctor of Science Martino, we will talk,” Azarin said pleasantly, settling himself in his chair. “I have been waiting for you to recover. I hope I am not inconveniencing you, sir, but you understand there are things that have waited — records to be completed, forms to fill in, and the like.” He shook his head. “Paperwork, sir. Always paperwork.”

“Of course,” Martino said. Azarin had difficulty fitting the perfectly normal voice to the ugly face. “I suppose our people have been annoying your people to get me back, and that always means a great deal of writing back and forth, doesn’t it?”

Here is a clever one, Azarin thought. Within the first minute, he was trying to find out if his people were pressing hard. Well, they were, God knew they were, if Novoya Moskva’s tone of voice meant anything.

“There is always paperwork,” he said, smiling. “You understand, I am responsible for this sector, and my people wish reports.” So, now you may guess as much as you wish. “Are you comfortable? I hope everything is as it should be. You understand that as colonel in command of this sector, I ordered that you be given the best of all medical attention.”

“Quite comfortable, thank you.”

“I am sure that you, as a Doctor of Science, must be even more impressed with the work than I, as a simple soldier.”

“My specialty is electronics, Colonel, not servomechanics.”

Ah. So now we are even.

Less than even, Azarin thought angrily, for Martino had yet to give him any sign of being helpful. It did not matter, after all, how much Martino did not find out.

These first talks were seldom very productive in themselves. But they set the tone of everything that followed. It was now that Azarin had to decide what tactics to use against this man. It was now that the lines would be drawn, and Azarin measured against Martino.

But how could anyone see what this man thought when his face was the face of a metal beast — a carved thing, unmoving, with no sign of anything? No anger, no fear, no indecision — no weakness!

Azarin scowled. Still, in the end, he would win. He would rip behind that mask, and secrets would come spilling out.

If there is time, he reminded himself. Six weeks, now. Six weeks. How far would the Allieds stretch their patience? How far would the Allieds let Novoya Moskva stretch theirs?

He almost glared at the man. It was his fault this incredible affair had ever taken place. “Tell me, Doctor Martino,” he said, “don’t you wonder why you are here, in one of our hospitals?”

“I assume you got the jump on our rescue teams.”

It was becoming clear to Azarin that this Martino intended to leave him no openings. “Yes,” he smiled, “but would you not expect your Allied government to take better safety precautions? Should they not have had teams close by?”

“I’m afraid I-never thought about it very much.”

So. The man refused to tell him whether the K-Eighty-Eight was normally considered an explosion hazard or not.

“And what have you thought about, Doctor of Science?”

The figure in the bed shrugged. “Nothing much. I’m waiting to get out of here. It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? I don’t imagine you’ll be able to keep me very long.”

Now the thing was deliberately trying to get him angry. Azarin did not like being reminded of the wasted weeks. “My dear Doctor of Science, you are free to go almost as soon as you wish.”

“Yes — exactly. Almost.”

So. The thing understood the situation perfectly, and would not yield — no more than its face could break out into fearful sweat.

Azarin realized his own palms were damp.

Abruptly, Azarin stood up. There was no good in pursuing this further. The lines were clearly drawn, the purpose of the talk was accomplished, nothing more could be done, and it was becoming more than he could stand to remain any longer with this monster. “I must go. We will talk again.” Azarin bowed. “Good afternoon, Doctor of Science Martino.”

“Good afternoon, Colonel Azarin.”

Azarin pushed the chair back against the wall and strode out. “I am finished for today,” he growled to the waiting Doctor Kothu, and went back to his office, where he sat drinking tea and frowning at the telephone.

7

Doctor Kothu came in, examined him, and left. Martino lay back in his bed, thinking.

Azarin was going to be bad, he thought, if he was given the chance to build up his temper over any period of time. He wondered how much longer the ANG would take to get him out of this.

But Martino’s greatest preoccupation, at the moment, was the K-Eighty-Eight. He had already decided what unlikely combination of factors had produced the explosion. Now, as he had been doing for the past several hours, he worked toward a new means of absorbing the terrific heat wastage that the K-Eighty-Eight developed.

He found his thoughts drifting away from it and toward what had happened to him. He raised his new arm and looked at it in fascination before he forced himself off the subject. He flung the arm down on the bed beside him, out of his field of vision, and felt the shock against the mattress.

How long am I going to stay in this place? he thought. Kothu had told him he could be getting out of bed soon. How much good is that going to do me if they keep me on this side of the line indefinitely?

He wondered how much the Soviets knew about the K-Eighty-Eight. Probably just enough so they’d do their best to keep him and pump it out of him. If they hadn’t known anything, they’d never have come after him. If they knew enough to use, again, they wouldn’t have bothered.

He wondered how far the Soviets would go before they were ready to give up. You heard all kinds of stories. Probably the same stories the Soviets heard about the ANG.

He was frightened, he suddenly realized. Frightened by what had happened to him, by what Kothu had done to save him, by the thought of having the Soviets somehow get the K-Eighty-Eight out of him, by the sudden feeling of complete helplessness that came over him.

He wondered if he might be a coward. It was something he had not considered since the age when he learned the difference between physical bravery and courage. The possibility that he might do something irrational out of simple fear was new to him.

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

The first thing lost under these conditions, Martino discovered, was the sense of time. He was not particularly surprised, since a completely foreign experience could not possibly contain any of the usual cues by which a human being learned his chronology. The room had no windows, and no clocks or calendars. These were the simplest and most obvious lacks. Then, there was no change in his routine. There was no stopping to sit down to a meal, or lying down to rest, and hunger or sleepiness furnish no help when they are constant. This room itself, somewhere in Azarin’s sector headquarters, was so constructed as to offer no signposts. It was rectangular, cast in unpainted cement from floor to ceiling. Martino’s route of passage was from one end to the other, and one of the walls toward which he walked was almost exactly the same as the other, even in such details as the grain of the gray surface. As he walked, he passed between two identical oak desks, facing each other, and each desk had a man in a gray-green uniform behind it. The men contrived to look alike, and a similar door entered the room behind each of them. The light fixture was exactly in the center of the ceiling. Martino had no idea of which door he had originally used to come into the room, or toward which wall he had first marched.As he passed the desks, it was always the man on his right who asked the first question. It might be anything: “What is your middle name?” or “How many inches in a foot?” The questions were meaningless, and no record was kept of his answers. The men behind the desks, who changed shifts at what might have been irregular intervals but who nevertheless always looked somehow alike, did not even care if he answered or not. If he remembered correctly, for some time at the beginning he had not answered. Somewhat later, he had irritatedly taken to giving nonsense replies: “Newton,” or “eight.” But now it was much less exhausting to simply tell the truth.

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

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

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

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

10

Azarin sat patiently behind his desk, waiting for word to come from the interrogation room. It was three days, now, since Martino had been brought from the hospital, and Azarin knew, as a man knows his trade, that the word would come sometime today. It was quite a simple business, Azarin thought. One took a man and peeled things away from him — more vital things than skin, though he had seen that technique work at the hands of men who had not learned the subtler phases of their trade. In effect, it was much the same, though the result was cleaner.

A man carries very little excess baggage in his head. Even a clerk, and a man like Martino was not a clerk. The more intelligent the man, the less excess baggage and the quicker the results. For once you exposed the man underneath, he was raw and tender — a touch here and there, and he gave up what he knew.Of course, having done that and knowing he had done that, the man was empty thereafter. He had found himself to be pliable, and after that anyone could use him — could do anything he wanted with him. He bore the mark of whoever touched him last. He did what you wanted of him. He was a living nothing.Ordinarily, Azarin drew only a normal measure of satisfaction from having done this to a man while he himself remained, forever and imperishable, Anastas Azarin. But in this case — Azarin growled at something invisible across the room.

1

I must remember, Martino thought, looking across the office at Colonel Azarin, that the K-Eighty-Eight is not meant to be a bribe. Some people buy the attention of other people by telling them some things. No man is so drab as not to have some personal detail that will intrigue others. I must remember that I can tell Azarin about the time I played hookey from grammar school because I was ashamed to raise my hand to go to the washroom. That is intriguing enough, and will attract enough attention to me. Or I can tell him some back fence gossip — about Johnson, the astrophysicist, for instance, who looks at figure studies in his room at night. That will hold his attention at least until I have exhausted all the details of the story.

I can tell him all these things, and as many more as I can remember, but I must not try to hold his attention by telling him about the K-Eighty-Eight because that is not a proper use of it. I must remember, he thought with infinite patience for clarity’s sake, never to admit I know anything about the K-Eighty-Eight. That is the greatest defense against the urge to gossip — to pretend disinterest when someone comes to you for further details.

“Sit down, Doctor of Science Martino,” Azarin said, smiling pleasantly. “Please be so good.”

Martino felt the answering smile well up through his entire body. He felt the traitor joy begin as a faint surprise that someone had spoken to him at last, and then spread into a great warmth at this man who had called him by name. Not thinking that nothing would show on his face, he trembled with panic at the thought of how easily Azarin was breaking through his defenses. He had hoped to be stronger than this.I must remember to say nothing; he thought, urgently now. If ever I begin, my friendship for this man won’t let me stop. I have to fight to say nothing at all.

“Would you care for a cigarette?” Azarin extended the sandalwood box across the desk. Martino’s right hand was trembling. He reached with his left. The metal fingertips, badly controlled, broke the papyros to shreds.He saw Azarin frown for a moment, and in that moment Martino almost cried out, he was so upset by what he had done to offend this man. But it took an effort to activate the proper vocal affectors in his brain, and his brain detected it and stopped it. I must remember I have other friends, he thought. I must remember that Edith and Barbara will be killed if I please this friend. He realized in a panic that Edith and Barbara were not his friends any longer — that they probably did not remember him — that no one remembered or noticed him or cared about him except Azarin. I must remember, he thought. I must remember to apologize to Edith and Barbara if I ever leave here. I must remember I will leave here.

Azarin was smiling again. “A glass of tea?” I must think about that, he thought. If I take tea, I will have to open my mouth. If I do that, will I be able to close it again? “Don’t be afraid, Doctor of Science Martino. Everything is all right now. We will sit, and we will talk, and I will listen to you.

“He felt himself beginning to do it. I must remember not going to school — and Johnson, he thought frantically.Why? He wondered. Because the K-Eighty-Eight is not meant to be a bribe.What does that mean?He listened to himself think in fascination, absorbed by this phenomenon of two opposing drives in a single mechanism, and wondered just exactly how his mind did the trick — what kind of circuits were involved, and were they actually in operation simultaneously or did they use the same components alternately?

“Are you playing with me?” Azarin shouted. “What are you doing, behind that face? Are you laughing at me?”

Martino stared at Azarin in surprise. What? What had he done?He could not wonder how long it might take him to complete a train of thought. It did not seem to him that a very long time at all had gone by since Azarin’s last question, or that a man looking at him might see nothing but an implacable, graven-faced figure with a deadly metal arm lying quiet but always ready to crush. “Martino, I did not bring you here for comedies!” Azarin’s eyes suddenly narrowed. Martino thought he saw fear under the anger, and it puzzled him greatly. “Did Rogers plan this? Did he deliberately send you?” Martino began to shake his head, to try to explain. But he caught himself. The thought began to come to him that there was no need to talk to this man — that he had already attracted all of Azarin’s attention.

The telephone rang, with the hard, shrill insistence that always came when the switchboard operator was relaying a call from Novoya Moskva. Azarin picked it up and listened. Martino watched him with no curiosity while Azarin’s eyes opened wide. “Tshort!” Azarin cried, and kicked his chair away from the desk. He put the phone down. Martino still took no notice. Even when Azarin’s shrunken voice muttered, “Your college friend, Heywood, drowned six hundred miles too soon,” Martino had no notion of what it meant.

2

Martino sat motionless in the Tatra as it drew near the border. The SIB man beside him — an Asiatic named Yung — was too quick to interpret every movement as an opening to practice his conversational English. Three months wasted, Martino was thinking. The whole program must be bogged down. I only hope they haven’t tried to rebuild that particular configuration.He searched his mind for the modified system he was almost certain he had thought of in their hospital. He had been trying to bring it back for the past two weeks, while Kothu and a therapist worked on him. But he had not been able to quite grasp it. Several times he thought he had it, but the memory was patchy and useless.Well, he thought as the car stopped, the therapist told me there was bound to be some trouble for a while. But it’ll come to me.

“Here you are, Doctor Martino,” Yung said brightly, unsnapping the door.

“Yes.” He looked out at the gateway, with its Soviet guards. Beyond it, he could see the Allied soldiers, and a car with two men getting out of it. He began to walk toward them. There’ll be no problems, he reminded himself. These people aren’t used to my looks. It’ll take a while to overcome that.But it can be done. A man is something more than just a collection of features. And I’ll get to work soon. That’ll keep me busy. If I can’t remember that idea I had in the hospital, I can always work out something else.It’s been a bad time, he thought, stepping through the gate. But I haven’t lost anything.