Algis Budrys - Who?

“Well?” Starke rasped in his high, dry-throated voice.

The man wagged his head indecisively. The bandages over his jaw parted once, showing a dark slit, before he said anything. When be did speak, his voice was indistinct. “Professor Starke?”

“Mister Starke. What is it?”

“I…don’t know if you remember me. I was one of your students. Class of sixty-six at Bridgetown High School. I’m Lucas Martino.”

“Yes, I remember you. Come in.” Starke moved aside and held the door, pushing it shut carefully behind the man, disgusted at having to be so careful of drafts. “Sit down. No, that’s my chair. Take the one opposite.”

The chief impression his visitor was giving was one of embarrassment. He sat down gingerly, unsure of himself, and opened his coat with clumsy, gloved fingers.

“Take off your hat.” Starke lowered himself back into his chair and peered at the man. “Ashamed of yourself?”

The man pulled the hat off, dragging it slowly. His entire skull was bandaged, the white gauze running down under his collar. He gestured toward it. “An accident. An industrial accident,” he mumbled.

“That’s none of my concern. What can I do for you?”

“I— I don’t know,” the man said in a shocked voice, as though his plans had extended only to Starke’s front door and he had never thought, till now, of what to do after that.

“What did you expect? Did you think I’d be surprised to see you? Or see you all wrapped up like the invisible man? I’m not. I know all about you. A man named Rogers was here and said you were on your way.” Starke cocked his head. “So now you’re caught flatfooted. Well — think. What’re you going to do now?”

“I was afraid Rogers would find out about you. Did he bother you?”

“Not a bit.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me you might not be who you say you are. He wanted my opinion.”

“Didn’t he tell you not to let me know that?”

“He did. I told him I’d do this my way.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“How would you know?,’

The man sighed. “Then you don’t think I’m Lucas Martino.”

“I don’t care. It’s no longer important whether you used to be in my class or not. If you’re here for help of any kind, you’ve wasted your time.”

“I see.” The man began putting his hat back on.

“You’ll wait and hear any reasons.”

“What reasons?” the man asked with dull bitterness. “You don’t trust me. That’s a good reason.”

“If that’s what you think, you’d better listen.”

The man sank back. “All right.” He seemed not to care. His emotional responses seemed to reach him slowly and indistinctly, as if traveling through cotton wool.

“What would you want me to do?” Starke rasped. “Take you in here to live with me? How long would that last — a month or two, a year? You’d have a corpse on your hands, and you’d still have no place to go. I’m an old man, Martino or whoever you are, and you ought to have taken that into account if you were making plans.”

The man shook his head.

“And if that’s not what you wanted, then you wanted me to help you with some kind of work. Rogers said it might be that. Was that it?”

The man raised his hands helplessly.

Starke nodded. “What made you think I was qualified? What made you think I could work on something forty years advanced over what I was taught at school? What made you think I could have kept up with new work in the field? I don’t have access to classified publications. Where did you think we’d get the equipment? What did you think would pay for it and — ”

“I have some money.”

“ — what did you think you’d gain by it if you did think you could answer those objections? This nation is effectively at war, and wouldn’t tolerate unauthorized work for a moment. Or weren’t you planning to work on anything important? Were you planning to drop corks into mousetraps?”

The man sat dumbly, his hands trailing over his thighs.

“Think, man.”

The man raised his hands and dropped them. He hunched forward. “I thought I was.”

“You weren’t.” Starke closed the subject. “Now — where’re you going to go from here?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know. You know, I had decided you were my last chance.”

“Don’t your parents live near here? If you are Martino?”

“They’re both dead.” The man looked up. “They didn’t live to be as old as you.”

“Don’t hate me for that. I’m sorry they’re dead. Life wasn’t meant to be given up gladly.”

“They left me the farm.”

“All right, then you’ve got a place to stay. Do you have a car?”

“No. I took the train down.”

“Muffled in your winding sheet, eh? Well, if you don’t want to sleep in the hotel, take my car. It’s in the garage. You can return it tomorrow. That’ll get you there. The keys are on the mantelpiece.”

“Thank you.”

“Return the car, but don’t visit me again. Lucas Martino was the one student whose brains I admired.”

“So you’re not sure,” Rogers said heavily, sitting in the chair where the man had sat the night before.

“No.”

“Can you take an educated guess?”

“I think in facts. It’s not a fact that he recognized me. He might have been bluffing. I saw no purpose in laying little traps for him, so I answered to my name. My picture has appeared in the local newspaper several times. ‘Local Educator Retires After Long Service’ was the most recent caption. He had my name to begin with. Am I to judge him incapable of elementary research?”

“He didn’t visit the newspaper office, Mr. Starke.”

“Mr. Rogers, police work is your occupation, not mine. But if this man is a Soviet agent, he could easily have had the way prepared for him.”

“That’s occurred to us, Mr. Starke. We’ve found no conclusive proof of anything like that.”

“Lack of contrary proof does not establish the existence of a fact. Mr. Rogers, you sound like a man trying to push someone into a decision you want.”

Rogers rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “All right, Mr. Starke. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

“I was a good deal more satisfied with my life before you and this man came into it.”

Rogers sighed. “There’s nothing very much any of us could do about that, is there?”

He left, made sure his surveillance teams were properly located, and went back to New York, driving up the turnpike at a slow and cautious rate.

Matteo Martino’s old farm had stood abandoned for eight years. The fences were down, and the fields overgrown. The barn had lost its doors long ago, and all the windows of the house were broken. There was no paint left on the barn, and very little on the house. What there was, was cracked, peeling, and useless. The inside of the house was littered, water-soaked, and filthy. Children had broken in often, despite the county police patrol, and scrawled messages on the walls. Someone had stolen the sinks, and someone else had hacked the few pieces of furniture left in it with a knife, at random.

The ground was ditched by gullies and flooded with rain-washed sand. Weeds had spread their tough roots into the soil. Someone had begun a trash pile along the remains of the back fence. The apple trees along the road were gnarled and grown out, their branches broken.

The first thing the man did was to have a telephone installed. He began ordering supplies from Bridgetown: food, clothes — overalls and work shirts, and heavy shoes — and then tools. No one questioned the legality of what he was doing; only Rogers could have raised the issue at all.