Algis Budrys - Who?

The surveillance teams watched him work. They saw him get up before dawn each morning, cook his meal in the improvised kitchen, and go out with his hammer and saw and nails while it was still too dark for anyone else to see what he was doing. They watched him drive fence posts and unroll wire, tearing the weeds aside. They watched him set new beams into the barn, working alone, working slowly at first, and then more and more insistently, until the sound of the hammer never seemed to stop throughout the day.

He burned the old furniture and the old linoleum from the house. He ordered a bed, a kitchen table, and a chair, put them in the house, and did nothing more with it except to gradually set new panes in the windows as he found spare moments from re-shingling the barn. When that was done, he bought a tractor and a plow. He began to clear the land again.

He never left the farm. He spoke to none of the neighbors who tried to satisfy their curiosity. He did no trading at the general store. When the delivery trucks from Bridgetown filled his telephone orders, he gave unloading instructions with his order and never came out of the house while the trucks were in the yard.

Lucas Martino stood looking up at the overhead maze of bus bars that fed power to the K-Eighty-Eight. Down in the pit below his catwalk, he heard his technicians working around the thick, spherical alloy tank. One of them cursed peevishly as he snagged his coveralls on a protruding bolt head. The tank bristled with them. The production models would no doubt be streamlined and neatly painted, but here in this experimental installation, no one had seen any necessity for superfluous finishing. Except perhaps that technician.

As he watched, the technicians climbed out of the pit. The telephone rang beside him, and when he answered it the pit crew supervisor told him the tank area was cleared.

“All right. Thank you, Will. I’m starting the coolant pumps now.”

The outside of the tank began to frost. Martino dialed the power gang foreman. “Ready for test, Allan.”

“I’ll wind ’em up,” the foreman answered. “You’ll have full power any time you want it after thirty seconds from…now. Good luck, Doctor Martino.”

“Thank you, Allan.”

He put the phone down and stood looking at the old brick wall across the enormous room. Plenty of space here, he thought. Not the way it was back in the States, when I was working with the undersized configurations because Kroenn’s equations showed I could. I knew he was wrong, somewhere, but I couldn’t prove it — I ought to know more mathematics, damn it. I do, but who can keep up with Kroenn? I remember, he was raving angry at himself for weeks when he found his own mistake.

It happens. The best of us slip a cog now and then. And it took Kroenn to see Kroenn’s mistake… Well, here we go…

He picked up the public address microphone and thumbed the button. “Test,” his voice rumbled through the building. He put the microphone down and started the tape recorder.

“Test Number One, experimental K-Eighty-Eight configuration two.” He gave the date. “Applying power at — ” he looked at his watch “twenty-one hundred hours, thirty-two minutes.” He threw the switch and leaned over the railing to look down into the pit. The tank exploded.

It was, once again, a rainy summer in New York. Gray day followed gray day, and even when the sun was out, the clouds waited at the edge of the horizon. The weather seemed to have gone bad all over the world. Hot winds scoured the great mid-continental plains of the north, and below the equator there was snow, and thaw, and snow, and thaw again. The oceans were never still, and from one seaboard to another the waves cracked against breakwaters with the hard, incessant slapping of high-velocity artillery. Icebergs prowled down out of the polar caps, and migratory birds flew closer to the land. There were riots in France and violent homicides in London.

Shawn Rogers left New York on a teeming day, the tires of his car singing on wet blacktop, and, for all his windshield wipers could do, the world seemed blurred, shifting, and impermanent. His car whined almost alone down the freeway, swaying in sharp lurches as the gusty wind struck it, and all the way down into the end of New Jersey the rain pursued him.

The secondary road to the farm surprised him by being wide, well graded, and smoothly surfaced. He was able to drive with only half his attention.

Five years, he thought, since I saw him last. Almost five since that night he came over the line. I wonder how he feels about things?

Rogers had his folders of daily reports, for the surveillance team still followed the man faithfully. ANG men delivered his milk, ANG men brought his rolls of fencing, and ANG men sweated in the fields across from his farm. And every month, Rogers’ secretary brought him a neatly typed resume of everything the man did. But even though he always read them, Rogers had learned how little was ever accurately abstracted from a man and successfully transferred to paper.

Rogers moved his mouth into a strained smile, his face tired and growing old. But what else was anyone to go by?

I wonder how he’ll take the news I’m bringing?

Rogers swung the car around the curve, and saw the farm the surveillance team had so often photographed for him.

Set in one corner of the farm, the house was a freshly painted white building with green shutters. There was a lawn, carefully mowed and bordered by hedges, and across the yard from the house stood a solidly built barn, with a pickup truck parked in front of it, with no name lettered on its doors. There was a kitchen garden beside the house, laid out with geometrical exactness, the earth black, freshly weeded, and without a stone, textured like chocolate cream. A row of apple trees marched beside the road, every limb pruned, the foliage glistening with spray. The fence beside them shone with new wire, each post set exactly upright, every strand stretched perfectly parallel to the others. The fields lay green in the rain, furrows deep to carry off the excess water, and at the far end of the property shrubs marked the edge of a small brook. As Rogers drove into the yard and stopped, a dog trotted out from behind the barn and stood in the rain, barking at him.

Rogers buttoned his raincoat and turned his collar up. He jumped out of the car, giving the door a hasty push shut, and ran across the yard to the back porch. As he reached its shelter, the door directly in front of him opened, and he found himself standing less than a foot away from the overalled man in the doorway.

There was change visible in the face. The metal had acquired a patina of microscopic scratches and scuffs, softening its machine-turned luster and fogging the sharpness with which it reflected light. The eyes were the same, but the voice was different. It was duller, drier, and seemed to come out more slowly.

“Mr. Rogers.”

“Hello, Dr. Martino.”

“Come in.” The man stepped aside, out of the doorway.

“Thank you. I should have called first, but I wanted to be sure we had a chance to talk at length.” Rogers stopped uncomfortably, just inside the door. “There’s something rather important to talk about, if you’ll spare me the time…”

The man nodded. “All right. I’ve got work to do, but you can come along and talk, I guess. I just cooked some lunch. There’s enough for two.”

“Thank you.” Rogers took off his raincoat, and the man hung it up on the hook beside the kitchen door. “I — how’ve you been?”

“All right. Chair over there. Sit down, and I’ll get the food.” The man walked over to a cupboard and took down two plates.