Algis Budrys: Who?

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

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

Rogers grimaced. “But he is Martino?”

Bannister shrugged.

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

“Get a can opener,” Bannister suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rogers winced.

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

“Name! Name! Name!

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

“Name! Name! Detail…Halt!

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

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

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

“Do you think he’s faking?”

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

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

Finchley shut off the projector.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shivered. The phone rang in the living room.

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That long?”

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

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

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