Algis Budrys - Who?

“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.

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.