Algis Budrys: Who?

“All right, Shawn. He wasn’t trying to rag you. He just wanted to be certain.”

“What you mean is, he’s riding you.”

Deptford hesitated. “Someone’s riding him, too, you know.,’

“I could still stand a little less Teutonic discipline in this department.”

“Have you been to sleep lately, Shawn?”

“No, sir. I’ll be filing daily reports, and when we crack this, I’ll phone.”

“Very well, Shawn. I’ll tell him. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

He hung up and the red scrambler bulb on the phone went out. He went back into the bathtub and lay there with his eyes closed, letting Martino’s dossier drift up into the forepart of his brain.

There was still very little in it. The man was still five feet eleven inches tall. His weight was up to two hundred sixty-eight pounds. His arches had collapsed, but the thickness of his skull plating apparently made up the height differential.

Nothing else in the I.D. chart was applicable. There were no entries for eyes, hair, or complexion. There was no entry for Date of Birth, though a physiologist had given him an age, within the usual limits of error, that corresponded with 1948. Fingerprints? Distinguishing marks and scars?

Rogers’ bitter smile was pale at the corners. He dried himself, kicked his old clothes into a corner, and dressed. He went back into the bathroom, dropped his toothbrush into his pocket, thought for a moment and added the tube of Alka-Seltzer, and went back to his office.

It was early in the morning of the second day. Rogers looked across his desk at Willis, the psychologist.

“If they were going to let Martino go anyway,” Rogers asked, “why would they go to so much trouble with him? He wouldn’t have needed all that hardware just to keep him alive. Why did they carefully make an exhibition piece out of him?”

Willis rubbed a hand over the stubble on his face. “Assuming he’s Martino, they may never have intended to let him go. I agree with you — if they were going to give him back to us originally, they’d probably just have patched him up any old way. Instead, they went to a great deal of trouble to rebuild him as close to a functioning human being as possible.

“I think what happened was that they knew he’d be useful to them. They expected a great deal of him, and they wanted him to be as physically capable of delivering it as they could make him. It’s quite probable they never even considered how he’d look to us. Oh, they may have gone beyond the absolute necessary minimum in dressing him up — but perhaps it was him they wanted to impress. In any case, they probably thought he’d be grateful to them, and that might give them a wedge. And let’s not discount this idea of arousing his purely professional admiration. Particularly since he’s a physicist. That could be quite a bridge between him and their culture. If that was one of the considerations, I’d say it was excellent psychological technique.”

Rogers lit a new cigarette, grimacing at the taste. “We’ve been over this before. We can play with almost any notion we want to and make it fit some of the few facts we know. What does it prove?”

“Well, as I said, they may never have intended to let us see him again. If we work with that as an assumption, then why did they finally let him go? Aside from the pressure we exerted on them, let’s say he held out. Let’s say they finally saw he wasn’t going to be the gold mine they’d expected. Let’s say they’ve got something else planned — next month, say, or next week. Looking at it that way, it’s reasonable for them to have let him go, figuring also that if they give Martino back, maybe they can get away with their next stunt.”

“That’s too many assumptions. What’s he got to say on the subject?”

Willis shrugged. “He says they made him some offers. He decided they were just bait and turned them down. He says they interrogated him and he didn’t crack.”

“Think it’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible. He hasn’t gone insane yet. That’s something in itself. He was always a pretty firmly balanced individual.”

Rogers snorted. “Look — they cracked everybody they ever wanted to crack. Why not him?”

“I’m not saying they didn’t. But there’s a possibility he’s telling the truth. Maybe they didn’t have enough time. Maybe he had an advantage over their usual subjects. Not having mobile features and a convulsed respiratory cycle to show when they had him close to the ragged edge — that might be a big help.”

“Yes,” Rogers said. “I’m becoming aware of that possibility.”

“His heartbeat’s no indicator, either, with a good part of the load taken over by his powerplant. I’m told his entire metabolic cycle isn’t kosher.”

“I can’t figure it,” Rogers said. “I can’t figure it at all. Either he’s Martino or he isn’t. They went to all this trouble. Now we’ve got him back. If he’s Martino, I still don’t see what they hope to gain. I can’t accept the notion they don’t hope to gain anything — that’s not like them.”

“Not like us, either.”

“All right. Look — we’re two sides, each convinced we’re right and the other fellow’s wrong. This century’s thrashing out the world’s way of life for the next thousand years. When you’re playing for stakes like that, you don’t miss a step. If he isn’t Martino, they might have known we wouldn’t just take him back without checking him. If this’s their idea of a smart trick for slipping us a ringer, they’re dumber than their past performance chart reads. But if he is Martino, why did they let him go? Did he go over to them? God knows, whole countries went Soviet that we never thought would.”

He rubbed the top of his head. “They’ve got us chasing our tails over this guy.”

Willis nodded sourly. “I know. Listen — how much do you know about the Russians?”

“Russians? About as much as I do about the other Soviets. Why?”

Willis said reluctantly, “Well, it’s a trap to generalize about these things. But there’s something we had to learn to take into account, down at PsychoWar. It’s a Slav’s idea of a joke. I keep thinking…whether it started out that way or not, every one of them that knows about this fellow is laughing at us now. They go in for deadpan practical jokes, and especially the kind where somebody bleeds a little. I’ve got a vision of the boys in Novoya Moskva clustered around the vodka at night and laughing and laughing and laughing.”

“That’s nice,” Rogers said. “That’s very fine.” He wiped his palm over his jaw. “That helps.”

“I thought you’d enjoy it.”

“God damn it, Willis, I’ve got to crack that shell of his! We can’t have him running around loose and unsolved. Martino was one of the very best in his business. He was right up there, right in the thick of every new wrinkle we’re going to pleat for the next ten years. He was working on this K-Eighty-Eight thing. And the Soviets had him four months. What’d they get out of him, what’d they do to him — do they still have him?”

“I know…” Willis said slowly. “I can see he might have given away almost anything, or even become an active agent of theirs. But on this business of his not being Martino at all — I frankly can’t believe that. What about the fingerprints on his one good hand?”

Rogers cursed. “His right shoulder’s a mass of scar tissue. If they can substitute mechanical parts for eyes and ears and lungs — if they can motorize an arm and graft it right into him — where does that leave us?”

Willis turned pale. “You mean — they could fake anything. It’s definitely Martino’s right arm, but it isn’t necessarily Martino.”