Table Of ContentAlgis Budrys
WHO?
Who was he? And why was he the way he was?
And how long was it before he died?
For Frank Kelly Freas,
who first created Martino,
and for Walter Fultz,
who saw him last
who saw him last
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
It was near the middle of the night. The wind came up from the river, moaning
under the filigreed iron bridges, and the weathercocks on the dark old buildings
pointed their heads north.
The Military Police sergeant in charge had lined up his receiving squad on either
side of the cobbled street. Blocking the street was a weathered concrete gateway
with a black-and-white-striped wooden rail. The headlights of the MP super-
Jeeps and of the waiting Allied Nations Government sedan glinted from the
raised shatterproof riot visors on the squad's varnished helmets. Over their heads
was a sign, fluorescing in the lights:
YOU ARE LEAVING THE ALLIED SPHERE
YOU ARE ENTERING THE SOVIET SOCIALIST SPHERE
In the parked sedan, Shawn Rogers sat waiting with a man from the ANG
Foreign Ministry beside him. Rogers was Security Chief for this sector of the
ANG administered Central European Frontier District. He waited patiently, his
light green eyes brooding in the dark.
The Foreign Ministry representative looked at his thin gold wristwatch. "They'll
be here with him in a minute." He drummed his fingertips on his briefcase. "If
they keep to their schedule."
"They'll be on time," Rogers said. "That's the way they are. They held him four
months, but now they'll be on time to prove their good faith all along." He
looked out through the windscreen, past the silent driver's shoulders, at the
gateway. The Soviet border guards on the other side---Slavs and stumpy Asiatics
in shapeless quilted jackets---were ignoring the Allied squad. They were
clustered around a fire in an oil drum in front of their checkpoint shack, holding
their hands out to the warmth. Their shroud-barreled submachine guns were
slung over their shoulders, hanging clumsily and unhandily. They were talking
and joking, and none of them were bothering to watch the frontier.
"Look at them," the Foreign Ministry man said peevishly. "They don't care what
we do. They're not concerned if we drive up with an armed squad."
The Foreign Ministry man was from Geneva, five hundred kilometers away.
Rogers had been here, in this sector, for seven years. He shrugged. "We're all old
acquaintances by now. This frontier's been here forty years. They know we're
not going to start shooting, any more than they are. This isn't where the war is."
He looked at the clustered Soviets again, remembering a song he'd heard years
ago: "Give the Comrade With the Machine Gun the Right to Speak." He
wondered if they knew of that song, over on their side of the line. There were
many things on the other side of the line that he wanted to know. But there was
little hope for it.
The war was in all the world's filing cabinets. The weapon was information:
things you knew, things you'd found out about them, things they knew about
you. You sent people over the line, or you had them planted from years ago, and
you probed. Not many of your people got through. Some of them might. So you
put together the little scraps of what you'd found out, hoping it wasn't too
garbled, and in the end, if you were clever, you knew what the Soviets were
going to do next.
And they probed back. Not many of their people got through---at least, you
could be reasonably sure they didn't---but, in the end, they found out what you
were going to do next. So neither side did anything. You probed, back and forth,
and the deeper you tried to go, the harder it was. For a little distance on either
side of the line, there was some light. Farther on, there was only a dark fog. And
some day, you had to hope, the balance would break in your favor.
The Foreign Ministry man was taking out his impatience in talk. "Why the devil
did we give Martino a laboratory so near the border in the first place?"
Rogers shook his head. "I don't know. I don't handle strategy."
"Well, why couldn't we get a rescue team of our own in there after the
explosion?"
"We did. Theirs just got in first. They moved fast and took him away." And he
wondered if that had been a simple piece of luck.
"Why couldn't we take him back from them?"
"I don't handle tactics on that level. I imagine we might have had trouble,
though, kidnapping a seriously hurt man out of a hospital." And the man was an
American national. Suppose he'd died? The Soviet propaganda teams would
have gone to work on the Americans, and when the next ANG bill came up in
their Congress, they might not be so quick with their share of next year's budget.
Rogers grunted to himself. It was that kind of war.
"I think it's a ridiculous situation. An important man like Martino in their hands,
and we're helpless. It's absurd."
"That's the kind of thing that gives you your work to do, isn't it?"
The Foreign Ministry representative changed his tack. "I wonder how he's taking
it? He was rather badly knocked about in the explosion, I understand."
"Well, he's convalescent now."
"I'm told he lost an arm. But I imagine they'll have taken care of that. They're
quite good at prosthetics, you know. Why, as far back as the nineteen forties,
they were keeping dogs' heads alive with mechanical hearts and so forth."
"Mm." A man disappears over the line, Rogers was thinking, and you send out
people to find him. Little by little, the reports come trickling in. He's dead, they
say. He's lost an arm, but he's alive. He's dying; We don't know where he is. He's
been shipped to Novoya Moskva. He's right here, in this city, in a hospital. At
least, they've got somebody in a hospital here. What hospital?
Nobody knows. You're not going to find out any more. You give what you have
to the Foreign Ministry, and the negotiations start. Your side closes down a
highway across the line. Their side almost shoots down a plane. Your side
impounds some fishing boats. And finally, not so much because of anything your
side had done but for some reason of their own, their side gives in.
And all this time, a man from your side has been lying in one of their hospitals,
broken and hurt, waiting for you to do something.
"There's a rumor he was quite close to completing something called a K-Eighty-
E-Eight," the Foreign Ministry man went on. "We had orders not to press too
hard, for fear they'd realize how important he was. That is, in the event they
didn't already know. But, of course, we were to get him back, so we couldn't go
too soft. Delicate business."
"I can imagine."
"Do you think they got the K-Eighty-Eight out of him?"
"They have a man on their side called Azarin. He's very good." How can I
possibly know until I've talked to Martino? But Azarin's damned good.
He wished he knew more about Azarin. He wished he knew more about the
Soviets. Everything he knew about the Russo-Chinese "Incident" of a decade
ago, for instance, told him it had been a war, and that the Russians had lost it.
But, if so, then why was the capital city New Moscow and not New Peking?
Why was the army half Chinese but the government Caucasian? If there had still
been Western embassies and trade missions behind the Curtain, it might be
possible to know. But there was none of that. There was nothing but opacity in
that land.
Out beyond the gateway, two headlights bloomed up, turned sideward, and
stopped. The rear door of a Tatra limousine snapped open, and at the same time
stopped. The rear door of a Tatra limousine snapped open, and at the same time
one of the Soviet guards went over to the gate and flipped the rail up. The Allied
MP sergeant called his men to attention.
Rogers and the Foreign Ministry representative got out of their car.
A man stepped out of the Tatra and came to the gateway. He hesitated at the
border and then walked forward quickly between the two rows of MP's.
"Good God!" the Foreign Ministry man whispered.
The lights glittered in a spray of bluish reflection from the man in the gateway.
He was mostly metal.
2.
He was wearing one of their shapeless, drab civilian suits, with lumpy shoes and
a striped brown shirt. His sleeves were too short, and his hands hung far out. One
was flesh and one was not. His skull was a polished metal ovoid, completely
featureless except for a grille where his mouth ought to be, and a half-moon
recess, curving upward at the ends, where his eyes lurked. He stood, looking ill
at ease, at the end of the two rows of soldiers. Rogers came up to him, holding
out his hand. "Lucas Martino?"
The man nodded. "Yes." It was his right hand that was still good. He reached up
and took Rogers' hand. His grip was strong and anxious. "I'm very glad to be
here."
"My name's Rogers. This is Mr. Haller, of the Foreign Ministry."
Haller shook Martino's hand automatically, staring.
"How do you do?" Martino said.
"Very well, thank you," the Foreign Ministry man mumbled. "And you?"
"The car's over here, Mr. Martino," Rogers cut in. "I'm with the sector Security
office. I'd appreciate it if you came with me. The sooner I interview you, the
sooner this'll be completely over." Rogers touched Martino's shoulder and urged
him lightly toward the sedan.
"Yes, of course. There's no need delaying." The man matched Rogers' quick
pace and slipped in ahead of him at his gesture. Haller climbed in on the other
side of Martino, and then the driver wheeled the car around and started them
rolling for Rogers' office. Behind them, the MP's got into their Jeeps and
followed. Rogers looked back through the car's rear window. The Soviet border
guards were staring after them.
Martino sat stiffly against the upholstery, his hands in his lap. "It feels wonderful
to be back," he said in a strained voice.
"I should think so," Haller said. "After what they---"
