Rogers followed the man out into the yard, and they walked across to the barn. The dog ran up beside them, and the man reached down to pet his neck. “Get back in your house, stupe. You’ll get wet. Go on, Prince. Go on, boy.” The dog sniffed uncertainly at Rogers, trotted along with them for a few steps, and turned back.
“Prince? Is that his name? Nice-looking dog. What breed is he?”
“Mongrel. He’s got a barrel he sleeps in, back of the barn.”
“You don’t keep him in the house, then?”
“He’s a watchdog. He’s got to be outside. And he’s not housebroken.” The man looked at Rogers. “A dog’s a dog, you know. If the only friend a man had was a dog, it’d mean he couldn’t get along with his own kind, wouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that. You like the dog, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Ashamed of it?”
“You’re pushing again, Rogers.”
Rogers dropped his eyes. “I suppose I was.”
They went into the barn, and the man switched on the lights. There was a tractor sitting in the middle of the barn, with a can full of drained transmission oil beside it. The man unrolled an oily tarpaulin, pulled it over beside the tractor, and laid out the tools that had been rolled inside it. “I have to fix this transmission today,” he said. “I bought this tractor second-hand, and the fellow that had it before chipped the gears. They’ve got to be replaced today, because I’ve got a field to harrow tomorrow.” He selected a wrench and slid under the tractor, on his back. He began loosening the nuts around the rim of the gearbox cover, paying no further attention to Rogers.
Rogers stood uncertainly beside the tractor, looking down at the man working under it. Finally, he looked around for something to sit on. There was a box set against the barn wall, and he went over, got it, and sat down beside the tractor, bending forward until he could see the man’s face. But that did him little good. Even though the gearbox had been drained during the morning, there was still oil dripping out of it. The man was working by touch, his eyes and mouth tightly shuttered, deaf, with dirty oil running in narrow streaks down across his skull.
Rogers sat and waited for ten minutes, watching the man’s hands working deftly at the cover, right hand guiding left, right hand, with its wrench, breaking the nuts loose with its hard fingers. Finally, the man put the wrench aside, locating the tool tarpaulin without difficulty, and lifted the cover down, dropping the nuts inside it. The left hand probed inside the gearbox, and a retaining slide dropped out, into the waiting right hand. The slide, too, went into the up-ended gearbox cover, and the left hand popped the gears out of their mounts. The man wriggled out from under the tractor and opened his eyes.
“I was going to ask you — ” Rogers began.
“Minute.” He stood up and took the worn gears over to a workbench, where he held them up to the light, cursing bitterly. “A man has no business buying machinery if he won’t treat it right. That’s a damned good design, that transmission. No reason in the world for anybody to have trouble with it.” His voice was almost querulous. “A machine won’t ever let you down, if you’ll only take the trouble to use it right — use it the way you’re supposed to, for the jobs it’s built to do. That’s all. All you have to do is understand it. And no machine’s that complicated an average man can’t understand it. But nobody tries. Nobody thinks a machine’s worth understanding. What’s a machine, after all? Just a few pieces of metal. One’s exactly like another, and you can always get another one just like it.
“But I’ll tell you something, Mr. Rogers — ” He turned suddenly, and faced across the barn. The light was behind him, and Rogers saw only his silhouette — the body lost in the shapeless, angular drape of the overalls, the shoulders square, and the head round and featureless. “Even so, people don’t like machines. Machines don’t talk and tell you their troubles. Machines don’t do anything but what they’re made for. They sit there, doing their jobs, and one looks like another — but it may be breaking up inside. It may be getting ready to not plow your field, or not pump your water, or throw a piston into your lap. It might be getting ready to do anything — so people are afraid of them, a little bit, and won’t take the trouble to understand them, and they treat them badly. So the machines break down more quickly, and people trust them less, and mistreat them more. So the manufacturers say, ‘What’s the use of building good machines? The clucks’ll only wreck ’em anyway,’ and build flimsy stuff, so there’re very few good machines being made any more. And that’s a shame.”
He dropped the gears on the bench and picked up a box holding the replacement set. Still angry, he ripped the top off the box, took out the gears, and brought them back to the tractor.
“Dr. Martino — ” Rogers said again.
“Yes?” he asked, laying the gears out in sequence on the tarpaulin.
Now that he’d come to the point of saying it, Rogers didn’t know how. He thought of the man, trapped in the casque of himself through these five years, and Rogers didn’t know how to put it.
“Dr. Martino, I’m here as the official representative of the Allied Nations Government, empowered to make you an offer.”
The man grunted, picking up the first gear and reaching up under the tractor to slip it in place.
“Frankly,” Rogers stumbled on, “I don’t think they quite knew how to say it, so they chose me to do it, thinking I knew you best.” He shrugged wryly. “But I don’t know you.”
“Nobody does,” the man said. “What’s the ANG want?”
“Well, the point I was trying to make was that I probably won’t phrase this properly. I don’t want my fumbling to prejudice your decision.”
The man made an impatient sound. “Get to it, man.” Then, with infinite gentleness, he slipped the gear into place and reached for the next.
“Well — you know things all over the world’re getting tense again.”
“Yes.” He wriggled further under the tractor, reached over with his right hand, and helped his left locate the second gear exactly in place. “What’s that got to do with me?” He took the last gear, mounted it, and forced the tight retaining slide into position, moving the closely machined part only as firmly as needed and no more. He scooped the nuts out of the gearbox cover and began hand-tightening it back in place.
“Dr. Martino-the ANG has re-instituted the K- Eighty-Eight program. They’d like you to work on it.”
The man under the tractor reached for his wrench, and his fingers slipped on the oily metal. He twisted around and reached with his left arm. There was a faint click as his fingers closed over it firmly, and then he turned back and began taking up the gearbox lugs.
Rogers waited, and after a while the man said, “So Besser failed.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Dr. Martino.”
“He must have. I’m sorry for him — he really believed he was right. It’s funny with scientists, you know — they’re supposed to be objective and detached, and formulate theories according to the evidence. But a man’s baby is a man’s baby, and sometimes they feel it very badly when an idea of theirs is proved wrong.” He finished tightening the cover, and screwed the drain plug in firmly. He crawled out from under the tractor, put the wrench down, and carefully rolled up the tarpaulin. “Well, that’s done,” he said. He put the tarpaulin under his arm, bent to pick up the can of old oil, and went over to the work bench, where he put the tools down and carefully poured the can out into a waste drum.
He took a new half-gallon can from a rack, punched a pouring spout into its top, and brought it back to the tractor, where he took off the filler cap and up-ended the can over the transmission. “Now I can get that field done tomorrow. The ground’s got to be loosened up, you know, or it’ll cake and get crusty.”