“What is your idea of physics, Martino?”
Lucas took the opening and turned into it gratefully. He found it led farther than he’d thought. “I think it’s the most important thing in the world, sir,” he said, and felt like a man stumbling out over a threshold.
“You do, eh? Why?” Starke slammed the door behind him.
Lucas fumbled for words. “The universe is a perfect structure. Everything in it is in balance. It’s complete. Nothing can be added to it or taken away.”
“And what does that mean?”
Bit by bit, facts were falling together in Lucas Martino’s mind. Ideas, half-thoughts, bits of formulation that he failed to recognize as fragments of a philosophy — all these things suddenly arranged themselves in a systematic and natural order as he listened to what he’d just said on impulse. For the first time since the day he’d come to this class with a fresh, blank laboratory notebook, he understood exactly what he was doing here. He understood more than that; he understood himself. His picture of himself was complete, finished for all time.
That left him free to turn to something else.
“Well, Martino?”
Lucas took one deep breath, and stopped fumbling. “The universe is constructed of perfectly fitted parts. Every time you rearrange the position of one, you affect all the others. If you add something in one place, you had to take it away from somewhere else. Everything we do — everything that has ever been done — was accomplished by rearranging pieces of the universe. If we knew exactly where everything fitted, and what moving it would do to all the other pieces, we’d be able to do things more effectively. That’s what physics is doing — investigating the structure of the universe and giving us a system to handle it with. That’s the most basic thing there is. Everything else depends on it.”
“That’s an article of faith with you, is it?”
“That’s the way it is. Faith has nothing to do with it.” The answer came quickly. He didn’t quite understand what Starke meant. He was too full of the realization that he had just learned what he was for.
Starke had run across carefully rehearsed speeches before. He got at least one a year from some bright boy who’d seen a movie about Young Tom Edison. He knew Martino wasn’t likely to be giving him that, but he’d been fooled before. So he took his long look at the boy before he said anything.
He saw Lucas Martino looking back at him as though sixteen-year-old boys took their irrevocable vows every day.
It upset Starke. It made him uncomfortable, and it made him draw back for the first time in his life.
“Well. So that’s your idea of physics. Planning to go on to Massachusetts Tech, are you?”
“If I can get the money together. And my grades aren’t too high, are they?”
“The grades can be taken care of, if you’ll work at it. The semester’s not that far gone. And money’s no problem. There’re all kinds of science scholarships. If you miss on that, you can probably get one of the big outfits like GE to underwrite you.”
Martino shook his head. “It’s a three-factor problem. My graduating average won’t be that high, no matter what I do the next two years here. And I don’t want to be tied to anybody’s company, and third, scholarships don’t cover everything. You’ve got to have decent clothes at college, and you’ve got to have some money in your pocket to relax on once in a while. I’ve heard about MIT. Nobody human can take their curriculum and earn money part-time. If you’re there, you’re there twenty-four hours a day. And I’m going for my doctorate. That’s seven years, minimum. No, I’m going to New York after I graduate here and work in my Uncle Luke’s place until I get some money put away. I’ll be a New York resident and put in a cheap year at CCNY. I’ll pile up an average there, and get my tuition scholarship to Massachusetts that way.”
The plan unfolded easily and spontaneously. Starke couldn’t have guessed it was being created on the spot. Martino had put all the facts together, seen how they fit, and what action they indicated. It was as easy as that.
“Talked it over with your parents, have you?”
“Not yet.” For the first time, he showed hesitation. “It’ll be rough on them. It’ll be a long time before I can send them any money.” Also, but never to be put in words for a stranger, the life of the family would be changed forever, never to be put back in the same way again.
2
“I don’t understand,” his mother said. “Why should you suddenly want to go to this school in Boston? Boston is far away from here. Farther than New York.”
He had no easy answer. He sat awkwardly at the dinner table, looking down at his plate.
“I don’t understand it either,” his father said to his mother. “But if he wants to go, that’s his choice. He’s not leaving right away, in any case. By the time he goes, he’ll be a man. A man has a right to decide these things.”
He looked from his mother to his father, and he could see it wasn’t something he could explain. For a moment, he almost said he’d changed his mind.
Instead he said, “Thank you for your permission.” Move one piece of the universe, and all the others are affected. Add something to one piece, another must lose. What real choice did he have, when everything meshed together, one block of fact against another, and there was only one best way to act?
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIVE
1
On the eighth day after the man had come over the line, the annunciator buzzed on Rogers’ desk.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Deptford is here to see you, sir.”
Rogers grunted. He said, “Send him in, please,” and sat waiting.
Deptford came into the office. He was a thin, grayfaced man in a dark suit, and he was carrying a briefcase.
“How are you, Shawn?” he said quietly.
Rogers stood up. “Fine, thanks,” he answered slowly. “How are you?”
Deptford shrugged. He sat down in the chair beside the end of Rogers’ desk and laid the briefcase in his lap. “I thought I’d bring the decision on the Martino matter down with me.” He opened the briefcase and handed Rogers a manila envelope. “In there’s the usual file copy of the official policy directive, and a letter to you from Karl Schwenn’s office.”
Rogers picked up the envelope. “Did Schwenn give you a very bad time, sir?”
Deptford smiled thinly. “They didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t seem to be anybody’s fault. But they’d needed an answer very badly. Now, at the sacrifice of the K-Eighty-Eight program, they don’t need it so badly any more. But they still need it of course.”
Rogers nodded slowly.
“I’m replacing you here as sector chief. They’ve put a new man in my old job. And the letter from Schwenn reassigns you to follow up on Martino. Actually, I think Schwenn arrived at the best answer to a complicated situation.”
Rogers felt his lips stretch in an uncomfortable grimace of surprise and embarrassment. “Well.” There was nothing else to say.
2
“Direct investigation won’t do it,” Rogers said to the man. “We tried, but it can’t be done. We can’t prove who you are.”
The glinting eyes looked at him impassively. There was no telling what the man might be thinking. They were alone in the small room, and Rogers suddenly understood that this had turned into a personal thing between them. It had happened gradually, he could see now, built up in small increments over the past days, but this was the first time it had struck him, and so it had also happened suddenly. Rogers found himself feeling personally responsible for the man’s being here, and for everything that had happened to him. It was an unprofessional way to feel, but the fact was that he and this man were here face to face, alone, and when it came down to the actual turn of the screw it was Rogers whose hand was on the wrench.