“Aren’t you going to say anything about whether you’ll accept the offer or not?”
The man lifted the pouring spout of the filler and replaced the cap. He put the empty can down and climbed up into the driver’s saddle, where he began going carefully through the gears, testing them for engagement and smoothness, without looking at Rogers until he was satisfied he’d done a good job. Then he turned his head. “They decide I was Martino?”
“I think,” Rogers said slowly, “they simply needed someone very badly. They felt, I think, that even if you weren’t Lucas Martino, you’d have been trained to replace him. It — seems to be very important to them to get the K- Eighty-Eight program working again as quickly as possible. They have plenty of competent technicians. But geniuses don’t appear often.”
The man climbed down off the tractor, picked up the empty oil can, and took it over to the bench. His arm bandage was black with floor dust, and he pulled a five-gallon can out from under the bench, uncapped it, and began taking the bandage off. The sharp smell of gasoline burned into Rogers’ nostrils.
“I was wonderin’ how they’d come to decide for sure. I can’t see any way of doing it.” He dropped the bandage into the gasoline. Plunging both arms into the can, he washed the bandage clean and hung it over a nail to dry.
“You’d be watched very closely, of course. And probably kept under guard.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I don’t mind your people being around here all of the time.” He took a tin cup out of the bottom of the gasoline can and sluiced down his arm, twisting and turning it to make sure every working part was washed out thoroughly. He took a stiff, fine-bristled brush from a rack and began cleaning his arm with methodical care, following an obviously old routine. Rogers watched him, wondering, once again, just what kind of brain lived behind that mask and was neither angry, nor bitter, nor triumphant that they’d had to come to him at last. “But I can’t do it,” the man said. He picked up an oil can and began lubricating his arm.
“Why not?” Rogers thought he saw the man’s composure wavering.
The man shrugged uncomfortably. “I can’t do that stuff any more.” The bandage was dry, and he wrapped his arm again. He didn’t meet Rogers’ eyes.
“What’re you ashamed of?” Rogers asked.
The man walked over to the tractor, as though he thought it was safer there.
“What’s the matter, Martino?”
The man put his left arm over the tractor’s hood and stood facing out through the open barn doors. “It’s a pretty good life, here. I work my land, get it in shape; I fix up the place I guess you know what it was like when I moved in. It’s been a lot of work. A lot of rebuildin’. Ten more years and I’ll have it right in the shape I want.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“I know. I don’t care. I don’t think about it. The thing is — ” His hand beat lightly on the tractor’s hood. “The thing is, I’m working all the time. A farm — everything on a farm — is so close to the edge between growing and rotting. You work the land, you grow crops, and when you do that, you’re robbing the land. You’re going to fertilize, and irrigate, and lime, and drain, but the land doesn’t know that. It’s got to get back what you took out of it. Your fenceposts rot, your building foundations crumble, the rain comes down and your paint peels, your crops get beaten down and start to rot — you’ve got to work hard, every day, all day, just to stay a little bit better than even. You get up in the morning, and you have to make up for what’s happened during the night. You can’t do anything else. You don’t think about anything else. Now you want me to go to work on the K-Eighty-Eight again.” Suddenly, his hand beat down on the tractor, and the barn echoed to the clang of metal. His voice was agonized. “I’m not a physicist. I’m a farmer. I can’t do that stuff any more!”
Rogers took a slow breath. “All right — I’ll go back and tell them.”
The man was quiet again. “What’re you going to do after that? Your men going to keep watching me?”
Rogers nodded. “It has to be that way. I’ll see you to your grave. I’m sorry.”
The man shrugged. “I’m used to it. I haven’t got anything that people watching is going to hurt.”
No, Rogers thought, you’re harmless now. And I’m watching you, so I’m useless. I wonder if I’ll end up living on a farm down the road?
Or is it just that you don’t dare take the chance of going on the K-Eighty-Eight project? Did they risk it, after all, with somebody who couldn’t fool us there?
Rogers’ mouth twisted. One more — once more and for the thousandth time, he’d raised the old, pointless question. Something bubbled through his blood, and he shivered slightly. I’ll be an old man, he thought, and I’ll always think I knew, but I’ll never get an answer.
“Martino,” he blurted. “Are you Martino?”
The man moved his head, and the metal glowed with a dull nimbus under its film of oil. He said nothing for a moment, his head moving from side to side as though he were looking for something lost. Then he tightened his grip on the tractor, and his shoulders came back. For a moment his voice had depth in it, as though he remembered something difficult and prideful he had done in his youth. “No.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
Anastas Azarin lifted the glass of lukewarm tea, pressed the spoon out of the way with his index finger, and drank it down without stopping until the glass was empty. He thumped it down in a circle of old stains on the end of his desk, and the spoon rattled. His orderly came in from the outer office, took the glass, refilled it, and set it down on the desk in easy reach. Azarin nodded shortly. The orderly clicked his heels, about-faced, and left the room.
Azarin watched him go, his mouth hooking deeply at one corner in a grimace of amusement that wrinkled all his face before it died as abruptly as it came. During that short moment, he had been transformed — his face had been open, frank, and friendly. But when his features smoothed again, all trace of the peasant, Azarin, left them. It was possible to see what Azarin had taught himself to become during his years of rising through the system: impersonal, efficient, wooden.
He went back to reading the weekly sector situation report, his blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger following the words, his lips muttering inaudibly.
He knew they laughed at him for his old-fashioned samovar. But the orderly knew what would happen to him if the glass ever remained empty. He knew they joked about the way he read. But they knew what would happen to them if he found errors in their reports.
Anastas Azarin had never graduated from their academies: He had never scribbled on their blackboards or filled their copybooks. While they were polishing the seats of their school uniforms on classroom benches, he had been out with his father, hefting an axe and dragging the great balks of timber through the dark forest. While they took their civil service examinations, he was supervising labor gangs on the taiga. While they hunched over their desks, he was in Mandjuria, eating bad rice with the little brown men. While they sat at home with their wives, reading their newspapers and dreaming of promotion, he was in a dressing station, dying of typhus.
And now he had a desk of his own, and an office of his own, and a pink-cheeked, wide-eyed orderly who brought him tea and clicked his heels. It was not their joke — it was his. It was he who could laugh — not they. They were nothing, and he was sector commandant — Anastas Azarin, Colonel, SIB. Tovarishch Polkovnik Azarin, if you please!
He bent over the reports, muttering. Nothing new. As usual, the Allieds kept their sector tight. There was this American scientist, Martino. What was he doing in his laboratory?