"Who?" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)

3

Rogers ignored the room full of waiting men and sat looking down at the two dossiers, not so much thinking as gathering his energy.

Both dossiers were open to the first page. One was thick, full of security check breakdowns, reports, career progress resumes, and all the other data that accumulate around a government employee through the years. It was labeled Martino, Lucas Anthony. The first page was made up of the usual identification statistics: height, weight, color of eyes, color of hair, date of birth, fingerprints, dental chart, distinguishing marks and scars. There was a set of standard nude photographs; front, back, and both profiles of a heavyset, muscular man with controlled, pleasantly intelligent features and a slightly thickened nose.

The second dossier was much thinner. As yet, there was nothing in the folder but the photographs, and it was unlabeled beyond a note: See Martino, L.A.(?) The photographs showed a heavyset, muscular man with broad scars running diagonally up from his left side, across his chest and around his back and both shoulders, like a ropey shawl. His left arm was mechanical up to the top of the shoulder, and seemed to have been grafted directly into his pectoral and dorsal musculature. He had thick scars around the base of his throat, and that metal head.

Rogers stood up behind his desk and looked at the waiting special team. “Well?”

Bannister, the English servomechanisms engineer, took the bit of his pipe out of his teeth. “I don’t know. It’s quite hard to tell on the basis of a few hours’ tests.” He took a deep breath. “As a matter of exact fact, I’m running tests but I’ve no idea what they’ll show, if anything, or how soon.” He gestured helplessly. “There’s no getting at someone in his condition. There’s no penetrating his surface, as it were. Half our instruments’re worthless. There’re so many electrical components in his mechanical parts that any readings we take are hopelessly blurred. We can’t even do so simple a thing as determine the amperage they used. It hurts him to have us try.” He dropped his voice apologetically. “It makes him scream.”

Rogers grimaced. “But he is Martino?”

Bannister shrugged.

Rogers suddenly slammed his fist against the top of his desk. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“Get a can opener,” Bannister suggested.

In the silence, Finchley, who was on loan to Rogers from the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, said, “Look at this.”

He touched a switch and the film projector he’d brought began to hum while he went over and dimmed the office lights. He pointed the projector toward a blank wall and started the film running. “Overhead pickup,” he explained. “Infra-red lighting. We believe he can’t see it. We think he was asleep.”

Martino — Rogers had to think of him by that name against his better judgment — was lying on his cot. The upturned crescent in his face was shuttered from the inside, with only the edges of a flexible gasket to mark its outline. Below it, the grille, centered just above the blunt curve of his jaw, was ajar. The impression created was vaguely that of a hairless man with his eyes shut, breathing through his mouth. Rogers had to remind himself that this man did not breathe.

“This was taken about two a.m. today,” Finchley said. “He’d been lying there for a little over an hour and a half.”

Rogers frowned at the tinge of bafflement in Finchley’s voice. Yes, it was uncanny not being able to tell whether a man was asleep or not. But it was no use doing anything if they were all going to let their nerves go ragged. He almost said something about it until he realized his chest was aching. He relaxed his shoulders, shaking his head at himself.

A cue spot flickered on the film. “All right,” Finchley said, “now listen.” The tiny speaker in the projector began to crackle.

Martino had begun to thrash on his cot, his metal arm striking sparks from the wall.

Rogers winced.

Abruptly, the man started to babble in his sleep. The words poured out, each syllable distinct. But the speech was wildly faster than normal, and the voice was desperate:

“Name! Name! Name!

“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight, about…face! Detail…forward…march!

“Name! Name! Detail…Halt!

“Name Lucas Martino born Bridgetown New Jersey May Tenth Nineteen Forty-Eight!”

Rogers felt Finchley touch his arm. “Think they were walking him?”

Rogers shrugged. “If that’s a genuine nightmare, and if that’s Martino, then, yes — it sounds very much like they were walking him back and forth in a small room and firing questions at him. You know their technique: keep a man on his feet, keep him moving, keep asking questions. Change interrogation teams every few hours, so they’ll be fresh. Don’t let the subject sleep or get off his feet. Walk him delirious. Yes, that’s what it might be.”

“Do you think he’s faking?”

“I don’t know. He may have been. Then again, maybe he was asleep. Maybe he’s one of their people, and he was dreaming we were trying to shake his story.”

After a time, the man on the cot fell back. He lay still, his forearms raised stiffly from the elbows, his hands curled into rigid claws. He seemed to be looking straight up at the camera with his streamlined face, and no one could tell whether he was awake or asleep, thinking or not, afraid or in pain, or who or what he was.

Finchley shut off the projector.