Who?

8

It was now two months, and still Azarin did not even know whether the K-Eighty-Eight was a bomb, a death ray, or a new means of sharpening bayonets.

He had had several totally unsatisfactory talks with that thing, Martino, who would not give in. It was all very polite, and it told him nothing. A man — any man — he could have fought. But a blank-faced nothing like some nightmare in the dark forests, that sat in its wheelchair looking like the gods they worshipped in jungle temples, that knew if it waited long enough Azarin would be beaten — that was more than could be tolerated.

Azarin remembered this morning’s call from Novoya Moskva, and suddenly he crashed his fist down upon his desk.

Their best man. They knew he was their best man, they knew he was Anastas Azarin, and yet they talked to him like that’ Clerks talked to him like that!

It was all because they wanted to give Martino back to the Allieds as quickly as they could. If they would give Azarin time, it would be another matter. If Martino did not have to be returned at all, if certain methods could be used, then something might really be done.

Azarin sat behind his desk, searching for the answer. Something must be thought of to satisfy Novoya Moskva — to delay things until, inevitably, a way was found to handle this Martino. But nothing would satisfy Central Headquarters unless they could in turn satisfy the Allieds. And the Allieds would be satisfied with nothing less than Martino.

Azarin’s eyes opened wide. His thick eyebrows rose into perfect semicircles. Then he reached for his telephone and called Doctor Kothu’s number. He sat listening to the telephone ring. He made one, Azarin thought. Perhaps he can make two.

His upper lip drew back from his teeth at the thought that the American, Heywood, was the best choice for the assignment. He would have much preferred to send someone solid — one of his own people, whose capabilities he knew and whose weaknesses he could allow for. But Heywood was the only choice. Probably he would fail sooner or later. But the important thing was that Novoya Moskva would not think so. They were very proud of their foreigners at Central Headquarters, and of the whole overcomplicated and inefficient system that supported them. They had it in their heads that a man could be a traitor to his own people and still not be crippled by the weaknesses that had driven him to treachery. Their repeated failures had done nothing to enlighten them, and for once Azarin was glad of it.

“Medical Doctor Kothu? This is Azarin. If I were to send you a suitable man — a whole man this time — could you do with him what you did with Martino?” He slapped the ends of his fingers against the edge of his desk, listening. “That is correct. A whole man. I wish you to make me a brother for the monster. A twin.”

When he was through speaking to Kothu, Azarin called Novoya Moskva, hunching forward over his desk, his papyros jutting straight out from his hand. His jaw was firmly set, his lower teeth thrust forward past his upper jaw. His lips were stretched. His face lost its wooden blankness. It was a different sort of a grin, this, from the one he usually showed the world. Like his habitual reticent mask, it had been forged in the years since he left his father’s forest. Its lines on his face had been baked in by foreign suns and scoured by the sand of alien deserts. It came to him as easily, now, as the somewhat boyish smile he’d always had. The difference was that Azarin was not aware he possessed this third expression.

It took some little time to convince Central Headquarters, but Azarin felt no impatience. He hammered his plan forward like a man hewing through a tree, steadily and with measured blows, knowing that he has only to swing often enough and the tree must fall.

He hung up, finally, and drained his tea glass in a few gulps. The orderly brought more. Azarin’s eyes crinkled pleasantly at the corners as he thought that once again it had been Anastas Azarin who found solutions while the clerks at Central Headquarters twittered with indecision.

He put his hands on the edge of his desk and unhurriedly pushed himself to his feet. He walked into his outer office. “I am on my way downstairs. You will have the car waiting for me,” he told his chief clerk.

It would take the courier several days to reach Washington with Heywood’s orders, but that part of the system, at least, was foolproof. Heywood would arrive here in a week. Meanwhile, there was no reason to wait for him. The cover plan was functioning automatically as of this moment. The Allieds would find Novoya Moskva much different to deal with, now that Azarin had stiffened some o£ the pliant spines at Central Headquarters. And, in consequence, Azarin would find his telephone much more silent, and much less peremptory.

So. Everything was arranged. By the simple, uneducated peasant, Anastas Azarin. By the dolt who moved his lips when he read. By the tea drinker. By the ignorant man from the dark forest, who worked while Novoya Moskva talked.

Azarin’s eyes twinkled as he came into Martino’s room, stopped, and looked at the man. “We will talk more,” he said. “Now we have plenty of time to find out about the K- Eighty-Eight.” It was the first time he had been able to bring the term out into the open. He saw the man’s body twitch.

9

The first thing lost under these conditions, Martino discovered, was the sense of time. He was not particularly surprised, since a completely foreign experience could not possibly contain any of the usual cues by which a human being learned his chronology. The room had no windows, and no clocks or calendars. These were the simplest and most obvious lacks. Then, there was no change in his routine. There was no stopping to sit down to a meal, or lying down to rest, and hunger or sleepiness furnish no help when they are constant. This room itself, somewhere in Azarin’s sector headquarters, was so constructed as to offer no signposts. It was rectangular, cast in unpainted cement from floor to ceiling. Martino’s route of passage was from one end to the other, and one of the walls toward which he walked was almost exactly the same as the other, even in such details as the grain of the gray surface. As he walked, he passed between two identical oak desks, facing each other, and each desk had a man in a gray-green uniform behind it. The men contrived to look alike, and a similar door entered the room behind each of them. The light fixture was exactly in the center of the ceiling. Martino had no idea of which door he had originally used to come into the room, or toward which wall he had first marched.As he passed the desks, it was always the man on his right who asked the first question. It might be anything: “What is your middle name?” or “How many inches in a foot?” The questions were meaningless, and no record was kept of his answers. The men behind the desks, who changed shifts at what might have been irregular intervals but who nevertheless always looked somehow alike, did not even care if he answered or not. If he remembered correctly, for some time at the begi

He knew what was happening to him. In the end, the brain in effect began manufacturing its own truth drugs in self defense against the fatigue poisons that were flooding it. The equation was: Correct replies = relief. There was none of the saving adrenaline of pain. There was only this walking through a meaningless world.It was that last which was affecting him most strongly.

The men behind the desks paid him no attention. unless he tried to stop walking. The remainder of the time they simply asked their questions, looking not at him but at each other. He suspected they neither knew who he was nor cared why he was here. Lately he had become certain of it. They were practicing their trade on each other, not on him. They used him only because most two-handed games require a ball. It meant nothing to them when he began giving correct answers, because they were not here to pass judgment on his answers.He knew they were here simply to soften him up, and that eventually Azarin would take over.