American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (91 page)

“I’ll be glad to help if I can, Mr. Rogers. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Miss DiFillipo.” He shook her hand again, and watched her leave.

Damn, he thought, there’s a kind of girl who wouldn’t get upset if her man was in my kind of business.

Then he sat frowning. “Barbara—it’s I—the German.” Well, that was one more thing to check out.

He wondered how Martino was feeling, holed up in his room. And he wondered how soon—or how long—it would be before they came upon the kind of evidence you could put on record and have stand up.

The interoffice buzzer broke in on him again.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Rogers? This is Reed. I’ve been running down some of the people on the Martino acquaintance list.”

“And?”

“This man, Francis Heywood, who was Lucas Martino’s roommate at M.I.T.”

“The one who got to be a big gun in the A.N.G. Technical Personnel Allocations Bureau? He’s dead. Died in a plane crash. What about him?”

“The F.B.I. just got a package on him. They pulled in a net of Soviet people in Washington. A really top-notch bunch, that’d been getting away with it for years. Sleepers, mostly. When Heywood was in Washington for the American government, he was one of them.”

“The same Francis Heywood?”

“Fingerprints and photos check with our file, sir.”

Rogers let the air seep out between his lips. “All right. Bring it here and let’s have a look at it.” He hung up slowly.

When the F.B.I. file came in, the pattern it made was perfect, with no holes anyone couldn’t fill with a little experienced conjecture, if he wanted to.

Francis Heywood had attended M.I.T. with Lucas Martino, sharing a room with him in one of the small dormitory apartments. Whether he was a Soviet sleeper even that far back was problematic. It made no significant difference. He was de finitely one of them by the time he was transferred out of the American government into the A.N.G. Working for the A.N.G., he was hired to assign key technical personnel to the best working facilities for their specific purposes. He had been trained for this same kind of work in the American government, and was considered the best expert in the specialty. At some point near this period, he could have turned active. The natural conclusion was that he had been able to maneuver things so that the Soviets could get hold of Martino. Heywood, in effect, had been a talent scout.

He might, or might not, have known what K-88 was. He was supposed to have only a rough idea of the projects he found space for, but it would certainly have been easier for him to make specific guesses than for most people. Or, if it was felt he ought to take the risk, he could have taken steps to find out. In any case, he had known what kind of man, and how important a project, he could deliver over the border.

That, again, was secondary. What mattered most was this:

A month after Lucas Martino had disappeared over the border, Francis Heywood had taken a transatlantic plane from Washington, where he had been on a liaison mission that might actually have been a cover for almost anything. The plane had reported engine explosions in mid-ocean, sent out a crash distress call, and fallen into the sea. Air rescue teams found some floating wreckage and recovered a few bodies, Francis Heywood’s not among them. The plane
had
crashed—sonar mapping found its pieces on the bottom. And, at the time, that had been that. Simple engine trouble of some kind. No report whatsoever of Soviet fighter planes sent out to create an incident, and the radio operator sending calm, well-trained messages to the last.

But now Rogers thought of the old business of dropping a man into the water at a prearranged spot, and having a submarine stand by to pick him up.

If you wanted to vary that so the man wouldn’t be missed, then you could crash a whole commercial flight—who’d think it strange to miss one body?—and the submarine could make sure only that one man didn’t drown. It was a little risky, but with the right kind of prearranged crash, and your man set for it, it was well within the kind of chance you took in this business.

He looked at Heywood’s dossier statistics:

Height: 6 feet. Weight: 220. He’d been a heavy-set man, with a dark complexion. His age was almost exactly the same as Martino’s. While in Europe, he had learned to speak Italian —presumably with an American accent.

And Rogers wondered just how much Lucas Martino had told him, through three years in the same room. How much the lonely boy from New Jersey had talked about himself. Whether he might not have had a picture of his girl, Edith, on his desk. Or even of a girl called Barbara, for Heywood to have seen every day until it was completely soaked into his memory. Maybe Heywood could have explained what Angela DiFillipo had heard last night on MacDougal Street.

How good an actor was their man? Rogers wondered. How good an actor do you believe a man can be?

God help us, Finch, he thought.

Young Lucas Martino came to Massachusetts Tech convinced there was something wrong with him, determined to repair it if he could. But as he went through registration, drew his classroom assignments, and struggled to fit himself into a study routine like nothing he had ever met before, he began to realize how difficult that might be.

Tech students were already handpicked on the day they entered. Tech graduates were expected to fill positions at the top. A thousand projects were piled up on the Allied world’s schedules, waiting for men to staff them. Once they were implemented, each project had a thousand other schedules waiting for its completion. Plans made a dozen years ahead of time were ready, each timed, each meshed to another, each dependent on the successful completion of each schedule. If a man were to some day endanger that structure in any way, his weakness had to be located as early as possible.

So Tech instructors were people who never gave a doubtful answer the benefit of the doubt. They did not drive their classes, or waste time in giving any particular student more attention than the next. Tech students were presumed capable of digesting as much of the text as was assigned to them, and of knowing exactly what it meant. The instructors lectured quietly, competently, and ruthlessly, never going back to review a point or, in tests, to shade a mark because an otherwise good student had slipped once.

Lucas admired it as the ideal system for its purpose. The facts were presented, and those who could not grasp them, use them, and fit themselves to the class’s progress, had to be eliminated before they slowed everyone down. It was a natural approach for him, and he had a tendency to be mildly incredulous when someone in the next chair turned to him helplessly, already far behind and with no hope of catching up. In the first few weeks of school, he established himself among his classmates as a cold, unfriendly brain, who acted as if he were somehow better than the rest of them.

His instructors, in that first year, took no notice of him. It was the potential failures that they were paid to pay attention to.

Lucas thought no more of that than he had at C.C.N.Y., where his teachers had been something close to overenthusiastic. He plunged into the work, not so much attracted to it as to the discovery that he
could
work—that it was expected of him, that he was given every opportunity to do so, and that the school was organized for people who could think in terms of work and nothing else.

It was almost two months before he became accustomed to it enough to lose the first edge of his enthusiasm. Then he could settle down and develop a routine. Then he had time for other things.

But he found that he was isolated. Somehow—he could not quite decide how—he had no friends. When he tried to approach some of his classmates, he found that they either resented him or were too busy. He discovered that most of them took at least half again as long at their assignments as he did, and that none of them were as sure of themselves as he. He puzzled over that—these were
Tech
students, after all—and learned that most people could be content to know what they were doing only eighty-five per cent of the time. But that did nothing to help him.

It only confused him more. He had expected, without question, that here at Tech he would meet a different breed of people. And, as a matter of fact, he had. There were plenty of students who abandoned every other concern when they came here. They slept little, ate hurriedly, and did nothing but study. In classes, they took notes at incredible length, took them back to their rooms at night, and pored over them. Letters from home went unanswered, and side trips into town at night were completely out of the question. Their conversation was a series of discussions about their work, and if any of them had personal problems, these were buried and left to take care of themselves while the grind of study went remorselessly on.

But, Lucas discovered, this did not mean that any of them were either happy or outstandingly familiar with their subjects. It only meant that they were temporary monomaniacs.

He wondered, for a while, if he might not be one, too. But that idea didn’t seem to fit the facts. So, once again, he was forced to the conclusion that he was a sort of freak—someone who had, somewhere, missed a step most people took so naturally that they never noticed it. He found himself deeply worried by it, at those odd moments when his mind would let him. Through most of the day, he was completely absorbed in work. But, at night, when he sat in his room with the day’s notes completed and the assignments read, when the current project was completed and he closed his books, then he sat staring blankly at the wall behind his desk and wondered what to do about the botch he’d made of Lucas Martino.

The only progress he ever made was in that brief time when he almost literally discovered his roommate.

Frank Heywood was the ideal person to share a small room with Lucas Martino. A quiet, calm type who never spoke except when it was absolutely necessary, he seemed to fit his movements about the room so that they never interfered with Lucas’. He used the room only to sleep and study in, slipping out whenever he had any free time. When Lucas thought about it, some weeks after the year began, he decided that Frank, like himself, had been too busy for friendship or anything more than enough politeness to let them live in peace. But, evidently, Frank also settled down and began to find a little leisure, because it was his roommate, and not Lucas, who initiated the short friendship between them.

“You know,” Frank astonished him by saying one night, “you are without a doubt the big gun in this student body.”

Lucas looked over from his desk, where he had been sitting with his chin in his hands. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you.” Heywood’s expression was completely serious. “I mean it. The word around the campus is you’re a grind. That’s a lot of bushwah. I’ve watched you, and you don’t hit the books half as hard as most of these monkeys. You don’t have to. One look and it’s in your head for keeps.”

“So?”

“So you’ve got brains.”

“Not many morons get into a school like this.”

“Morons?” Frank gestured scornfully. “Hell, no! This place is the cradle of next generation’s good old American knowhow, the hope of the future, the repository of all our finest young technical minds. And most of them couldn’t give you the square of plus one without scratching their behinds and thinking about it for an hour. Why? Because they’ve been taught what book to look it up in, not how to use it. But not you.”

Lucas looked at him in amazement. For one thing, this was by far the longest thing Frank had ever said to him. For another, here was a completely new viewpoint—an attitude toward Tech and everything it represented that he had never heard before, and never considered.

“How do you mean that?” he asked, curious to learn as much about it as he could.

“Like this: the way things are taught around here, the only way most people can get through is by memorizing what they’re told. I’ve been talking to some of these jokers. I’ll bet you I can find ten guys right on this floor who can repeat their texts back word for word, right down to the last comma, and do it like somebody pulling a tapeworm up his throat hand over hand. I will also bet you that if it turns out, fifteen years from now, that some Commie typesetter deliberately fouled up the words in the text, Allied science is going to be shot to hell because nobody’ll have initiative enough to figure out what should have been there. Particularly not those ten guys. They’d keep on forever designing missile control systems that tuned in WBZ, because that was the way the book said to do it.”

“I still don’t follow you,” Lucas said, frowning.

“Look—these guys aren’t morons. They’re pretty damned bright, or they wouldn’t be here. But the only way they’ve ever been taught to learn something is to memorize it. If you throw a lot of new stuff at them in a hurry, they’ll still memorize it —but they haven’t got time to
think
. They just stuff in words, and when it comes time to show what they know, they unroll a piece. Yard goods.

“I say that’s a hell of a dangerous thing to have going on. I say anybody with brains ought to realize what he’s doing to himself and the whole Allied effort when he stuffs facts down indiscriminately. I say anybody who
did
realize it would want to do something about it. But these clucks aren’t even bothered by it enough to wrinkle their foreheads. So, considering everything, I say they may have brains, but they don’t have brains
enough
.

“Now, you I’ve watched. When I sit here looking at you doing up your notes, it’s a pleasure. Here’s a guy with a look on his face as if he’s looking at a love letter, for Christ’s sake, when he’s reading an electronics text. Here’s a guy who fills out project reports like a man building a good watch. Here’s a guy that’s chewing before he swallows—here’s a guy who’s doing something with what they give them. Here, when you come right down to it, is a guy this place was
really
set up to produce.”

Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Me?”

“You. I get around. I guess I’ve at least taken a look at every bird on this campus. There’s a few like you on the faculty, but none in the student body. A few come close, but nobody touches you. That’s why I say out of all the students here, all four classes, you’re the guy to watch. You’re the guy who’s going to be really big in his field, I don’t give a damn if it’s civil engineering or nuclear dynamics.”