American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (93 page)

He never left the farm. He spoke to none of the neighbors who tried to satisfy their curiosity. He did no trading at the general store. When the delivery trucks from Bridgetown filled his telephone orders, he gave unloading instructions with his order and never came out of the house while the trucks were in the yard.

Lucas Martino stood looking up at the overhead maze of bus bars that fed power to the K-88. Down in the pit below his catwalk, he heard his technicians working around the thick, spherical, alloy tank. One of them cursed peevishly as he snagged his coveralls on a protruding bolt head. The tank bristled with them. The production models would no doubt be streamlined and neatly painted, but here in this experimental installation, no one had seen any necessity for superfluous finishing. Except perhaps that technician.

As he watched, the technicians climbed out of the pit. The telephone rang beside him, and when he answered it the pit crew supervisor told him the tank area was cleared.

“All right. Thank you, Will. I’m starting the coolant pumps now.”

The outside of the tank began to frost. Martino dialed the power gang foreman. “Ready for test, Allan.”

“I’ll wind ’em up,” the foreman answered. “You’ll have full power any time you want it after thirty seconds from . . . now. Good luck, Doctor Martino.”

“Thank you, Allan.”

He put the phone down and stood looking at the old brick wall across the enormous room. Plenty of space here, he thought. Not the way it was back in the States, when I was working with the undersized configurations because Kroenn’s equations showed I could. I knew he was wrong, somewhere, but I couldn’t prove it—I ought to know more mathematics, damn it. I do, but who can keep up with Kroenn? I remember, he was raving angry at himself for weeks when he found his own mistake.

It happens. The best of us slip a cog now and then. Well, it took Kroenn to see Kroenn’s mistake. . . . Well, here we go . .

He picked up the public address microphone and thumbed the button. “Test,” his voice rumbled through the building. He put the microphone down and started the tape recorder.

“Test Number One, experimental K-Eighty-eight configuration two.” He gave the date. “Applying power at—” he looked at his watch “—twenty-one hundred hours, thirty-two minutes.” He threw the switch and leaned over the railing to look down into the pit. The tank exploded.

It was, once again, a rainy summer in New York. Gray day followed gray day, and even when the sun was out, the clouds waited at the edge of the horizon. The weather seemed to have gone bad all over the world. Hot winds scoured the great mid-continental plains of the north, and below the equator there was snow, and thaw, and snow, and thaw again. The oceans were never still, and from one seaboard to another the waves cracked against breakwaters with the hard, incessant slapping of high-velocity artillery. Icebergs prowled down out of the polar caps, and migratory birds flew closer to the land. There were riots in Asia, and violent homicides in London.

Shawn Rogers left New York on a teeming day, the tires of his car singing on wet blacktop, and for all his windscreen cleaner could do, the world seemed blurred, shifting, and impermanent. His car whined almost alone down the freeway, swaying in sharp lurches as the gusty wind struck it, and all the way down into the end of New Jersey the rain pursued him.

The secondary road to the farm surprised him by being wide, well graded, and smoothly surfaced. He was able to drive with only half his attention.

Five years, he thought, since I saw him last. Almost five since that night he came over the line. I wonder how he feels about things?

Rogers had his folders of daily reports, for the surveillance team still followed the man faithfully. A.N.G. men delivered his milk, A.N.G. men brought his rolls of fencing, and A.N.G. men sweated in the fields across from his farm. And every month, Rogers’ secretary brought him a neatly typed résumé of everything the man did. But even though he always read them, Rogers had learned how little was ever accurately abstracted from a man and successfully transferred to paper.

Rogers moved his mouth into a strained smile, his face tired and growing old. But what else was anyone to go by?

I wonder how he’ll take the news I’m bringing?

Rogers swung the car around the curve, and saw the farm the surveillance team had so often photographed for him.

Set in one corner of the farm, the house was a freshly-painted white building with green shutters. There was a lawn, carefully mowed and bordered by hedges, and across the yard from the house stood a solidly built barn, with a pickup truck parked in front of it, with no name lettered on its doors. There was a kitchen garden beside the house, laid out with geometrical exactness, the earth black, freshly weeded, and without a stone, textured like chocolate cream. A row of apple trees marched beside the road, every limb pruned, the foliage glistening with spray. The fence beside them shone with new wire, each post set exactly upright, every strand stretched perfectly parallel to the others. The fields lay green in the rain, furrows deep to carry off the excess water, and at the far end of the property, shrubs marked the edge of a small brook. As Rogers drove into the yard and stopped, a dog trotted out from behind the barn and stood in the rain, barking at him.

Rogers buttoned his raincoat and turned his collar up. He jumped out of the car, giving the door a hasty push shut, and ran across the yard to the back porch. As he reached its shelter, the door directly in front of him opened, and he found himself standing less than a foot away from the overalled man in the doorway.

There was change visible in the face. The metal had acquired a patina of microscopic scratches and scuffs, softening its machine-turned lustre and fogging the sharpness with which it reflected light. The eyes were the same, but the voice was different. It was duller, drier, and seemed to come out more slowly.

“Mr. Rogers.”

“Hello, Mr. Martino.”

“Come in.” The man stepped aside, out of the doorway.

“Thank you. I should have called first, but I wanted to be sure we had a chance to talk at length.” Rogers stopped uncomfortably, just inside the door. “There’s something rather important to talk about, if you’ll spare me the time . . .”

The man nodded. “All right. I’ve got work to do, but you can come along and talk, I guess. I just cooked some lunch. There’s enough for two.”

“Thank you.” Rogers took off his raincoat, and the man hung it up on a hook beside the kitchen door. “I—how’ve you been?”

“All right. Chair over there. Sit down, and I’ll get the food.” The man walked over to a cupboard and took down two plates.

Rogers sat down at the kitchen table, looking around stiffly for lack of something else to do.

The kitchen was neat and clean. There were curtains up over the sink, and there was fresh linoleum on the floor. There were no dishes left over on the drainboard, the sink itself had been scrubbed clean, and everything was put away, carefully and systematically. Rogers tried to picture the man washing, ironing, and hanging curtains—doing it all according to a logically thought-out system, with not a move wasted, taking a minimum of time, as carefully as he’d ever set up a test series or checked the face of an oscilloscope. Day after day, for five years.

The man set a plate down in front of Rogers: boiled potatoes, beets, and a thick slice of pork tenderloin. “Coffee? Just made some fresh.”

“Thanks. I’ll take it black, please.”

“Suit yourself.” There was a faint grinding noise as the man put the cup down with his metal hand. Then he sat opposite Rogers and began to eat silently, without lifting his head or stopping. He was obviously impatient to get the necessary meal over and done with so he could get back to his work. Rogers had no choice but to eat as quickly as possible, and no opening to start talking. The meal was cooked well.

When they finished, the man stood up and silently gathered the plates and silverware, stacking them in the sink and running water over them. He handed Rogers a dish towel. “I’d appreciate your drying these. We’ll get done sooner.”

“Certainly.” They stood together at the sink, and as the man handed him each washed plate and cup, Rogers dried it carefully and put it in the drainboard rack. When they were through, the man put the dishes back in the cupboard, and Rogers started to put on his raincoat.

“Be with you in a minute,” the man said. He opened a drawer and took out a roll of bandaging. He held one end between the fingers of his metal hand and carefully wound a loose spiral up his arm, pushing his shirtsleeve out of the way. Taking safety pins out of his overall pocket, he fastened the two ends. Then he took a can of oil out of the drawer and carefully soaked the bandage before putting everything back and pushing the drawer shut. “Got to do it,” he explained to Rogers. “Dust and grit gets in there, and it wears.”

“Of course.”

“Well, let’s go.”

Rogers followed the man out into the yard, and they walked across to the barn. The dog ran up beside them, and the man reached down to pet his neck. “Get back in your house, stupe. You’ll get wet. Go on, Prince. Go on, boy.” The dog sniffed uncertainly at Rogers, trotted along with them for a few steps, and turned back.

“Prince? Is that his name? Nice-looking dog. What breed is he?”

“Mongrel. He’s got a barrel he sleeps in, back of the barn.”

“You don’t keep him in the house, then?”

“He’s a watchdog. He’s got to be outside. And he’s not housebroken.” The man looked at Rogers. “A dog’s a dog, you know. If the only friend a man had was a dog, it’d mean he couldn’t get along with his own kind, wouldn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say that. You like the dog, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Ashamed of it?”

“You’re pushing again, Rogers.”

Rogers dropped his eyes. “I suppose I was.”

They went into the barn, and the man switched on the lights. There was a tractor sitting in the middle of the barn, with a can full of drained transmission oil beside it. The man unrolled an oily tarpaulin, pulled it over beside the tractor, and laid out the tools that had been rolled inside it. “I have to fix this transmission today,” he said. “I bought this tractor second-hand, and the fellow that had it before chipped the gears. They’ve got to be replaced today, because I’ve got a field to harrow tomorrow.” He selected a wrench and slid under the tractor, on his back. He began loosening the nuts around the rim of the gearbox cover, paying no further attention to Rogers.

Rogers stood uncertainly beside the tractor, looking down at the man working under it. Finally, he looked around for something to sit on. There was a box set against the barn wall, and he went over, got it, and sat down beside the tractor, bending forward until he could see the man’s face. But that did him little good. Even though the gearbox had been drained during the morning, there was still oil dripping out of it. The man was working by touch, his eyes and mouth tightly shuttered, deaf, with dirty oil running in narrow streaks down across his skull.

Rogers sat and waited for ten minutes, watching the man’s hands working deftly at the cover, right hand guiding left, right hand, with its wrench, breaking the nuts loose from their lugs, then left hand taking the nuts off with its hard fingers. Finally, the man put the wrench aside, locating the tool tarpaulin without difficulty, and lifted the cover down, dropping the nuts inside it. The left hand probed inside the gearbox, and a retaining slide dropped out, into the waiting right hand. The slide, too, went into the up-ended gearbox cover, and the left hand popped the gears out of their mounts. The man wriggled out from under the tractor and opened his eyes.

“I was going to ask you—” Rogers began.

“Minute.” He stood up and took the worn gears over to a workbench, where he held them up to the light, cursing bitterly. “A man has no business buying machinery if he won’t treat it right. That’s a damned good design, that transmission. No reason in the world for anybody to have trouble with it.” His voice was almost querulous. “A machine won’t ever let you down, if you’ll only take the trouble to use it right—use it the way you’re supposed to, for the jobs it’s built to do. That’s all. All you have to do is understand it. And no machine’s that complicated an average man can’t understand it. But nobody tries. Nobody thinks a machine’s worth understanding. What’s a machine, after all? Just a few pieces of metal. One’s exactly like another, and you can always get another one just like it.

“But I’ll tell you something, Mr. Rogers—” He turned suddenly, and faced across the barn. The light was behind him, and Rogers saw only his silhouette—the body lost in the shapeless, angular drape of the overalls, the shoulders square, and the head round and featureless. “Even so, people don’t like machines. Machines don’t talk and tell you their troubles. Machines don’t do anything but what they’re made for. They sit there, doing their jobs, and one looks like another—but it may be breaking up inside. It may be getting ready to not plow your field, or not pump your water, or throw a piston into your lap. It might be getting ready to do
anything
—so people are afraid of them, a little bit, and won’t take the trouble to understand them, and they treat them badly. So the machines break down more quickly, and people trust them less, and mistreat them more. So the manufacturers say, ‘What’s the use of building good machines? The clucks’ll only wreck ’em anyway,’ and build flimsy stuff, so there’re very few good machines being made any more. And that’s a shame.”

He dropped the gears on the bench and picked up a box holding the replacement set. Still angry, he ripped the top off the box, took out the gears, and brought them back to the tractor.

“Mr. Martino—” Rogers said again.

“Yes?” he asked, laying the gears out in sequence on the tarpaulin.

Now that he’d come to the point of saying it, Rogers didn’t know how. He thought of the man, trapped in the casque of himself through these five years, and Rogers didn’t know how to put it.