1

On the eighth day after the man had come over the line, the annunciator buzzed on Rogers’ desk.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Deptford is here to see you, sir.”

Rogers grunted. He said, “Send him in, please,” and sat waiting.

Deptford came into the office. He was a thin, grayfaced man in a dark suit, and he was carrying a briefcase.

“How are you, Shawn?” he said quietly.

Rogers stood up. “Fine, thanks,” he answered slowly. “How are you?”

Deptford shrugged. He sat down in the chair beside the end of Rogers’ desk and laid the briefcase in his lap. “I thought I’d bring the decision on the Martino matter down with me.” He opened the briefcase and handed Rogers a manila envelope. “In there’s the usual file copy of the official policy directive, and a letter to you from Karl Schwenn’s office.”

Rogers picked up the envelope. “Did Schwenn give you a very bad time, sir?”

Deptford smiled thinly. “They didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t seem to be anybody’s fault. But they’d needed an answer very badly. Now, at the sacrifice of the K-Eighty-Eight program, they don’t need it so badly any more. But they still need it of course.”

Rogers nodded slowly.

“I’m replacing you here as sector chief. They’ve put a new man in my old job. And the letter from Schwenn reassigns you to follow up on Martino. Actually, I think Schwenn arrived at the best answer to a complicated situation.”

Rogers felt his lips stretch in an uncomfortable grimace of surprise and embarrassment. “Well.” There was nothing else to say.

2

“Direct investigation won’t do it,” Rogers said to the man. “We tried, but it can’t be done. We can’t prove who you are.”

The glinting eyes looked at him impassively. There was no telling what the man might be thinking. They were alone in the small room, and Rogers suddenly understood that this had turned into a personal thing between them. It had happened gradually, he could see now, built up in small increments over the past days, but this was the first time it had struck him, and so it had also happened suddenly. Rogers found himself feeling personally responsible for the man’s being here, and for everything that had happened to him. It was an unprofessional way to feel, but the fact was that he and this man were here face to face, alone, and when it came down to the actual turn of the screw it was Rogers whose hand was on the wrench.

“I see what you mean,” the man said. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it.” He was sitting stiffly in his chair, his metal hand across his lap, and there was no telling whether he had been thinking of it coldly and dispassionately, or whether hopes and desperate ideas had gone echoing through his brain like men in prison hammering on the bars. “I thought I might be able to come up with something. What about skin pore patterns? Those couldn’t have been changed.”

Rogers shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Martino. Believe me, we had experts in physical identification thrashing this thing back and forth for days. Pore patterns were mentioned, as a matter of fact. But unfortunately, that won’t do us any good. We don’t have verified records from before the explosion. Nobody ever thought we’d have to go into details as minute as that.” He raised his hand, rubbed it wearily across the side of his head, and dropped it in resignation. “That’s true of everything in that line, I’m afraid. We have your fingerprints and retinal photographs on file. Both are useless now.”

And here we are, he thought, fencing around the entire question of whether you’re really Martino but went over to them. There’re limits to what civilized people can bring out into the open, no matter how savagely they can speculate. So it doesn’t matter. There’s no easy escape for either of us, no matter what we say or do now. We’ve had our try at the easy answers, and there aren’t any. It’s the long haul for both of us now.

“Isn’t there anything to work on at all?”

“I’m afraid not. No distinguishing marks or scars that couldn’t be faked, no tattoos, no anything. We’ve tried, Mr. Martino. We’ve thought of every possibility. We accumulated quite a team of specialists. The consensus is there’s no fast answer.”

“That’s hard to believe,” the man said.

“Mr. Martino, you’re more deeply involved in the problem than any of us. You’ve been unable to offer anything useful. And you’re a pretty smart man.”

“If I’m Lucas Martino,” the man said dryly.

“Even if you’re not.” Rogers brought his palms down on his knees. “Let’s look at it logically. Anything we can think of, they could have thought of first. In trying to establish anything about you, normal approaches are useless. We’re the specialists in charge of taking you apart, and a great many of us have been in this kind of work a long time. I was head of ANG Security in this sector for seven years. I’m the fellow responsible for the agents we drop into their organizations. But when I try to crack you, I’ve got to face the possibility that just as many experts on the other side worked at putting you together — and you yourself can most likely match my own experience in spades. What’s opposed here are the total efforts of two efficient organizations, each with the resources of half the world. That’s the situation, and we’re all stuck with it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“That’s what I’m here to tell you. We couldn’t keep you here indefinitely. We don’t do things that way. So you’re free to go.”

The man raised his head sharply. “There’s a catch to it.”

Rogers nodded. “Yes, there is. We can’t let you go back to sensitive work. That’s the catch, and you already knew it. Now it’s official. You’re free to go and do anything you like, as long as it isn’t physics.”

“Yes.” The man’s voice was quiet. “You want to see me run. How long does that injunction apply? How long’re you going to keep watching me?”

“Until we find out who you are.”

The man began to laugh, quietly and bitterly.

3

“So he’s leaving here today?” Finchley asked.

“Tomorrow morning. He wants to go to New York. We’re paying his flight transportation, we’ve assigned him a one-hundred-per cent disability pension, and given him four months back pay at Martino’s scale.”

“Are you going to put a surveillance team on him in New York?”

“Yes. And I’ll be on the plane with him.”

“You will? You’re dropping your job here?”

“Yes. Orders. He’s my personal baby. I’ll head up the New York ANG surveillance unit.”

Finchley looked at him curiously. Rogers kept his eyes level. After a moment, the FBI man made an odd sucking noise between his two upper front teeth and let it go at that. But Rogers saw his mouth stretch into the peculiar grimace a man shows when a fellow professional falls from grace.

“What’s your procedure going to be?” Finchley asked carefully. “Just keep him under constant watch until he makes a wrong move?”

Rogers shook his head. “No. We’ve got to screw it down tighter than that. There’s only one possible means of identification left. We’ve got to build up a psychological profile on Lucas Martino. Then we’ll match it against this fellow’s pattern of actions and responses, in situations where we’d be able to tell exactly how the real Martino’d react. We’re going to dig — deeper than any security clearance, deeper than the Recording Angel, if we have to. We’re going to reduce Lucas Martino to so many points on a graph, and then we’re going to chart this fellow against him. Once he does something Lucas Martino would never have done, we’ll know. Once he expresses an attitude the old, loyal Lucas Martino didn’t have, we’ll come down on him like a ton of bricks.”

“Yes — but…” Finchley looked uncomfortable. His specific assignment to Rogers’ team was over. From now on he’d be only a liaison man between Rogers’ ANG surveillance unit and the FBI. As a member of a different organization, he’d be expected to give help when needed, but no unasked-for suggestions. And particularly now, with Rogers bound to be sensitive about rank, he was wary of overstepping.