For several more weeks, he went through a period of great emotional intoxication, convinced that he had finally come to understand himself. In those weeks, he and Frank talked about whatever interested Lucas at the moment, and carried on serious discussions long into the night. But the feeling of being two geniuses together was an essential part of it, and one night Lucas thought to ask Frank how he was doing at his studies.

“Me? I’m doing fine. Half a point over passing grade, steady as a chalkline.”

“Half a point?”

Heywood grinned. “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine. I’ll get a sheepskin that says Massachusetts Institute of Technology on it, the same as yours.”

“Yes, but it’s not the diploma—”

“—it’s what you know? Sure, if you’re planning to go on from there. I could, to be completely honest, give even you a run for the money when it comes to that. But why the hell should I? I’m not going to sweat my caliones off at Yucca Flat for the next forty years, draw my pension, and retire. Uh-uh. I’m going to take that B.S. from MIT and make it my entrance ticket into some government bureau, where I’ll spend the next forty years sitting behind a desk, freezing my caliones off in an air-conditioned office, and someday I’ll retire on a bigger pension.”

“And-and that’s all?”

Heywood chuckled. “That’s all, paisan.”

“It sounds so God-damned empty I could spit. A guy with your brains, planning a life like that.”

Heywood grinned and spread his hands. “There it is, though. So why should I kill myself here? This way I get by, and I’ve got lots of free time.” He grinned again. “I get to have long talks with my roommate, I get to run around and see other people — hell, amico, there’s no sweat this way. And it takes a guy with brains to pull it in a grind house like Tech, I might add.”

It was the total waste of those brains that appalled Lucas. He found it impossible to understand and difficult to like. Certainly, it destroyed the mood of the past month.He drew back into his shell after that. He was not hostile to Heywood, or anything like it, but he let the friendship die quickly. He lost, with it, any idea of being a genius. In time he even forgot that he had ever come close to making a fool of himself over it, though occasionally, when something went especially well for him in his later life, the idle thought would crop up to be instantly, and embarrassedly, suppressed.

He and Heywood finished their undergraduate work, still roommates. Heywood was once more the perfect person for one small room with Lucas Martino, and seemed not to mind Lucas’ long periods of complete silence. Sometimes Lucas saw him sitting and watching him.After they graduated, Heywood left Boston, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, disappeared. And it was only some years later that one of the men for whom he was a graduate assistant came to him and said, “This hypothesis you were talking about, Martino — it might be worth your doing a paper on it.”

So Heywood missed the birth of the K-Eighty-Eight completely, and Lucas Martino, for his part, once again had something to claim all his attention and keep him from thinking about the unanswered problems in his mind.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

Edmund Starke had become an old man, living alone in a rented four-room bungalow on the edge of Bridgetown. He had dried to leathery hardness, his muscles turning into strings beneath his brittle skin, his veins thick and blue. The hair was gone from the top of his skull, revealing the hollows and ridges in the bone. His glasses were thick, and clumsy in their cheap frames. His jaw was set, thrust forward past his upper teeth, and his eyes were habitually narrowed. Like most old men, he slept little, resting in short naps rather than for very long at any one time. He spent his waking hours reading technical journals and working on an elementary physics textbook which, he felt suspiciously, was turning out to resemble every elementary physics text written before it.

Today he was sitting in the front room, twisting the spine of a journal in his fingers and peering across the room at the opposite wall. He heard footsteps on the dark porch outside and waited for the sound of the bell. When it came, he got up in his night robe and slippers, walked slowly to the door and opened it.A big man stood in the doorway, his face bandaged bulkily, the collar of his coat pulled up and his hat low over his eyes. The light from the room glittered blankly on dark glasses.

“Well?” Starke rasped in his high, dry-throated voice.

The man wagged his head indecisively. The bandages over his jaw parted once, showing a dark slit, before he said anything. When be did speak, his voice was indistinct. “Professor Starke?”

“Mister Starke. What is it?”

“I…don’t know if you remember me. I was one of your students. Class of sixty-six at Bridgetown High School. I’m Lucas Martino.”

“Yes, I remember you. Come in.” Starke moved aside and held the door, pushing it shut carefully behind the man, disgusted at having to be so careful of drafts. “Sit down. No, that’s my chair. Take the one opposite.”

The chief impression his visitor was giving was one of embarrassment. He sat down gingerly, unsure of himself, and opened his coat with clumsy, gloved fingers.

“Take off your hat.” Starke lowered himself back into his chair and peered at the man. “Ashamed of yourself?”

The man pulled the hat off, dragging it slowly. His entire skull was bandaged, the white gauze running down under his collar. He gestured toward it. “An accident. An industrial accident,” he mumbled.

“That’s none of my concern. What can I do for you?”

“I— I don’t know,” the man said in a shocked voice, as though his plans had extended only to Starke’s front door and he had never thought, till now, of what to do after that.

“What did you expect? Did you think I’d be surprised to see you? Or see you all wrapped up like the invisible man? I’m not. I know all about you. A man named Rogers was here and said you were on your way.” Starke cocked his head. “So now you’re caught flatfooted. Well — think. What’re you going to do now?”

“I was afraid Rogers would find out about you. Did he bother you?”

“Not a bit.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me you might not be who you say you are. He wanted my opinion.”

“Didn’t he tell you not to let me know that?”

“He did. I told him I’d do this my way.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“How would you know?,’

The man sighed. “Then you don’t think I’m Lucas Martino.”

“I don’t care. It’s no longer important whether you used to be in my class or not. If you’re here for help of any kind, you’ve wasted your time.”

“I see.” The man began putting his hat back on.

“You’ll wait and hear any reasons.”

“What reasons?” the man asked with dull bitterness. “You don’t trust me. That’s a good reason.”

“If that’s what you think, you’d better listen.”

The man sank back. “All right.” He seemed not to care. His emotional responses seemed to reach him slowly and indistinctly, as if traveling through cotton wool.

“What would you want me to do?” Starke rasped. “Take you in here to live with me? How long would that last — a month or two, a year? You’d have a corpse on your hands, and you’d still have no place to go. I’m an old man, Martino or whoever you are, and you ought to have taken that into account if you were making plans.”

The man shook his head.

“And if that’s not what you wanted, then you wanted me to help you with some kind of work. Rogers said it might be that. Was that it?”

The man raised his hands helplessly.

Starke nodded. “What made you think I was qualified? What made you think I could work on something forty years advanced over what I was taught at school? What made you think I could have kept up with new work in the field? I don’t have access to classified publications. Where did you think we’d get the equipment? What did you think would pay for it and — ”