There had been a peculiar shifting across his field of vision. He looked down toward his feet. Yellow sheets, yellowish white bedstead, yellow walls with a brown strip from floor to shoulder height. He blinked again, and the room went dark. He looked up toward the ceiling and barely saw a faint glow where the light had been, as though he were looking through leaded glass.

He couldn’t feel the texture of the pillow against the back of his neck. He couldn’t smell the smell of a hospital. He blinked again and the room was clear. He looked from side to side, and at the edges of his vision, just barely in sight and very close to his eyes, he saw two in-curving cuts in what seemed to be metal plating. It was as though his face were pressed up to the door slit of a solitary confinement cell. He inched up his right hand to touch his face.

4

Five weeks — of which Martino knew nothing and during which Azarin had been unable to accomplish anything. Azarin held the telephone headpiece in one hand and opened the inlaid sandalwood box on his desk with the other. He selected a gold-tipped papyros and put the tip in one corner of his mouth where it would be out of the way. There was a perpetual match-box on his desk, and he jerked at the protruding match. It came free, but the pull had been too uneven to draw a proper spark out of the flint in the box. The match wick failed to catch light, and he thrust the match back into the box, jerked the matchbox off his desk and into the wastebasket, pulled open his desk drawer, found real matches, and lit the papyros. His lip curled tightly to hold the cigarette and let him talk at the same time.

“Yes, sir. I appreciate that the Allieds are putting great pressure on us for the return of this man.” The connection from Novoya Moskva was thin, but he did not raise his voice. Instead, he tightened it, giving it a hard, mechanical quality, as though he were driving it over the wires by force of will. He cursed silently at the speed with which Rogers had located Martino. It was one thing, negotiating with the Allieds when it was possible to say there was no knowledge of such a man. It was quite another when they could reply with the name of a specific hospital. It meant time lost that might have been stolen, and they were short of time to begin with. But there had never been any hiding anything important from Rogers for very long.

Very well, then that was the way it was. Meanwhile, however, there were these telephone calls.

“The surgeons will not have completed their final operation until tomorrow, at the earliest. I shall not be able to interrogate the man for perhaps two days thereafter. Yes, sir. I suggest the delay is the surgeons’ responsibility. They say we are lucky to have the man alive at all, and that everything they are doing is absolutely necessary. Martino’s condition was most serious. Every one of the operations was extremely delicate, and I am informed that nervous tissue regenerates very slowly, even with the most modern methods. Yes, sir. In my opinion, Medical Doctor Kothu is highly skilled. I am confirmed in this by my file copy of his certification from your headquarters.”

Azarin was gambling a little there, he knew. Central Headquarters might decide to step in whether it had an ostensible reason or not. But he thought they would wait for a time. Their own staff had passed on Kothu and the rest of the medical team in the local hospital, since it was a military establishment. They would hesitate to belie themselves. And they knew Azarin was one of their best men. At Central Headquarters, they did not laugh at him. They knew his record.

No, he could afford to gamble with his superiors. It was a valuable thing to practice, for a man who would some day be among the superiors and was readying himself for it.

“Yes, sir. Two weeks more.” Azarin bit down on the end of the papyros, and the hollow filter tube of giltwrapped pasteboard crumpled. He began chewing it lightly, sucking the smoke in between his teeth. “Yes, sir. I am aware of the already long delay. I will bear the international situation in mind.”

Good. They were going to let him go ahead. For a moment, Azarin was happy.

Then the edge of his mind nibbled at the fact that he still had no idea of where to begin his interrogation — that not the first shred of the earliest groundwork had been done.

Azarin scowled. Preoccupied, he said, “Good-bye, sir,” put the telephone down, and sat with his elbows on the desk, leaning forward, the papyros held between the thumb and the forefinger of his right hand.

He was very good at his work, he knew. But he had never before encountered precisely these conditions. Neither had Novoya Moskva, and that was a help, but it was no help on the direct problem.

These temporary detentions were normally quite cut-and-dried. The man was diplomatically pumped of whatever he would yield in a short space of time. Usually, this was little. Occasionally, it was more. But always the man was returned as quickly as possible. Except in cases where it was desirable to stir the Allieds up, for some larger purpose, it was always best not to annoy them. The Allieds, upset by something like this, could go to quite extraordinary lengths of retaliation, and no one could tell what other strategies they might not cripple with their countermoves. Similarly, there were certain methods it was best not to use on their people. Returning a man in bad condition invariably made things difficult for months afterward.

So, usually it was a day or two at most before a man was returned to the Allieds. There, Rogers would take a day or two in discovering how much Azarin had found out. And that was the sum of it. If, at times, Azarin learned something useful, Rogers neutralized it at once. In Azarin’s opinion, the entire business was a pitiful waste of time and energy.

But now, with this Martino, what did he have? He had a man who had invented something called a K-Eighty-Eight, a man of high but undocumented reputation. Once more, Azarin cursed the circumstances of the times in which he lived. Once more he was angrily conscious of the fact that it was being left for the working professional-for Anastas Azarin-to clean up the work done by such fumbling amateurs as Heywood.

Azarin stared down at his desk in blank fury. And, of course, Novoya Moskva refused to act as though such a thing was basically its own fault. They simply pressed Azarin for results. Was he not an intelligence officer, after all? What could possibly be so difficult? What could possibly have taken him five weeks?

It was always this way in dealing with clerks. They had books, after all. The books had taught them how things were done. So things were done as they had been done in 1941 and in 1963, when the books were written.

No one knew anything about this man, except that he’d invented something. They had no file on him except for his undergraduate period at the technical academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cursing, Azarin wished that the SIB had, in actuality, some of the super-ferrets with which it was credited by the kind studios-the daring and supernally intelligent operatives who somehow passed through concrete walls and into vaults stuffed with alphabetically arranged Allied secrets conveniently shapirographed in Cyrillic print. He would have enjoyed having one or two of these on his staff, knowing that any information they brought, back was completely accurate, correctly interpreted, did not have to be confirmed by other operatives, was up to date, had not been planted, and, furthermore, that these operatives had not meanwhile been subverted by Rogers. Such people did occur, of course. They immediately became instructors and staff officers, because they were altogether too few.

So there he had been, this Martino, protected by the usual security safeguards common to both sides. Azarin had planned to some day add the K-Eighty-Eight to the always incomplete and usually obsolescent jigsaw puzzle of information that was the best anyone could do. But he had not planned to have it happen like this.