But meanwhile he felt a mounting, querulous sense of terrible injustice. He was near to pouting as he walked. He knew why that was, too. His brain, after all, had solved the problem. He was fulfilling the equation — he was doing what they wanted him to. He was giving correct answers, and by all that was reasonable, they ought to respond by giving him relief. But they ignored him; they showed no sign of understanding that he was doing what they wanted. And if he was doing what they wanted, and they ignored him, the brain could only decide that somehow it was not transmitting its signals through his actions to them. If there had been only one of them, the brain could have decided that one was deaf and blind, reciting his questions by idiotic rote. But there were two of them, always, and there must be a dozen in all. So the brain could only decide that it was he who was incapable of making himself heard — that it was Lucas Martino who was nothing.

At the same time, he knew what was happening to him.

10

Azarin sat patiently behind his desk, waiting for word to come from the interrogation room. It was three days, now, since Martino had been brought from the hospital, and Azarin knew, as a man knows his trade, that the word would come sometime today. It was quite a simple business, Azarin thought. One took a man and peeled things away from him — more vital things than skin, though he had seen that technique work at the hands of men who had not learned the subtler phases of their trade. In effect, it was much the same, though the result was cleaner.

A man carries very little excess baggage in his head. Even a clerk, and a man like Martino was not a clerk. The more intelligent the man, the less excess baggage and the quicker the results. For once you exposed the man underneath, he was raw and tender — a touch here and there, and he gave up what he knew.Of course, having done that and knowing he had done that, the man was empty thereafter. He had found himself to be pliable, and after that anyone could use him — could do anything he wanted with him. He bore the mark of whoever touched him last. He did what you wanted of him. He was a living nothing.Ordinarily, Azarin drew only a normal measure of satisfaction from having done this to a man while he himself remained, forever and imperishable, Anastas Azarin. But in this case — Azarin growled at something invisible across the room.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Eddie Bates was a sleeper. He was a wiry, flat-bellied, ugly man with a face that had been grotesquely scarred by acne. His youth had been miserable, for all that he faithfully lifted weights a half-hour every day in his bedroom. Toward the end of his teens he had spent six months in a reformatory for assault and battery. It should have been assault with intent to kill, but only Eddie knew how far he had planned to go when he first began hitting the other boy — a flashily good-looking youngster who had made a remark about a girl Eddie never had found the courage to speak to.When he was twenty, he found a job in a garage.

He worked in a mood of perpetual sullen resentment that made most of the customers dislike him. Only one of them — a casually likable man who drove an expensive car — had taken pains to cultivate his friendship. Eddie ran a few errands for him after work, and assumed he was a criminal of some kind, since he paid quite well and had Eddie deliver his cryptic messages by roundabout methods.Eddie did his work well and faithfully, tied to the man by something more than money. The man was the only respectable friend he had in the world, and when the man made him another offer, Eddie accepted. So, Eddie Bates had become a sleeper. His friend now paid him not to run messages, and to stay out of trouble, He found him a job as an airlines mechanic.Every month that Eddie continued to be a respectable citizen, and drew his pay from the airline, an envelope with additional pay reached him by means as devious as those in which Eddie had once been employed. By now, Eddie knew who his friend was working for. But the man was his friend, and he was never asked to do anything else to earn the extra money.

Eddie avoided considering the realities of his position. As time went by, this became progressively easier.He grew older, and continued to work for the airline. Several things happened to him. For one thing, he had a natural talent for machinery. He understood it, respected it, and was willing to work with infinite patience until it was functioning properly. He found that very few of the people he worked with turned away from his face once they had seen him work on an engine. For another, he had found a girl.

Alice worked in the diner where Eddie ate his lunch every day. She was a hard-working girl who knew that the only kind of man worth bothering with was a steady man with a good trade. Looks were not particularly important to her — she distrusted handsome men on principle. It was an accepted thing between her and Eddie that they would be married as soon as they had enough money saved for the down payment on a house near the airport.

But now Eddie Bates, the sleeper, had been activated. He crouched near the plane’s inboard engine nacelle, up on the high wing far above the dark hangar floor, and wondered what he was going to do.He had his orders. He had more — he had the thing his friend had given him. It was a metal cartridge the size of a pint milk bottle, one end of which was a knob with time calibrations marked off on it. His friend had preset it and given it to him, and told to put it in an engine. He had not explained that it was only intended to force the plane down into the water at a pre-calculated point. Eddie assumed it was meant to blow the wing off in flight. He was a mechanic, not an explosives expert. Like most people, he had no accurate idea of the power of a given weight of charge, and no idea how much of the cartridge’s actual bulk was taken up by timing mechanisms. He wavered for a long time, hidden by himself in the darkness near the hangar roof. He added things up time after time, growing more desperate and more indecisive.He had never quite expected that he would be asked to do something like this. He gradually admitted to himself that as time had gone by, he had come to believe that he would never be asked to do anything.

But the man was his friend, and Eddie had taken his money. But he had other friends, now, and he had worked on this engine himself this afternoon, tuning it patiently.But the money was important. It was helping his savings a great deal. The more he saved, the sooner he could marry Alice. But if he didn’t plant the bomb, the money would stop.Other things might happen if he didn’t plant the bomb. His friend might turn him in somehow, and then he would lose the respect of his friends here in the shop, and never marry Alice.

He had to do somethingHe drew a quick breath and thrust the bomb through the opened inspection plate into the space between the engine and the inner surface of the nacelle. He hastily bolted the plate back down and ran out of the hangar. He had done only one thing to offset the complete helplessness he felt. As he slipped the cartridge through the opened plate, his fingers closed on it convulsively, almost as though by reflex, almost as though clutching at some hope of salvation, or almost as though thrusting away something precious to him. And he knew as he was doing it that it was only an empty gesture, because what did it matter when the plane crashed? He had re-set the timer, but no one — certainly not Eddie Bates — could have said by how much.