6

The telephone rang. Rogers rolled over on his cot and lifted the receiver off the unit on the floor beside him. “Rogers,” he mumbled. “Yes, Mr. Deptford.” The radiant numerals on his watch were swimming before his eyes, and he blinked sharply to steady them. Eleven-thirty p.m. He’d been asleep a little under two hours.

“Hello, Shawn. I’ve got your third daily report in front of me here. I’m sorry to have awakened you, but you don’t really seem to be making much progress, do you?”

“That’s all right. About waking me up, I mean. No — no, I’m not getting far on this thing.”

The office was dark except for the seep of light under the door from the hall. Across the hall, in a larger office Rogers had commandeered, a specialist clerical staff was collating and evaluating the reports Finchley, Bannister, Willis, and the rest of them had made. Rogers could faintly hear the restless pitter-pat of keyboards.

“Would it be of any value for me to come down?”

“And take over the investigation? Come ahead. Any time.”

Deptford said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “Would I get any farther than you have?”

“No.”

“That’s what I told Karl Schwenn.”

“Still giving you the business, is he?”

“Shawn, he has to. The entire K-Eighty-Eight program has been held up for months. No other project in the world would have been permitted to hang fire this long. At the first doubt of its security, it would have been washed out as a matter of routine. You know that, and that ought to tell you how important the K-Eighty-Eight is. I think you’re aware of what’s going on in Africa at this moment. We’ve got to have something to show. We’ve got to quiet the Soviets down — at least until they’ve developed something to match it. The Ministry’s putting pressure on the Department to reach a quick decision on this man.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re almost literally taking this man apart like a bomb. But we don’t have anything to show whose bomb he is.”

“There must be something.”

“Mr. Deptford, when we send a man over the line, we provide him with their I.D. papers. We go further. We fill his pockets with their coins, their door keys, their cigarettes, their combs. We give him one of their billfolds, with their sales receipts and laundry tickets. We give him photographs of relatives and girls, printed on their kind of paper with their processes and chemicals — and yet every one of those items come out of our manufacturing shops and never saw the other side of the line before.”

Deptford sighed. “I know. How’s he taking it?”

“I can’t tell. When one of our people goes over the line, he has a cover story. He’s an auto mechanic, or a baker, or a tramway conductor. And if he’s one of our good people — and for important jobs we only send the best — then, no matter what happens, no matter what they do to him — he stays a baker or a tramway conductor. He answers questions like a tramway conductor. He’s as bewildered at it all as a tramway conductor would be. If necessary, he bleeds and screams and dies like a tramway conductor.”

“Yes.” Deptford’s voice was quiet. “Yes, he does. Do you suppose Azarin ever wonders if perhaps this man he’s working on really is a tramway conductor?”

“Maybe he does, sir. But he can’t ever act as if he did, or he wouldn’t be doing his job.”

“All right, Shawn. But we’ve got to have our answer soon.”

“I know.”

After a time, Deptford said: “It’s been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, Shawn?”

“Some.”

“You’ve always done the job for me.” Deptford’s voice was quiet, and then Rogers heard the peculiar click a man’s drying lips make as he opens his mouth to wet them. “All right. I’ll explain the situation upstairs, and you do what you can.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Good night, Shawn. Go back to sleep, if you can.”

“Good night, sir.” Rogers hung up. He sat looking down at the darkness around his feet. It’s funny, he thought. I wanted an education, and my family lived a half block away from the docks in Brooklyn. I wanted to be able to understand what a categorical imperative was, and recognize a quote from Byron when I heard one. I wanted to wear a tweed jacket and smoke a pipe under a campus oak somewhere. And during the summers while I was going to high school, I worked for this insurance company, file clerking in the claims investigation division. So when I got the chance to try for that ANG scholarship, I took it. And when they found out I knew something about investigation work, they put me in with their Security trainees. And here I am, and I never thought about it one way or another. I’ve got a pretty good record. Pretty damned good. But I wonder, now, if I wouldn’t have done just as well at something else?

Then he slowly put his shoes on, went to his desk, and clicked on the light.

7

The week was almost over. They were beginning to learn things, but none of them were the slightest help.

Bannister laid the first engineering drawing down on Rogers’ desk. “This is how his head works — we believe. It’s a difficult thing, not being able to get clear X-rays.”

Rogers looked down at the drawing and grunted. Bannister began pointing out specific details, using his pipestem to tap the drawing.

“There’s his eye assembly. He has binocular vision, with servo-motored focusing and tracking. The motors are powered by this miniature pile, in his chest cavity, here. So are the remainder of his artificial components. It’s interesting to note he has a complete selection of filters for his eye lenses. They did him up brown. By the by, he can see by infra-red if he wants to.”

Rogers spat a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. “That’s interesting.”

Bannister said, “Now — right here, on each side of the eyes, are two microphones. Those are his ears. They must have felt it was better design to house both functions in that one central skull opening. It’s directional, but not as effective as God intended. Here’s something else; the shutter that closes that opening is quite tough — armored to protect all those delicate components. The result is he’s deaf when his eyes’re closed. He probably sleeps more restfully for it.”

“When he isn’t faking nightmares, yeah.”

“Or having them.” Bannister shrugged. “Not my department.”

“I wish it wasn’t mine. All right, now what about that other hole?”

“His mouth? Well, there’s a false, immovable jaw over the working one — again, apparently, to protect the mechanism. His true jaws, his saliva ducts and teeth are artificial. His tongue isn’t. The inside of the mouth is plastic-lined. Teflon, probably, or one of its kin. My people’re having a little trouble breaking it down for analysis. But he’s cooperative about letting us gouge out samples.”

Rogers licked his dips. “Okay — fine,” he said brusquely. “But how’s all this hooked into his brain? How does he operate it?”

Bannister shook his head. “I don’t know. He uses it all as if he were born with it, so there’s some sort of connection into his voluntary and autonomic nervous centers. But we don’t yet know exactly how it was done. He’s cooperative, as I said, but I’m not the man to start disassembling any of this — we might not be able to put him back together again. All I know is that somewhere, behind all that machinery, there’s a functioning human brain inside that skull. How the Soviets did it is something else again. You have to remember they’ve been fiddling with this sort of thing a long time.” He laid another sheet atop the first one, paying no attention to the pallor of Rogers’ face.

“Here’s his powerplant. It’s only roughed out in the drawing, but we think it’s just a fairly ordinary pocket pile, something like the SNAP series the Americans worked out for their space program. It’s located where his lungs were, next to the blower that operates his vocal cords and the most ingenious oxygen circulator I’ve ever heard of. The delivered power’s electrical, of course, and it works his arm, his jaws, his audiovisual equipment, and everything else.”