“We know that, Mr. Martino,” Finchley said gently.

Martino’s red gaze shifted. “You just think you do.” He turned back to face the wall. “Weren’t you two about to leave?”

Rogers nodded silently before he spoke. “Yes. Yes, we were, Mr. Martino. We’ll be going. Sorry.”

“All right.” He sat without speaking until they were almost out the door. Then he said, “Can you get me some lens tissue?”

“I’ll send some in right away.” Rogers closed the door gently. “His eyes must get dirty, at that,” he commented to Finchley.

The FBI man nodded absently, walking along the hall beside him.

Rogers said uncomfortably, “That was quite a show he put on. If he is Martino, I don’t blame him.”

Finchley grimaced. “And if he isn’t, I don’t blame him either.”

“You know,” Rogers said, “if we’d been able to crack him today, they would have kept the K-Eighty-Eight program going. It won’t actually be scrubbed until midnight. It was more or less up to me.”

“Oh?”

Rogers nodded. “I told him it was washed out because I wanted to see what he’d do. I suppose I thought he might make some kind of break.”

Rogers felt a peculiar kind of defeat. He had run down. He was empty of energy, and everything from now on would only be a falling downhill, back the way he had come.

“Well,” Finchley said, “you can’t say he didn’t react.”

“Yes, he did. He reacted.” Rogers found himself disliking the sound of what he would say. “But he didn’t react in any way that would help. All he did was act like a normal human being.”

CHAPTER FOUR

1

The physics laboratory at Bridgetown Memorial High School was a longish room with one wall formed by the windows of the building front. It was furnished with long, varnished, masonite-topped tables running toward the end of the room where Edmund Starke’s desk was set on a raised platform. Blackboards ran along two of the remaining walls, and equipment cupboards took up the other. By and large, the room was adequate for its purpose, neither substandard nor good enough to satisfy Starke, neither originally designed to be a laboratory nor rendered hopelessly unsuited by its conversion from two ordinary classrooms. It was intended to serve as the space enclosing the usual high school physics class, and that was what it was.

Lucas Martino saw it as something else again, though he didn’t realize it and for quite some time couldn’t have said why. But never once did he remind himself that a highly similar class might have been held in any high school in the world. This was his physics class, taught by his instructor, in his laboratory. This was the place, in its place, as everything in his universe was in its place or beginning to near it. So when he came in each day he first looked around it searchingly before he took his chair at one of the tables, with an unmistakably contented and oddly proprietary expression. Consequently, Starke marked him out for an eager student.

Lucas Martino couldn’t ignore a fact. He judged no fact; he only filed it away, like a machine part found on a workshop bench, confident that someday he would find the part to which it fitted, knowing that some day all these parts would, by inevitable process, join together in a complete mechanism which he would put to use. Furthermore, everything he saw represented a fact to him. He made no judgments, so nothing was trivial. Everything he had ever seen or heard was put somewhere in his brain. His memory was not photographic — he wasn’t interested in a static picture of his past — but it was all-inclusive. People said his mind was a jumble of odd knowledge. And he was always trying to fit these things together, to see to what mechanism they led.

In classes, he was quiet and answered only when asked to. He had the habit of depending on himself to fit his own facts together, and the notion of consulting someone else — even Starke — by asking an impromptu question was foreign to him. He was accustomed to a natural order of things in which few answers were supplied. Asking Starke to help him with his grasp of facts would have seemed unfair to him.

Consequently, his marks showed unpredictable ups and downs. Like all high school science classes, the only thing Starke’s physics class was supposed to teach was the principal part of the broad theoretical base. His students were given and expected to learn by rote the various simpler laws and formulae, like so many bricks ripped whole out of a misty and possibly useful structure. They were not yet — if ever — expected to construct anything of their own out of them. Lucas Martino failed to realize this. He would have been uncomfortable with the thought. It was his notion that Starke was throwing out hints, and he was presumed capable of filling in the rest for himself.

So there were times when he saw the inevitable direction of a lecture before its first sentences were cold, and when he leaped to the conclusion of an experiment before Starke had the apparatus fairly set up. One thing after another would fall into place for him, garnering its structure out of his storehouse of half-ideas, hints, and unrelated data. When this happened, he’d experienced what someone else would have called a flash of genius.

But there were other times when things only seemed to fit, when actually they did not, and then he shot down a blind alley in pursuit of a hare-brained mistake, making some ridiculous error no one else would have made or could have.

When this happened, he painfully worked his way back along the false chain of facts, taking each in turn and examining it to see why he’d been fooled, eventually returning to the right track. But, having once built a structure, he found it impossible to discard it entirely. So another part of his mind was a storehouse of interesting ideas that hadn’t worked, but were interesting — theories that were wild, but had seemed to hold together. To a certain extent, these phantom heresies stayed behind to color his thinking. He would never quite be an orthodox theory-spieler.

Meanwhile, he went on gathering facts.

Starke was a veteran of the high school teaching circuit. He’d seen his share of morning glories and of impassive average-mechanics working for the Valedictorian’s chair on graduation night. He’d gotten past the point of resenting them, and long before that he’d gotten past the point of wasting his conversation on them. He’d found out early in the game that their interests were not in common with his own.

So Lucas Martino attracted him and he felt obligated to establish some kind of link with the boy. He took several weeks to find the opportunity, and even then he had to force it. He was clumsy, because sociability wasn’t his forte. He was an economical man, saw no reason to establish social relations with anyone he didn’t respect, and respected few people.

Lucas was finishing up a report at the end of a class when Starke levered himself out of his chair, waited for the rest of the class to start filing out, and walked over to the boy.

“Martino — ”

Lucas looked up, surprised but not startled. “Yes, Mr. Starke?”

“Uh — you’re not a member of the Physics Club, are you?”

“No, sir.” The Physics Club existed as yet another excuse for a group picture in the yearbook.

“Well — I’ve been thinking of having the club perform some special experiments. Outside of class. Might even work up some demonstrations and stage them at an assembly. I thought the rest of the student body might be interested.” All of this was sheer fabrication, arrived at on the spur of the moment, and Starke was astonished at himself. “Wondered if you’d care to join in.”

Lucas shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Starke. I don’t have much extra time, with football practice and work at night.”