"Algis Budrys - Who" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)

Algis Budrys

WHO?



Who was he? And why was he the way he was?

And how long was it before he died?





For Frank Kelly Freas,

who first created Martino,

and for Walter Fultz,

who saw him last


PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

It was near the middle of the night. The wind came up from the river, moaning under the filigreed iron bridges, and the weathercocks on the dark old buildings pointed their heads north.

The Military Police sergeant in charge had lined up his receiving squad on either side of the cobbled street. Blocking the street was a weathered concrete gateway with a black-and-white-striped wooden rail. The headlights of the MP super-Jeeps and of the waiting Allied Nations Government sedan glinted from the raised shatterproof riot visors on the squad's varnished helmets. Over their heads was a sign, fluorescing in the lights:

YOU ARE LEAVING THE ALLIED SPHERE

YOU ARE ENTERING THE SOVIET SOCIALIST SPHERE

In the parked sedan, Shawn Rogers sat waiting with a man from the ANG Foreign Ministry beside him. Rogers was Security Chief for this sector of the ANG administered Central European Frontier District. He waited patiently, his light green eyes brooding in the dark.

The Foreign Ministry representative looked at his thin gold wristwatch. "They'll be here with him in a minute." He drummed his fingertips on his briefcase. "If they keep to their schedule."

"They'll be on time," Rogers said. "That's the way they are. They held him four months, but now they'll be on time to prove their good faith all along." He looked out through the windscreen, past the silent driver's shoulders, at the gateway. The Soviet border guards on the other side---Slavs and stumpy Asiatics in shapeless quilted jackets---were ignoring the Allied squad. They were clustered around a fire in an oil drum in front of their checkpoint shack, holding their hands out to the warmth. Their shroud-barreled submachine guns were slung over their shoulders, hanging clumsily and unhandily. They were talking and joking, and none of them were bothering to watch the frontier.

"Look at them," the Foreign Ministry man said peevishly. "They don't care what we do. They're not concerned if we drive up with an armed squad."

The Foreign Ministry man was from Geneva, five hundred kilometers away. Rogers had been here, in this sector, for seven years. He shrugged. "We're all old acquaintances by now. This frontier's been here forty years. They know we're not going to start shooting, any more than they are. This isn't where the war is."

He looked at the clustered Soviets again, remembering a song he'd heard years ago: "Give the Comrade With the Machine Gun the Right to Speak." He wondered if they knew of that song, over on their side of the line. There were many things on the other side of the line that he wanted to know. But there was little hope for it.

The war was in all the world's filing cabinets. The weapon was information: things you knew, things you'd found out about them, things they knew about you. You sent people over the line, or you had them planted from years ago, and you probed. Not many of your people got through. Some of them might. So you put together the little scraps of what you'd found out, hoping it wasn't too garbled, and in the end, if you were clever, you knew what the Soviets were going to do next.

And they probed back. Not many of their people got through---at least, you could be reasonably sure they didn't---but, in the end, they found out what you were going to do next. So neither side did anything. You probed, back and forth, and the deeper you tried to go, the harder it was. For a little distance on either side of the line, there was some light. Farther on, there was only a dark fog. And some day, you had to hope, the balance would break in your favor.