Who? by Algis Budrys

Author:Algis Budrys [Budrys, Algis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: sf
Publisher: Pyramid Books
Published: 1958-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

3

The clock on Rogers’ desk read a few minutes past nine. Rogers still sat behind his desk, and Finchley waited in the chair beside it.

Rogers felt tired. He’d been up some twenty-two hours, and the fact that Finchley and their man had done the same was no help.

It’s piled up on me, he thought. Day after day without enough sleep, and tension all the time. I should have been in bed hours ago.

But Finchley had gone through it all with him. And their man must feel infinitely worse. And what was a little lost sleep compared to what the man had lost? Still Rogers was feeling sick to his stomach. His eyes were burning. His scalp was numb with exhaustion, and he had a vile taste in his mouth. He wondered if his sticking to the job was made any the less because Finchley was younger and could take it, or because the metal-faced man was still following his ghost up and down the city streets. He decided it was.

“I hate to ask you to stay here so late, Finch,” he said.

Finchley shrugged. “That’s the job, isn’t it?” He picked up the piece of Danish pastry left over from supper, swirled his cold half-container of old coffee, and took a swallow. “I’ve got to admit I hope this doesn’t happen every night. But I can’t understand what he’s doing.”

Rogers toyed with the blotter on his desk, pushing it back and forth with his fingertips. “We ought to be getting another report fairly soon. Maybe he’s done something.”

“Maybe he’s going to sleep in the park.”

“The city police’ll pick him up if he tries to.”

“What about that? What’s the procedure if he’s arrested for a civil crime?”

“One more complication.” Rogers shook his head hopelessly, drugged by fatigue. “I briefed the Commissioner’s office and we’ve got cooperation on the administrative level. It’d be a poor move to issue a general order for all patrolmen to leave him alone. Somebody’d let it slip. The theory is that beat patrolmen will call in to their precinct houses if they spot a metal-headed man. The precinct captains have instructions that he’s to be left alone. But if a patrolman arrests him for vagrancy before he calls in, then all kinds of things could go wrong. It’ll be straightened out in a hurry, but it might get on record somewhere. Then, a few years from now, somebody doing a book or something might come across the record, and that’ll be that. We can’t keep the media bottled up forever.” Rogers sighed. “I only hope it’d be a few years from now.” He looked down at his desktop. “It’s a mess. This world was never organized to include a faceless man.”

It’s true, he thought. Just by being alive, he’s made me stumble from the very start. Look at us all — Security, the whole ANG-handcuffed because we couldn’t simply shoot him and get him out of the way. Going around in circles, trying to find an answer. And he hasn’t yet done anything.

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