Man Plus (26 page)
Scanyon had already ordered an Air Force spottercopter into the air, in a search pattern all around the project. Its TV cameras were sweeping the freeway, the access roads, the parking lots, the fields and prairie, and displaying what they saw on the wall TV
at the end of the room. The Tonka police force had been alerted to watch for a strange devil-like creature running around at seventy kilometers an hour, which had led to trouble for the Tonka desk sergeant. He made a bad mistake. He asked the project security officer if he had been drinking. Ten seconds later, with his head filled with visions of pounding a beat in Kiska, the sergeant was on the police radio to all vehicles and foot patrolmen. The orders for the police were not to arrest Roger, not even to approach him. They were only to find him.
What Scanyon wanted was someone to blame. "I hold you responsible, Dr. Ramez,"
he barked at the staff shrink. "You and Major Carpenter. How could you let Torraway get into this sort of action without advance warning?"
Ramez said placatingly, "General, I told you Roger was unstable with regard to his wife. That's why I asked for someone like Sulie. He needed another object to fixate on, someone directly connected with the project--"
"Didn't work very well, did it?"
Sulie stopped listening. She knew very well that her turn was next, but she was trying to think. Over Scanyon's desk she saw the moving view from the copter. It was expressed as a schematic, the roads as lines of green, the vehicles as points of blue, buildings yellow. The few pedestrians were bright red. Now, if one of those red dots should suddenly start to move at the speed of a blue vehicle, that would be Roger. But he had had plenty of time to get farther away than the area the copter was covering.
"Tell them to scan the town, General," she said suddenly.
He frowned, but he picked up the phone and gave the order. He didn't get a chance to put it down again; there was an incoming call he could not refuse.
Telly Ramez got up from his chair next to the director and came around to Sulie Carpenter. She didn't look up from the folded transcript of the simulation. He waited patiently.
The director's call was from the President of the United States. They would have known that from the sweat that rolled down beneath Scanyon's temples, even if they had not seen Dash's tiny face in the screen on the director's desk. Faintly the voice leaked through to them: ". . . spoke to Roger he seemed--I don't know, disinterested. I thought it over, Vern, and then I decided to call you. Is everything going all right?"
Scanyon swallowed. He glanced around the table and abruptly folded up the privacy petals on the phone; the image dwindled to postage-stamp size. The voice faded to nothingness as the sound was transferred to a parabolic speaker aimed directly at Scanyon's head, and Scanyon's own words were swallowed by the petal-like shields. The rest of the room had no difficulty in following the conversation anyway; it was written very clearly on Scanyon's face.
Sulie looked up from the transcript at Telly Ramez. "Get him off the phone," she said impatiently. "I know where Roger is."
Ramez said, "At his wife's house."
She rubbed her eyes wearily. "I guess we didn't need a simulation for that, did we?
I'm sorry, Telly. I guess I wasn't keeping him on the hook as firmly as I thought I was."
They were right; of course; we had known that for some time. As soon as Scanyon got off the phone with the President the security office called to say that the bugs in Dorrie's bedroom had picked up the sound of Roger coming in through the window.
Scanyon's lemony small eyes seemed almost at the point of tears. "Put the sound on the horn," he ordered. "Display the house." And then he switched his phone to an outside line and dialed Dorrie's number.
From the loudspeaker came the sound of one ring, then a metallic noise and Roger's flat cyborg voice rasping, "Hello?" And a moment later, softer but equally toneless,
"Christ."
Scanyon jerked the earpiece away and rubbed his ear. "What the hell happened?" he demanded. There was no answer from anyone to the rhetorical question, and gingerly he put the phone back. "I'm getting some kind of trouble signal," he announced.
"We can send a man in, General," the assistant security chief suggested. "There are two of our men in that car out in front of the house there." The helicopter pickup had slid across the screen and settled at 1,800 feet over the Courthouse Square in the city of Tonka.
The camera was set for infrared, and in the upper corner of the screen the broad dark band of the Ship Canal identified the edge of the town. A rectangle of darkness surrounded by the moving lights of cars just below the screen's center point was the Courthouse Square, and Roger's home was marked with a tracer star in red. The assistant reached up and touched the blob of light nearby to show the car. "We're in voice contact with them, General," he went on. "They didn't see Colonel Torraway go in."
Sulie stood up. "I don't recommend it," she said.
"Your recommendations aren't too popular with me right now, Major Carpenter,"
Scanyon snarled.
"All the same, General--" She stopped as Scanyon raised his hand.
From the speaker Dorrie's voice came faintly: _I want a cup of tea_. And then Roger's: _Wouldn't you rather I rnade you a drink?_ And her almost inaudible _No_.
"All the same," Sulie spoke up, "he's stable enough now. Don't screw it up."
"I can't let him just sit out there! Who the hell knows what he'll do next? _You?_"
"You've got him spotted. I don't think he'll move, anyway, not for a while. Don Kayman's not far from there and he's a friend. Tell him to go get Roger."
"Kayman's not much of a combat specialist."
"Is that what you want? If Roger doesn't come back peacefully, exactly what are you going to do about it?"
_Do you want some tea?_
_No. . . . No, thank you._
"And turn that off," Sulie added. "Leave the poor bastard a little privacy."
Scanyon sat slowly back in his chair, patting the top of his desk with both hands at once, very gently. Then he picked up the phone and gave orders. "We'll do it your way one more time, Major," he said. "Not because I have much confidence. I just don't have much choice, either. I can't threaten you with anything. If this goes wrong again, I doubt I'll be in a position to punish anybody. But I'm pretty sure _somebody_ will."
Telesforo Ramez said, "Sir, I understand your position, but I think this isn't fair to Sulie. The simulation shows that he has to have a confrontation with his wife."
"The point of a simulation, Dr. Ramez, is that it should tell you what's going to happen _before_ it happens."
"Well, it also shows that Torraway is basically pretty stable in every other respect.
He'll handle this, General."
Scanyon went back to patting his desk.
Ramez said, "He's a complicated person. You've seen his Thematic Apperception Test patterns, General. He's high in all the fundamental drives: achievement, affiliation--not quite so high in power, but still healthy. He's not a manipulator. He's introspective. He needs to work things out in his head. Those are the qualities you want, General. He'll need all that. You can't ask him to be one person here in Oklahoma and another person on Mars."
"If I'm not mistaken," the general said, "that's what you promised me, with your behavior modification."
"No, General," the psychiatrist said patiently. "I only promised that if you gave him a reward like Sulie Carpenter he'd find it easier to reconcile himself to his problems with his wife. He has."
"B-mod has its own dynamics, General," Sulie put in. "You called me in pretty late."
"What are you telling me?" Scanyon asked dangerously. "Is he going to crack up on Mars?""I hope not. The odds are as good as we know how to make them, General. He's cleaned up a lot of old shit; you can see it in his latest TATs. But six days from now he'll be gone, and I won't be in his life any more. And that's wrong. B-mod should _never_ be cut off cold turkey. It should be phased out--a little less of me being around and then a little less than that until he's had a chance to build up his defenses."
The gentle patting on the desk was slower now, and Scanyon said, "It's a little late to tell me that."
Sulie shrugged, and did not speak.
Scanyon looked thoughtfully around the table. "All right. We've done all we can here tonight. You're all dismissed until eight--no, make that ten in the morning. By then I expect every one of you to have a report, no more than three minutes long, on where your own area of responsibilities stands, and what we should do."
Don Kayman got the message from a Tonka police patrol car. It swooshed up behind him, lights flashing and siren screaming, and pulled him over to order him to turn around and go back to Roger's apartment.
He knocked on the door with some trepidation, unsure of what he would find. And when the door opened, with Roger's gleaming eyes peering out from behind it, Kayman whispered a quick Hail Mary as he tried to look past Roger into the apartment--for what?
For the dismembered body of Dorrie Torraway? For a shambles of destruction? But all he saw was Dorrie herself, huddled in a wing chair and obviously weeping. The sight almost pleased him, since he had been prepared for so much worse.
Roger came along with no argument. "Goodbye, Dorrie," he said, and did not wait for an answer. He had trouble fitting himself into Don Kayman's little car, but his wings folded down. By pushing the reclining seat back as far as it would go he was able to manage, in a cramped and precarious position that would have been hopelessly uncomfortable for any normal human being. Roger, of course, was not a normal human being. His muscular system was content with prolonged overloads in almost any configuration it could bend into at all.
They were silent until they were almost at the project. Then Don Kayman cleared his throat. "You had us worried."
"I thought I would," said the flat cyborg voice. The wings stirred restlessly, writhing against each other like a rubbing of hands. "I wanted to see her, Don. It was important to me."
"I can understand that." Kayman turned into the broad, empty parking lot. "Well?"
he probed. "Are things all right?"
The cyborg mask turned toward him. The great compound eyes gleamed like faceted ebony, without expression, as Roger said: "You're a jerk, Father Kayman, sir. How all right can they be?"
Sulie Carpenter thought wistfully of sleep, as she might think of a vacation on the French Riviera. They were equally out of the question at that moment. She took two caps of amphetamines and a B-l2 injection, self-administered into the places in her arm she had learned to locate long ago.
The simulation of Roger's reactions had been compromised by the power failure, so she did it over again from punch-in to readout. We were content that this should be so. It gave us a chance to make a few corrections.
