Man Plus (28 page)

The long Hohmann-orbit trip to Mars takes seven months. All previous astronauts, cosmonauts and sinonauts had found them very wearing months indeed. Each day had 86,400 seconds to fill, and there was very little to fill them with.

Roger was different from all the others in two ways. First, he was the most precious passenger any spaceship had yet carried. In and around his body were the fruits of seven billion Man Plus dollars. To the maximum extent possible, he had to be spared.

The other way was that, uniquely, he _could_ be spared.

His body clocks had been disconnected. His perception of time was what the computer told him it should be.

They slowed him down gradually, at first. People began to seem to move a little more briskly. Mealtime came sooner than he was ready for it. Voices grew shriller.

When that phased in nicely, they increased the retardation in his systems. Voices passed into high-pitched gibberish, and then out of his perception entirely. He hardly saw people at all, except as flickers of motion. They sealed off his room from the day--it was not to keep him from escaping, it was to protect him from the quick transition from day to night. Platters of room-temperature, picnic-style food appeared before him. When he had begun to push them away to signal he was done or didn't want them, they whisked out of sight.

Roger knew what was being done to him. He didn't mind. He accepted Sulie's promise that it was good, and needful, and all right. He thought he was going to miss Sulie and looked for a way to tell her so. There was a way, but it all went so rapidly; messages were chalked as if by magic on a board in front of him. When he responded, he found his answers snatched away and erased before he was quite sure he was through: HOW ARE YOU FEELING?

Pick up the chalk, write one word.

FINE

and then the board is gone, brought back with another message--WE'RE TAKING YOU TO MERRITT ISLAND.

And his reply:

I'M READY.

snatched away before he could add the rest, which he scrawled rapidly on his bedside table--GIVE MY LOVE TO DORRIE

He had intended to add "and Sulie," but there was no time; suddenly the table was gone. He was gone from the room. There was a sudden dizzying lurch of movement. He caught a quick glimpse of the ambulance entrance to the project, and a quick phantom glimpse of a nurse--was it Sulie?--with her back to him, adjusting her panty hose. His whole bed seemed to leap into the air, into a brutal blaze of winter sunlight, then into--what? A car? Before he could even question, it sprang into the air, and he realized that it was a helicopter, and then that he was very close to being sick. He felt his gorge rising in his throat.

The telemetry faithfully reported, and the controls were adequate to the problem.

He still felt he would like to vomit, feeling himself thrown around as though in the most violent sort of cross-chop sea, but he did not.

Then they stopped.

Out of the helicopter.

Bright sunlight again.

Into something else--which he recognized, after it had begun to move, as the interior of a CB-5, fitted up as a hospital ship. Safety webbing spun magically around him.

It was not comfortable--there was still the hammering and the twisting vertigo, though not as unbearable--but it did not last long. A minute or two, it seemed to Roger.

Then pressure smote his ears and they were taking him out of the plane, into blinding heat and light--Florida, of course, he realized tardily; but by then he was in an ambulance, then out of it . . .

Then, for a time that seemed to Roger ten or fifteen minutes and was actually the better part of a day, nothing happened except that he was in a bed, and was fed, and his wastes were removed by catheter, and then a note appeared before him: GOOD LUCK, ROGER, WE'RE ON OUR WAY.

and then a steam hammer smote him from underneath and he lost consciousness.

It is all very well, he thought, to spare me the inconvenience of boredom, but you may be killing me to do it. But before he could think of a way to communicate this to anyone he was out.

Time passed. A time of dreams.

He realized groggily that they had been keeping him sedated, not only slowed down but asleep; and in realizing this, he was awake.

There was no feeling of pressure. In fact, he was floating. Only a spiderweb of retaining straps kept him in place.

He was in space.

A voice spoke next to his ear: "Good morning, Roger. This is a tape recording."

He turned his head and found a tiny speaker grille next to his ear.

"We've slowed it down so that you can understand it. If you want to speak to us, you just tape what you want to say, in a minute. Then we'll speed it up so we can understand it.

Ain't science grand?

"Anyway, we're into day thirty-one as I tape this. In case you don't remember me any more, I'm Don Kayman. You had a little trouble. Your muscle system fought against the takeoff acceleration, and you pulled some ligaments. We had to do a little surgery.

You're mending nicely. Brad rebuilt part of the cybernetics, and you probably can handle the deltas when we land in good shape. Let's see. There's nothing else important to say, and probably you have some questions, but before you take your turn there's a message for you."

And the tape whispered scratchily for a moment, and then Dorrie's voice came on, bent and attenuated. Over a background hiss of static she said: "Hi, honey. Everything's fine back home, and I'm keeping the home fires burning for you. I think of you. Take care of yourself."

And then Kayman's voice again: "Now here's what you do. First off, if there's anything important--if you hurt, or anything like that--tell us that right away. There's a lot of real-time loss in this, so say the important stuff first, and when you're through just hold up your hand while we change tapes, and then you can go on to the chitchat. Now go."

And the tape stopped, and a small red light that had said "Play" next to the speaker grille went out, and a green one came on to say "Record." He picked up the microphone and was getting ready to say that no, there wasn't any particular problem, when he happened to look down and notice that his right leg was missing.

We were, of course, monitoring every moment in the spacecraft.

The communication link had stretched pretty thin even after the first month. The geometry was troublesome. While the spacecraft was climbing out toward Mars's orbit, Mars was moving. So was the Earth, and a good deal faster. It would go around the sun almost twice before Mars completed a single one of its orbits. The telemetry from the spacecraft now took something like three minutes to reach Goldstone. We were passive listeners. It would get worse. Any command from Earth would come half an hour late by the time the spacecraft was circling Mars, round-trip time at the speed of light. We had surrendered instant control; the ship and its passengers were effectively on their own.

Later still the Earth and Mars would be on opposite sides of the sun. The weak signals from the spacecraft would be so compromised by solar interference that we would not even receive reliably. But by then the 3070 would be in orbit, and shortly thereafter the MHD generator would join it. Then there would be plenty of power for everything. It was all planned out, where each would go, how they would interlink with each other, with the orbiting ship, with the ground station and with Roger, wherever he might roam.

We launched the 3070, powered down into stand-by mode. It was a robot run. The ionization risk turned out, on analysis, to be unacceptable in a spacecraft of normal configuration, so the Cape engineers stripped away all the life support, all the telemetry, the demolition system and half of the maneuver capability. The weight went into shielding.

Once it was launched it was silent and lifeless, and would stay that way for seven months.

Then General Hesburgh would capture control and play both ends of the docking maneuver. It would be difficult, but that was what he was paid for.

We launched the MHD generator a month later, with a crew of two volunteers and a maximum of publicity. Everyone was interested now. And no one objected, not even the NPA. They disdained the first launch. They acknowledged tracking the launch of the 3070

and offered their data to the NASA net. When the generator went up, their ambassador sent a polite note of congratulations.

Clearly something was happening.

It was not all psychological. New York City had two straight weeks without rioting, and garbage was collected from some of the main streets. Winter rains put out the last of the great fires in the Northwest, and the governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California sent out a joint call for volunteers. More than a hundred thousand young people signed up to replant the mountain slopes.

The President of the United States was the last to notice the change; he was too busy with the internal disasters of a nation that had overbred and overspent itself into tragedy. But the time came when he realized there had been a change, not only within the United States but world-wide, not only in a change in mood but in a change in tactics. The Asians withdrew their nuclear subs to the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and when Dash got confirmation of that he picked up the phone and called Vern Scanyon.

"I think--" He paused, and reached out to touch the smooth wood of his desk top. "I think it's working. Pat your staff on the back for me. Now, what else do you need?"

But there was nothing.

We were fully committed now. We had gone as far as we could go, and the rest was up to the expedition itself.