Man Plus (3 page)
"No, of course not--well, hell. Yes, I mind," said Roger savagely. "It's about like anybody else's, I guess. After being married a few years."
The psychiatrist leaned back, looking thoughtfully at Roger. He said, "In your case, Dr. Torraway, this interview is pretty much a formality. You've had quarterly checks for the last seven years and profiled well within the normal range every time. There's nothing violent or unstable in your history. Let me just ask you if you feel uneasy about meeting the President."
"A little awed, maybe," said Roger, shifting gears.
"That's natural enough. Did you vote for Dash?"
"Sure--wait the hell a minute. That's none of your business!"
"Right, Dr. Torraway. You can go back to the briefing room now."
They didn't actually let him go back in the same room, but in one of the smaller conference chambers. Kathleen Doughty joined him almost at once. They had worked together for two and a half years, but she was still formal. "Looks like we've passed, Mr.
Dr. Colonel Torraway, sir," she said, her eyes focused as usual on a point over his left shoulder, the cigarette held between her face and him. "Ah, good, a little libation," she said, and reached out past him.
A livened waiter--no, Roger reminded himself, a Secret Service man wearing a waiter's uniform--was standing there with a tray of drinks. Roger took a whiskey and soda, the big prosthesiologist accepted a small glass of dry sherry. "Be sure you drink it all," she whispered to his shoulder. "They put something in it, I think."
"Something what?"
"To calm you down. If you don't drink it all, they put an armed guard behind you."
To humor her Roger drank his whiskey straight down, but he wondered how someone with her delusions and fears had passed the psychiatric clearance so readily. His five minutes with the shrink had reinforced his self-observing stance, and he was busily analyzing with one part of his mind. Why did he feel Uneasy in this woman's presence?
Not just because she was wiggy in her mannerisms. He wondered if the trouble was that she admired his courage so much. He had tried to explain to her that being an astronaut no longer took much courage, no more than flying a transport, probably less than driving a cab. Of course, as a back-up for Man Plus there was a very real danger. But only if the men ahead of him in line all dropped out, and that was not a chance to cause much worry.
Nevertheless, she went on regarding him with that intensity that in some lights seemed to be admiration, and in others pity.
With the other part of his mind, as always, he was alert for his wife. When she finally came in she was angry, and, for her, disheveled. The hair she had spent an hour putting up was now down. It hung waist-length, a fine frothy fall of black that made her look like a Tenniel drawing of Alice, if Tenniel had been working for _Playboy_ at the time. Roger hurried over to soothe her, a job which took so much of his attention that he was caught off-guard when he felt a sudden stir and heard someone say, not very loud or formally, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States."
Fitz-James Deshatine came grinning and nodding into the room, looking exactly like himself on television, only shorten. Without prompting the lab people sorted themselves into a semicircle, and the President went around it, shaking every hand, with the project director at his side making the introductions. Deshatine had been beautifully briefed. He had the politician's trick of catching every name and making some sort of personal response. To Kathleen Doughty it was "Glad to see some Irish in this crew, Dr.
Doughty." To Roger it was "We met once before, Colonel Torraway. After that fine job with the Russians. Let's see, that must be seven years ago, when I was chairman of the Senate committee. Perhaps you remember." Certainly Roger remembered--and was flattered, and knew he was being flattered, that the President remembered. To Dorrie it was "Good heavens, Mrs. Torraway, how come a pretty girl like you wastes herself on one of these scientific Johnnies?" Roger stiffened a little when he heard that. It was not so much that it was down-putting to him, it was the kind of empty compliment Dorrie always disdained.
But she was not disdaining it. Coming from the President of the United States, it brought a sparkle to her eyes. "What a beautiful man," she whispered, following his progress as he made the circle.
When he had finished going around the semicircle, he hopped to the little platform and said, "Well, friends, I came here to look and listen, not to talk. But I do want to thank every one of you for putting up with the nonsense they make you go through to have me around. I'm sorry about that. It isn't my idea. They just tell me it's necessary, as long as there are so many wacks around. And as long as the enemies of the Free World are what they are, and we're the kind of open, trusting people _we_ are." He grinned directly at Dorrie. "Tell me, did they make you soak your fingernails before they let you in?"
Dorrie laughed musically, startling hen husband. (She had been complaining with vicious anger that her nail polish had been ruined.) "They certainly did, Mr. President.
Just like my manicurist," she called.
"Sorry about that. They say that's to make sure that you don't have any secret bio-chem-i-cal poisons to scratch me with when we shake hands. Well, you got to do what the man says, I guess. Anyway"--he chuckled--"if you think it's a nuisance for you pretty ladies, you should see how my old cat acts when they do it to her. Good thing she didn't really have poison on her claws last time they did it. She scored on three Secret Service men, my nephew and two of her own kittens before she was through." He laughed, and Roger was a little surprised to find that he and Donrie and the rest were joining in.
"Anyway," said the President, coming to the point, "I'm grateful for your courtesy.
And I am one thousand times more grateful for the way you're pushing the Man Plus project through. I don't have to tell you what it means to the Free World. There's Mars out there, the only piece of real estate around that's worth having, apart from the one we're all standing on right now. By the end of this decade it's going to belong to somebody. There
are only two choices. It will belong to them, or it will belong to us. And I want it to be us.
You people are the ones that are going to make sure that happens, because you're going to give us the Man Plus that will live on Mars. I want to thank you deeply and sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, in the name of every living human being in the Free World democratic lands, for making this dream possible. And now," he said, smothering an attempt at a round of polite applause, "I think it's time I stopped talking and started listening. I want to see what's happening with our Man Plus. General Scanyon, it's all yours.""Right, Mr. President."
Vern Scanyon was director of the laboratory division of the Grissom Memorial Institute of Space Medicine. He was also a retired two-star general and acted it. He checked his watch, glanced at his executive assistant (he sometimes called him his executive officer) for confirmation and said, "We have a few minutes before Commander Hartnett finishes his warm-up tests. Suppose we look in on him on the closed circuit for a minute. Then I'll try to tell you what's going to happen today."
The room darkened.
A TV projection screen lighted up behind the platform. There was a scrape as one of the "waiters" moved a chair for the President to sit in. He muttered something. The chair was moved back, and the President nodded, shadowy in the flicker from the projection screen, and looked up.
The screen showed a man.
He did not look like a man. His name was Will Hartnett. He was an astronaut, a Democrat, a Methodist, a husband, a father, an amateur tympanist, a beautifully smooth ballroom dancer; but to the eye he was none of those things. To the eye he was a monster.
He did not look human at all. His eyes were glowing, red-faceted globes. His nostrils flared in flesh folds, like the snout of a star-nosed mole. His skin was artificial; its color was normal heavy sun tan, but its texture was that of a rhinoceros's hide. Nothing that could be seen about him was of the appearance he had been born with. Eyes, ears, lungs, nose, mouth, circulatory system, perceptual centers, heart, skin--all had been replaced or augmented. The changes that were visible were only the iceberg's tip. What had been done inside him was far more complex and far more important. He had been rebuilt for the single purpose of fitting him to stay alive, without external artificial aids, on the surface of the planet Mars.
He was a cyborg--a cybernetic organism. He was part man and part machine, the two disparate sections fused together so that even Will Hartnett, looking at himself in the mirror on the occasions when he was permitted to see a mirror, did not know what of him was him and what had been added.
In spite of the fact that nearly everyone in the room had actually played a part in creating the cyborg, in spite of the familiarity all of them had had with his photos, TV
image and his person itself, there was a muffled gasp. As the TV camera caught him he was doing endless effortless push-ups. The view was from a yard or so from the top of his strangely formed head, and as Hartnett locked himself up on his arms his eyes came level with the camera, glinting from the facets that gave him multiple scanning of the environment.
He looked very strange. Roger, remembering the old movies of his childhood hours before the TV, thought that his good old buddy looked a lot weirder than any animated carrot or magnified beetle on the horror shows. Hartnett had been born in Danbury, Connecticut. Every visible artifact he wore had been manufactured in California, Oklahoma, Alabama or New York. But none of it looked human or even terrestrial. He looked _Martian_.
In the sense that form follows function, Martian he was. He was shaped for Mars. In a sense, too, he was there already. Grissom Labs had the finest Mars-normal tanks in the world, and Hartnett's push-ups were on iron oxide sands, in a pressure chamber where the weight of gas had been dropped to ten millibars, only 1 percent of the thrust on the outside of the double glass walls. The temperature of the sparse gas molecules around him was held at forty-five degrees below zero, Celsius. Batteries of high-ultraviolet lamps flooded the scene with the exact spectrum of sunlight on a Martian winter day.
If the place where Hartnett was was not truly Mars, it was close enough to fool even a Martian--if there had ever been such things as Martians--in every respect but one. In all but that one respect, a Ras Thavas or a Wellsian mollusk might have emerged from sleep, looked about him and decided that he was indeed on Mars, on a late fall day in the middle latitudes, shortly after sunrise.
The one anomaly simply could not be helped. He was subject to standard Earth gravity instead of the fractional attraction that would be proper for the surface of Mars.
The engineers had gone so far as to calculate the cost of flying the entire Mars-normal tank in a jet conversion, dropping it along a calculated parabola to simulate, at least for ten or twenty minutes at a time, the proper Martian weights. They had decided against it on the grounds of cost, and pondering, they had estimated, allowed for and finally dismissed the effects of the one anomaly.
The one thing no one feared might go wrong with Hartnett's new body was that it might be too weak for any stresses that might be placed on it. He was already lifting five-hundred-pound weights. When he really reached Mars, he would be able to carry more than half a ton.
In a sense Hartnett on Earth was more hideous than he would be on Mars, because his telemetry equipment was as monstrous as himself. Pulse, temperature and skin resistance sensor pads clung to his shoulders and head. Probes reached under the tough artificial skin to measure his internal flows and resistances. Transmitter antennae fanned out like a peasant's broom from his backpack. Everything that was going on in his system was being continually measured, encoded and transmitted to the 100-meter-per-second broad-band recording tapes.
