Man Plus (33 page)

The vehicle with the magnetohydrodynamic generator attained Mars orbit, and with General Hesburgh helping, matched orbit with Deimos and nestled into the crater. It was a perfect coupling. The vehicle swung out its struts to touch the rock of the moon, augered them in, and locked. A brief jet from the maneuvering system tested its stability: it was now a part of Deimos. The power system began to sequence toward full operational mode. A fusion flame woke the plasma fires. Radar reached out to find the target on the lander, then locked on to the dome. Power began to flow. The energy density of the field was low enough for Brad and Kayman to walk around in it unaware, and to Roger it was like the basking warmth of sunlight; but the foil strips in the outer dome gathered the microwave energy and channeled it to the pumps, the batteries.

The fusion fuel had a life of fifty years. For that long at least there would be energy for Roger and his backpack computer on Mars, whatever happened on Earth.

And meanwhile--

There were other couplings.

In the long spiral up from Earth, Sulie Carpenter and her pilot, Dinty Meighan, had had time heavy on their hands and had found a way to use it.

The act of copulation in free fall presents certain problems. First Sulie had to buckle one strand of webbing around her waist, then Dinty embraced her with his arms, and she him with her legs. Their motions were underwater slow. It took Sulie a long, gentle, dreamy time to come to orgasm, and Dinty was even slower. When they were finished they were hardly even breathing hard. Sulie stretched and yawned, arching her belly against the retaining strap. "Nice," she said drowsily. "I'll remember that."

"We both will, honey," he said, misunderstanding her. "I think that's the best way we screw. Next time--"

She shook her head to interrupt him. "No next time, Dinty dear. That was it."

He pulled his head back to look at her. "What?"

She smiled. Her right eye was still only centimeters from his left, and their view of each other curiously foreshortened. She craned forward and rubbed her cheek gently against his bristly one.

He scowled and detached himself, suddenly feeling naked where before he had been only bare. He pulled his shorts out from behind the handhold where he had cached them and slid into them.

"Sulie, what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter. We're almost ready for orbit, that's all."

He pushed himself backward across the cramped compartment to get a better look at her. She was worth looking at. Her hair had gone back to muddy blond and her eyes were brown without the contact lenses; and even after almost two hundred days of never being more than ten meters from him, she still looked good to Dinty Meighan. "I didn't think you had any surprises left," he marveled.

"You never can tell about a woman."

"Come on, Sulie! What's this all about? You sound as though you've been planning--Hey!" A thought struck him. "You volunteered for this mission--not to go to Mars, but to go to some guy! Right? One of the guys ahead of us?"

"You're very quick, Dinty. Not," she said fondly, "where I don't want you to be, though."

"Who is it, Brad? Hesburgh? Not the priest?--oh, wait a minute!" He nodded. "Sure!

The one you were mixed up with back on Earth. The cyborg!"

"Colonel Roger Torraway, the human being," she corrected. "As human as you are, except for some improvements."

He laughed, more resentment than humor. "A lot of improvements, and no balls at all."

Sulie unstrapped herself. "Dinty," she said sweetly, "I've enjoyed sex with you, and I respect you, and you've been about as comfortable to be with as any human being possibly could be on this Goddamned eternity trip. But there are some things I don't want you to say. You're right. Roger doesn't happen to have any testicles, right at this exact moment.

But he's a human being I can respect and love, and he's the only one like that I've found lately. Believe me, I've looked."

"Thanks!"

"Oh, don't do this, dear Dinty. You know you're not really jealous. You've already got a wife."

"Next year I do! That's a long way off." She shrugged, grinning. "Ah, but Sulie!

There are some things you can't kid me about. You love screwing!"

"I like body contact and intimacy," she corrected, "and I like coming to orgasm. I like both those things better with someone I love, Dinty. No offense."

He scowled. "You've got a long wait, sweetie."

"Maybe not."

"The hell you say. I won't see Irene for seven months. But you--you won't be back any faster than I will; and then it only begins. They've got to put him back together for you.

Assuming they _can_ put him back together. It sounds like a long time between fucks."

"Oh, Dinty. Don't you think I've thought this all out?" She patted him in passing, on the way to her own locker. "Sex isn't just coitus. There are more ways to orgasm than with a penis in my vagina. And there's more to sex than orgasm. Not to mention love. Roger,"

she went on, wriggling into her jump suit, not so much for modesty as for pockets, "is a resourceful, loving person, and so am I. We'll make out--anyway, until the rest of the colonists land."

"Rest?" he struggled. "Rest of the _colonists?_"

"Haven't you figured it out yet? I'm not going back with all of you, Dinty, and I don't think Roger is either. We're going to be Martians!"

And meanwhile, in the Oval Room of the White House, the President of the United States was confronting Vern Scanyon and a young, coffee-colored man with tinted glasses and the build of a football player. "So you're the one," he said, appraising him. "You think we don't know how to run a computer study."

"No, Mr. President," the young man said steadily. "I don't think that's the problem."

Scanyon coughed. "Byrne here," he said, "is a graduate student on work-study from M.I.T. His thesis is on sampling methodology, and we gave him access to some of the, ah, classified material. Especially public-opinion studies about attitudes on the project."

"But not to a computer," Byrne said.

"Not to a big one," Scanyon corrected. "You had your own desk dataplex."

The President said mildly, "Get on with it, Scanyon."

"Well, his results came out different. According to his interpretations, the public opinion on the whole question of colonizing Mars was, well, apathy. You remember, Mr.

President, there was some question about the results at the time? The raw results weren't encouraging at all? But when we played them through analysis they came out positive to--what do you call it?--two sigmas. I never knew why."

"Did you check?"

"Certainly, Mr. President! Not me," Scanyon added quickly. "That wasn't my responsibility. But I'm satisfied that the studies were verified."

Byrne put in, "Three different times, with three different programs. There were minor variations, of course. But they all came out significant and reliable. Only when I repeated them on my desk machine they didn't. And that's the way it is, Mr. President. If you work up the figures on any big computer in the net you get one result. If you work them up on a small isolated machine you get another."

The President drummed the balls of his thumbs on the desk. "What's your conclusion?"

Byrne shrugged. He was twenty-three years old, and his surroundings intimidated him. He looked to Scanyon for help and found none; he said, "You'll have to ask somebody else that one, Mr. President. I can only give you my own conjecture. Somebody's buggering our computer network."

The President rubbed the left lobe of his nose reflectively, nodding slowly. He looked at Byrne for a moment and then said, without raising his voice, "Carousso, come on in here. Mr. Byrne, what you see and hear in this room is top secret. When you leave, Mr.

Carousso will see that you are informed as to what that means to you in detail; basically, you are not to talk about it. To anyone. Ever."

The door to the President's anteroom opened and a tall, solid man with a self-effacing air walked in. Byrne stared at him wonderingly: Charles Carousso, the head of the CIA! "What about it, Chuck?" the President asked. "What about him?"

"We've checked Mr. Byrne, of course," said the Agency man. His words were precise and uninflected. "There isn't anything significantly adverse to him--you'll be glad to know, I suppose, Mr. Byrne. And what he says checks out. It isn't only the public-opinion surveys. The war-risk projections, the cost/effectiveness studies--run on the net they come out one way, run on independent calculating machines they come out another. I agree with Mr. Byrne. Our computer net has been compromised."

The President's lips were pressed together as though he were holding back what he wanted to say. All he allowed to come out was, "I want you to find out how this happened, Chuck. But the question now is, who? The Asians?"

"No, sir! We checked that out. It's impossible."

"Bullshit it's impossible!" roared the President. "We know they already did tap our lines once, on the simulation of Roger Torraway's systems!"

"Mr. President, that's an entirely different case. We found that tap and neutralized it. It was in the groundlines cable on a nonsensitive linkage. The comm circuits on our major machines are absolutely leakproof." He glanced at Byrne. "You have a report on the techniques involved, Mr. President; I'll be glad to go over it with you at another time."

"Oh, don't worry about me," said Byrne, smiling for the first time. "Everybody knows the links are multiply scrambled. If you've checked me out, I'm sure you found out that a lot of us graduate students fool around trying to tap in, and none of us make it."