Man Plus (6 page)
It was only the little two-room suite that was officially his home that gave him any comfort at all. There he had his TV set, his stereo, his telephone, his books. Sometimes one of the graduate students or a fellow astronaut would visit with him there, playing chess or trying to talk a conversation while their chests labored and lungs pumped fruitlessly at the 7,500-foot pressure. These visits he looked forward to and tried to prolong. When no one was with him he was on his own resources. Infrequently he read. Sometimes he sat before the TV, regardless of what was being shown on it. Most often he "rested." That was how he described it to his overseers, by which he meant sitting or lying with his vision system in stand-by. It was like having one's eyes closed but remaining awake. A bright enough light would register on his senses, as it will even through a sleeper's closed lids; a sound would penetrate at once. In those times his brain raced, conjuring up thoughts of sex, food, jealousy, sex, anger, children, nostalgia, love . . . until he pleaded for relief and was given a course in self-hypnosis which let him wash his mind empty. After that in "rest" mode he did almost nothing that was conscious, while his nervous system groomed and prepared
itself for the next sensations of pain and his brain counted the seconds until his flight would be over and his normal human body given back to him.
There were a lot of those seconds. He had multiplied them out often enough. Seven months in orbit to Mars. Seven months coming back. A few weeks at both ends, getting ready for the launch and then debriefing before they would start the process of restoring him to his own body. A few months--no one would tell him exactly how many--while the surgery took place and the replaced parts healed.
The number of seconds, close as he could guess it, was some forty-five million. Give or take as much as ten million. He felt each one of them arrive and linger and reluctantly slip past.
The psychologists had tried to avoid all this by planning every moment for him. He refused the plans. They tried to understand him with devious tests and pattern-scanning.
He let them pry, but inside himself he kept a citadel of privacy that he would not let them invade. Hartnett had never thought of himself as an introspective man; he knew that he was a mile wide and an inch deep, and that he led an unexamined life. He liked it that way.
But now that he had nothing left but the interior of his mind that was his own, he guarded that.
He wished sometimes that he did know how to examine his life. He wished he could understand his reasons for doing what he did.
Why had he volunteered for the mission? Sometimes he tried to remember, and then decided he had never known. Was it because the free world needed Martian living space? Because he wanted the glamour of being the first Martian? For the money? For the scholarships and favors it would mean for the kids? To make Brenda love him?
It probably was in among those reasons somewhere, but he couldn't remember. If he had ever known.
In any case he was committed. The thing he _was_ sure of was that he had no way to back out now.
He would let them do whatever savage, sadistic torturing they wanted of his body.
He would board the spaceship that would take him to Mars. He would endure the seven endless months in orbit. He would go down to the surface, explore, stake claims, take samples, photograph, test. He would rise up again from the Martian surface and live somehow through the seven-month return, and he would give them all the information they wanted. He would accept the medals and the applause and the lecture tours and the television interviews and the contracts for books.
And then he would present himself to the surgeons to be put back the way he was supposed to be.
All of those things he had made his mind up to, and he was sure he would carry them out.
There was only one question in his mind to which he had not yet worked out an answer. It had to do with a contingency he was not prepared to meet. When he first volunteered for the program, they had told him very openly and honestly that the medical problems were complex and not fully understood. They would have to learn how to deal with some of them on him. It was possible that some of the answers would be hard to find or wrong. It was possible that returning him to his own shape would be, well, difficult.
They told him that very clearly, at the very beginning, and then they never said it again.
But he remembered. The problem he had not resolved was what he would do if for any reason, when the whole mission was over, they could not put him back together right
away. What he couldn't decide was whether he would then simply kill himself or at the same time kill as many as possible of his friends, superiors and colleagues as well.
Four
Group of Probable Pallbearers
Roger Torraway, Col. (Ret.) USAF, B.A., M.A., D.Sc. (Hon.). At the time he woke up in the morning, the night shift finished bench-running the cyborg's photoreceptors. There had been an unidentified voltage drop caught on the monitors when they were last in use on the cyborg, but nothing showed in the bench test, and nothing had been visible when they were stripped. They were certified serviceable.
Roger had slept badly. It was a terrible responsibility, being custodian of mankind's last forlorn hope for freedom and decency. When he woke up it was with that thought in mind; there was a part of Roger Torraway--it showed itself most commonly in dreams--that was about nine years old. It took all the things the President said at face value, although Roger himself, doubling as diplomat and mission .head, world traveler, familiar of a dozen capitals, really did not thInk in his conscious mind that the "Free World"
existed.
He dressed, his mind in the familiar occupation of resolving a dichotomy. Let's assume Dash is on the level, and occupying Mars means salvation for humanity, he thought. Can we cut it? He thought of Willy Hartnett--good-looking (or he had been, till the prosthesiologists got at him). Amiable. Good with his hands. But also a little bit of a lightweight, when you came to look at him honestly. Likely to take a drink too many at the club on a Saturday night. Not to be trusted in the kitchen with another man's wife at a party. He was not a hero, by any measure Roger could find. But who was? He cast his mind down the list of back-ups to the cyborg. Number One, Vic Freibart, currently off on a ceremonial tour with the Vice President and temporarily removed from the order of succession. Number Two, Carl Mazzini, on sick leave while the leg he had broken at Mount Snow healed up. Number Three: Him.
There was no Valley Forge quality in any of them.
He made his breakfast without waking Dorrie, got the car out and left it puffing on its skirts while he picked up the morning paper, threw it into the garage and closed the door. His next-door neighbor, walking toward his car pool, hailed him. "See the news this morning? I see Dash was in town last night. Some high-level conference."
Roger said automatically, "No, I haven't put on the TV this morning." But I did see Dash, he thought, and I could take the wind out of _your_ sails. It annoyed him not to be
able to say it. Security was a confounded nuisance. Half of his recent trouble with Dorrie, he was sure, came from the fact that in the neighborhood wives' morning block conference and coffee binge she was allowed to mention her husband only as a formerly active astronaut, now in administrative work. Even his trips abroad had to be played down--"out of town," "business trip," anything but "Well, _my_ husband is meeting with the Chiefs of Staff of the Basutoland Air Force this week." She had resisted. She still resisted, or at least complained to Roger about it often enough. But as far as he knew, she had not broken security. Since at least three of the wives were known to report to the Lab intelligence officer, he undoubtedly would have known.
As Roger got into the car he remembered that he had not kissed Dorrie goodbye.
He told himself that it did not matter. She would not wake up and therefore would not know; if by any chance she did wake up, she would complain at being wakened. But he did not like to give up a ritual. While he thought about it, however, he was automatically putting the car into Drive and keying his code number for the Lab; the car began to move.
He sighed, snapped on the TV and watched the _Today Show_ all the way to work.
Fr. Donnelly S. Kayman, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., S.J. As he began celebrating the Mass in the Lady Chapel of St. Jude's, three miles away, on the other side of Tonka, the cyborg was greedily swallowing the one meal he would get that day. Chewing was difficult because lack of practice had made his gums sore, and the saliva didn't seem to flow as freely as it should any more. But the cyborg ate with enthusiasm, not even thinking about the test program for the day, and when he had finished he gazed sadly at the empty plate.
Don Kayman was thirty-one years old and the world's most authoritative areologist (which is to say, specialist in the planet Mars)--at least in the Free World. (Kayman would have admitted that old Parnov at the Shklovskii Institute in Novosibirsk also knew a thing or two.) He was also a Jesuit priest. He did not think of himself as being one thing first and the other with what part of him was left over; his work was areology, his person was the priesthood. Meticulously and with joy he elevated the Host, drank the wine, said the final _redempit_, glanced at his watch and whistled. He was running late. He shed his robes in record time. He aimed a slap at the Chicano altar boy, who grinned and opened the door for him. They liked each other; Kayman even thought that the boy might himself become both priest and scientist one day.
Now in sports shirt and slacks, Kayman jumped into his convertible. It was a classic, wheels instead of hoverskirts; it could even be driven off the guided highways. But where was there to go off the highways? He dialed the laboratories, switched on the main batteries and opened his newspaper. Without attention the little car nosed into the freeway, found a gap in the traffic, leaped to fill it and bore him at eighty miles an hour to his job.
The news in the newspaper was, as usual, mostly bad.
In Paris the MFP had issued another blast at the Chandrigar peace talks. Israel had refused to vacate Cairo and Damascus. New York City's martial law, now in its fifteenth month, had failed to prevent the ambush of a Tenth Mountain Division convoy trying to sneak across the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to the relief of the garrison in Shea Stadium; fifteen soldiers were dead, and the convoy had returned to the Bronx.
Kayman dropped the paper sadly. He tilted the rear-view mirror back, raised the side windows to deflect some of the wind and began to brush his shoulder-length hair.
Twenty-five strokes on each side--it was almost as much a ritual with him as the Mass. He would brush it again that day, because he had a lunch date with Sister Clotilda. She was already half convinced that she wanted to apply for relief from certain of her vows, and Kayman wanted to resume the discussion with her as soon, and as often and as long, as suitable.
