Man Plus (8 page)
Twenty-three years later Brad still dreamed about it as though it had just happened.
In his sleep it scared him witless, and he awakened sweaty and crying and gasping for breath.
It was not all loss. He had discovered that considerable advantages had been bought at the cost of an eye. Item, there was the insurance, on the life of his father and on the maiming of everyone concerned. Item, the injury had kept him out of the Army, and had permitted him to join the Marine Corps in an essentially civilian capacity when he wanted field experience in his specialty. Item, it had given him an acceptable excuse for avoiding the stupider risks and more tiresome obligations of adolescence. He never had to prove his courage in violent sports and always was excused from whatever parts of gym he most detested.
Biggest item of all, it gave him an education. Under the Aid to Handicapped Children provisions of his state's welfare system, it had paid his way through school, college and graduate school. It had given him four degrees and turned him into one of the
world's greatest experts on the perceptual systems of the eye. On balance, it was a favorable transaction. Even adding in the negative factor of a mother who had spent the remaining ten years of her life in some pain and a good deal of shortness of temper, it was worthwhile.
Brad had wound up on the Man Plus project because he was the best they could get.
He had chosen to work for the Marine Corps, because nowhere better could one find experimental subjects prepared by shell, claymore and bolo than in the field hospitals of Tanzania, Borneo and Ceylon. That work had been noted in high echelons of the military.
They had not accepted Brad, they had drafted him.
What he was not sure of was that Man Plus was the best _he_ could get. Other recruits had been dragged into the space program by glamour or appeals to duty. It wasn't at all like that with Bradley. As soon as he had grasped what the man from Washington was driving at, the implications and opportunities spread out before him. It was a new track. It meant abandoning some plans, deferring others. But he could see where it would lead: say, three years helping to develop the optic systems of the cyborg. A world reputation coming out of it. Then he could quit the program and enter the limitless lush pastures of private practice. One hundred and eight Americans per hundred thousand had essentially total loss of function in one or both eyes. It added up to better than three hundred thousand prospective patients, every one of whom would want the best man in the field to treat him.
Working on the Man Plus program would stamp him the best man in his field at once. He could have a clinic of his own before he was forty. Not big. Just big enough to be supervised personally in every detail by him, and run by a staff of juniors trained by him and working under his direction. It would run to, oh, maybe five or six hundred patients a year--a fraction of 1 percent of the prospects. Which fraction of 1 percent would he accept?
At least half of them would come from those most solvent and most willing to pay. Also, of course, charity cases. At least a hundred of them a year, everything free, even their bedside phones. While the several hundred who could pay would pay a lot. The Bradley Clinic (already it sounded as time-honored and proper as "Menninger" in his ears) would be a model for medical services all over the world, and it would make him one hell of a lot of money.
It was not Bradley's fault that the three years had extended themselves past five. It wasn't even his part of the program that caused the delays. Or not most of them, anyway.
In any event, he was still young. He would leave the program with thirty good working years ahead of him--unless he chose to retire earlier, perhaps keeping a consultancy and a stock arrangement at the Bradley Clinic. And there were other advantages to working in the space program, in that so many of his associates had married such attractive women.
Bradley had no interest in getting married, but he very much liked having wives.
Back in the seven-room laboratory suite where he ruled, Brad kicked ass on enough of his subordinates to insure that the new retinal mediation link would be ready for transplant within the week, and glanced at his watch. It was not yet eleven. He dialed Roger Torraway on the intercom and got him after a delay. "How about lunch, Rog? I want to go over this new implant with you."
"Oh, too bad, Brad. I wish I could. But I'm going to be in the tank with Will Hartnett for at least the next three hours. Maybe tomorrow."
"Talk to you then," said Brad cheerfully, and hung up. He was not surprised; he had already checked Torraway's schedule. But he was pleased. He told his secretary that he
would be leaving for an outside conference and then lunch, and would be back after two, then ordered his car. He fed it the coordinates for the corner of the block where Roger Torraway lived. Where Dorrie Torraway lived.
Five
Monster Becoming Mortal Again
As Brad left, whistling, his car radio was full of news of the world. The Tenth Mountain Division had recoiled back to a fortified area in Riverdale. A typhoon had wrecked the rice crop in Southeast Asia. President Deshatine had ordered the U.S.
delegation to walk out of the United Nations debate on sharing scarce resources.
There was much news that was not on the sound-only radio, because the newscasters either didn't know about it or didn't think it was important. For example, not one word was said about two Chinese gentlemen on a mission in Australia, or about the results of certain secret popularity polls the President kept locked in his safe, or about the tests being run on Willy Hartnett. So Brad didn't hear about any of these things. If he had, and had understood their importance, he would have cared. He was not an uncaring man.
He was not an evil one, either. He was just not a particularly good one.
Sometimes that question came up--for instance, when it was time to get rid of a girl or drop a friend who had been helpful on the way up. Sometimes there were recriminations. Then Brad would smile and shrug and point out that it wasn't a fair world.
Lancelot didn't win all the tournaments. Sometimes the evil black knight dumped him on the ground. Bobby Fischer wasn't the most lovable chess player in the world, merely the best. And so on.
And so Brad would confess that he was not a model man by social standards.
Indeed he wasn't. Something had gone wrong in his childhood. The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him. War with China? Well, let's see, calculated Brad, there's sure to be a lot of surgery; perhaps I'll get to head my own hospital. A world depression? His money was in farmland; people would always eat.
He was not admirable. All the same, he was the best person alive to do what the cyborg needed--namely, to provide Willy Hartnett with mediation between stimulus and interpretation. Which is a way of saying that somewhere between the external object the cyborg saw and the conclusions the cyborg's brain drew from it, there had to be a stage where unnecessary information was filtered out. Otherwise the cyborg would simply go mad. To understand why this is so, consider the frog.
Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant.
That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.
As vertebrates go, the frog is a dull and simple kind of creature. It has a brain, but not a big one or a very sophisticated one. There's not much excess capacity in the frog brain to play around with, so that one doesn't want to waste any of it on nonessentials.
Evolution is always economical. Male frogs do not write poems or torture themselves with fears that their female frogs may be unfaithful. Nor do they want to think about things which do not directly concern staying alive.
The frog's eye is simple, too. In human eyes there are complexities frogs know not.
Suppose a human comes into a room containing a table which bears an order of steak and French fries; even if he cannot hear, cannot taste and has lost the power of smell, he is drawn to the food. His eye turns to the steak. There is a spot on the eye called the "fovea,"
the part of the eye with which a person sees best, and it is that spot that directs itself toward the target. The frog doesn't do that; one part of its eye is as good as another. Or as bad. Because the interesting thing about a frog's-eye view of what fot a frog is the equivalent of a steak--namely, a bug big enough to be worth swallowing but small enough not to try to swallow back--is that the frog is blind to food unless the food _behaves_ like food. Surround the frog with the most nutritious chopped insect pate you can devise. It will starve to death--unless a ladybug wanders by.
If one thinks about how a frog eats, this strange behavior begins to make sense. The frog fits a very neat ecological niche. In a state of nature, no one fills that niche with minced food. The frog eats insects, so insects are what he sees. If something passes through his field of vision which is the right size for an insect, and moves at the proper speed for an insect, the frog does not debate whether he is hungry or not or which insects taste best. He eats it. Then he goes back to waiting for the next one.
In the laboratory this is an antisurvival trait. You can trick a frog with a piece of cloth, a bit of wood on a string, anything that moves properly and is the right size. He will eat them and starve. But in nature there are no such tricks. In nature only bugs move like bugs, and every bug is frog dinner.
This principle is not difficult to understand. Say this to a naïve friend and he will say, "Oh, yes, I see. The frog just ignores anything that doesn't look like a bug." Wrong!
The frog doesn't do anything of the kind. He does not ignore non-bug objects. He simply never sees them in the first place. Tap a frog's optic nerve and drag a marble slowly past--too big, too slow--and no instrument can pick up a nerve impulse. There is none. The eye does not bother to "see" what the frog does not want to know about. But swing a dead fly past, and your meter dials flick over, the nerve transmits a message, the frog's tongue licks out and grabs.
And so we come to the cyborg. What Bradley had done was to provide a mediation stage between the ruby complex eyes and the aching human brain of Willy Hartnett which filtered, interpreted and generally prepackaged all of the cyborg's visual inputs. The "eye"
saw everything, even in the UV part of the spectrum, even in the infrared. The brain could not deal with so vast a flow of inputs. Bradley's mediation stage edited out the unimportant bits.
The stage was a triumph of design, because Bradley was indeed extremely good at the one thing he was good at. But he was not there to install it. And so because Brad had a
