Man Plus

  He moved restlessly, and discovered he was tethered to the bed.

  For a moment terror flooded through his mind: trapped, helpless, alone. Had they turned him off? Were his senses deliberately blacked out? What was happening?

  A small voice near his ear spoke again: "Roger? This is Brad. Your readouts say you're awake."

  The relief was overpowering. "Yes," he managed. "What's going on?"

  "We've got you in a sensory-deprivation environment. Apart from my voice, can you hear anything?"

  "Not a sound," said Roger. "Not anything."

  "How about light?"

  Roger reported the dim heat glow. "That's all."

  "Fine," said Brad. "Now, here's the thing, Roger. We're going to let you work in your new sensorium a little bit at a time. Simple sounds. Simple patterns. We've got a slide projector through the wall over the head of your bed, and a screen by the door—you can't see it, of course, but it's there. What we're going to do—wait a minute. Kathleen's determined to talk to you."

  Faint friction sounds and scuffles, and then Kathleen Doughty's voice: "Roger, this shithead forgot one important thing. Sensory deprivation's dangerous, you know that."

  "I've heard it," Roger admitted.

  "According to the experts the worst part of it is feeling impotent to end it. So any time you begin to feel bad, just talk; one of us will always be here, and we'll answer. It'll be Brad, or me, or Sulie Carpenter, or Clara."

  "Are you all there right now?"

  "Christ, yes—plus Don Kayman and General Scanyon and, cripes, half the staff. You won't lack for company, Roger. I promise you that. Now. What about my voice, is that giving you any trouble?"

  He thought. "Not that I notice. You do sound a little bit like a creaking door," he evaluated.

  "That's bad."

  "I don't think so. You sound kind of that way all the time, Kathleen."

  She giggled. "Well, I'm going to stop talking in a minute anyway. What about Brad's voice?"

  "I didn't notice anything. Or anyway, I'm not sure. I was sort of dreaming and for a minute I thought he was singing "Aura Lee" along with his guitar."

  Brad cut in. "That's interesting, Roger! What about now?"

  "No. You sound like yourself."

  "Well, your readouts look good. All right. We'll go into that later. Now, what we're going to do is give you pure, simple visual inputs to deal with. As Kathleen says, you can speak to us any time and we'll answer if you want us to. But we won't speak much for a while. Let the visual circuits work themselves in before we confuse things with simultaneous sight and sound, got it?"

  "Go ahead," said Roger.

  There was no answer, but in a moment a pale point of light appeared against the far wall.

  It was not bright. With the eyes he had been born with, Roger suspected, he would not have been able to see it at all; as it was, he could make it out clearly, and even in the filtered air of his hospital room, he could see the faint path of light from projector to wall over his head.

  Nothing else happened for a long time.

  Roger waited as patiently as he could.

  More time passed.

  Finally he said, "All right, I see it. It's a dot. I've been watching it all along, and it's still just a dot. I do observe," he said, turning his head about, "that there's enough reflected light from it that I can see the rest of the room a little bit, but that's all."

  When Brad's voice came, it sounded like thunder: "Okay, Roger, hold on and we'll give you something else."

  "Wow!" Roger said. "Not so loud, okay?"

  "I wasn't any louder than before," Brad objected. And in fact his voice had reduced itself to normal proportions.

  "Okay, okay," Roger muttered. He was getting bored. After a moment another point of light appeared, a few inches from the first one. Both held for another long time, and then a line of light leaped into being between them.

  "This is pretty dull," he complained.

  "It's meant to be." It was Clara Bly's voice this time.

  "Hi," Roger greeted her. "Listen. I can see pretty well now, in all this light you're giving me. What are all these wires sticking into me?"

  Brad cut in: "They're your telemetry, Roger. That's why we had to tie you down, so you wouldn't roll over and mess up the leads. Everything's on remote now, you know. We had to take almost everything out of your room."

  "So I noticed. All right, go ahead."

  But it was tedious and remained tedious. These were not the kinds of things that were calculated to keep one's mind busy. They might be important, but they were also dull. After an interminable stretch of simple geometric figures of light, the intensity reduced so that there was less and less spill of reflection to illuminate the rest of the room, they began feeding him sounds: clicks, oscillator beeps, a chime, a hiss of white noise.

  In the room outside the shifts kept changing. They stopped only when the telemetry indicated Roger needed sleep or food or a bedpan. None of those needs were frequent. Roger began to be able to tell who was on duty from the tiniest of signs: the faintly mocking note in Brad's voice that was only there when Kathleen Doughty was in the room, the slower, somehow more affectionate chirping of the sound tapes when Sulie Carpenter was monitoring the responses. He discovered that his time sense was not the same as that of those outside, or of "reality," whatever that was. "That's to be expected, Rog," said the weary voice of Brad when he reported it. "If you work at it, you'll find you can exercise volitional control over that. You can count out seconds like a metronome if you want to. Or move faster or slower, depending on what's needed."

  "How do I do that?" Roger demanded.

  "Hell, man!" Brad flared. "It's your body, learn to use it." Then, apologetically, "The same way you learned to block off vision. Experiment till you figure it out. Now pay attention; I'm going to play you a Bach partita."

  Somehow the time passed.

  But not easily and not quickly. There were long periods when Roger's altered time sense contrarily dragged his tedium out, times when, against his will, he found himself thinking again about Dorrie. The lift that Dash's visit had given him, the pleasant concern and affection from Sulie Carpenter—these were good things; but they did not last forever. Dorrie was a reality of his reverie, and when his mind was empty enough to wander it was to Dorrie that it wandered. Dorrie and their joyous early years together. Dorrie, and the terrible knowledge that he was no longer enough of a man to gratify her sexual needs. Dorrie and Brad . . .

  Kathleen Doughty's voice snapped, "I don't know what the hell you're doing, Roger, but it's screwing up your vital signs! Cut it out."

  "All right," he grumbled. He put Dorrie out of his mind. He thought of Kathleen's rancorous, affectionate voice, of what the President had said, of Sulie Carpenter. He made himself tranquil.

  As a reward they showed him a slide of a bunch of violets, in full color.

  Ten

  The Batman's Entrechats

  Suddenly, amazingly, there were only nine days left.

  Outside the clerical condominium Father Kayman shivered in the cold, waiting for his ride to the project. The fuel shortage had worsened a great deal in the past two weeks, with the fighting in the Middle East and the Scottish Freedom Fighters blowing up the North Sea pipelines. The project itself had overriding priorities for whatever it needed, even though some of the missile silos had not enough fuel for topping off their birds; but all the staff had been urged to turn off lights, share rides, turn down their home thermostats, watch less TV. An early snowstorm had dusted the Oklahoma prairies, and outside the condominium a seminary student was sleepily pushing the snow off the walks. There was not much of it, and, Kayman thought, it was not particularly nice-looking. Was it his imagination, or was it tattletale gray? Could the ash from the blazing California and Oregon forests have soiled the snow fifteen hundred miles away?

  Brad beeped his horn, and Kayman jumped. "Sorry," Kayman said, getting in and closing the door. "Say, shouldn't we t
ake my car next time? Uses a lot less fuel than this thing of yours."

  Brad shrugged morosely and peered into his rear-view mirror. Another hovercar, this one a light, fast sports job, was swinging around the corner after them. "I drive for two anyway," he said. "That's the same one that was tailing me on Tuesday. They're getting sloppy. Or else they want to make sure I know I'm being followed."

  Kayman looked over his shoulder. The following car was certainly taking no pains to be inconspicuous. "Do you know who it is, Brad?"

  "Is there any doubt?"

  Kayman didn't answer. Actually, there wasn't. The President had made clear to Brad that he was not under any circumstances to fool around with the monster's wife, in a half-hour interview of which Brad vividly recalled every painful second. The shadowing had begun immediately thereafter, to make sure Brad didn't forget.

  But it was not a subject that Kayman wanted to discuss with Brad. He turned on the radio, tuned to a news broadcast. They listened for a few minutes of censored but still overpowering disaster until Brad wordlessly reached out and snapped it off. Then they rode in silence, under the leaden sky, until they reached the great white cube of the project, alone on the desolate prairie.

  Inside there was nothing gray: the lights were strong and glaring; the faces were tired, sometimes concerned, but they were alive. In here at least, Kayman thought, there was a sense of accomplishment and purpose. The project was right on schedule.

  And in nine days the Mars craft would be launched, and he himself would be on it.

  Kayman was not afraid to go. He had shaped his life toward it, from the first days in the seminary when he had realized that he could serve his God in more places than a pulpit and was encouraged by his father superior to continue his interest in all heavens, whether astrophysical or theological. Nevertheless, it was a weighty thought.

  He felt unready. He felt the world was unready for this venture. It all seemed so curiously impromptu, in spite of the eternities of work that they had put in, himself included. Even the crew was not finally decided. Roger would go; he was the raison d'être of the whole project, of course. Kayman would go, that had been decided firmly. But the two pilots were still only provisional. Kayman had met them both and liked them. They were among NASA's best, and one had flown with Roger in a shuttle mission eight years before. But there were fifteen others on the short list of eligibles—Kayman did not even know all the names, only that there were a lot of them. Vern Scanyon and the director general of NASA had flown to reason with the President in person, urging him to confirm their choices; but Dash, for Dash's own reasons, had reserved the right of final decision to himself, and was withholding his hand.

  The one thing that seemed fully ready for the venture was the link in the chain that had once seemed most doubtful, Roger himself.

  The training had gone beautifully. Roger was fully mobile now, all over the project building, commuting from the room he still kept as "home" to the Mars-normal tank, to the test facilities, to any place he cared to go. The whole project was used to seeing the tall black-winged creature loping down a hall, the huge, faceted eyes recognizing a face and the flat voice calling a cheery greeting. The last week and more had been all Kathleen Doughty's. His sensorium appeared under perfect control; now it was time to learn to exploit all the resources of his musculature. So she had brought in a blind man, a ballet dancer and a former paraplegic, and as Roger began to expand his horizons they took over his tutorial tasks. The ballet dancer was past stardom now, but he had known it, and as a child he had studied with Nureyev and Dolin. The blind man was no longer blind. He had no eyes, but his optic system had been replaced with sensors very like Roger's own, and the two of them compared notes over subtle hues and tricks of manipulating the parameters of their vision. The paraplegic, who now moved on motorized limbs that were precursors of Roger's, had had a year to learn to use them, and he and Roger took ballet classes together.

  Not always physically together, not quite. The ex-paraplegic, whose name was Alfred, was still far more human than Roger Torraway, and among other human traits he possessed was a need for air. As Kayman and Brad came into the control chamber for the Mars-normal tank, Alfred was doing entrechats on one side of the great double glass pane and Roger, inside the almost airless tank, was duplicating his moves on the other. Kathleen Doughty was counting cadence, and the loud-speaker system was playing the A-major waltz from Les Sylphides. Vern Scanyon was sitting over by a wall on a reversed chair, hands clasped over the back of the chair and chin resting on his hands. Brad went over to him at once, and the two of them began to talk inaudibly.

  Don Kayman found a place to sit near the door. Paraplegic and monster, they were doing incredibly rapid leaps, twiddling their feet in blurs of motion. It was not the right music for entrechats, Kayman thought, but neither of them seemed to care. The ballet dancer was staring at them with an unreadable expression. He probably wishes he were a cyborg, Kayman thought. With muscles like that he could take over any stage in the country.

  It was a mildly amusing thought, but for some reason Kayman felt ill-at-ease. Then he remembered: this was just where he had been sitting when Willy Hartnett had died before his eyes.

  It seemed so long ago. It had only been a week since Brenda Hartnett had brought the kids around to say goodbye to him and Sister Clotilda, but she had almost dropped out of their minds already. The monster named Roger was the star of the show now. The death of another monster in that place, so short a time ago, was only history.

  Kayman took up his rosary and began to count the fifteen decades of the Blessed Virgin. While one part of him was repeating the Ayes, another was conscious of the pleasant, warm, heavy feel of the ivory beads and the crisp contrast of the crystal. He had made up his mind to take the Holy Father's gift to Mars with him. It would be a pity if it were lost—well, it would be a pity if he were lost too, he thought. He could not weigh risks like that, so he decided to do what His Holiness had evidently meant him to do and take this gift on the longest journey it had ever known.

  He became conscious of someone standing behind him. "Good morning, Father Kayman."

  "Hello, Sulie." He glanced at her curiously. What was strange about her? There seemed to be golden roots to her dark hair, but that was nothing particularly surprising; even a priest knew that women chose their hair color at will. For that matter, so did some priests.

  "How's it going?" she asked.

  "I'd say perfect. Look at them jump! Roger looks as ready as he'll ever be and, Deo volente, I think we'll make the launch date."

  "I envy you," the nurse said, peering past him into the Mars-normal tank. He turned his face to her, startled. There had been more feeling in her voice than a casual remark seemed to justify. "I mean it, Don," she said. "The reason I got into the space program in the first place was that I wanted to go up myself. Might have made it if—"

  She stopped and shrugged. "Well, I'm helping you and Roger, I guess," she said. "Isn't that what they used to say women were for? Helpmates. It isn't a bad thing, anyway, when it's as important a thing to help as this."

  "You don't really sound convinced of that," Kayman offered.

  She grinned and then turned back to the tank.

  The music had stopped. Kathleen Doughty took the cigarette out of her lips, lit another and said, "Okay, Roger, Alfred. Take ten. You're doing great."

  Inside the tank Roger allowed himself to sit crosslegged. He looked exactly like the Devil squatting on a hilltop in the classical old Disney tape, Kayman thought. A Night on Bald Mountain?

  "What's the matter, Roger?" Kathleen Doughty called. "You're surely not tired."

  "Tired of this, anyway," he groused. "I don't know why I need all this ballet-dancing. Willy didn't have it."

  "Willy died," she snapped.

  There was a silence. Roger turned his head toward her, peering through the glass with his great compound eyes. He snarled, "Not because of lack of entrechats."

  "How do you know
that? Oh," she admitted grudgingly, "I suppose you could survive without some of this. But you're better with it. It's not just a matter of learning how to get around. The other thing you have to learn to do is avoid destroying your environment. Do you have any idea how strong you are now?"

  Inside the tank Roger hesitated, then shook his head. "I don't feel strong, particularly," his flat voice said.

  "You can punch through a wall, Roger. Ask Alfred. What do you run the metric mile in, Alfred?"

  The ex-paraplegic folded his hands over his fat belly and grinned. He was fifty-eight years old and had not been much of an athlete even before the myasthenia gravis destroyed his natural limbs. "A minute forty-seven," he said with pride.

  "I expect you to do better than that, Roger," called Kathleen. "So you have to learn how to control it."

  Roger made a noise that wasn't quite a word, then stood up. "Balance the locks," he said. "I'm coming out."

  The technician touched a switch and the great pumps began to let air into the exit chamber with a sound like ripping linoleum. "Oh," moaned Sulie Carpenter, next to Don Kayman, "I don't have my contacts in!" And she fled before Roger could come into the room.

  Kayman stared after her. One puzzle was solved: he knew what had looked strange about her. But why would Sulie wear contacts that changed her brown eyes to green?

  He shrugged and gave up.

  We knew the answer. We had gone to a lot of trouble to find Sulie Carpenter. The critical factors made a long list, and the least important of the items on that list were the color of hair and the color of eyes, since either could be so easily changed.

  As the deadline approached, Roger's position began to change. For two weeks he had been meat on a butcher's block, slashed and rolled and chopped with no personal participation and no control over what happened to him. Then he had been a student, following the orders of his teachers, learning the control of his senses and the use of his limbs. It was a transition from laboratory preparation to demigod, and he was more than halfway there.