He felt it happening. For days now he had been questioning everything he was told to do and sometimes refusing. Kathleen Doughty was no longer his boss, capable of ordering him to do a hundred chinups and an hour of pirouettes. She was his employee, retained by him to help in what he wanted to do. Brad, who had become far less offhandedly humorous and far more intense, was now asking Roger for favors: "Try these color discrimination tests for me, will you? It'll look good on my paper about you." Often Roger humored them, but sometimes not.
The one he humored most frequently and surely was Sulie Carpenter, because she was always there and always cared about him. He had almost forgotten how much she looked like Dorrie. He only was aware that she looked very good.
She met his moods. If he was edgy she was quietly cheerful. If he wanted to talk, she talked. They played board games sometimes; she was a highly competitive Scrabble player. Once, late at night, when Roger was experimenting with the length of wakefulness he could handle, she brought in a guitar and they sang, her pleasant, unobtrusive contralto ornamenting his flat and almost toneless whisper. Her face changed while he looked at it, but he had learned to handle that. The interpretation circuits in his sensorium reflected his feelings when he let them, and there were times when Sulie Carpenter looked more like Dorrie than Dorrie did herself.
After he had finished his day's run in the Mars-normal tank, Sulie raced him back to his room, laughing girl against thudding monster down the wide lab corridors; he won easily, of course. They chatted for a while and then he sent her away.
Nine days to liftoff.
It was less than that, really. He would be flown to Merritt Island three days before the launch, and his last day in Tonka would be devoted to fitting the backpack computer and retuning some of his sensorium for the special Martian conditions. So he had six—no, five—days.
And he had not seen Dorrie for weeks.
He looked at himself in the mirror he had demanded they install: insect eyes, bat wings, dully gleaming flesh. He amused himself by letting his visual interpretations flow, from bat to giant fly to demon . . . to himself, as he remembered himself, pleasant-faced and youthful.
If only Dorrie had a computer to mediate her sight! If only she could see him as he had been! He swore he would not call her; he could not force her to look at the comic-strip contraption that was her husband.
Having sworn, he picked up the phone and dialed her number.
It was an impulse that could not be denied. He waited. His accordion-pleated time sense prolonged the interval, so that it was an eternity before the raster blaze from the screen and the buzz from the speaker sounded the first ring.
Then time betrayed him again. It seemed forever until the second ring. Then it came, and lasted an eternity, and was over.
She did not answer.
Roger, who was the sort of person who counted things, knew that most persons did not respond until the third ring. Dorrie, however, was always eager to know who the phone was bringing into her life. From a sound sleep or out of the bathtub, she seldom let it ring past twice.
At length the third ring came, and still no reply.
Roger began to hurt.
He controlled it as best he could, unwilling to sound the alarms on the telemetry. He could not stop it entirely. She was out, he thought. Her husband had turned into a monster and she was not at home sympathizing or worrying; she was shopping or visiting a friend or seeing a flick.
Or with a man.
What man? Brad, he thought. It wouldn't be impossible; he had left Brad down at the tank twenty-five minutes ago by the clock. Time enough for them to rendezvous somewhere. Even time enough for Brad to get to the Torraway home. Perhaps she was not out at all. Perhaps—
Fourth ring—
Perhaps they were there, the two of them, naked and coupling on the floor in front of the phone. She would be saying, "Go in the other room, honey, I want to see who it is." And he would say, laughing, "No, let's answer this way." And she would say—
Fifth ring—and the raster blossomed into the colors of Dorrie's face. Her voice said, "Hello?"
Quick as sound Roger's fist shot out and covered the lens. "Dorrie," he said. His voice sounded flat and harsh again to him. "How are you?"
"Roger!" she cried. The pleasure in her voice sounded very real. "Oh, honey, I'm so glad to hear you! How are you feeling?"
His voice automatically said, "Fine." It went on, without the need of help from his conscious mind, to correct the statement, to say what had been happening to him, cataloging the tests and the exercises. At the same time he was staring into the screen with every sense on high gain.
She looked—what? Tired? Looking tired was confirmation of his fears. She was carousing with Brad every night, heedless of her husband in pain and clownish humiliation. Rested and cheerful? Looking rested and cheerful was confirmation, too. It meant she was relaxing, enjoying herself—heedless of her husband's torment.
There was really nothing wrong with Torraway's brain, in that it had a lifelong habit of analysis and logic. It did not fail to occur to him that the game he was playing with himself was called "You Lose." Everything was evidence of Dorrie's guilt. Yet no matter how carefully he scanned her image, with what multiplied senses, she didn't look hostile or cloyingly overaffectionate. She only looked like Dorrie.
When he thought that he felt a burst of tenderness that made his voice break. "I've missed you, honey," he said flatly. The only thing that spoke of feelings was that one syllable was retarded a fraction of a second: "Hon . . . ee."
"And I've missed you. I've kept myself busy, dear," she chattered. "I've been painting your den. It's a surprise, but of course it's going to be such a long time till you see it that— Well, it's going to be peach. With buttercup woodwork and I think maybe a pale-blue ceiling. You like? I was going to make it all ochre and brown, you know, fall colors, Mars colors, to celebrate. But 1 thought by the time you got back you'd be pretty sick of Mars colors!" And quickly, without pause: "When am I going to see you?" The change in her voice caught him by surprise.
"Well, I look pretty awful," he said.
"I know what you look like. Dear God, Roger, do you think Midge and Brenda and Callie and I haven't talked this over for the last two years? Ever since the program started. We've seen the sketches. We've seen the photos of the mockups. And we've seen the pictures of Willy."
"I'm not exactly like Willy any more. They've changed things—"
"And I know about that too, Roger. Brad told me all about it. I'd like to see you."
At that moment his wife's face changed without warning to a witch's. The crochet hook she held became a peasant twig broom. "You've been seeing Brad?"
Was there a microsecond pause before she answered? "I suppose he shouldn't have told me," she said, "because of security and all. But I wanted him to. It's not that bad, honey. I'm a big girl. I can handle it."
For a moment Roger wanted to snatch his hand away from the lens and let himself be seen, but he was becoming confused, feeling strange. He could not interpret his feelings. Was it vertigo? Emotion? Some malfunction in his machine half? He knew it would be only moments until Sulie or Don Kayman or someone came in, warned by the telltale telemetry outside. He tried to control himself.
"Maybe later," he said without conviction. "I—I think I'd better hang up now, Dorrie."
Behind her their familiar living room was changing too. The depth of field of the phone lens was not very good; even to his machine senses the rest of the room was blurred. Was that a man standing in the shadows? Was it wearing a Marine officer's shirt? Would Brad be doing that?
"I have to hang up now," he said, and did.
Clara Bly came in, full of questions and concern. He shook his head at her without speaking.
There were no lachrymeal ducts in his new eyes, so of course he could not cry. Even that relief was denied him.
Eleven
Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope
Our trendline projections had shown that the time was right to let the world know about Roger Torraway, warts and all. So it had all gone out, and every TV screen in the world had seen Roger on point in a dozen perfect fouettés, in between the close-ups of the starved dead in Pakistan and the fires in Chicago.
It had the effect of making Dorrie a celebrity. Roger's call had upset her. Not as much as the note from Brad saying that he wouldn't be able to see her again, not nearly as much as the forty-five minutes the President had spent with her impressing on her what would happen if she messed up his pet astronaut. Certainly not as much as the knowledge that she was being followed, her telephone tapped, her home certainly bugged. But she hadn't known how to deal with Roger. She suspected she never would, and did not mind at all that in a few days he would be launched into space, where there would be little necessity for her to worry about their relationship for at least a year and a half.
She also did not mind the sudden glare of publicity.
Now that the newspapers had it all the TV reporters had been to see her, and she had seen her own courageous face on the six o'clock report. Fem was sending someone around. The someone phoned first. She was a woman of about sixty, veteran of the lib years, who sniffed, "We never do this, interviewing somebody just because she's somebody's wife. But they wanted it. I couldn't turn down the assignment, but I want to be honest with you and let you know that it's distasteful to me."
"I'm sorry," Dorrie apologized. "Do you want me to cancel out?"
"Oh, no," said the woman, speaking as though it were Dorrie's fault, "it's not your fault, but I think it's a betrayal of everything Fem stands for. Never mind. I want to come up to your home. We'll do a fifteen-minute spread for the cassette edition, and I'll write it up for the print. If you can—"
"I—" Dorrie began.
"—try to talk about you, rather than him. Your background. Your interests. Your—"
"I'm sorry, but I'd really prefer—"
"—feelings about the space program and so on. Dash says it's an essential American objective and the future of the world depends on it. What do you think? I don't mean answer the question now, I mean—"
"I don't want to have it in my home," Dorrie inserted into the conversation, without waiting for a place for it.
"—think about it, and answer on camera. Not at your home? No, that's not possible. We'll be over in an hour."
Dorrie was left with a dwindling spot of light to talk to, and then even that was gone. "Bitch," she said, almost absent-mindedly. She didn't really mind having the interview in her home. She minded not being given a choice. That she minded a lot. But there was no choice available to her, except to go out before the Fem person showed up.
Dome Torraway, Dee Mintz as was, felt strongly about having choices. One of the things that had attracted her to Roger in the first place, apart from the glamour of the space program and the security and money that went with it—and apart from Roger's rather nice-looking, studly self—was that he was willing to listen to what she wanted. Other men had been mostly interested in what they wanted, which was not the same from man to man but very consistent within the range of relationships of any one man. Harold always wanted to dance and party, Jim always wanted sex, Everett wanted sex and parties, Tommy wanted political dedication, Joe wanted mothering. What Roger wanted was to explore the world with her along, and he seemed perfectly willing to explore the parts of it that she wanted as much as the parts that were important to him.
She had never regretted marrying him.
There were a lot of lonely times. Fifty-four days when he was in Space Station Three. Any number of shorter missions. Two years on tour duty all over the world, working with the whole system of ground monitoring stations from Aachen to Zaire, with no proper home anywhere. Dorrie had given that up, after a while, and gone back to the apartment in Tonka. But she hadn't minded. Perhaps Roger had; the question had never crossed her mind. Anyway, they had seen each other quite often enough. He had been home every month or two, and she kept her time full. There was her shop—she had opened it while Roger was in Iceland, with a five-thousand-dollar check he sent her for her birthday. There were her friends. There were, from time to time, men.
None of these filled her life, but she didn't expect it to be filled. She rather expected to be lonely. She had been an only child, with a mother who could not stand her neighbors, and so she had not had very many friends. The neighbors couldn't stand her mother very well, either, because her mother was a speed freak on a small scale, likely to be burned right out of her mind most afternoons, which made things complicated for Dorrie. But she didn't mind that; she didn't know there was any other way to live.
At thirty-one Dorrie was as healthy, as pretty and as competent to deal with the world as she ever had been or would be again. She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?
She used the time until Ms. Hagar Hengstrom and her crew from Fem arrived to assemble a selection of ceramic ware from her shop on the coffee table before the couch she intended to sit in. What time was left she devoted to the less important task of brushing her hair, checking her make-up and changing into her newest laced-pants suit.
When the doorbell rang she was quite ready.
Ms. Hagar Hengstrom pumped her hand and walked in, brilliant blue hair and a curly black cigar. She was followed by her lightperson, her soundperson, her cameraperson and her prop boys. "Room's small," she muttered, appraising the furnishings with contempt. "Torraway will sit over there. Move it."
The prop boys jumped to manhandle an easy chair from its place by the window to the corner now occupied by a breakfront, which they tugged into the center of the room. "Wait a minute," said Dorrie. "I thought I'd just sit on the couch here—"
"Don't you have the light reading yet?" Hengstrom demanded. "Sally, start the camera. You never know what we might use for rollunder."
"I mean it," Dorrie said.
Hengstrom looked at her. The voice had not been loud, but the tone was dangerous. She shrugged. "Let's set it up," she proposed, "and if you don't like it we'll talk it over. Run through for me, will you?"
"Run through what?" The pale young girl with the hand-held camera was pointing it at her, Dorrie noticed; it distracted her. The lightperson had found a wall socket and was holding a crucifix of floods in each hand, moving them gently to erase shadows as fast as they formed each time Dorrie moved.
"Well, for openers, what are your plans for the next two years? You're surely not just going to hang around waiting for Roger Torraway to come home."
Dorrie tried to make her way to the couch, but the lightperson frowned and waved her in the other direction, and two of the prop boys shoved the coffee table out of reach. She said, "I've got my shop. I thought you might like to have some of the pieces from it on camera while you interviewed me—"
"That's fine, sure. I meant personally. You're a healthy woman. You have sexual needs. Back up a little, please—Sandra's getting a buzz from something on the sound system."
Dorrie found herself standing in front of the chair, and there seemed nothing to do but to sit in it. "Of course—" she began.
"You have a responsibility," Hengstrom said. "What sort of an example are you going to set young womanhood? Turning yourself into a dried-up old maid? Or living a naturally full life?"
"I don't know if I want to discuss—"
"I've checked you out pretty carefully, Torraway. I like what I've found out. You're your own person—as much as any person can be, anyway, who accepts the ridiculous farce of marriage. Why'd you do it?"
Dorrie hesitated. "Roger's really a very nice person," she offered.
"What about it?"
"Well, I mean, he offered me a great deal of comfort and support—"
Hagar He
ngstrom sighed. "Same old slave psychology. Never mind. The other thing that puzzles me is your getting involved in the space program. Don't you feel it's a sexist shuffle?"
"Why, no. The President told me himself," Dorrie said, aware that she was trying to score points in case of another visit from Dash, "that putting a man on Mars was absolutely indispensable to the future of the human race. I believe him. We owe a—"
"Play that back," Hengstrom commanded.
"What?"
"Play back what you just said. Putting a what on Mars?"
"A man. Oh. I see what you mean."
Hengstrom nodded sadly. "You see what I mean, but you don't change the way you think. Why a man? Why not a person?" She looked commiseratingly at the soundperson, who shook her head in sympathy. "Well, let's get to something more important: do you know that the whole crew of the Mars voyage is supposed to be male? What do you think of that?"
It was quite a morning for Dorrie. She never did get her ceramic pieces on camera.
When Sulie Carpenter came on duty that afternoon she brought Roger two surprises: a cassette of the interview, borrowed from the project public-relations (read: censorship) office, and a guitar. She gave him the cassette first, and let him watch the interview while she remade his bed and changed the water for his flowers.
When it was over she said brightly, "Your wife handled herself very well, I thought. I met Hagar Hengstrom once. She's a very difficult woman."
"Dorrie looked fine," said Roger. You could not read any expression in the remade face or hear it in the flat tones, but the bat wings were fluttering restlessly. "I always liked those pants."
Sulie nodded and made a note to herself: the open lacing up both sides of each leg showed a great deal of flesh. Evidently the steroids implanted in Roger were doing their job. "Now I've got something else," she said, and opened the guitar case.