The phone rang.
Roger's instant reflexes had him grabbing the earpiece out of its cradle almost before the first brrr sounded, so quickly and brutally that it was deformed into scrap in his hand. The vision screen flickered and then went dark again, its circuitry linked with the sound. "Hello?" Roger said. But there was no answer; he had made sure that nobody would ever speak on that instrument again.
"Christ," he said. He had had no clear idea of how this meeting would go, but it was apparent that it had begun badly.
When Dorrie came out of the bathroom she wasn't crying, but she wasn't speaking either. She went into the kitchen without looking at him. "I want a cup of tea," she said over her shoulder.
"Wouldn't you rather I made you a drink?" Roger offered hopefully.
Roger could hear the sounds of the electric kettle being filled, the faint susurrus as it began to simmer and, several times, a cough. He listened harder and heard his wife's breathing, which became slower and steadier.
He sat down in the chair that had always been his chair and waited. His wings were in the way. Even though they elevated themselves automatically over his head he could not lean back. Restlessly he roamed into the living room. His wife's voice called through the swinging doors: "Do you want some tea?"
"No." Then he added, "No, thank you." Actually he would have liked it very much, not because of any need for fluids or nutrients but for the feeling of participating in some normal, precedented event with Dorrie. But he did not want to spill and slobber in front of her, and he had not practiced much with cups and saucers and liquids.
"Where are you?" She hesitated at the swinging doors, the cup in her hands, and then saw him. "Oh. Why don't you turn a light on?"
"I don't want to. Honey, sit down and close your eyes for a minute." He had an idea.
"Why?" But she did as he requested, seating herself in the wing chair on one side of the fake fireplace. He picked up the chair, with her in it, and turned it away, so that she was facing into the wall. He looked around for something to sit in himself—there was nothing, or nothing that comported with his new geometry: floor pillows and couches, all awkward for his body or his wings—but on the other hand, he knew, he had no particular need to sit. His artificial musculature did not need that sort of relaxation very much.
So he stood behind her and said, "I'd feel better if you weren't looking at me."
"I understand that, Roger. You frightened me, is all. I wish you hadn't burst in the window like that! On the other hand, I shouldn't have been so positive I could see you, I mean like that, without— Without going into hysterics, I guess is what I want to say."
"I know what I look like," he said.
"It's still you, though, isn't it?" Dorrie said to the wall. "Although I don't remember you ever climbing the outside of a building to get into my bed before."
"It's easy," he said, taking a chance on what was almost an attempt at lightness.
"Well"—she paused for a sip of tea—"tell me. What's this about?"
"I wanted to see you, Dorrie."
"You did see me. On the phone."
"I didn't want it to be on the phone. I wanted to be in the same room with you." He wanted even more than that to touch her, to reach out to the nape of her neck and press and caress the tendons into relaxing, but he did not quite dare that. Instead he reached down and ignited the gas flame in the fireplace, not so much for warmth as for a little light to help Dorrie. And for cheerfulness.
"We aren't supposed to do that, Roger. There's a thousand-dollar fine—"
He laughed. "Not for you and me, Dorrie. Anybody gives you any trouble, you call up Dash and say I said it was all right."
His wife took a cigarette from the box on the end table and lit it. "Roger, dear," she said slowly, "I'm not used to all this. I don't just mean the way you look. I understand about that. It's hard, but at least I knew what it was going to be before it happened. Even if I didn't think it would be you. But I'm not used to your being so—I don't know, important."
"I'm not used to it either, Dorrie." He thought back to the TV reporters and the cheering crowds when he returned to Earth after rescuing the Russians. "It's different now, I feel as if I'm carrying something on my back—the world, maybe."
"Dash says that's exactly what you're doing. Half of what he says is crap, but I don't think that part is. You're a pretty significant man, Roger. You were always a famous one. Maybe that's why I married you. But that was like being a rock star, you know? It was exciting, but you could always walk away from it if you got tired of it. This I don't think you can walk away from."
She stubbed out her cigarette. "Anyway," she said, "you're here, and they're probably going crazy at the project."
"I can handle that."
"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "I guess you can. What shall we talk about?"
"Brad," he said. He had not intended it. The word came out of his artificial larynx, shaped by his restructured lips, with no intervention by his conscious mind.
He could feel her stiffening up. "What about Brad?" she asked.
"Your sleeping with him, that's what about Brad," he said. The back of her neck was glowing dully now, and he knew that if he could see her face it would display the revealing tracery of veins. The dancing gas flames from the fireplace made an attractive spectrum of colors on her dark hair; he watched the play appreciatively, as though it did not matter what he was saying to his wife, or she to him.
She said, "Roger, I really don't know how to deal with you. Are you angry with me?"
He watched the dancing colors silently.
"After all, Roger, we talked this out years ago. You have had affairs, and so have I. We agreed they didn't mean anything."
"They mean something when they hurt." He willed his vision to stop, and welcomed the darkness as an aid to thought. "The others were different," he said.
"Different how?" She was angry now.
"Different because we talked them over," he said doggedly. "When I was in Algiers and you couldn't stand the climate, that was one thing. What you did back here in Tonka and what I did in Algiers didn't affect you and me. When I was in orbit—"
"I never slept with anybody else while you were in orbit!"
"I know that, Dorrie. I thought that was kind of you. I really did, because it wouldn't have been fair, would it? I mean, my own opportunities were pretty limited. Old Yuli Bronin wasn't my type. But now it's different. It's like I was in orbit again, only worse. I don't even have Yuli! I not only don't have a girl friend, I don't have the equipment to do anything about it if I did."
She said wretchedly, "I know all that. What can I tell you?"
"You can tell me you'll be a good wife to me!" he roared.
That frightened her; he had forgotten what his voice could sound like. She began to cry.
He reached out to touch her and then let his hand fall. What was the use?
Oh, Christ, he thought. What a mess! He took consolation only in that this interview had been here, in the privacy of their own home, quite unplanned and secret. It would have been unbearable in the presence of anyone else; but naturally we had monitored every word.
Twelve
Two Simulations and a Reality
Copper-fingered Roger had blown more than a fuse. He had shorted a whole box of circuit breakers. It took twenty minutes to get the lights on again.
Fortunately the 3070 had stand-by power for its memory, so the cores were not wiped. The computations that were in process were compromised. All of them would have to be done over again. The automatic surveillance was out of service until long after Roger was gone.
One of the first ones to know what had happened was Sulie Carpenter, catching a cat nap in the office next to the computer room, waiting for Roger's simulation to finish. It didn't finish. The alarm bells signifying interruption of the information being processed woke her. The bright fluorescent rod-lights were out, and only the red incandescents gave a dim, despairing glow.
>
Her first thought was her precious simulation. She spent twenty minutes with the programmers, studying the partial printout, hoping that it would be all right, before she gave up and charged out to Vern Scanyon's office. That was when she found out that Roger had run off.
Power was back by then; it had come on while she was taking the fire stairs two at a time. Scanyon was already on the phone, ordering the people he wanted to blame in for an emergency conference. Clara Bly was the one who told Sulie about Roger; one by one, as the others entered the room, they were brought up to date. Don Kayman was the only major figure who was out of the project; they located him watching television in his clerical condominium. Kathleen Doughty came up from the physiotherapy room in the basement, dragging Brad with her, all pink-skinned and damp; he had been trying to substitute an hour in the sauna for a night's sleep. Freeling was at Merritt Island, but not needed particularly; half a dozen others came in and slumped, dispiritedly or worriedly, into the leather chairs around the conference table.
Scanyon had already ordered an Air Force spottercopter into the air, in a search pattern all around the project. Its TV cameras were sweeping the freeway, the access roads, the parking lots, the fields and prairie, and displaying what they saw on the wall TV at the end of the room. The Tonka police force had been alerted to watch for a strange devil-like creature running around at seventy kilometers an hour, which had led to trouble for the Tonka desk sergeant. He made a bad mistake. He asked the project security officer if he had been drinking. Ten seconds later, with his head filled with visions of pounding a beat in Kiska, the sergeant was on the police radio to all vehicles and foot patrolmen. The orders for the police were not to arrest Roger, not even to approach him. They were only to find him.
What Scanyon wanted was someone to blame. "I hold you responsible, Dr. Ramez," he barked at the staff shrink. "You and Major Carpenter. How could you let Torraway get into this sort of action without advance warning?"
Ramez said placatingly, "General, I told you Roger was unstable with regard to his wife. That's why I asked for someone like Sulie. He needed another object to fixate on, someone directly connected with the project—"
"Didn't work very well, did it?"
Sulie stopped listening. She knew very well that her turn was next, but she was trying to think. Over Scanyon's desk she saw the moving view from the copter. It was expressed as a schematic, the roads as lines of green, the vehicles as points of blue, buildings yellow. The few pedestrians were bright red. Now, if one of those red dots should suddenly start to move at the speed of a blue vehicle, that would be Roger. But he had had plenty of time to get farther away than the area the copter was covering.
"Tell them to scan the town, General," she said suddenly.
He frowned, but he picked up the phone and gave the order. He didn't get a chance to put it down again; there was an incoming call he could not refuse.
Telly Ramez got up from his chair next to the director and came around to Sulie Carpenter. She didn't look up from the folded transcript of the simulation. He waited patiently.
The director's call was from the President of the United States. They would have known that from the sweat that rolled down beneath Scanyon's temples, even if they had not seen Dash's tiny face in the screen on the director's desk. Faintly the voice leaked through to them: ". . . spoke to Roger he seemed—I don't know, disinterested. I thought it over, Vern, and then I decided to call you. Is everything going all right?"
Scanyon swallowed. He glanced around the table and abruptly folded up the privacy petals on the phone; the image dwindled to postage-stamp size. The voice faded to nothingness as the sound was transferred to a parabolic speaker aimed directly at Scanyon's head, and Scanyon's own words were swallowed by the petal-like shields. The rest of the room had no difficulty in following the conversation anyway; it was written very clearly on Scanyon's face.
Sulie looked up from the transcript at Telly Ramez. "Get him off the phone," she said impatiently. "I know where Roger is."
Ramez said, "At his wife's house."
She rubbed her eyes wearily. "I guess we didn't need a simulation for that, did we? I'm sorry, Telly. I guess I wasn't keeping him on the hook as firmly as I thought I was."
They were right; of course; we had known that for some time. As soon as Scanyon got off the phone with the President the security office called to say that the bugs in Dorrie's bedroom had picked up the sound of Roger coming in through the window.
Scanyon's lemony small eyes seemed almost at the point of tears. "Put the sound on the horn," he ordered. "Display the house." And then he switched his phone to an outside line and dialed Dorrie's number.
From the loudspeaker came the sound of one ring, then a metallic noise and Roger's flat cyborg voice rasping, "Hello?" And a moment later, softer but equally toneless, "Christ."
Scanyon jerked the earpiece away and rubbed his ear. "What the hell happened?" he demanded. There was no answer from anyone to the rhetorical question, and gingerly he put the phone back. "I'm getting some kind of trouble signal," he announced.
"We can send a man in, General," the assistant security chief suggested. "There are two of our men in that car out in front of the house there." The helicopter pickup had slid across the screen and settled at 1,800 feet over the Courthouse Square in the city of Tonka. The camera was set for infrared, and in the upper corner of the screen the broad dark band of the Ship Canal identified the edge of the town. A rectangle of darkness surrounded by the moving lights of cars just below the screen's center point was the Courthouse Square, and Roger's home was marked with a tracer star in red. The assistant reached up and touched the blob of light nearby to show the car. "We're in voice contact with them, General," he went on. "They didn't see Colonel Torraway go in."
Sulie stood up. "I don't recommend it," she said.
"Your recommendations aren't too popular with me right now, Major Carpenter," Scanyon snarled.
"All the same, General—" She stopped as Scanyon raised his hand.
From the speaker Dorrie's voice came faintly: I want a cup of tea. And then Roger's: Wouldn't you rather I rnade you a drink? And her almost inaudible No.
"All the same," Sulie spoke up, "he's stable enough now. Don't screw it up."
"I can't let him just sit out there! Who the hell knows what he'll do next? You?"
"You've got him spotted. I don't think he'll move, anyway, not for a while. Don Kayman's not far from there and he's a friend. Tell him to go get Roger."
"Kayman's not much of a combat specialist."
"Is that what you want? If Roger doesn't come back peacefully, exactly what are you going to do about it?"
Do you want some tea?
No. . . . No, thank you.
"And turn that off," Sulie added. "Leave the poor bastard a little privacy."
Scanyon sat slowly back in his chair, patting the top of his desk with both hands at once, very gently. Then he picked up the phone and gave orders. "We'll do it your way one more time, Major," he said. "Not because I have much confidence. I just don't have much choice, either. I can't threaten you with anything. If this goes wrong again, I doubt I'll be in a position to punish anybody. But I'm pretty sure somebody will."
Telesforo Ramez said, "Sir, I understand your position, but I think this isn't fair to Sulie. The simulation shows that he has to have a confrontation with his wife."
"The point of a simulation, Dr. Ramez, is that it should tell you what's going to happen before it happens."
"Well, it also shows that Torraway is basically pretty stable in every other respect. He'll handle this, General."
Scanyon went back to patting his desk.
Ramez said, "He's a complicated person. You've seen his Thematic Apperception Test patterns, General. He's high in all the fundamental drives: achievement, affiliation—not quite so high in power, but still healthy. He's not a manipulator. He's introspective. He needs to work things out in his head. Those are the qualities you w
ant, General. He'll need all that. You can't ask him to be one person here in Oklahoma and another person on Mars."
"If I'm not mistaken," the general said, "that's what you promised me, with your behavior modification."
"No, General," the psychiatrist said patiently. "I only promised that if you gave him a reward like Sulie Carpenter he'd find it easier to reconcile himself to his problems with his wife. He has."
"B-mod has its own dynamics, General," Sulie put in. "You called me in pretty late."
"What are you telling me?" Scanyon asked dangerously. "Is he going to crack up on Mars?"
"I hope not. The odds are as good as we know how to make them, General. He's cleaned up a lot of old shit; you can see it in his latest TATs. But six days from now he'll be gone, and I won't be in his life any more. And that's wrong. B-mod should never be cut off cold turkey. It should be phased out—a little less of me being around and then a little less than that until he's had a chance to build up his defenses."
The gentle patting on the desk was slower now, and Scanyon said, "It's a little late to tell me that."
Sulie shrugged, and did not speak.
Scanyon looked thoughtfully around the table. "All right. We've done all we can here tonight. You're all dismissed until eight—no, make that ten in the morning. By then I expect every one of you to have a report, no more than three minutes long, on where your own area of responsibilities stands, and what we should do."
Don Kayman got the message from a Tonka police patrol car. It swooshed up behind him, lights flashing and siren screaming, and pulled him over to order him to turn around and go back to Roger's apartment.
He knocked on the door with some trepidation, unsure of what he would find. And when the door opened, with Roger's gleaming eyes peering out from behind it, Kayman whispered a quick Hail Mary as he tried to look past Roger into the apartment—for what? For the dismembered body of Dorrie Torraway? For a shambles of destruction? But all he saw was Dorrie herself, huddled in a wing chair and obviously weeping. The sight almost pleased him, since he had been prepared for so much worse.