Man Plus

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 take 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’etre 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.

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.