Man Plus

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 want, 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.

Roger came along with no argument. “Goodbye, Dorrie,” he said, and did not wait for an answer. He had trouble fitting himself into Don Kayman’s little car, but his wings folded down. By pushing the reclining seat back as far as it would go he was able to manage, in a cramped and precarious position that would have been hopelessly uncomfortable for any normal human being. Roger, of course, was not a normal human being. His muscular system was content with prolonged overloads in almost any configuration it could bend into at all.

They were silent until they were almost at the project. Then Don Kayman cleared his throat. “You had us worried.”

“I thought I would,” said the flat cyborg voice. The wings stirred restlessly, writhing against each other like a rubbing of hands. “I wanted to see her, Don. It was important to me.”

“I can understand that.” Kayman turned into the broad, empty parking lot. “Well?” he probed. “Are things all right?”

The cyborg mask turned toward him. The great compound eyes gleamed like faceted ebony, without expression, as Roger said: “You’re a jerk, Father Kayman, sir. How all right can they be?”

Sulie Carpenter thought wistfully of sleep, as she might think of a vacation on the French Riviera. They were equally out of the question at that moment. She took two caps of amphetamines and a B-l2 injection, self-administered into the places in her arm she had learned to locate long ago.

The simulation of Roger’s reactions had been compromised by the power failure, so she did it over again from punch-in to readout. We were content that this should be so. It gave us a chance to make a few corrections.

While she was waiting she took a long, hot soak in a hydrotherapy tub, and when the simulation had run she studied it carefully. She had taught herself to read the cryptic capital letters and integers, to guard against programming errors, but this time she spared the hardware no time and went at once to the plain-language readout at the end. She was very good at her job.

That job did not happen to be ward nurse. Sulie Carpenter had been one of the first of the aerospace female doctors. She had her degree in medicine, had specialized in psychotherapy, all the myriad eclectic disciplines of it, and had gone into the space program because nothing on Earth seemed really worth doing to her. After completing astronaut training she had come to wonder if there was anything in space that was worth doing either. Research had seemed at least abstractly worth while, so she had applied for work with the California study teams and got it. There had been a fair number of men in her life, one or two of them important to it. None of them had worked out. That much of what she had told Roger had been true; and after the most recent bruising failure she had contracted her area of interest until, she told herself, she grew up enough to know what she wanted from a man. And there she stayed, sidetracked in a loop off the main current of human affairs, until we turned up her card out of all the hundreds of thousands of punched cards, to fill Roger’s need.

When her orders came, wholly without warning, they were directly from the President himself. There was no way she could have refused the assignment. Actually she had no desire to. She welcomed the change. Mother-henning a hurting human being stroked the feelgood centers of her personality; the importance of the job was clear to her, because if there was any faith in her it was in the Mars project; and she was aware of her competence. Of competence she had a great deal. We rated her very high, a major piece in the game we were playing for the survival of the race.

When she had finished with Roger’s simulation it was nearly four in the morning.

She slept a couple of hours in a borrowed bed in the nurses’ quarters. Then she showered, dressed and put her green contact lenses in. She was not happy with that particular aspect of her job, she reflected on the way to Roger’s room. The dyed hair and the change of eye color were deceptions; she did not like to deceive. One day she would like to leave out the contacts and let her hair go back to its muddy blond — oh, maybe helped out a little with a rinse, to be sure; she did not object to artifice, only to pretending to be something she wasn’t.

But when she entered Roger’s room she was smiling. “Lovely to see you back. We missed you. How was it, running around on your own?”

“Not bad at all,” said the flat voice. Roger was standing by the window, staring out at the blobs of tumbleweed lumping and bouncing across the parking lot. He turned to her. “You know, it’s all true, what you said. What I’ve got now isn’t just different, it’s better.”

She resisted the desire to reinforce what he had said, and only smiled as she began to strip his bed. “I was worried about sex,” he went on. “But you know what, Sulie? It’s like being told I can’t have any caviar for the next couple of years. I don’t like caviar. And when you come right down to it, I don’t want sex right now. I suppose you punched that into the computer? ‘Cut down sex drive, increase euphoria’? Anyway, it finally penetrated my little brain that I was just making trouble for myself, worrying about whether I could get along without something I really didn’t want. It’s a reflection of what I think other people think I should want.”

“Acculturation,” she supplied.

“No doubt,” he said, “Listen, I want to do something for you.”

He picked up the guitar, propped himself against the window frame with one heel against the sill, and settled the instrument across his knee. His wings quietly rearranged themselves over his head as he began to play.

Sulie was startled. He was not merely playing; he was singing. Singing? No, it was a sound more like a man whistling through his teeth, faint but pure. His fingers on the guitar strummed and plucked an accompaniment while the keening whistle from his lips flowed through the melody of a tune she had never heard before.

When he had finished she demanded, “What was that?”

“It’s a Paganini sonata for guitar and violin,” he said proudly. “Clara gave me the record.”

“I didn’t know you could do that. Humming, I mean — or whatever it was.”

“I didn’t either until I tried. I can’t get enough volume for the violin part, of course. And I can’t keep the guitar sound low enough to balance it, but it didn’t sound bad, did it?”

“Roger,” she said, meaning it, “I’m impressed.”

He looked up at her and impressed her again by managing a smile. He said, “I bet you didn’t know I could do that, either. I didn’t know it myself till I tried.”

At the meeting Sulie said flatly, “He’s ready, General.”

Scanyon had managed enough sleep to look rested, and enough of something else, some inner resource or whatever, to look less harried. “You’re sure, Major Carpenter?”

She nodded her head. “He’ll never be readier.” She hesitated. Vern Scanyon, reading her expression, waited for the amendment. “The problem, as I see it, is that he’s right to go now. All his systems are up to operating level. He’s worked through his thing with his wife. He’s ready. The longer he stays around here, the more chance that she’ll do something to upset his balance.”

“I doubt that very much,” said Scanyon, frowning.

“Well, she knows what trouble she’ll be in. But I don’t want to take that chance, I want him to move.”

“You mean take him down to Merritt Island?”

“No. I want to put him on hold.”

Brad spilled coffee from the cup he had been raising to his lips. “No way, sweetie!” he cried, genuinely shocked. “I have seventy-two more hours testing on his systems! If you slow him down I can’t get readings—”

“Testing for what, Dr. Bradley? For his operating efficiency, or for the sake of the papers you’re going to write on him?”

“Well — Christ, certainly I’m going to write him up. But I want to check him as thoroughly as possible, every minute I can, for his sake. And for the mission’s.”

She shrugged. “That’s still my recommendation. There’s nothing for him to do here but wait. He’s had enough of that.”

“What if something goes wrong on Mars?” Brad demanded.

She said, “You wanted my recommendation. That’s it.”

Scanyon put in, “Please make sure we all know what you’re talking about. Especially me.”

Sulie looked toward Brad, who said, “We’ve planned to do that for the voyage, General, as you know. We have the capacity to override his internal clocks by external computer mediation. There are — let’s see — five days and some hours to launch; we can slow him down so that his subjective time is maybe thirty minutes over that period. It makes sense — but what I said makes sense, too, and I can’t take the responsibility for letting him out of my hands until I’ve made every test I want to make.”

Scanyon scowled. “I understand what you’re saying; it’s a good point, and I’ve got a point of my own, too. What happened to what you were saying last night, Major Carpenter? About not cutting off his behavior modification too abruptly.”

Sulie said, “He’s at a plateau stage, General. If I could have another six months with him I’d take it. Five days, no; there’s more risk than there is benefit. He’s found a real interest in his guitar — you should hear him. He’s built up really structurally good defenses in regard to his lack of sexual organs. He has even taken things into his own hands by running out last night — that’s a major step, General; his profile was much too passive to be good, when you consider the demands of this mission. I say put him on hold now.”

“And I say I need more time with him,” flared Brad. “Maybe Sulie’s right. But I’m right too, and I’ll take it to the President if I have to!”

Scanyon looked thoughtfully at Brad, then around the room. “Any other comments?”

Don Kayman put in, “For what it’s worth, I agree with Sulie. He’s not happy about his wife, but he’s not shaken up either. This is as good a place as any for him to go.”

“Yeah,” said Scanyon, gently patting the desk top again. He looked into space, and then said, “There’s something none of you know. Your simulation isn’t the only one of Roger that has been done lately.” He looked at each face and emphasized, “This is not to be discussed with anyone outside this room. The Asians are doing one of their own. They’ve tapped into our 3070 circuits somewhere between here and the two other computers and stolen all the data, and they’ve used it to make their own simulation.”

“Why?” Don Kayman demanded, only a beat before the others at the table.

“That’s what I wish I knew,” said Scanyon heavily. “They’re not interfering. We wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for a routine line check that uncovered their tap — and then some cloak and dagger stuff in Peking that I don’t know about and don’t want to. All they did was read everything out and make their own program. We don’t know what use they are going to make out of it, but there’s a surprise in it. Right after that they dropped their protest against the launch. In fact, they offered the use of their Mars orbiter to expedite telemetry for the mission.”

“I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them!” Brad flared.

“Well, we’re not going to put much reliance on their bird, you can bet on that. But there it is: they say they want the mission to work. Well,” he said, “that’s just one more complication, but it all comes down to a single decision right now, correct? I have to make up my mind whether or not to put Roger on hold. Okay. I’ll do it. I accept your recommendation, Major Carpenter. Tell Roger what we’re going to do, and tell him whatever you and Dr. Ramez think you should about why. As for you, Brad” — he raised his hand to ward off Brad’s protests — “I know what you’re going to say. I agree. Roger needs more time with you. Well, he’ll get it. I’m ordering you along on the mission.” He slid a sheet of paper closer to him on his desk, crossed out one name on a list, wrote in another. “I’m going to drop one of the pilots to make room for you. I already checked. There’s plenty of back-up, with the machine guidance systems and the fact that you all have had some pilot training anyhow. That’s the final crew roster for the Mars launch: Torraway, Kayman, General Hesburgh as pilot — and you.”

Brad protested. It was only a reflex. Once the idea had settled in he accepted it. What Scanyon had said was true enough, and besides, Brad perceived instantly that the career he had programmed for himself could not help but be enhanced by actual physical participation in the mission itself. It would be a pity to leave Dorrie, and all the Dorries, but there would be so many Dorries when he got back…

And everything else followed as the night the day. That was the last decision. Everything else was only implementation. On Merritt Island the crews began fueling the launch vehicle. The rescue ships were deployed across the Atlantic in case of failure. Brad was flown to the island for his fitting, with six ex-astronauts detailed to cram in all the touch-up teaching he needed and could get in the time available. Hesburgh was one of them, short, sure and smiling, his demeanor a constant reassurance. Don Kayman took a precious twelve-hour relief to say good-by to his nun.

With all of this we were quite content. We were content with the decision to send Brad along. We were content with the trendline extrapolations that every day showed more positive results from the effect of the launch on world opinion and events. We were content with Roger’s state of mind. And with the NPA simulation of Roger we were most content of all; in fact, that was an essential to our plans for the salvation of the race.