Man Plus

Sixteen On the Perception of Perils

Vern Scanyon parked his car any which way across the painted yellow lines that marked his own place, jumped out and held his thumb against the elevator button. He had been awake less than forty minutes, but he was not at all sleepy. What he was, was angry and apprehensive. The President’s appointments secretary had waked him out of a sound sleep with a phone call to say that the President had diverted his flight to stop at Tonka — “to discuss the problems of the perceptual system of Commander Torraway.” To kick ass, more accurately. Scanyon had not known anything about Roger’s sudden attack on Don Kayman until he was in his car, hastening to the project building to meet the President.

“Morning, Vern.” Jonny Freeling looked scared and angry, too. Scanyon brushed past him into his own office.

“Come on in,” he barked. “Now, in words of one syllable. What happened?”

Freeling said resentfully, “It’s not my responsibility to—”

“Freeling.”

“Roger’s systems overreacted a little. Apparently Kayman moved suddenly, and the simulations systems translated it into a threat; Roger defended himself and pushed Kayman away.”

Scanyon stared.

“Broke his arm,” Freeling amended. “It was only a simple fracture, General. No complications. It’s splinted, it’ll heal perfectly — he just has to get by with one functioning arm for a while. It’s a pity for Don Kayman, of course. He won’t be very comfortable—”

“Fuck Kayman! Why didn’t he know how to act around Roger?”

“Well, he did know. He found something that he thought was indigenous life! That was pretty exciting. All he wanted to do was show it to Roger.”

“Life?” Scanyon’s eyes looked more hopeful.

“Some sort of plant, they think.”

“Can’t they tell?”

“Well, Roger seems to have knocked it out of Kayman’s hand. Brad went looking for it afterward, but he couldn’t find it.”

“Jesus,” Scanyon snorted. “Freeling, tell me one thing. What kind of incompetents have we got working for us?” It was not a question that had a proper answer, and Scanyon didn’t wait for one. “In about twenty minutes,” he said, “the President of the United States is going to come through that door and he’s going to want to know line by line what happened and why. I don’t know what he’s going to ask, but whatever it is there’s one answer I don’t want to give him, and that’s ‘I don’t know.’ So tell me, Freeling. Tell me all over again what happened, why it went wrong, why we didn’t think it would go wrong and how we can be damn sure it isn’t going to go wrong again.” It took a little more than twenty minutes, but then they had more; the President’s plane touched down late, and by the time Dash arrived Scanyon was as ready as he knew how to be. Even ready for the fury in the President’s face.

“Scanyon,” Dash snapped at once, “I warned you, no more surprises. This time is one too many, and I think I’m going to have to have your ass.”

“You can’t put a man on Mars without risks, Mr. President!”

Dash stared eye to eye for a moment, then said, “Maybe. What’s the priest’s condition?”

“He’s got a broken radius, but it’s going to be all right. There’s something more important than that. He thinks he found life on Mars, Mr. President!”

Dash shook his head. “I know, some kind of plant. But he managed to lose it.”

“For the moment. Kayman’s a good man. If he said he found something important, he did. He’ll find it again.”

“I certainly hope so, Vern. Don’t slide away from this. Why did this thing happen?”

“A slight overcontrol of his perceptual systems. That’s it, Mr. President, and that’s all it is. In order to make him respond quickly and positively, we had to build in some simulation features. To get his attention to priority messages, he sees his wife speaking to him. To get him to react to danger, he sees something frightening. That way his head can keep up with the reflexes we built into his body. Otherwise he’d go crazy.”

“Breaking the priest’s arm wasn’t crazy?”

“No! It was an accident. When Kayman jumped at him he interpreted it as an actual attack of some kind. He responded. Well, Mr. President, in this case it was wrong, and it cost us a broken arm; but suppose there had been a real threat? Any kind of a threat! He would have met it. Whatever it was! He’s invulnerable, Mr. President. Nothing can ever catch him offguard.”

“Yeah,” said the President, and after a moment, “maybe so.” He stared over Scanyon’s head for a moment and said, “What about this other crap?”

“Which crap, Mr. President?”

Dash shrugged irritably. “As I understand it, there’s something wrong with all our computer projections, especially the polls we took.”

Alarm bells went off in Scanyon’s head. He said reluctantly, “Mr. President, there’s a lot of paper on my desk I haven’t got through yet. You know I’ve been traveling a lot—”

“Scanyon,” said the President, “I’m going now. Before you do anything else, I want you to take a look through the papers on your desk and find that paper and read it. Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, I want you in my office, and then I want to know what’s happening, specifically three things. First, I want to hear that Kayman’s all right. Second, I want that living thing found. Third, I want to know the score on the computer projections, and it better be all right. So long, Scanyon. I know it’s only five in the morning, but don’t go back to bed.”

By then we could have reassured Scanyon and the President about one thing. The object Kayman had picked up was indeed some form of life. We had reconstructed the sampled data through Roger’s eyes, filtered out the simulations, and seen what he had seen. It had not yet occurred to the President or his advisers that that could be done, but it would. It was not possible to make out fine details, because of the limited number of bits available, but the object was shaped rather like an artichoke, coarse leaves pointing upward, and a little like a mushroom: there was a crystalline cap of transparent material over it. It possessed roots, and unless it was an artifact (point zero zero one probability, at most), it had to be a form of life. We did not find that very interesting except, of course, as it would reinforce general interest in the Mars project itself. As to the doubt cast on the computer simulations, we were considerably more interested. We had followed that development for some time, ever since a graduate student named Byrne had written a Systems-360 program to recheck his desk-calculator previous recheck of some of the poll results. We were as concerned about it as the President was. But the probability of any serious consequence there too appeared quite small, especially since everything else was going well. The MHD generator was almost ready for preorbit injection course corrections; we had selected an installation site for it in the crater called Voltaire on the moon, Deimos. Not far behind it was the vehicle that contained the 3070 and its human crew of two, including Sulie Carpenter. And on Mars itself they had already begun construction of permanent installations. They were a little behind schedule. Kayman’s accident had slowed them down, not only because of what it did to him but because what Brad then insisted on doing to Roger: field-stripping his shoulder-pack computer to test for glitches. There weren’t any. But it took two Martian days to be sure; and then, because Kayman begged, they took time to find his life form. They found it, or not it, exactly, but dozens of other specimens of the same thing; and Brad and Roger left Kayman inside the lander to study it while they began building their domes.

The first step was to find an area of Mars which had suitable geology. The surface should be as much like soil as possible, but solid rock had to be not far below. It took half a day of pounding explosive spikes into the ground and listening to echoes to be sure they had that.

Then, laboriously, the solar generators were spread out, and the subsurface rock-bound water was boiled out. As the first tiny plume of steam appeared at the lip of the pipe, they cheered. It would have been easy to miss it. The utterly dry Martian air snatched every molecule up almost as soon as it left the pipe. But by leaning close to the valve at the end one could see a faint, irregular misting that distorted shapes beyond it. It was water vapor, all right.

The next step was to spread out three great stretches of monomolecular film, the smallest first and the largest on top, and seal the topmost to the ground all around its periphery. Then they carried the pumps out on the basket-wheeled vehicle and started them going. The Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, but it was there; the pumps would ultimately fill the domes, partly with the compressed carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere, partly with the water vapor they were boiling out of the rock. There was, to be sure, no oxygen to speak of in any of that, but they didn’t have to find oxygen; they would make it, in exactly the same way Earth made its oxygen: through the intercession of photosynthetic plants.

It would take four or five days for the outer dome to fill to its planned quarter kilogram of pressure. Then they would start filling the second one, up to almost a kilogram (which would increase the pressure in the diminishing space of the outer shell to about a half kilo). Then, finally, they would fill the inner dome to two kilograms, and so they would have an environment in which people could live without pressure suits, and even breathe as soon as the crops gave them breathing material.

Of course, Roger didn’t need any of that. He didn’t need the oxygen; he didn’t even need the plants for food, or not much and not for a long time. He could stay perhaps forever living off the unfailing light of the sun for most of his energy, plus what would be microwaved down from the MHD generator once it was in place. What was needed for the minuscule remaining part of him which was raw animal could easily be supplied by the concentrated foods from the ship for a long time; and only then, after perhaps a couple of Martian years, would he have to begin to depend on what came out of the hydroponics tanks and the seeds they were already sprouting in sealed cold-frames under the canopies.

It all took several days, since Kayman wasn’t a great deal of help. Getting in and out of a pressure suit was agony for him, so they left him in the lander most of the time. When it came time to lug the tanks of carefully hoarded sludge from their toilet facilities over to the dome, Kayman lent a hand. “Exactly one hand,” he said, trying to handle the magnesium-shafted rake by wrapping his good arm around it.

“You’re doing fine,” Brad encouraged. There was enough pressure in the innermost dome now to lift it above their heads, but not quite enough to let them take off their pressure suits. Which was just as well, Brad realized; this way they couldn’t smell what they were raking into the sterile soil.

By the time the dome was fully extended the pressure was up to a hundred millibars. This is the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at some ten miles above sea level. It is not an environment in which naked man can survive and work for very long, but it is an environment in which he will only die if something kills him. Half that pressure would be lethal instantly; his body temperature would boil his fluids away.

But when the internal pressure hit the 100-millibar level all three of them crowded through the three successive airlocks and Brad and Don Kayman ceremoniously took off their pressure suits. Brad and Don fitted nosepieces, something like that of an aqualung, in place for breathing; there was still no oxygen to speak of inside the dome. But they got pure oxygen from the tanks on their backs, and with that they were, for the first time, almost as free as Roger, inside a transplanted bit of Earth that was a hundred meters across and as tall as a ten-story building.

And inside it, in orderly rows, the seeds they had transplanted were already beginning to sprout and grow.

Meanwhile—

The vehicle with the magnetohydrodynamic generator attained Mars orbit, and with General Hesburgh helping, matched orbit with Deimos and nestled into the crater. It was a perfect coupling. The vehicle swung out its struts to touch the rock of the moon, augered them in, and locked. A brief jet from the maneuvering system tested its stability: it was now a part of Deimos. The power system began to sequence toward full operational mode. A fusion flame woke the plasma fires. Radar reached out to find the target on the lander, then locked on to the dome. Power began to flow. The energy density of the field was low enough for Brad and Kayman to walk around in it unaware, and to Roger it was like the basking warmth of sunlight; but the foil strips in the outer dome gathered the microwave energy and channeled it to the pumps, the batteries.

The fusion fuel had a life of fifty years. For that long at least there would be energy for Roger and his backpack computer on Mars, whatever happened on Earth.

And meanwhile—

There were other couplings.

In the long spiral up from Earth, Sulie Carpenter and her pilot, Dinty Meighan, had had time heavy on their hands and had found a way to use it.

The act of copulation in free fall presents certain problems. First Sulie had to buckle one strand of webbing around her waist, then Dinty embraced her with his arms, and she him with her legs. Their motions were underwater slow. It took Sulie a long, gentle, dreamy time to come to orgasm, and Dinty was even slower. When they were finished they were hardly even breathing hard. Sulie stretched and yawned, arching her belly against the retaining strap. “Nice,” she said drowsily. “I’ll remember that.”

“We both will, honey,” he said, misunderstanding her. “I think that’s the best way we screw. Next time—”

She shook her head to interrupt him. “No next time, Dinty dear. That was it.”

He pulled his head back to look at her. “What?”

She smiled. Her right eye was still only centimeters from his left, and their view of each other curiously foreshortened. She craned forward and rubbed her cheek gently against his bristly one.

He scowled and detached himself, suddenly feeling naked where before he had been only bare. He pulled his shorts out from behind the handhold where he had cached them and slid into them.

“Sulie, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. We’re almost ready for orbit, that’s all.”

He pushed himself backward across the cramped compartment to get a better look at her. She was worth looking at. Her hair had gone back to muddy blond and her eyes were brown without the contact lenses; and even after almost two hundred days of never being more than ten meters from him, she still looked good to Dinty Meighan. “I didn’t think you had any surprises left,” he marveled.

“You never can tell about a woman.”

“Come on, Sulie! What’s this all about? You sound as though you’ve been planning — Hey!” A thought struck him. “You volunteered for this mission — not to go to Mars, but to go to some guy! Right? One of the guys ahead of us?”

“You’re very quick, Dinty. Not,” she said fondly, “where I don’t want you to be, though.”

“Who is it, Brad? Hesburgh? Not the priest? — oh, wait a minute!” He nodded. “Sure! The one you were mixed up with back on Earth. The cyborg!”

“Colonel Roger Torraway, the human being,” she corrected. “As human as you are, except for some improvements.”

He laughed, more resentment than humor. “A lot of improvements, and no balls at all.”

Sulie unstrapped herself. “Dinty,” she said sweetly, “I’ve enjoyed sex with you, and I respect you, and you’ve been about as comfortable to be with as any human being possibly could be on this Goddamned eternity trip. But there are some things I don’t want you to say. You’re right. Roger doesn’t happen to have any testicles, right at this exact moment. But he’s a human being I can respect and love, and he’s the only one like that I’ve found lately. Believe me, I’ve looked.”

“Thanks!”

“Oh, don’t do this, dear Dinty. You know you’re not really jealous. You’ve already got a wife.”

“Next year I do! That’s a long way off.” She shrugged, grinning. “Ah, but Sulie! There are some things you can’t kid me about. You love screwing!”

“I like body contact and intimacy,” she corrected, “and I like coming to orgasm. I like both those things better with someone I love, Dinty. No offense.”

He scowled. “You’ve got a long wait, sweetie.”

“Maybe not.”

“The hell you say. I won’t see Irene for seven months. But you — you won’t be back any faster than I will; and then it only begins. They’ve got to put him back together for you. Assuming they can put him back together. It sounds like a long time between fucks.”

“Oh, Dinty. Don’t you think I’ve thought this all out?” She patted him in passing, on the way to her own locker. “Sex isn’t just coitus. There are more ways to orgasm than with a penis in my vagina. And there’s more to sex than orgasm. Not to mention love. Roger,” she went on, wriggling into her jump suit, not so much for modesty as for pockets, “is a resourceful, loving person, and so am I. We’ll make out — anyway, until the rest of the colonists land.”

“Rest?” he struggled. “Rest of the colonists?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m not going back with all of you, Dinty, and I don’t think Roger is either. We’re going to be Martians!”

And meanwhile, in the Oval Room of the White House, the President of the United States was confronting Vern Scanyon and a young, coffee-colored man with tinted glasses and the build of a football player. “So you’re the one,” he said, appraising him. “You think we don’t know how to run a computer study.”

“No, Mr. President,” the young man said steadily. “I don’t think that’s the problem.”

Scanyon coughed. “Byrne here,” he said, “is a graduate student on work-study from M.I.T. His thesis is on sampling methodology, and we gave him access to some of the, ah, classified material. Especially public-opinion studies about attitudes on the project.”

“But not to a computer,” Byrne said.

“Not to a big one,” Scanyon corrected. “You had your own desk dataplex.”

The President said mildly, “Get on with it, Scanyon.”

“Well, his results came out different. According to his interpretations, the public opinion on the whole question of colonizing Mars was, well, apathy. You remember, Mr. President, there was some question about the results at the time? The raw results weren’t encouraging at all? But when we played them through analysis they came out positive to — what do you call it? — two sigmas. I never knew why.”

“Did you check?”

“Certainly, Mr. President! Not me,” Scanyon added quickly. “That wasn’t my responsibility. But I’m satisfied that the studies were verified.”

Byrne put in, “Three different times, with three different programs. There were minor variations, of course. But they all came out significant and reliable. Only when I repeated them on my desk machine they didn’t. And that’s the way it is, Mr. President. If you work up the figures on any big computer in the net you get one result. If you work them up on a small isolated machine you get another.”

The President drummed the balls of his thumbs on the desk. “What’s your conclusion?”

Byrne shrugged. He was twenty-three years old, and his surroundings intimidated him. He looked to Scanyon for help and found none; he said, “You’ll have to ask somebody else that one, Mr. President. I can only give you my own conjecture. Somebody’s buggering our computer network.”

The President rubbed the left lobe of his nose reflectively, nodding slowly. He looked at Byrne for a moment and then said, without raising his voice, “Carousso, come on in here. Mr. Byrne, what you see and hear in this room is top secret. When you leave, Mr. Carousso will see that you are informed as to what that means to you in detail; basically, you are not to talk about it. To anyone. Ever.”

The door to the President’s anteroom opened and a tall, solid man with a self-effacing air walked in. Byrne stared at him wonderingly: Charles Carousso, the head of the CIA! “What about it, Chuck?” the President asked. “What about him?”

“We’ve checked Mr. Byrne, of course,” said the Agency man. His words were precise and uninflected. “There isn’t anything significantly adverse to him — you’ll be glad to know, I suppose, Mr. Byrne. And what he says checks out. It isn’t only the public-opinion surveys. The war-risk projections, the cost/effectiveness studies — run on the net they come out one way, run on independent calculating machines they come out another. I agree with Mr. Byrne. Our computer net has been compromised.”

The President’s lips were pressed together as though he were holding back what he wanted to say. All he allowed to come out was, “I want you to find out how this happened, Chuck. But the question now is, who? The Asians?”

“No, sir! We checked that out. It’s impossible.”

“Bullshit it’s impossible!” roared the President. “We know they already did tap our lines once, on the simulation of Roger Torraway’s systems!”

“Mr. President, that’s an entirely different case. We found that tap and neutralized it. It was in the groundlines cable on a nonsensitive linkage. The comm circuits on our major machines are absolutely leakproof.” He glanced at Byrne. “You have a report on the techniques involved, Mr. President; I’ll be glad to go over it with you at another time.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” said Byrne, smiling for the first time. “Everybody knows the links are multiply scrambled. If you’ve checked me out, I’m sure you found out that a lot of us graduate students fool around trying to tap in, and none of us make it.”

The agency man nodded. “As a matter of fact, Mr. President, we tolerate that; it’s good field-testing for our security. If people like Mr. Byrne can’t think up a way past the blocks, I doubt the Asians can. And the blocks are leakproof. They have to be. They control circuits that go to the War Machine in Butte, the Census Bureau, UNESCO—”

“Wait a minute!” barked the President. “You mean our machines tie in with both UNESCO, which the Asians use, and the War Machine?”

“There is absolutely no possibility of a leak.”

“There’s been a leak, Carousso!”

“Not to the Asians, Mr. President.”

“You just finished telling me there’s one wire that goes out of our machine to the War Machine and another that goes straight to the Asians, with a detour through UNESCO!”

“Even so, Mr. President, I absolutely guarantee it’s not the Asians. We would know that. All major computers are crosslinked to some extent. That’s like saying there’s a road from everywhere to everywhere else. Right, there is. But there are roadblocks. There is no way the NPA can get access to the War Machine, or to most of these studies. Even so, if they had done it, we would know from covert sources. They haven’t. And,” he went on, “in any case, Mr. President, can you think of any reason why the NPA would distort results in order to compel us to colonize Mars?”

The President drummed his thumbs, looking around the room. At last he sighed. “I’m willing to go along with your logic, Chuck. But if it wasn’t the Asians that buggered our computers, then who?”

The agency man was morosely silent.

“And,” Dash snarled, “for Christ’s sake, why?”