Man Plus

Three Man Becoming Martian

Time was when the planet Mars looked like another Earth. The astronomer Schiaparelli, peering through his Milanese telescope at the celebrated conjunction of 1877, saw what he thought were “channels,” announced them as “canali” and had them understood as “canals” by half the literate population of Earth. Including nearly all the astronomers, who promptly turned their telescopes in the same direction and discovered more.

Canals? Then they must have been dug for a purpose. What purpose? To hold water — there was no other explanation that saved the facts.

The logic of the syllogism was compelling, and by the turn of the century there was hardly a doubter in the world. It was accepted as lore that Mars held an older, wiser culture than our own. If only we could somehow speak to them, what marvels we would learn! Percival Lowell mused over a sketching pad and came up with a first attempt. Draw great Euclidean shapes on the Sahara Desert, he said. Line them with brushwood, or dig them as trenches and fill them with oil. Then on some moonless night when Mars is high in the African heavens, set them afire. Those alien Martian eyes that he took to be fixed firmly to their alien Martian telescopes would see. They would recognize the squares and triangles. They would understand that communication was intended, and out of their older wisdom they would find a way to respond.

Not everybody believed quite as much quite so firmly as Lowell. Some said that Mars was too small and too cold ever to harbor a hugely intelligent race. Dig canals? Oh, yes, that was a simple enough peasant skill, and a race that was dying of thirst could well manage to scratch out ditches, even enormous ditches visible across interplanetary space, to keep itself alive. But beyond that, the environment was simply too harsh. A race living there would be like the Eskimos, forever trapped on the threshold of civilization because the world outside their ice huts was too hostile to grant them leisure to learn abstractions. No doubt when our telescopes were able to resolve the individual Martian face we would see only a brutish mask, stolid and stunned, brother to the ox; able to move soil and to plant crops, yes, but not to aspire to a life of the mind.

But, wise or brutal, Martians were there — or so thought the best opinion of the times.

Then better telescopes were built, and better ways were found to understand what they disclosed. To the lens and the mirror was added the spectroscope and the camera. In the eyes and understanding of astronomers Mars swam a little closer every day. At every step, as the image of the planet itself grew more sharp and clear, the vision of its putative inhabitants became more cloudy and less real. There was too little air. There was too little water. It was too cold. The canals broke up, under better resolution, into irregular blotches of surface markings. The cities that should have marked their junctions were not there.

By the time of the first Mariner fly-bys the Martian race, which had never lived except in the imagination of human beings, was irrevocably dead.

It still seemed that life of a sort could exist, perhaps lowly plants, even a rude sort of amphibian. But nothing like a man. On the surface of Mars an air-breathing, water-based creature like a human being could not survive for a quarter of an hour.

It would be the lack of air that would kill him most quickly. His death would not be from simple strangulation. He would not live long enough for that to happen. In the 10-millibar pressure of the surface of Mars his blood would boil away and he would die in agony of something like the bends. If he somehow survived that, then he would die of lack of air to breathe. If he survived both of those — given air in a backpack, and a face mask fed with a mixture of gases that did not contain nitrogen, at some intermediate pressure level between Earth- and Mars-normal — he would still die. He would die from exposure to unshielded solar radiation. He would die from the extremes of Martian temperature — at its best, a warmish spring day; at its coldest, worse than Antarctic polar night. He would die from thirst. And if he could somehow survive all of those, he would die more slowly, but surely, from hunger, since there was nowhere on the surface of Mars one morsel that a human being could eat.

But there is another kind of argument that contradicts the conclusions drawn from objective facts. Man is not bound by objective facts. If they inconvenience him, he changes them, or makes an end run around them.

Man cannot survive on Mars. However, man cannot survive in the Antarctic, either. But he does.

Man survives in places where he ought to die, by bringing a kinder environment with him. He carries what he needs. His first invention along those lines was clothing. His second, storable food, like dried meat and parched grain. His third, fire. His most recent, the whole series of devices and systems that gave him access to the sea bottoms and to space.

The first alien planet men walked on was the moon. It was even more hostile than Mars, in that the vital supplies of which Mars had very little — air, water and food — did not, on the moon, exist at all. Yet as early as the 1960s men visited the moon, carrying with them air and water and everything else they needed in life-support systems mounted on their spacesuits or built into their landing modules. From there it was no trick to build the systems bigger. It was not easy because of the magnitudes involved. But it was straightforward scaling up, to the point of semi-permanent and not far from self-sustaining closed-cycle colonies. The first problem of support was purely logistic. For each man you needed tons of supplies; for each pound of cargo blasted into space you spent a million dollars’ worth of fuel and hardware. But it could be done.

Mars is orders of magnitude more remote. The moon circles the Earth only a quarter of a million miles out. At its very closest, a few times in a century, Mars is more than a hundred times as far.

Mars is not only distant from the Earth, it is farther than Earth from the sun. Whereas the moon receives as much energy per square inch as the Earth does, Mars, by the law of inverse squares, gets only half as much.

From some point on Earth, a rocket can be sent to the moon at any hour of any day. But Mars and Earth do not circle each other; both circle the sun, and as they do so at different speeds they are sometimes not very close and sometimes very far. It is only when they are at minimal travel distances that a rocket can efficiently be sent from one to another, and those times occur only once in every period of two years, for one month and some weeks.

Even the factors in Mars’s makeup which make it more like the Earth work against maintaining a colony there. It is bigger than the moon, and thus its gravity is more like Earth’s. But because it is bigger and pulls harder a rocket needs more fuel to land on it, and more fuel to take off again.

What it all comes down to is that a colony on the moon can be supported from Earth. A colony on Mars cannot.

At least a colony of human beings cannot.

But what if one reshapes a human being?

Suppose one takes the standard human frame and alters some of the optional equipment. There’s nothing to breathe on Mars. So take the lungs out of the human frame, replace them with micro-miniaturized oxygen regeneration cat-cracking systems. One needs power for that, but power flows down from the distant sun.

The blood in the standard human frame would boil; all right, eliminate the blood, at least from the extremities and the surface areas — build arms and legs that are served by motors instead of muscles — and reserve the blood supply only for the warm, protected brain. A normal human body needs food, but if the major musculature is replaced by machines, the food requirement drops. It is only the brain that must be fed every minute of every day, and fortunately, in terms of energy requirements the brain is the least demanding of human accessories. A slice of toast a day will keep it fed.

Water? It is no longer necessary, except for engineering losses — like adding hydraulic fluid to a car’s braking system every few thousand miles. Once the body has become a closed system, no water needs to be flushed through it in the cycle of drink, circulate, excrete or perspire.

Radiation? A two-edged problem. At unpredictable times there are solar flares, and then even on Mars there is too much of it for health; the body must therefore be clothed with an artificial skin. The rest of the time there is only the normal visible and ultraviolet light from the sun. It is not enough to maintain heat, and not quite enough even for good vision; so more surface must be provided to gather energy — hence the great bat-eared receptors on the cyborg — and, to make vision as good as it can be made, the eyes are replaced with mechanical structures.

If one does all these things to a human being, what is left is no longer precisely a human being. It is a man plus large elements of hardware.

The man has become a cybernetic organism: a cyborg.

The first man to be made into a cyborg was probably Willy Hartnett. There was some doubt. There were persistent rumors of a Chicom experiment that had succeeded for a while and then failed. But it was pretty clear that Hartnett was at least the only one alive at this particular moment. He had been born in the regular human way and had worn the regular human shape for thirty-seven years. It was only in the last eighteen months that he had begun to change.

At first the changes were minor and temporary.

His heart was not removed. It was only bypassed now and then by a swift soft-plastic impeller that he wore for a week at a time strapped on a shoulder.

His eyes were not removed either… then. They were only sealed closed with a sort of gummy blindfold, while he practiced recognizing the perplexing shapes of the world as they were revealed to him through a shrilly buzzing electronic camera that was surgically linked to his optic nerve.

One by one the separate systems that would make him a Martian were tested. It was only when each component had been tested and adjusted and found satisfactory that the first permanent changes had been made.

They were not really permanent. That was a promise that Hartnett clung to. The surgeons had made it to Hartnett, and Hartnett had made it to his wife. All the changes could be reversed and would be. When the mission was over and he was safely back, they would remove the hardware and replace it with soft human tissues again, and he would be returned to purely human shape.

It would not, he understood, be exactly the shape he had started out with. They could not preserve his own organs and tissues. They could only replace them with equivalents. Organ transplants and plastic surgery would do all they could to make him look like himself again, but there was small chance he would ever again be able to travel on his old passport photo.

He did not greatly mind that. He had never considered himself a handsome man. He was content to know that he would have human eyes again — not his own, of course. But the doctors had promised they would be blue, and that lids and lashes would cover them again, and with any luck at all, they thought, the eyes could even weep. (With joy, he foresaw.) His heart would again be a lump of muscle the size of a fist. It would pump red human blood to all the ends of limb and body. His lung muscles would take air into his chest, and there natural human alveoli would absorb oxygen and release CO₂. The great photoreceptor bat-ears (that gave so much trouble, because their support strength was up to the demands of Martian gravitation but not terrestrial, so that they were constantly being detached and returned to the shop) would be dismantled and gone. The skin that had been so painfully constructed and fitted to him would be equally painfully flayed off again, and replaced with human skin that sweated and grew hair. (His own skin was still there under the skin-tight artificial covering, but he did not expect it would survive the experiment. It had had to be discouraged from carrying on its normal functions during the time it was buried under the artificial hide. Almost surely it would have lost the capacity for them and would have to be replaced.)

Hartnett’s wife had exacted one promise from him. She had made him swear that as long as he wore the Halloween mask of the cyborg, he would keep out of the sight of his children. Fortunately the children were little enough to be biddable, and teachers, friends, neighbors, parents of schoolmates and all had been made cooperative by hints of stories of jungle rot and skin ailments. They had been curious, but the story had worked, and no one had urged Terry’s father to come to a PTA meeting or Brenda’s husband to join her at their backyard barbecue.

Brenda Hartnett herself had tried not to see her husband, but in the long run curiosity drove out fear. She had herself smuggled into the tank room one day while Willy was practicing a coordination test, riding a bicycle around the reddish sands with a basin of water balanced on the handlebars. Don Kayman had stayed with her, fully expecting her to faint or scream or perhaps be sick to her stomach. She did none of those things, surprising herself as much as the priest. The cyborg looked too much like a Japanese horror film to be taken seriously. It was only that night that she really related the bat-eared, crystal-eyed creature on the bike with the father of her children. The next day she went to the project’s medical director and told him that Willy must be getting starved for screwing by then and she didn’t see why she couldn’t accommodate him. The doctor had to explain to her what Willy had not been able to bring himself to say, that in the present state of the art those functions had had to be regarded as superfluous and therefore had been temporarily, uh, disconnected.

Meanwhile the cyborg toiled away at his tests and awaited each next installment of pain.

His world was in three parts. The first part was a suite of rooms kept at a pressure equivalent to about 7,500 feet of altitude so that the project staff could go in and out with only mild inconvenience when they had to. This was where he slept, when he could, and ate what little he was given. He was always hungry, always. They’d tried, but they hadn’t been able to disconnect the cravings of his senses. The second part was the Mars-normal tank in which he did his gymnastics and performed his tests so that the architects of his new body could observe their creation at work. And the third part was a low-pressure chamber on wheels that rolled him from his private suite to his public test arena, or wherever else he, rarely, had any occasion to go.

The Mars-normal tank was like a zoo cage in which he was always on display. The rolling tank offered him nothing but waiting to be moved into something else.

It was only the little two-room suite that was officially his home that gave him any comfort at all. There he had his TV set, his stereo, his telephone, his books. Sometimes one of the graduate students or a fellow astronaut would visit with him there, playing chess or trying to talk a conversation while their chests labored and lungs pumped fruitlessly at the 7,500-foot pressure. These visits he looked forward to and tried to prolong. When no one was with him he was on his own resources. Infrequently he read. Sometimes he sat before the TV, regardless of what was being shown on it. Most often he “rested.” That was how he described it to his overseers, by which he meant sitting or lying with his vision system in stand-by. It was like having one’s eyes closed but remaining awake. A bright enough light would register on his senses, as it will even through a sleeper’s closed lids; a sound would penetrate at once. In those times his brain raced, conjuring up thoughts of sex, food, jealousy, sex, anger, children, nostalgia, love… until he pleaded for relief and was given a course in self-hypnosis which let him wash his mind empty. After that in “rest” mode he did almost nothing that was conscious, while his nervous system groomed and prepared itself for the next sensations of pain and his brain counted the seconds until his flight would be over and his normal human body given back to him.

There were a lot of those seconds. He had multiplied them out often enough. Seven months in orbit to Mars. Seven months coming back. A few weeks at both ends, getting ready for the launch and then debriefing before they would start the process of restoring him to his own body. A few months — no one would tell him exactly how many — while the surgery took place and the replaced parts healed.

The number of seconds, close as he could guess it, was some forty-five million. Give or take as much as ten million. He felt each one of them arrive and linger and reluctantly slip past.

The psychologists had tried to avoid all this by planning every moment for him. He refused the plans. They tried to understand him with devious tests and pattern-scanning. He let them pry, but inside himself he kept a citadel of privacy that he would not let them invade. Hartnett had never thought of himself as an introspective man; he knew that he was a mile wide and an inch deep, and that he led an unexamined life. He liked it that way. But now that he had nothing left but the interior of his mind that was his own, he guarded that.

He wished sometimes that he did know how to examine his life. He wished he could understand his reasons for doing what he did.

Why had he volunteered for the mission? Sometimes he tried to remember, and then decided he had never known. Was it because the free world needed Martian living space? Because he wanted the glamour of being the first Martian? For the money? For the scholarships and favors it would mean for the kids? To make Brenda love him?

It probably was in among those reasons somewhere, but he couldn’t remember. If he had ever known.

In any case he was committed. The thing he was sure of was that he had no way to back out now.

He would let them do whatever savage, sadistic torturing they wanted of his body. He would board the spaceship that would take him to Mars. He would endure the seven endless months in orbit. He would go down to the surface, explore, stake claims, take samples, photograph, test. He would rise up again from the Martian surface and live somehow through the seven-month return, and he would give them all the information they wanted. He would accept the medals and the applause and the lecture tours and the television interviews and the contracts for books.

And then he would present himself to the surgeons to be put back the way he was supposed to be.

All of those things he had made his mind up to, and he was sure he would carry them out.

There was only one question in his mind to which he had not yet worked out an answer. It had to do with a contingency he was not prepared to meet. When he first volunteered for the program, they had told him very openly and honestly that the medical problems were complex and not fully understood. They would have to learn how to deal with some of them on him. It was possible that some of the answers would be hard to find or wrong. It was possible that returning him to his own shape would be, well, difficult. They told him that very clearly, at the very beginning, and then they never said it again.

But he remembered. The problem he had not resolved was what he would do if for any reason, when the whole mission was over, they could not put him back together right away. What he couldn’t decide was whether he would then simply kill himself or at the same time kill as many as possible of his friends, superiors and colleagues as well.