Man Plus

Five Monster Becoming Mortal Again

As Brad left, whistling, his car radio was full of news of the world. The Tenth Mountain Division had recoiled back to a fortified area in Riverdale. A typhoon had wrecked the rice crop in Southeast Asia. President Deshatine had ordered the U.S. delegation to walk out of the United Nations debate on sharing scarce resources.

There was much news that was not on the sound-only radio, because the newscasters either didn’t know about it or didn’t think it was important. For example, not one word was said about two Chinese gentlemen on a mission in Australia, or about the results of certain secret popularity polls the President kept locked in his safe, or about the tests being run on Willy Hartnett. So Brad didn’t hear about any of these things. If he had, and had understood their importance, he would have cared. He was not an uncaring man. He was not an evil one, either. He was just not a particularly good one.

Sometimes that question came up — for instance, when it was time to get rid of a girl or drop a friend who had been helpful on the way up. Sometimes there were recriminations. Then Brad would smile and shrug and point out that it wasn’t a fair world. Lancelot didn’t win all the tournaments. Sometimes the evil black knight dumped him on the ground. Bobby Fischer wasn’t the most lovable chess player in the world, merely the best. And so on.

And so Brad would confess that he was not a model man by social standards. Indeed he wasn’t. Something had gone wrong in his childhood. The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him. War with China? Well, let’s see, calculated Brad, there’s sure to be a lot of surgery; perhaps I’ll get to head my own hospital. A world depression? His money was in farmland; people would always eat.

He was not admirable. All the same, he was the best person alive to do what the cyborg needed — namely, to provide Willy Hartnett with mediation between stimulus and interpretation. Which is a way of saying that somewhere between the external object the cyborg saw and the conclusions the cyborg’s brain drew from it, there had to be a stage where unnecessary information was filtered out. Otherwise the cyborg would simply go mad.

To understand why this is so, consider the frog.

Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.

As vertebrates go, the frog is a dull and simple kind of creature. It has a brain, but not a big one or a very sophisticated one. There’s not much excess capacity in the frog brain to play around with, so that one doesn’t want to waste any of it on nonessentials. Evolution is always economical. Male frogs do not write poems or torture themselves with fears that their female frogs may be unfaithful. Nor do they want to think about things which do not directly concern staying alive.

The frog’s eye is simple, too. In human eyes there are complexities frogs know not. Suppose a human comes into a room containing a table which bears an order of steak and French fries; even if he cannot hear, cannot taste and has lost the power of smell, he is drawn to the food. His eye turns to the steak. There is a spot on the eye called the “fovea,” the part of the eye with which a person sees best, and it is that spot that directs itself toward the target. The frog doesn’t do that; one part of its eye is as good as another. Or as bad. Because the interesting thing about a frog’s-eye view of what fot a frog is the equivalent of a steak — namely, a bug big enough to be worth swallowing but small enough not to try to swallow back — is that the frog is blind to food unless the food behaves like food. Surround the frog with the most nutritious chopped insect pate you can devise. It will starve to death — unless a ladybug wanders by.

If one thinks about how a frog eats, this strange behavior begins to make sense. The frog fits a very neat ecological niche. In a state of nature, no one fills that niche with minced food. The frog eats insects, so insects are what he sees. If something passes through his field of vision which is the right size for an insect, and moves at the proper speed for an insect, the frog does not debate whether he is hungry or not or which insects taste best. He eats it. Then he goes back to waiting for the next one.

In the laboratory this is an antisurvival trait. You can trick a frog with a piece of cloth, a bit of wood on a string, anything that moves properly and is the right size. He will eat them and starve. But in nature there are no such tricks. In nature only bugs move like bugs, and every bug is frog dinner.

This principle is not difficult to understand. Say this to a naive friend and he will say, “Oh, yes, I see. The frog just ignores anything that doesn’t look like a bug.” Wrong! The frog doesn’t do anything of the kind. He does not ignore non-bug objects. He simply never sees them in the first place. Tap a frog’s optic nerve and drag a marble slowly past — too big, too slow — and no instrument can pick up a nerve impulse. There is none. The eye does not bother to “see” what the frog does not want to know about. But swing a dead fly past, and your meter dials flick over, the nerve transmits a message, the frog’s tongue licks out and grabs.

And so we come to the cyborg. What Bradley had done was to provide a mediation stage between the ruby complex eyes and the aching human brain of Willy Hartnett which filtered, interpreted and generally prepackaged all of the cyborg’s visual inputs. The “eye” saw everything, even in the UV part of the spectrum, even in the infrared. The brain could not deal with so vast a flow of inputs. Bradley’s mediation stage edited out the unimportant bits.

The stage was a triumph of design, because Bradley was indeed extremely good at the one thing he was good at. But he was not there to install it. And so because Brad had a date, and also because the President of the United States had to go to the bathroom and two Chinese named Sing and Sun wanted to try a pizza, the history of the world changed.

Jerry Weidner, who was Brad’s principal assistant, supervised the slow laborious process of resetting the cyborg’s vision systems. It was a fussy, niggling sort ofjob. Like nearly all of the things that had to be done to Willy Hartnett, it was attended with maximum discomfort for him. The sensitive nerves of the eyelid had long since been dissected out; otherwise they would have been shrieking pain at him day and night. But he could feel what was happening — if not as pain, then as a psychically disturbing knowledge that somebody was sliding edged instruments around in a very touchy part of his anatomy. His actual vision was kept on stand-by mode, so he “saw” only dim moving shadows. It was enough. He hated it.

He lay there for an hour or more while Weidner and the others tinkered with changes in potentials, noted readings, talked to each other in the numbers that are the language of technologists. When they were finally satisfied with the field strength of his perceptual system and allowed him to stand, without warning he almost toppled. “Sheesssst,” he snarled. “Dizzzzy again.”

Worried and resigned, Weidner said, “All right, we better ask for vertigo checks.” So there was another thirty-minute delay while the balance teams checked his reflexes until he burst out, “Chrisssst, cut it out. I can ssstand on one foot for the nexssst twenty hours, ssso what doesss it prove?” But they kept him on one foot anyhow, measuring how close he could get his fingertips to touching with his vision in stand-by mode.

The balance teams then declared themselves satisfied, but Jerry Weidner was not. The dizziness had happened before, and it had never been satisfactorily tracked down, either to the built-in mechanical horizon or to the crude natural stirrup-andanvil bones in his ear. Weidner did not know that it stemmed from the mediation system that was his own special responsibility, but he didn’t know that it did not, either. He wished Brad would get the hell back from his long lunch.

At that time, halfway around the world, there were these two Chinese named Sing and Sun. They were not characters in a dirty joke. Those were their names. Sing’s great-grandfather had died at the mouth of a Russian cannon after the failure of the Righteous Harmony Fists to expel the white devils from China. His father had conceived him on the Long March, and died before he was born, in combat against the soldiers of a war lord allied to Chiang Kai-shek. Sing himself was nearly ninety years old. He had shaken the hand of Comrade Mao, had diverted the Yellow River for Mao’s successors and was now supervising the greatest hydraulic engineering project of his career in an Australian town called Fitzroy Crossing. It was his first prolonged trip outside the territory of New People’s Asia. He had three ambitions for it: to see an uncensored pornographic film, to drink a bottle of Scotch that came from Scotland rather than the People’s Province of Honshu, and to taste a pizza. With his colleague Sun he had made a good start on the Scotch, had found out where to accomplish the viewing of the film and was now desirous of tasting the pizza.

Sun was much younger — not yet forty — and in spite of everything, suffering from respect for his associate’s age. There was also the fact that Sun was several echelons lower in social status than the older man, although he was obviously a coming man in the techno-industrial wing of the Party. Sun had just returned from a year of leading a mapping team through all of the Great Sandy Desert. It was not only sand. It was soil — good, arable, productive soil — lacking only a few trace elements and water. What Sun had mapped had been the soil chemistry of a million square miles. When Sun’s soil map and Sing’s great uphill aqueduct, with its fourteen great batteries of nucleardriven pumps, came together, they would equal a new kind of life for those million miles of desert. Chemical supplements + sun-distilled water from the distant seacoast = ten crops a year with which to feed a hundred million ethnically Chinese New Australians.

The project had been carefully studied and contained only one flaw. The Old New Australians, descendants of the populating drives of the post — World War II period, did not want New New Australians coming in to farm that land. They wanted it for themselves. As Sun and Sing entered Danny’s Pizza Hut on Fitzroy Crossing’s main street, two Old New Australians, one named Koschanko and one named Gradechek, were just leaving the bar, and unfortunately recognized Sing from his newspaper pictures. Words passed. The Chinese recognized the smell of stale beer and took the truculence to be only drink; they tried to pass, and Koschanko and Gradechek pushed them out of the street door. Bellicosity began swinging, and the ninety-year-old skull of Sing Hsi-chin split itself open against a curbstone.

At this point Sun drew a pistol he was not authorized to be carrying, and shot the two assailants dead.

It was only a drunken brawl. The police of Fitzroy Crossing had handled thousands of more dramatic crimes, and could have handled this one if they had been allowed to. But it did not stop there, because one of the barmaids was herself a New New Australian of Honanese extraction, recognized Sun, discovered who Sing was, picked up the phone and called the New China News Agency bureau in Lagrange Mission, down on the coast, to say that one of China’s most famous scientists had been brutally murdered.

Within ten minutes the satellite network had carried a factually shaky but very colorful version of the story all over the world.

Before an hour was out, the New People’s Asian mission to Canberra had requested an appointment with the Foreign Minister to deliver its protest, spontaneous demonstrations were in full blast in Shanghai, Saigon, Hiroshima and a dozen other NPA cities, and half a dozen observation satellites were being nudged out of their orbits to pass over Northwest Australia and the Sunda Islands seas. Two miles outside the harbor of Melbourne a great gray shape swam to the surface of the sea and floated there, offering no signals and responding to none for more than twenty minutes. Then it declared itself the NPA nuclear submarine The East Is Red on a routine diplomatic visit to a friendly port. The news was received in time to cancel the RAAF air strike that had been ordered against the unknown intruder, but only just.

Under Pueblo, Colorado, the President of the United States was interrupted in his after-lunch nap. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, distastefully sipping a cup of black coffee, when the DOD liaison aide came in with a sitrep and the news that a condition red alert had been declared, in accordance with the prepared responses long since programmed into the North American Defense Command Net. He already had the satellite reports and an on-the-scene account from a military mission to Fitzroy Crossing; he knew about the appearance of the submarine The East Is Red, but did not yet know that the air strike had been called off. Summarizing the information, he said to the President, “So it’s go or no-go, sir. NADCOM recommends a launch with abort options in fifty minutes.”

The President snarled, “I don’t feel good. What the hell did they put in that soup?” Dash was not in a mood to think about China just at that moment; he had been dreaming about a private poll which showed his popularity down to 17 percent, including both the “excellent” and “satisfactory” ratings, with 61 percent calling his administration “poor” or “very unsatisfactory.” It had not been a dream. That was what the morning’s political briefing had shown him.

He pushed the coffee cup away and glumly contemplated the decision he, alone in all the world, was now required to make. To launch missiles against the major cities of New People’s Asia was in theory a reversible choice: they could be aborted at any time before reentry, defused, falling harmlessly into the sea. But in practice the NPA posts would detect the launch, and who knew what those crazy Chinese bastards would do? His belly felt as though he were in the last minutes of pregnancy, and there seemed to be a good chance that he would throw up. His number one secretary said chidingly, “Dr. Stassen did advise you not to eat any more cabbage, sir. Perhaps we should instruct the chef not to make that soup any more.”

The President said, “I don’t want lectures right now. All right, look. We’ll hold at the present state of readiness until further orders from me. No launch. No retaliation. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said the DOD man regretfully. “Sir? I have several specific queries, from NADCOM, from the Man Plus project, from the admiral commanding SWEPAC—”

“You heard me! No retaliation. Everything else, keep going.” His number one secretary clarified the point for him. “Our official position,” he said, “is this affair in Australia is a domestic matter and not a national concern for the United States. Our action stance does not change. We keep all systems go, but take no action. Is that right, Mr. President?”

“Right,” said Dash thickly. “Now if you can get along without me for ten minutes, I got to go to the john.”

Brad did think of phoning in to see how the recalibration was going, but he really liked showering with a girl, with all the fun involved in soaping each other, and the Chero-Strip bathroom armorarium included bath oil beads, bubbles and marvelous thick towels. It was three o’clock before he decided to think about going back to work.

By that time it was pretty much too late. Weidner had tried to get permission to postpone testing from the deputy director, who wouldn’t do it on his own authority but bucked it to Washington, who queried the President’s office and received the reply: “No, you cannot, positively cannot, repeat not, postpone this or any other test.” The man giving the reply was the President’s number one secretary, who was looking at the “risk of war” projection on the wall of the President’s most private study while he spoke. Even as he was talking the broad black bar was bending itself still more steeply up toward the red line.

So they went ahead with the test, Weidner tight-lipped and frowning. It went well enough until it began to go very badly indeed. Roger Torraway’s mind was far away until he heard the cyborg call him. He locked in and stood, in skin suit and breathing mask, on the ruddy sands. “What’s the matter, Willy?” he demanded.

The great ruby eyes turned toward him. “I— I can’t ssssee you, Roger!” the cyborg shrilled. “I— I—”

And he toppled and fell. It was as quick as that. Roger did not even move toward him until he felt a great thundering hammer of air beat in on him, sending him stumbling toward the recumbent monster form.

From the 7,500-foot equivalent outside the Mars-normal chamber Don Kayman came desperately running in. He had not waited to lock. He had thrown both doors open. He was no longer a scientist. He was a priest; he dropped to his knees beside the contorted form of what had been Willy Hartnett.

Roger stared while Don Kayman touched the ruby eyes, traced a cross on the synthetic flesh, whispering what Roger could not hear. He did not want to hear. He knew what was happening.

The first candidate for cyborg was now receiving Extreme Unction in front of his eyes.

The lead backup was Yic Freibart, taken off the list by presidential order.

The number two alternate was Carl Mazzini, ruled out because of his broken leg.

The third alternate, and the new champion, was him.