Man Plus

Six Mortal in Mortal Fear

It is not an easy thing for a flesh-and-blood human being to come to terms with the knowledge that some of his flesh is going to be ripped from him and replaced with steel, copper, silver, plastic, aluminum and glass. We could see that Torraway was not behaving very rationally. He went blundering down the hall away from the Mars-normal tank in great urgency, as though he had a most pressing errand. He had no errand except to get away. The hall seemed like a trap to him. He felt he could not stand to have one person come up to him and say he was sorry about Willy Hartnett, or acknowledge Torraway’s own new status. He passed a men’s room, stopped, looked around — no one was watching him — and entered to stand at the urinal, eyes glazed, fixed to the shiny chrome. When the door pushed open, Torraway made a great show of zipping and flushing, but it was only a boy from the typing poo1 who looked at him incuriously and headed for a booth.

Outside the men’s room the deputy director caught him. “Goddamn lousy thing,” he said. “I guess you know you’re—”

“I know,” said Torraway, pleased that his voice was so calm. “We’re going to have to find out what happened fast. I’m having a meeting in my office in ninety minutes. We’ll have the first autopsy reports. I want you there.”

Roger nodded, glanced at his wrist watch and turned smartly away. The important thing, he thought, was to keep moving as though he were too busy to interrupt. Unfortunately he couldn’t think of a single thing he had to do, or even that he could pretend to be doing, to keep conversation away. No, he recognized, not conversation. It was thought he wanted to keep away, thinking about himself. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t furious at fate. He just wasn’t prepared to look into the personal consequences of Willy Hartnett’s death, not right at that moment—

He looked up; someone had been calling his name.

It was Jon Freeling, Brad’s surgical assistant in perceptual systems, looking for Brad.

“Why, no,” said Torraway, glad to be talking about something other than Willy’s death or his own future, “I don’t know where he is. Went to lunch, I think.”

“Two hours ago. His tail’s going to be in a crack if I can’t find him before the DD’s meeting. I’m not sure I can field all the questions — and I can’t go looking for him, they’re bringing the cyborg into my lab now, and I’ve got to—”

“I’ll find him for you,” Torraway said hastily. “I’ll call him at home.”

“Tried it. No dice. And he didn’t leave a number where he could be reached.”

Torraway winked, suddenly feeling relieved, delighted to have a challenge he could respond to. “You know Brad,” he said. “You have to remember there’s a lot of tomcat in that boy. I’ll find him.” And he took the elevator to the administrative floor turned two corners and rapped on the door marked Administrative Statistics.

The function of the people inside that door had very little to do with statistics. The door didn’t open at once; instead, a spy-hole opened and a blue eye looked out at him. “I’m Colonel Torraway, and it’s an emergency.”

“One moment,” said a girl’s voice; there was a sound of clattering and scraping, and then the door unlocked and she let Torraway in. There were four other people in the room, all of them in civilian clothes and looking rather undistinguished, as they were meant to do. Each had an old-fashioned rolltop desk, of a kind one did not usually expect to see in a modern space-agency office. The tops could be pulled down to conceal what was on the desks at a moment’s notice; they were down now.

“It’s Dr. Alexander Bradley,” Roger said. “He’s needed urgently in about an hour and his department can’t find him. Commander Hartnett is dead, and—”

The girl said, “We know about Commander Hartnett. Do you want us to find Dr. Bradley for you?”

“No, I’ll do it. But I expect you can tell me where to start looking. I know you keep tabs on all of us, extracurricular activities and all.” He did not actually wink at her too, but he heard the sound of a wink in his voice.

The girl looked at him steadily for a moment. “He’s probably at—”

“Hold it,” called the man at the desk behind her, his voice surprisingly angry.

She shook her head, overruling him without looking at him. “Try the Chero-Strip Hover Hotel,” she said. “He usually uses the name of Beckwith. I’d suggest you telephone. Maybe it would be better if we did it for you, at that—”

“Oh, no,” said Torraway easily, resolute to keep this chore for himself. “It’s important I talk to him myself.”

The young man said strongly, “Dr. Torraway, I really suggest you let us handle—”

But he was already backing out of the door, nodding, not listening any more. He had made up his mind not to bother telephoning but to drive to the motel; it was a valid reason to get out of the lab while he collected his thoughts.

Outside the air-controlled laboratory buildings Tonka had been getting hotter and hotter. The sun penetrated even the tinted windshield, filling Torraway’s car with heat that defied the cooling system. He drove inexpertly on manual, taking the curves so sloppily that the guidance wheels skidded. The motel was fifteen stories tall and solid glass; it seemed to aim the sunlight directly at him, like Archimedes’s warriors defending Syracuse. He was glad to get out in the underground parking lot and take the moving stairs up to the lobby.

The lobby itself was as tall as the building, completely enclosed, with the rooms racked around it and flying bridges and galleries crisscrossing overhead. The clerk had never heard of Dr. Alexander Bradley.

“Try Beckwith,” suggested Torraway, offering a bill. “He sometimes has trouble remembering his name.”

But it was no use, the clerk either couldn’t place Brad or wouldn’t. Roger drove out of the parking space, paused in the beat of the sunshine and considered what to do next. He stared unseeing into the reflecting pool that doubled as the motel’s air-conditioning heat sink. Probably he should try phoning Brad at his apartment, he thought. Should have done it while he was in the lobby; he didn’t much want to turn around and go back in. Or call from the car, for that matter; the car phone was broadcast radio, and the conversation would be better private. He could go home and call from there, he planned; it was not more than a five-minute run—

At which point it first registered on Roger that he really ought to tell his wife what had happened.

It was not a duty he looked forward to. Telling Dorrie unfortunately implied spelling it all out to himself. But Roger had a good attitude toward inevitable things, even if unpleasant, and keeping his mind in neutral, he turned the car toward home and Dorrie.

Unfortunately Dorrie wasn’t there.

He called to her in the hallway, peered into the dining room, looked at the swimming pool in the back, checked both bathrooms. No Dorrie. Out shopping, no doubt. It was annoying, but it couldn’t be helped, and he was just about to leave a note for her, staring out the window while he tried to think how to phrase the note, when he saw her driving up in her micromidget two-seater.

He had the door open for her before she got to it.

He expected she would be surprised. He had not expected that she would just stand there, her pretty eyebrows raised and motionless, her expression showing no movement at all. She looked like a snapshot of herself, frozen in the middle of a step.

He said, “I wanted to talk to you about something. I just came from the Chero-Strip, because Brad is involved too, but—”

She came to life and said politely, “Let me come in and sit down.” There was still no expression on her face as she paused in the hallway to look at herself in the mirror. She smoothed some blemish on her cheek, fluffed her hair, went into the living room and sat down without taking off her hat. “It’s awfully warm out today, isn’t it?” she observed.

Roger sat down too, trying to collect his thoughts. It was important not to frighten her. Once he had watched a television program about how to break bad news, some shrink with a need for more patients and a fear of being labeled unethical keeping him from hiring a man with a sandwich board, going on the talk shows in the hope of catching a few live ones for his waiting room. Never be blunt, he said. Give the person a chance to prepare himself. Tell it a little at a time. At that period Roger had thought it was comic; he remembered telling Dorrie about it — Honey, have you got your charge card?… Well, you’ll need it for the black dress… The black dress for the funeral… The funeral we have to go to, and you’ll want to look nice because of who it is… Well, after all, she was a pretty old lady. And you know she didn’t drive very well. The policemen said she didn’t suffer after she creamed the truck. Your father’s bearing up very well. They had both laughed about it.

“Please go ahead,” Dorrie said invitingly, taking a cigarette out of the box on the coffee table. As she lit it, Roger saw the butane flame quiver and realized with astonishment that her hand was shaking. He was both surprised and a little pleased; evidently she was bracing herself for some kind of bad news. She had always been very perceptive, he thought admiringly, and now that she was ready, he plunged in.

“It’s Willy Hartnett, dear,” he said kindly. “Something went wrong this morning and—”

He paused, waiting for her to catch up to him. She did not look concerned as much as puzzled.

“He’s dead,” said Torraway shortly, and stopped to let it sink in.

She nodded thoughtfully. It wasn’t penetrating, Roger thought regretfully. She didn’t understand. She had liked Willy, but she was not crying or screaming or showing any emotion at all.

He finished the thought, giving up on tact: “And of course that means that I’m next in line,” he said, trying to speak slowly. “The others are out of it; you remember, I told you. So I’m the one they’ll want to, uh, prepare for the Mars mission.”

The look on her face perplexed him. It was fragile and apprehensive, almost as though she had been expecting something worse and still was not sure it was not coming. He said impatiently, “Don’t you understand what I’m saying, dear?”

“Why, yes. That’s — well, it’s a little hard to take in.” He nodded, satisfied, and she went on, “But I’m confused. Didn’t you start by saying something about Brad and the Chero-Strip?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I know I threw a lot at you at once. Yes. I said I had just been at the motel, looking for Brad. You see, it looks like it’s the perceptual systems that went wrong and killed Willy. Well, that’s Brad’s baby. And today of all days he took a long lunch to — well, I don’t have to tell you about Brad. He’s probably shacked up somewhere with one of the nurses. But it’s going to look bad if he isn’t there for the meeting—”He stopped to look at his watch. “Wow, I’ve got to get back myself. But I did want to break this to you in person.”

“Thank you, honey,” she said absently, pursuing a thought. “Wouldn’t it have been better to phone him?”

“Who?”

“Brad, of course.”

“Oh. Oh, sure, except it was sort of private. I didn’t want anyone listening in. And besides, I didn’t think he’d be answering the phone. In fact, the desk clerk wouldn’t admit he was ever there. And I had to go to Security to get a lead on where he might be.” He had a sudden thought; he knew Dorrie liked Brad, and he wondered for a half second if she was upset at Brad’s immorality. The thought dismissed itself, and he burst out admiringly, “Honey, I have to say you’re taking this beautifully. Most women would be in hysterics by now.”

She shrugged and said, “Well, what’s the use of making a fuss? We both knew this could happen.”

He ventured, “I won’t look very good, Dorrie. And, you know, I think the physical part of our marriage will be down the drain for a while — even not counting the fact I’ll be away on the mission for better than a year and a half.”

She looked thoughtful, then resigned; then she looked directly at him and smiled. She got up to come over beside him and put her arms around him. “I’ll be proud of you,” she said. “And we’ll have long, long lives after you get back.” She ducked back as he reached to kiss her and said playfully, “None of that, you’ve got to get back. What are you going to do about Brad?”

“Well, I could go back to the motel—”

She said decisively, “Don’t do it, Roger. Let him look out for himself. If he’s up to something he shouldn’t be, that’s his problem. I want you to get back to the meeting, and — Oh, say, that’s right! I’m going out again. I’ll be passing quite near the motel. If I see Brad’s car in the lot I’ll put a note on it.”

“That didn’t even occur to me,” he said admiringly.

“So don’t worry. I don’t want you thinking about Brad. With all that’s coming up, we have to be thinking of you!”

Jonathan Freeling, M.D., F.A.C.S., A.A.S.M.

Jonny Freeling had been in aerospace medicine long enough to have lost the habit of dealing with cadavers. Particularly he was unused to cutting up the bodies of friends. Astronauts didn’t usually leave their bodies behind when they died, anyway. If they died in line of duty it was unlikely there would be any p.m.; the ones that were lost in space stayed there, the ones that died nearer home were usually boiled to gas in the flame of hydrogen and oxygen. In neither case was there anything to put on a table.

It was hard to realize that this object he was dissecting was Willy Hartnett. It wasn’t as much like an autopsy as like, say, field-stripping a carbine. He had helped put these parts together — these platinum electrodes here, these microminiaturized chips in their black box there; now it was time to take them apart again. Except that there was blood. In spite of everything, Willy had died with a lot of wet, seeping human blood still in him.

“Freeze and section,” he said, serving up a gobbet on a glass slide to his general-duty nurse, who accepted it with a nod. That was Clara Bly. Her pretty black face reflected sadness, although one could not tell, Freeling reflected, lifting out a dripping metal strand that was part of the vision circuits, how much of the sadness was over the death of the cyborg and how much over her interrupted going-away party. She was leaving to get married the next day; the recovery room just behind that door was still festooned with crepe and paper flowers for her party. They had asked Freeling if they should clear it away for the autopsy, but of course there was no need to; no one would be recovering in that recovery room.

He looked up at his surgical assistant, standing where the anesthesiologist would have been in a normal operation, and barked, “Any word from Brad?”

“He’s in the building,” she said.

Then why doesn’t he get his ass down here? is what Freeling thought, but he didn’t say it, only nodded. At least he was back. Whatever grief was coming because of this, Freeling wouldn’t have to carry it alone.

But the more he probed and fished, the more he found himself baffled. Where was the grief? What had killed Hartnett? The electronic components didn’t seem to be wrong; every time he removed one it was rushed off to the instrumentation people, who workbenched in on the spot. No problems. Nor did the gross physical structure of the brain give any immediate explanation…

Was it possible that the cyborg had died of nothing at all?

Freeling leaned back, conscious of sweat under the hot lights, instinctively waiting for his scrub nurse to wipe it off. She wasn’t there, and he remembered and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He went in again, carefully separating and removing the optical nerve system — what there was of it; the major sections had gone with the eyes themselves, replaced by electronics.

Then he saw it.

First blood seeping under the corpus callosum. Then, as he gently lifted and probed, the gray-white slippery sheath of an artery, with a bulge that had burst. Blown. A cardiovascular accident. A stroke.

Freeling left it there. The rest could be done later or not at all. Maybe it would be as well to leave what was left of Willy Hartnett as close to intact as it was. And it was time for the meeting.

The conference room doubled as the hospital library, which meant that when a meeting was going on, look-up research stopped. There were cushioned seats for fourteen people at the long table, and they were all filled, with the overflow on folding chairs, squeezed in where they could. Two seats were empty; they were for Brad and Jon Freeling, off on a last-minute run to the lab for final results on some slides, they said; actually so that Freeling could brief his boss on what had happened while he was “out to lunch.” Everybody else was there, Don Kayman and Vic Samuelson (now promoted to Roger’s back-up man, and not looking as though he liked it), Telly Ramez, the chief shrink, all of the cardiovascular people muttering among themselves, the top brass from the administrative sectors — and the two stars. One of the stars was Roger Torraway, uneasily sitting near the head of the table and listening with a fixed smile to other people’s conversations. The other was Jed Griffin, the President’s main man for breaking logjams. His title was only Chief Administrative Assistant to the President, but even the deputy director treated him like the Pope. “We can start any time, Mr. Griffin,” urged the deputy director. Griffin’s face spasmed a smile and he shook his head.

“Not until those other fellows get here,” he said.

When Brad and Freeling arrived, all conversation stopped as though a plug had been pulled. “Now we can begin,” snapped Jed Griffin, and the worry to his tone was evident to everyone in the room, every person of whom shared it. We were worried too, of course. Griffin did not want to carry his worry alone and promptly shared it with everyone in the room: “You don’t know,” he said, “how close this whole project is to being terminated, not next year or next month, not phased out, not cut down. Through.”

Roger Torraway took his eyes off Brad, and fixed them on Griffin.

“Through,” repeated Griffin. “Washed out.”

He seemed to take satisfaction in saying it, Torraway thought.

“And the only thing that saved it,” said Griffin, “was these.” He tapped the oval table with a folded wad of green-tinted computer printouts. “The American public wants the project to continue.”

Torraway felt a clutching touch at his heart, and it was only in that moment that he realized how swift and urgent the feeling of hope that had preceded it had been. For a moment it had sounded like a reprieve.

The deputy director cleared his throat. “I had understood,” he said, “that the polls showed a considerable, ah, apathy about what we were doing.”

“Preliminary results, yes.” Griffin nodded. “But when you add them all up and put them through the computer it comes out to a strong, nationwide support. It’s real enough. Significant to two sigmas, as I believe you people say. The people want an American to live on Mars.

“However,” he added, “that was before this latest fiasco. God knows what that would do if it got out. The administration doesn’t need a dead end, something to apologize for. It needs a success. I can’t tell you how much depends on it.”

The deputy director turned to Freeling. “Dr. Freeling?” he said.

Freeling stood up. “Willy Hartnett died of a stroke,” he said. “The full p.m. report is being typed up, but that’s what it comes to. There’s no evidence of systemic deterioration; at his age and condition, I wouldn’t have expected it. So it was trauma. Too much strain for the blood vessels in his brain to stand.” He gazed at his fingertips reflectively. “What comes next is conjecture,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do. I’m going to ask for consultations from Ripplinger at the Yale Medical School and Anford—”

“The hell you are,” snapped Griffin.

“I beg your pardon?” Freeling was caught off balance.

“No consultations. Not without full-scale security clearance first. This is urgent-top, Dr. Freeling.”

“Oh. Well — then I’ll have to take the responsibility myself. The cause of the trauma was too many inputs. He was overloaded. He couldn’t handle it.”

“I never heard of anything like that causing a stroke,” Griffin complained.

“It takes a good deal of stress. But it happens. And here we’re into new kinds of stress, Mr. Griffin. It’s like — well, here’s an analogy. If you had a child who was born with congenital cataracts, you would take him to a doctor, and the doctor would remove them. Only you would have to do it before he reached the age of puberty — before he stopped growing, internally as well as externally, you see. If you don’t do it by then, it’s better if you leave him blind. Kids who have such cataracts removed after the age of thirteen or fourteen have, as a matter of historical record, an interesting phenomenon in common. They commit suicide before they’re twenty.”

Torraway was trying to follow the conversation, but not quite succeeding. He was relieved when the deputy director intervened. “I don’t think I see what that has to do with Will Hartnett, Jon.”

“There, too, it is a matter of too many inputs. In the case of the kids after the cataract operation, what appears to happen is disorientation. They get new inputs that they have not grown a system to handle. If there is sight from birth onward, the visual cortex develops systems to handle, mediate and interpret it. If not, there are no developed systems, and it is too late to grow them.

“I think Willy’s trouble was that we gave him inputs that he had no mechanism available to handle. It was too late for him to grow one. All the incoming data swamped him; the strain broke a blood vessel. And,” he went on, “I think that will happen to Roger here, too, if we do the same thing with him.”

Griffin turned a brief, assessing look at Roger Torraway. Torraway cleared his throat, but said nothing. There did not seem to be anything for him to say. Griffin said, “What are you telling me, Freeling?”

The doctor shook his head. “Only what I’ve said. I tell you what’s wrong, it’s up to somebody else to tell you how to fix it. I don’t think you can fix it. I mean, not medically. You’ve got a brain — Willy’s or Roger’s. It has grown up as a radio receiver. Now you’re putting TV pictures into it. It doesn’t know how to deal with them.”

All this time Brad had been scribbling, looking up from time to time with an expression of interest. He looked down again at his note pad, wrote something, regarded it thoughtfully, wrote again, while the attention of everyone in the room turned to him.

At last the deputy director said, “Brad? It sounds as though the ball’s in your court.”

Brad looked up and smiled. “That’s what I’m working on,” he said.

“Do you agree with Dr. Freeling?”

“No question about it. He’s right. We can’t feed raw inputs into a nervous system that hasn’t got equipment to mediate and translate them. Those mechanisms don’t exist in the brain, not in anybody’s brain, unless we want to take a child at birth and rebuild him then so that the brain can develop what it needs.”

“Are you proposing that we wait for a new generation of astronauts?” Griffin demanded.

“No. I’m proposing we build mediating circuits into Roger. Not just sensory inputs. Filters, translators — ways of interpreting the inputs, the sight from different wavelengths of the spectrum, the kinesthetic sense from the new muscles — everything. Look,” he said, “let me go back a little bit. Do any of you know about McCulloch and Lettvin and the frog’s eye?” He glanced around the room. “Sure, Jonny, you do, and one or two of the others. I’d better review a little of it. The frog’s perceptual system — not just the eye, all of the vision parts of it — filters out what isn’t important. If a bug passes in front of the frog’s eye, the eye perceives it, the nerves transmit the information, the brain responds to it, and the frog eats the bug. If, say, a little leaf drops in front of the frog he doesn’t eat it. He doesn’t decide not to eat it. He doesn’t see it. The image forms in the eye, all right, but the information is dropped out before it reaches the brain. The brain never becomes aware of what the eye has seen, because it doesn’t need to. It simply is not relevant to a frog to know whether or not a leaf is in front of it.”

Roger was following the conversation with great interest, but somewhat less comprehension. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m more complicated — I mean, a man is a lot more complicated than a frog. How can you tell what I ‘need’ to see?”

“Survival things, Rog. We’ve got a lot of data from Willy. I think we can do it.”

“Thanks. I wish you were a little more sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure enough,” said Brad, grinning. “This didn’t catch me entirely by surprise.”

Torraway said, his throat half-closed and his voice thin, “You mean you let Willy go ahead and—”

“No, Roger! Come on. Willy was my friend, too. I thought there was enough of a safety factor to at least keep him alive. I was wrong, and I’m at least as sorry as you are, Roger. But we all knew there was a risk that the systems wouldn’t work right, that we’d have to do more.”

“That,” said Griffin heavily, “was not made very clear in your progress reports.” The deputy director started to speak but Griffin shook his head. “We’ll come to that another time. What are you saying now, Bradley? You’re going to filter out some of the information?”

“Not just filter it out. Mediate it. Translate it into a form Roger can handle.”

“What about Torraway’s point that a man is more complicated than a frog? Have you ever done this with human beings?”

Surprisingly, Brad grinned; he was ready for that one. “As a matter of fact, yes. About six years ago, before I came here — I was still a graduate student. We took four volunteers and we conditioned them to a Pavlovian response. We flashed a bright light in their eyes, and simultaneously rang an electric doorbell that pulsed at thirty beats a second. Well, of course, when you get a bright light in your eyes, your pupils contract. It isn’t under conscious control. You can’t fake it. It is a response to light, nothing else, just an evolutionary capacity to protect the eye from direct sunlight.

“That sort of response, involving the autonomic nervous system, is hard to condition into human beings. But we managed it. When it takes, it sets pretty firmly. After — I think it was after three hundred trials apiece, we had the response fixed. All you had to do was ring the bell, and the subjects’ pupils would shrink down to dots. You follow me so far?”

“I remember enough from college to know about Pavlovian reflexes. Standard stuff,” said Griffin.

“Well, the next part wasn’t standard. We tapped into the auditory nerve, and we could measure the actual signal going to the brain: ding-a-ling, thirty beats per second, we could read it on the oscilloscope.

“So then we changed the bell. We got one that rang at twenty-four beats a second. Care to guess what happened?” There was no response. Brad smiled. “The oscilloscope still showed thirty beats a second. The brain was hearing something that wasn’t really happening.

“So, you see, it isn’t just frogs that do this sort of mediation. Human beings perceive the world in predigested ways. The sensory inputs themselves edit and rearrange the information.

“So what I want to do with you, Roger,” he said genially, “is give you a little help in interpretation. We can’t do much with your brain. Good or bad, we’re stuck with it. It’s a mass of gray jelly with a capacity-limiting structure and we can’t keep pouring sensory information into it. The only place we have to work is at the interface — before it hits the brain.”

Griffin slapped his open palm on the table. “Can we make the window date?” he growled.

“I can but try, sir,” said Brad genially.

“You can but get your ass in a crack if we buy this and it doesn’t work, boy!”

The geniality faded from Brad’s face. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me the odds!” Griffin barked.

Brad hesitated. “No worse than even money,” he said at last.

“Then,” said Griffin, smiling at last, “let it be so.”

Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.

He slowed down to let Brad catch up with him. “Brad,” he said, “you’re pretty sure of what you were saying?”

Brad slapped him gently on the back. “More sure than I said, to tell you the truth. I just didn’t want to stick my neck out for old Griffin. And listen, Roger, thanks.”

“For what?”

“For trying to warn me today. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” said Roger. He stood there for a moment, watching Brad retreating back, and wondering how Brad knew about something he had told only to his wife.

We could have told him — as in fact we could have told him many, many things, including why the polls showed what they showed. But no one really needed to tell him. He could have told himself — if he had allowed himself to know.