Man Plus

Eight Through Deceitful Eyes

The weather had changed quickly and for good. We had seen the shift coming as a wedge of polar air pushed down out of Alberta as far as the Texas Panhandle. Wind warnings had grounded the hovercars. Those of the project personnel who didn’t have wheeled vehicles were forced to come by public transportation, and the parking lots were almost bare except for great ungainly knots of tumbleweed bouncing before the wind.

Not everyone had heeded the warnings, and there were the colds and flu bugs of the year’s first real cold snap. Brad was laid up. Weidner was ambulatory, but not allowed near Roger for fear of infecting him with a trivial little illness that he was in no shape to handle. Most of the work of doing Roger was left to Jonathan Freeling, whose health was then guarded almost as jealously as Roger’s own. Kathleen Doughty, indestructibly tough old lady, was in Roger’s room every hour, dropping cigarette ash and advice on the nurses. “Treat him like a person,” she ordered. “And put some clothes on before you go home. You can show off your beautiful little butt any time — what you have to do now is keep from catching cold until we can spare you.” The nurses did not resist her. They did their best, even Clara Bly, recalled from her honeymoon to fill in for the nurses on the sick list. They cared as much as Kathleen Doughty did, although it was hard to remember, looking down at the grotesque creature that was still named Roger Torraway, that he was in fact a human being, as capable of yearning and depression as themselves.

Roger was beginning to be more clearly conscious from time to time. Twenty hours and more each day he was out cold, or in a half-dreaming analgesic daze; but sometimes he recognized the people in the room with him, and sometimes even spoke coherently to them. Then we would put him out again.

“I wish I knew what he was feeling,” said Clara Bly to her relief nurse.

The other girl looked down at the mask that was all there was left of his face, with the great wide eyes that had been fabricated for him. “Maybe you’re better off if you don’t,” she said. “Go home, Clara.”

Roger heard that; the oscilloscope traces showed that he had. By studying the telemetry we could form some notion of what was inside his mind. Often he was in pain, that was evident. But the pain was not a warning of something that needed attention, or a spur to action. It was simply a fact of his life. He learned to expect it and to accept it when it happened. He was not conscious of very much else that pertained to his own body. His body-knowledge senses had not yet come to deal with the reality of his new body. He did not know when his eyes, lungs, heart, ears, nose and skin were replaced or supplemented. He didn’t know how to recognize the clues that might have given him information. The taste of blood and vomit at the back of his throat: how was he to know that that meant his lungs were gone? The blackness, the suppressed pain in the skull that was so unlike any other headache he had ever had: how could he tell what it meant, how could he distinguish between the removal of his entire optic system and the turning off of a light switch?

He realized dimly at one point that somewhen he had stopped smelling the familiar hospital aroma, scented odor killer and disinfectant. When? He didn’t know. All he knew was that there were no smells in his environment any more.

He could hear. With a sharpness of discrimination and a level of perception he had never experienced before, he could hear every word that was said in the room, in however low a whisper, and most of what happened in the adjoining rooms as well. He heard what people said, when he was conscious enough to hear at all. He understood the words. He could feel the good will of Kathleen Doughty and Jon Freeling, and understood the worry and anger that underlay the voices of the deputy director and the general.

And above all, he could feel pain.

There were so many different kinds of pain! There were all the aches of all the parts of his body. There was the healing of surgery, and there was the angry pulsing of tissues that had been bruised as major work was done. There were the endless little twinges as Freeling or the nurses jacked instrumentation into a thousand hurtful places on the surface of his body so that they could study the readings they gave.

And there was the deeper, internal pain that sometimes seemed physical, that came when he thought of Dorrie. Sometimes, when he was awake, he remembered to ask if she had been there or had called. He could not remember ever getting an answer.

And then one day he felt a searing new pain inside his head… and realized it was light.

He was seeing again.

When the nurses realized that he could see them they reported to Jon Freeling at once, who picked up the phone and called Brad. “Be right over,” Brad said. “Keep him in the dark till I get there.”

It took more than an hour for Brad to make the trip, and when he turned up he was clearly wobbly. He submitted to an antiseptic shower, an oral spray and the fitting of a surgical mask, and then, cautiously, he opened the door and entered Roger’s room.

The voice from the bed said, “Who’s there?” It was weak and quavering, but it was Roger’s voice.

“Me. Brad.” He fumbled along the side of the door until he found the light knob. “I’m going to turn the lights on a little bit, Roger. Tell me when you can see me.”

“I can see you now,” sighed the voice. “At least I guess it’s you.”

Brad arrested his hand. “The hell you canhe began, and then he paused. “What do you mean, you see me? What do you see?”

“Well,” whispered the voice, “I’m not sure about the face. That’s just a sort of glow. But I can see your hands, and your head. They’re bright. And I can make out your body and arms pretty well. A lot fainter, though — yeah, I can see your legs, too. But your face is funny. The middle of it is just a splotch.”

Brad touched the surgical mask, comprehending. “Infrared. You’re seeing the heat. What else can you see, Roger?”

Silence from the bed for a moment. Then, “Well, there’s a sort of square of light; I guess it’s the door frame. I mostly just see the outline of it. And something pretty bright over against the wall, where I hear something too — the telemetry monitors? And I can see my own body, or at least I can see the sheet over me, with a sort of outline of my body on it.”

Brad stared around the room. Even with time for dark adaptation he could see almost nothing: a polka-dot pattern of illuminated dials from the monitors, and a very faint seepage of light around the door behind him.

“That’s pretty good, Rog. Anything else?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what they are. Some lights low down, over near you. Very dim.”

“I think those are the heating ducts. You’re doing fine, boy. All right, now hold on. I’m going to turn up the room lights a little bit. Maybe you can get along without them, but I can’t and neither can the nurses. Tell me what you feel.”

Slowly he inched the dimmer dial around, an eighth of a turn, a bit more. The surround lights behind the moldings under the ceiling came alive — weakly at first, then a trifle stronger. Brad could see the shape on the bed now, first the glitter of the spread wings that had revolved forward, over the body of Roger Torraway, then the body itself, with a sheet draped over it waist-high.

“I see you now,” sighed Roger in his reedy voice. “It’s a little different — I’m seeing color now, and you’re not so bright.”

Brad took his hand off the knob. “That’s good enough for now.” He leaned back against the wall giddily. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a cold or something… How about you, do you feel anything? I mean, any pain, anything like that?”

“Christ, Brad!”

“No, I mean connected with vision. Does the light hurt your — your eyes?”

“They’re about the only thing that doesn’t hurt,” sighed Roger.

“Fine. I’m going to give you a little more light — about that much, okay? No trouble?” “No.”

Brad walked delicately over to the bed. “All right, I want you to try something. Can you — well, close your eyes? I mean, can you turn off the vision receptors?”

Pause. “I — don’t think so.”

“Well, you can, Rog. The capacity is built in, you’ll just have to find it. Willy had a little trouble at first, but he got it. He said he just sort of fooled around, and then it happened.”

“…Nothing’s happening.”

Brad pondered for a second. His head was muzzy from the infection, and he could feel his stamina ebbing away. “How about this? Did you ever have sinus trouble?”

“No — well, maybe. A little bit.”

“Can you remember where it hurt?”

The shape moved uncomfortably on the bed, the great eyes staring into Brad’s. “I — think so.”

“Feel around near there,” Brad ordered. “See if you can find muscles to move. The muscles aren’t there, but the nerve endings that controlled them are.”

“…Nothing. What muscle am I looking for?”

“Oh, hell, Roger! It’s called the rectus lateralis, and what good does that do you? Just fool around.”

“…Nothing.”

“All right.” Brad sighed. “Never mind for now. Keep on trying as often as you can, all right? You’ll find how to do it.”

“That’s a comfort,” whispered the resentful voice from the bed. “Hey, Brad? You’re looking brighter.”

“What do you mean, brighter?” Brad snapped.

“More bright. More light from your face.”

“Yeah,” said Brad, realizing he was beginning to feel giddy again. “I think I may be running a temperature. I’d better get out of here. This gauze, it’s supposed to keep me from infecting you, but it’s only reliable for fifteen minutes or so—”

“Before you go,” whispered the voice insistently. “Do something for me. Turn off the lights again for a minute.”

Brad shrugged and complied. “Yeah?”

He could hear the ungainly body shifting in the bed. “I’m just turning to get a better look,” Roger reported. “Listen, Brad, what I wanted to ask you is, how are things working out? Am I going to make it?”

Brad paused for reflection. “I think so,” he said honestly. “Everything’s all right so far. I wouldn’t crap you, Roger. This is all frontier stuff, and something could go wrong. But so far it doesn’t look that way.”

“Thanks. One other thing, Brad. Have you seen Dorrie lately?”

Pause. “No, Roger. Not for a week or so. I’ve been pretty sick, and when I wasn’t sick I was damn busy.”

“Yeah. Say, I guess you might as well leave the lights the way you had them so the nurses can find their way around.”

Brad turned up the switch again. “I’ll be in when I can. Practice trying to close your eyes, will you? And you’ve got a phone — call me any time you want to. I don’t mean if anything goes wrong — I’ll know about that if it happens, don’t worry; I don’t go to the toilet without leaving the number where I can be reached. I mean if you just want to talk.”

“Thanks, Brad. So long.”

At least the surgery was over — or the worst of it, anyway. When Roger came to realize that, he felt a kind of relief that was very precious to him, although there were still more unrelieved stresses in his mind than he wanted to handle.

Clara Bly cleaned him up and against direct orders brought him flowers to boost his morale. “You’re a good kid,” whispered Roger, turning his head to look at them.

“What do they look like to you?”

He tried to describe it. “Well, they’re roses, but they’re not red. Pale yellow? About the same color as your bracelet.”

“That’s orange.” She finished whipping the new sheet over his legs. It billowed gently in the upthrust from the fluidized bed. “Want the bedpan?”

“For what?” he grumbled. He was into his third week of a low-residue diet, and his tenth day of controlled liquid intake. His excretory system had become, as Clara put it, mostly ornamental. “I’m allowed to get up anyway,” he said, “so if anything does happen I can take care of it.”

“Big man,” Clara grinned, bundling up the dirty linen and leaving. Roger sat up and began again his investigation of the world around him. He studied the roses appraisingly. The great faceted eyes took in nearly an extra octave of radiation, which meant half a dozen colors Roger had never seen before from IR to UV; but he had no names for them, and the rainbow spectrum he had seen all his life had extended itself to cover them all. What seemed to him dark red was, he knew, low-level heat. But it was not quite true even to say that it seemed to be red; it was only a different quality of light that had associations of warmth and well-being.

Still, there was something very strange about the roses, and it was not the color.

He threw off the sheet and looked down at himself. The new skin was poreless, hairless and wrinkle-free. It looked more like a wetsuit than the flesh he had known all his life. Under it, he knew, was a whole new musculature, power-driven, but there was no visible trace of that.

Soon he would get up and walk, all by himself. He was not quite ready for that. He clicked on the TV set. The screen lit up with a dazzling array of dots in magenta and cyan and green. It took an effort of will for Roger to look at them and see three girls singing and weaving; his new eyes wanted to analyze the pattern into its components. He clicked stations and got a newscast. New People’s Asia had sent three more nuclear subs on a “courtesy visit” to Australia. President Deshatine’s press secretary said sternly that our allies in the Free World could count on us. All the Oklahoma football teams had lost. Roger clicked it off; he found himself getting a headache. Every time he shifted position the lines seemed to slope off at an angle, and there was a baffling bright glow from the back of the set. After the current was off he watched for some time the cathode tube’s light failing, and the glow from the back darkening and dimming. It was heat, he realized.

Now, what was it Brad had said? “Feel around, near where your sinuses are.”

It was a strange feeling, being in the first place in an unfamiliar body and then trying to locate inside it a control that no one could quite define. Just in order to close the eyes! But Brad had assured him he could do it. Roger’s feelings toward Brad were complex, and one component of them was pride; if Brad said it could be done by anyone, then it was going to be done by Roger.

Only it wasn’t being done. He tried every combination of muscle squeezes and will power he could think of, and nothing happened.

A sudden recollection hit him: years old, a memory from the days when he and Dorrie had first been married. No, not married, not yet; living together, he remembered, and trying to decide if they wanted to publicly join their lives. That was their massage-and-transcendental-meditation period, when they were exploring each other in all the ways that had ever occurred to either of them, and he remembered the smell of baby oil with a dash of musk added, and the way they had laughed over the directions for the second chakra: “Take the air into your spleen and hold it, then breathe out as your hands glide up on either side of your partner’s spine.” But they had never been able to figure out where the spleen was, and Dorrie had been very funny, searching the private recesses of their bodies: “Is it there? There? Oh, Rog, look, you’re not serious about this…

He felt a sudden interior pain swell giddyingly inside him, and leaned back in desolation. Dorrie!

The door burst open.

Clara Bly flew in, bright eyes wide in her dark, pretty face. “Roger! What are you doing?”

He took a deep, slow breath before he spoke. “What’s the matter?” He could hear the flatness in his own voice; it had little tone left, after what they had done to it.

“All your taps are jumping! I thought — I don’t know what I thought, Roger. But whatever was happening, it was giving you trouble.”

“Sorry, Clara.” He watched as she hurried over to the monitors on the wall, studying them swiftly.

“They look a little better,” she said grudgingly. “I guess it’s all right. But what the hell were you doing to yourself?”

“Worrying,” he said.

“About what?”

“Where my spleen is. Do you know?”

She stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before she replied. “It’s under your lower ribs, on your left side. About where you think your heart is. A little lower down. Are you putting me on, Roger?”

“Well, kind of. I guess I was reminiscing about something I shouldn’t have, Clara.”

“Please don’t do it any more!”

“I’ll try.” But the thought of Dorrie and Brad was still lurking there, right under the conscious of his mind. He offered, “One thing — I’ve been trying to close my eyes, and I can’t.”

She approached and touched his shoulder in friendly sympathy. “You’ll do it, hon.”

“Yeah.”

“No, really. I was with Willy around this time, and he got pretty discouraged. But he made it. Anyway,” she said, turning, “I’ll take care of it for you for now. Lights-out time. You’ve got to be fresh as a daisy in the morning.”

He said suspiciously, “What for?”

“Oh, not more cutting. That’s over for a while. Didn’t Brad tell you? Tomorrow they’re going to hook you into the computer for all that mediation stuff. You’re going to be a busy boy, Rog, so get some sleep.” She turned off the light, and Brad watched as her dark face changed into a gentle glow that he thought of as peach.

Something occurred to him. “Clara? Do me a favor?”

She stopped with her hand on the door. “What’s that, honey?”

“I want to ask you a question.”

“So ask.”

He hesitated, wondering how to do what he wanted to do. “What I want to know,” he said, working it out in his head as he went along, “is, let’s see — oh, yes. What I want to know, Clara, is, when your husband and you are in bed making love, what different ways do you use?”

“Roger!” The brightness of her face suddenly went up half a decibel; he could see the tracing of veins under the skin as hot blood flooded through her veins.

He said, “I’m sorry, Clara. I guess — I guess lying here I get kind of horny. Forget I asked you, will you?”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was a professional’s, no longer a friend’s: “Sure, Roger. It’s okay. You just kind of caught me off-guard. It’s… well, it’s all right, it’s just that you never said anything like that to me before.”

“I know. Sorry.”

But he wasn’t sorry, or not exactly.

He watched the door close behind her and studied the rectangular tracing of light bleeding through from the hall outside. He was careful to keep his mind as calm as he could. He didn’t want to start the monitors ringing alarm bells again.

But he wanted to think about something that was right on the borderline of the danger zone, and that was how come the flush he had tricked onto Clara Bly’s face looked so much like the sudden brightness that had come onto Brad’s when he asked if Brad had been with Dorrie.

We were fully mobilized next morning, checking the circuits, cutting in the stand-bys, insuring that the automatic switchover relays were tuned to intervene at the faintest flicker of a malfunction. Brad came in at 6:00 A.M., weak but clear-headed and ready to work. Weidner and Jon Freeling were only minutes after him, although the primary job for the day was all Brad’s. They could not stay away. Kathleen Doughty was there-of-course, as she had been at every step, not because her duty required it but because her heart did. “Don’t give my boy a bad time,” she growled over her cigarette. “He’s going to need all the help he can get when I start on him next week.”

Sounding every syllable, Brad said, “Kathleen. I will do the goddamned best I can.”

“Yeah. I know you will, Brad.” She stubbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. “I never had any children, and I guess Roger and Willy sort of filled in.”

“Yeah,” grunted Brad, no longer listening. He was not qualified or allowed to touch the 3070 or any of the ancillary units. All he could do was watch while the technicians and the programmers did their job. When the third recheck had gone almost to completion without a glitch he finally left the computer room and took the elevator up three flights to Roger’s room.

At the door he paused to breathe for a moment, then opened the door with a smile. “You’re about ready to plug in, boy,” he said. “Feel up to it?”

The insect eyes turned toward him. Roger’s flat voice said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. What I feel is mostly scared.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to be scared of. Today,” Brad amended hastily, “all we’re going to do is test out themediation.”

The bat wings shuddered and changed position. “Will that kill me?” asked the maddeningly monotone voice.

“Oh, come on, Roger!” Brad was suddenly angry.

“It’s only a question,” ticked the voice.

“It’s a crappy question! Look, I know how you feel—”

“I doubt that.”

Brad stopped, and studied Roger’s uncommunicative face. After a moment he said, “Let me go over it again. What I’m going to do is not kill you, it’s keep you alive. Sure, you’re thinking of what happened to Willy. It isn’t going to happen to you. You’re going to be able to handle what happens — here, and on Mars, where it’s important.”

“It’s important to me here,” said Roger.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. When the system is all go you’ll only see or hear what you need, understand? Or what you want. You’ll have a good deal of volitional control. You’ll be able—”

“I can’t even close my eyes yet, Brad.”

“You will. You’ll be able to use all of it. But you won’t unless we get started on it. Then all this stuff will filter out the unnecessary signals, so you won’t be confused. That’s what killed Willy: confusion.”

Pause, while the brain behind the grotesque face ruminated. What Roger finally said was, “You look lousy, Brad.”

“Sorry about that. I actually don’t feel too good.”

“Are you sure you’re up to this?”

“I’m sure. Hey, Roger. What are you telling me? Do you want to put this off?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I wish I knew, Brad. Get on with it.”

We were all ready by then; the “go” lights had been flashing green for several minutes. Brad shrugged and said morosely to the duty nurse, “Let ‘er rip.”

There were ten hours, then, of phasing in the mediation circuits one by one, testing, adjusting, letting Roger try his new senses on projected Rorschach blots and Maxwell color wheels. For Roger the day raced by. His sense of time was unreliable. It was no longer regulated by everyman’s built-in biological clocks but by his machine components; they slowed his perception of time down when there was no stress situation, speeded it up when needed. “Slow down,” he begged, watching the nurses whiz past him like bullets. And then, when Brad, beginning to shake with fatigue, knocked over a tray of inks and crayons, to Roger the pieces seemed actually to float to the ground. He had no difficulty in catching two bottles of ink and the tray itself before they touched the floor.

When he came to think of it after, he realized that they were the pieces that might have spilled or broken. He had let the wax crayons fall free. In that fraction of a second of choice, he had chosen to catch the objects that needed catching and let the others go, without being aware of what he did.

Brad was highly pleased. “You’re doing great, boy,” he said, holding to the foot of the bed. “I’m going to take off now and get some sleep, but I’ll be in to see you tomorrow after the surgery.”

“Surgery? What surgery?”

“Oh,” said Brad, “just a little touch-up. Nothing compared to what you’ve already had, believe me! From now on,” he said, turning to leave, “you’re just about through being born; now all you have to do is grow up. Practice. Learn to use what you’ve got. The hard parts are all behind you. How are you doing with cutting off vision when you want to?”

“Brad,” rang out the flat voice, louder in amplitude but tonally gray, “what the hell do you want of me? I’m trying!”

“I know,” Brad said, conciliating. “See you tomorrow.”

For the first time that day Roger was left alone. He experimented with his new senses. He could see that they might be very useful to him in survival situations. But they were also very confusing. All the tiny noises of everyday life were magnified. From the hall he could hear Brad talking to Jonny Freeling and the nurses going off duty. He knew that with the ears his mother had cultured for him in her womb he would not have been able to perceive even a whisper; now he could make out the words at will: “ — local anesthetic, but I don’t want to. I want him out. He’s got enough trauma to deal with.” That was Freeling talking to Brad.

The lights were more brilliant than before. He tried to diminish the sensitivity of his vision, but nothing happened. What he really wanted, he thought, was a single Christmas-tree bulb. That was plenty of light; these floods of luminosity were disconcerting. Also, he observed, the lights were maddeningly rhythmical; he could perceive each pulse of the sixty-Hertz current. Inside the fluorescent tubes he observed the writhing of a glowing snake of gas. Incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, were almost dark, except for the bright filaments at the center, which he could examine in detail. There was no sense of eyestrain, even when looking at the brightest of lights.

He heard a new voice in the corridor, and sharpened his hearing to listen: Clara Bly, just coming on duty for the evening shift. “How’s the patient, Dr. Freeling?”

“Just fine. He seems rested. You didn’t have to give him a sleeping pill last night?”

“No. He was fine. Kind of” — she giggled — “kind of randy, though. He made a sort of a pass, which I never expected from Roger.”

“Huh.” There was a puzzled pause. “Well, that won’t be a problem any more. I’ve got to check the readouts. Take care.”

Roger thought he would have to be extra nice to Clara; it would not be hard to do, for she was his favorite among the nurses. He lay back, listening to the rustle of his own black wings and the rhythmic sounds from the telemetry panels. He was very tired. It would be nice to sleep—

He sprang up. The lights had stopped! Then they were on again, as soon as he became aware of it.

He had learned to close his eyes!

Satisfied, Roger let himself sink back onto the gently flowing bed. It was true enough; he was learning.

They woke him to feed him, and then to put him to sleep again for his last operation.

There was no anesthesia. “We’re just going to turn you off,” said Jon Freeling. “You won’t feel a thing.” And indeed he didn’t. First he was wheeled into the surgery next door, intensive-care bottles, pipes, drains and all. He could not smell the smell of disinfectant, but he knew it was there; he could perceive the brightness gathered at the cusp of every metallic object, the heat from the sterilizer, like a sunburst against the wall.

And then Dr. Freeling ordered him out, and we complied. We depressed his sensory inputs one by one; to him it was as though the sounds grew fainter, the lights dimmer, the body touches more gentle. We dampened the pain inputs throughout all his new skin, extinguished them completely where Freeling’s knife would cut and needle would pierce. There was a complex problem there. Many of the pain inputs were to be maintained after he recovered. He would have to have some warning system when he was free on the surface of Mars, something to tell him if he was being burned or torn or damaged; pain was the sharpest alarm we could give him. But for much of his body, pain was over. Once we extinguished the inputs we programmed them out of his sensorium entirely.

Roger, of course, knew nothing of this. Roger just went to sleep and woke up again.

When he looked up he screamed.

Freeling, leaning back and flexing his fingers, jumped and dropped his mask. “What’s the matter?”

Roger said, “Jesus! For a minute there I saw — I don’t know. Could it have been a dream? But I saw you all around me, looking down, and you looked like a bunch of ghouls. Skulls. Skeletons. Grinning at me! And then you were you again.”

Freeling looked at Weidner and shrugged. “I think,” he said, “that that’s just your mediation circuits at work. You know? Translating what you see into something you can grasp immediately.”

“I don’t like it,” Roger flared.

“Well, we’ll have to talk to Brad about it. But honestly, Roger, I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I think it’s like the computer took your sensations of fear and pain — you know, what everyone feels when he has an operation — and put them together with the visual stimulus: our faces, the masks, all that stuff. Interesting. I wonder how much of it was in the mediation, and how much was plain postoperative delusion?”

“I’m glad you find it interesting,” Roger sulked.

But truthfully, he found it interesting too. When he was back in his own room he let his mind roam. He could not summon the fantasy pictures at will. They came when they wanted to come, but they were not as fearsome as that first terrified glimpse of bare mandibles and hollow eye sockets. When Clara came in with a bedpan and left again after he waved it away, he watched her through the closing door; and the shadow of the door became a cave entrance, and Clara Bly a cave bear growling irritably at him. She was still a little annoyed, he realized; some subsonic cue in her face was registering in his senses, and being analyzed by the buzzing 3070 downstairs and displayed as a warning.

But when she came back she was wearing Dorrie’s face. It melted away and reclothed itself in her familiar dark skin and bright eyes, not like Dorrie at all; but Roger took it as a sign that things were all right between them again…

Between Clara and himself.

Not, he thought, between Dorrie and himself. He gazed at the phone by his bed. The vision circuits were permanently off at his request; he didn’t want to call someone and forget what they might see. But he had not used it to call Dorrie at all. Often enough he reached out his hand for the phone, but every time he drew his hand back.

He didn’t know what to say to her.

How do you ask your wife if she is sleeping with your best friend? You come right out and ask her, that’s how, his gut feelings told Roger; but he could not quite make himself do it. He was not sure enough. He could not risk that accusation; he might be wrong.

The thing was, he couldn’t discuss it with his friends, not any of them. Don Kayman would have been a natural for that; it was a priest’s function. But Don was so clearly, so sweetly and tenderly in love with his pretty little nun that Roger could not put himself in the pain of discussing pain with him.

And for most of his friends, the trouble was that they honestly would not have seen what the trouble was. Open marriage was so common in Tonka — in most of the Western world, indeed — that it was the rare closed couple that caused gossip. To admit to jealousy was very difficult.

And anyway, Torraway told himself stoutly, it was not jealousy that troubled him. Not exactly jealousy. It was something else. It was not Sicilian machismo or the outrage of the property owner who finds someone trespassing in his own fertile gardens. It was that Dorrie should want to love only him. Since he only wanted to love her…

He became aware that he was slipping into a state of mind that would surely ring the alarm bells on the telemetry readouts. He didn’t want that. He resolutely took his mind away from his wife.

He practiced “closing his eyes” for a time; it was reassuring to be able to summon up this new skill when he wanted it. He could not have described, any better than Willy Hartnett had, what it was he did; but somehow he was able to reach the decision to stop receiving visual inputs, and somehow the circuitry inside his head and down in the 3070 room were able to convert that decision into blackness. He could even dim the light selectively. He could brighten it. He could, he discovered, filter out all but one band of wavelengths or suppress one or cause one or more of the rainbow colors to be brighter than the rest.

It was quite satisfying, really, although in time it cloyed. He wished he had lunch to look forward to, but there would be no lunch that day, partly because he had had an operation, partly because they were gradually deaccustoming him to eating. Over the next few weeks he would eat and drink less and less; by the time he was on Mars, he would really need to eat only about one square meal a month.

He flung back the sheet and gazed idly down at the artifact that his body had become.

A second later he shouted a great raw scream of fear and pain. The telemetry monitors all flashed blinding red. In the corridor outside Clara Bly turned in midstep and dashed for his door. Back in Brad’s bachelor apartment the warning bells went off a split-second later, tclling him of something urgent and serious that woke him out of an unsound, fatigued sleep.

When Clara opened the door she saw Roger, curled fetally on the bed, groaning in misery. One hand was cupping his groin, between his closed legs. “Roger! What’s the matter?”

The head lifted, and the insect eyes looked at her blindly. Roger did not stop the animal sounds that were coming from him, did not speak. He only lifted his hand.

There, between his legs, was nothing. Nothing at all of penis, testicles, scrotum; nothing but the gleaming artificial flesh, with a transparent bandage over it, concealing the surgery lines. It was as if nothing had ever been there. Of the diagnostic signs of manhood… nothing. The tiny little operation was over, and what was left was nothing at all.