Man Plus

Nine Dash Visits a Bedside

Don Kayman didn’t like the timing, but he had no choice; he had to visit his tailor. Unfortunately, his tailor was in Merritt Island, Florida, at the Atlantic Test Center.

He flew there worried, and arrived worried. Not only at what had happened to Roger Torraway. That seemed to be under control, praise be to Divine Mercy, although Kayman couldn’t help feeling that they had almost lost him and somebody had blundered badly in not preparing him for that last little bit of “minor cosmetic surgery.” Probably, he thought charitably, it was because Brad had been ill. But surely they had come close to blowing the whole project.

The other thing he was fretting about was that he could not avoid the secret feeling of sin that seemed to be a realization that internally, in his heart of hearts, he wished the project would be blown. He had had a tearful hour with Sister Clotilda when the probability that he would go to Mars had firmed up into the cutting of orders. Should they marry first? No. No on pragmatic, practical reasons: although there was not much doubt that both could ask for and receive the dispensation from Rome, there was also not much hope that it would come through in less than six months.

If only they had applied earlier…

But they hadn’t, and both of them knew that they were not willing to marry without it, or even to go to bed together without the sacrament. “At least,” said Clotilda toward the end, attempting to smile, “you won’t have to worry about my being unfaithful to you. If I wouldn’t break my vows for you, I doubt I’d do it for any man.”

“I wasn’t worried,” he said; but now, under the gleaming blue skies of Florida, staring up at the gantries that rose to reach for the fluffy white clouds, he was worrying. The Army colonel who had volunteered to show him around was aware that something was troubling Kayman, but he had no way of diagnosing the trouble.

“It’s safe enough,” he said, probing at random. “I wouldn’t give a thought to the low-injection rendezvous orbit.”

Kayman tore his attention away from his interior and said, “I promise you I wasn’t. I don’t even know what you mean.”

“Oh. Well, it’s just that we’re putting your bird and the two support launches into a lower orbit than usual: two twenty kilometers instead of four hundred. It’s political, of course. I hate it when the bureaucrats tell us what we have to do, but this time it doesn’t really make a difference.”

Kayman glanced at his watch. He still had an hour to kill before returning for his last fitting of Mars-suit and spacesuit, and he was not anxious to spend it fretting. He judged accurately that the colonel was one of those happy folk who like to talk about nothing as much as their work, and that all he need give would be an occasional grunt to keep the colonel explaining everything that could be explained. He gave the grunt.

“Well, Father Kayman,” said the colonel expansively, “we’re giving you a big ship, you know. Too big to launch in one piece. So we’re putting up three birds, and you’ll meet in orbit — two twenty by two thirty-five, optimal, and I expect we’ll be right on the money — and—”

Kayman nodded without really listening. He already knew the flight plan by heart; it was in the orders he had been given. The only open questions were who the remaining two occupants of the Mars bird would be, but it would only be a matter of days before that was decided. One would have to be a pilot to stay in orbit while the other three crowded into the Mars-lander and went down to the surface of the planet. The fourth man should, ideally, be someone who could function as back-up to pilot, areologist and cyborg; but of course no such person existed. It was time to make the decision, though. The three human beings — the three unaltered human beings, he corrected himself — would not have Roger’s capacity for surviving naked on the surface of Mars. They would have to have the same fittings he was going through now, and then the final brush-up training in procedures that all of them would need, even Roger.

And launch time was only thirty-three days away.

The colonel had finished with the docking and reassembly maneuvers and was getting ready to outline the day-by-day calendar of events on all the long months to Mars. Kayman said, “Wait a minute, Colonel. I didn’t quite get that about political considerations. What does that have to do with how we take off?”

The colonel grumbled resentfully, “Damn ecology freaks, they get everybody upset. These Texas Twin launch vehicles, they’re big. About twenty times the thrust of a Saturn. So they make a lot of exhaust. It comes to something like twenty-five metric tons of water vapor a second, times three birds — a lot of water vapor. And admittedly there’s some risk that the water vapor — well, no, let’s be fair; we know damn well — excuse me, Father — that what all that water vapor would do at normal orbit-injection altitudes would be to knock out the free electrons in a big patch of sky. They found that way back in. let’s see, I think it was ‘73 or ‘74, when they put the first Spacelab up. Knocked the free electrons out of a volume of atmosphere that stretched from Illinois to Labrador when it was measured. And of course that’s what keeps you from getting sunburned. One of the things. They help filter out the solar UV. Skin cancer, sunburn, destruction of flora — well, they’re all real; they could happen. But it’s not our own people Dash is worried about! The NPA, that’s what bugs him. They’ve given him an ultimatum that if your launch damages their sky they will consider it a ‘hostile act.’ Hostile act! What the hell do you call it when they parade five nuclear subs off Cape May, New Jersey? Claim it’s oceanographic research, but you don’t use cruiser-killer subs for oceanography, not in our Navy, anyway…

“Anyway,” the colonel said, bringing himself back to his guest and smiling, “it’s okay. We’ll just put you into rendezvous orbit a little lower down, out of the free-electron layer. Costs more fuel. Winds up making more pollution, the way I look at it. But it keeps their precious free electrons intact — not that there’s any real chance they’d survive across the Atlantic into Africa even, much less Asia…”

“You’ve been very interesting, Colonel,” Kayman said courteously. “I think it’s time for me to get back, though.”

The fitters were ready for him. “Just slip into this for size.” The physicotherapist member of the team grinned. “Slipping into” the spacesuit was twenty minutes of hard work, even if the whole team had been helping. Kayman insisted on doing it himself. In the spacecraft he wouldn’t have any more help than the rest of the crew, who would be busy with their own affairs; and in an emergency he wouldn’t have any help at all. He wanted to be ready for any emergency. It took an hour, and another ten minutes to get out of it after they’d checked all the parameters and pronounced everything fine; and then there were all the other garments to try.

It was dark outside, a warm Florida autumn night, before he was finished. He looked at the row of vestments laid out on the worktables and grinned. He pointed to the comm-antenna fabric that dangled from one wrist, the radiation cloak for use in solar-flare conditions, the body garment that went under the suits themselves. “You’ve got me all fixed up. That’s the maniple, there’s the chasuble, that’s my alb. Couple more pieces and I’d be all ready to say Mass.” Actually he had included a complete set of vestments in his weight allotment — it had seriously depleted the available reserve for books, music tapes and pictures of Sister Clotilda. But he was not prepared to discuss that with these worldly people. He stretched and sighed. “Where’s a good place to eat around here?” he asked. “A steak, or maybe some of that red snapper you people talk about — and then bed—”

The Air Force MP who had been standing by for two hours, glancing at his watch, stepped forward and spoke up. “Sorry, Father,” he said. “You’re wanted elsewhere right now, and you’re due in, let’s see, about twenty minutes.”

“Due where? I’ve got a long flight tomorrow—”

“I’m sorry, sir. My orders are to bring you to the Ad Building at Patrick Air Force Base. I expect they’ll tell you what it’s all about then.”

The priest drew himself up. “Corporal,” he said, “I’m not under your jurisdiction. I suggest you tell me what it is you want.”

“No, sir,” the MP agreed. “You’re not. But my orders are to bring you, and with all due respect, sir, I will.”

The physicotherapist touched Kayman’s shoulder. “Go ahead, Don,” he said. “I have a feeling you’re in pretty high echelons right now.”

Grumbling, Kayman allowed himself to be led out and put into a hoverjeep. The driver was in a hurry. He did not bother with the roads, but aimed the vehicle out toward the surf, judged his time and distance and skittered out onto the surface of the ocean between waves. Then he turned south and gunned it; in ten seconds they were doing at least a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Even on high-lift thrust, with three meters of air between them and the average height of the water, the rolling, twisting chop from the waves corkscrewing under them had Kayman swallowing saliva and looking for a throw-up bag against a rather possible need in no time at all. He tried to get the corporal to slow down. “Sorry, sir”; it was the MP’s favorite expression, it seemed.

But they managed to reach the beach at Patrick before Kayman quite vomited, and back on land the driver slowed to reasonable speeds. Kayman tottered out and stood in the damp, lush night until two more MPs, radio-alerted to his coming, saluted and escorted him inside a white stucco building.

Before ten minutes had elapsed he was stripped to the skin and being searched, and he realized what high echelons he was indeed moving in.

The President’s jet touched down at Patrick at 0400 hours. Kayman had been dozing on a beach chair with a throw rug over his legs; he was shaken courteously awake and led to the boarding steps while refueling tankers were topping off the wing tanks in peculiarly eerie silence. There was no conversation, no banging of bronze nozzles against aluminum filler caps, only the throbbing of the tank truck’s pumps.

Somebody very important was asleep. Kayman wished with all his heart that he was too. He was conducted to a recliner chair, strapped in and left; and even before his WAC hostess had left his side the jet was picking its way to the takeoff strip.

He tried to doze, but while the jet was still climbing to cruise altitude the President’s valet came back and said, “The President will see you now.”

Sitting down and freshly shaved around his goatee, President Deshatine looked like a Gilbert Stuart painting of himself. He was at ease in a leather-backed chair, unfocused eyes peering out the window of the presidential jet while he listened to some sort of tape through earphones. A full coffee cup was steaming next to his elbow, and an empty cup was waiting by the silver pot. Next to the cup was a slim box of purple leather embossed with a silver cross.

Dash didn’t keep him waiting. He looked around, smiled, pulled off the earphones, and said, “Thank you for letting me kidnap you, Father Kayman. Sit down, please. Help yourself to coffee if you’d like it.”

“Thanks.” The valet sprang to pour and retired to stand behind Don Kayman. Kayman didn’t look around; he knew that the valet would be watching every muscle tremor, and so he avoided sudden moves.

The President said, “I’ve been in so many time zones the last forty-eight hours that I’ve forgotten what the real world is like. Munich, Beirut, Rome. I picked up Vern Scanyon in Rome when I heard about the trouble with Roger Torraway. Scared the shit out of me, Father. You almost lost him, didn’t you?”

Kayman said, “I’m an areologist, Mr. President. It was not my responsibility.”

“Cut it out, Father. I’m not assigning blame; there’s plenty to go around, if it comes to that. I want to know what happened.”

“I’m sure General Scanyon could tell you more than I can, Mr. President,” Kayman said stiffly.

“If I wanted to settle for Vern’s version,” the President said patiently, “I wouldn’t have stopped to pick you up. You were there. He wasn’t. He was off in Rome at the Vatican Pacem in Excelsis Conference.”

Kayman took a hasty sip from his coffee cup. “Well, it was close. I think he wasn’t properly briefed for what was going to happen, because there was a flu epidemic, really. We were short of staff. Brad wasn’t there.”

“That has happened before,” the President observed.

Kayman shrugged and did not pick up the lead. “They castrated him, Mr. President. What the sultans used to call a complete castration, penis and all. He doesn’t need it, because there’s so little consumable going into him now that it all gets excreted anally, so it was just a vulnerable spot. There’s no question it had to come off, Mr. President.”

“What about the — what do you call it — prostatectomy? Was that a vulnerable spot too?”

“You really should ask one of the doctors about this, Mr. President,” Kayman said defensively.

“I’m asking you. Scanyon said something about ‘priest’s disease,’ and you’re a priest.”

Kayman grinned. “That’s an old expression, from the days when all priests were celibate. But, yes, I can tell you about it; we talked about it a lot in the seminary. The prostate produces fluid — not much, a few drops a day. If a man doesn’t have ejaculations, it mostly just passes out with the urine, but if he is sexually excited there’s more and it doesn’t all pass out. It backs up, and the congestion leads to trouble.”

“So they cut out his prostate.”

“And implanted a steroid capsule, Mr. President. He won’t become effeminate. Physically, he’s now a complete self-contained eunuch, and — Oh. I mean unit.”

The President nodded. “That’s what they call a Freudian slip.”

Kayman shrugged.

“And if you think that way,” the President pressed, “what the hell do you think Torraway thinks?”

“I know it’s not easy for him, Mr. President.”

“As I understand it,” Dash went on, “you aren’t just an areologist, Don, you’re a marriage counselor, too. And not doing too well, right? That trampy little wife of his is giving our boy a hard time.”

“Dorrie has a lot of problems.”

“No, Dorrie has one problem. Same problem we all have. She’s screwing up our Mars project, and we can’t afford to have that happen. Can you straighten her out?”

“Well, I don’t mean make her a perfect person. Cut it out, Don! I mean, can you get her to put his mind at rest, at least enough so he doesn’t go into shock any more? Give him a kiss and a promise, send him a Valentine when he’s on Mars — God knows Torraway doesn’t expect any more than that. But he has a right to that much.”

“I can try,” said Kayman helplessly.

“And I’m going to have a few words with Brad,” the President said grimly. “I’ve told you, I’ve told you all, this project has to work. I don’t care about somebody’s cold in the head or somebody else’s hot pants, I want Torraway on Mars and I want him happy there.”

The plane banked to change course away from the traffic around New Orleans, and a glint of morning sun shone up from the greasy oil-slick surface of the Gulf. The President squinted down at it angrily. “Let me tell you, Father Kayman, what I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking that Roger would be happier mourning over the death of his wife in a car smash than worrying about what she’s doing when he’s not around. I don’t like thinking that way. But I have just so many options, Kayman, and I have to pick the one that’s least bad. And now,” he said, suddenly smiling, “I’ve got something for you, from His Holiness. It’s a present; take a look at it.”

Wondering, Kayman opened the purple box. It held a rosary, coiled on purple velvet inside the leather case. The Ave Marias were ivory, carved into rosebuds; the big Paternoster beads were chased crystal. “It has an interesting history,” the President went on. “It was sent back to Ignatius Loyola from one of his missions in Japan, and then it was in South America for two hundred years with the — what do you call them? — the Reductions of Paraguay? It’s a museum piece, really, but His Holiness wanted you to have it.”

“I — I don’t know what to say,” Kayman managed.

“And it has his blessing.” The President leaned back and suddenly looked a great deal older. “Pray with it, Father,” he said. “I’m not a Catholic. I don’t know how you feel about these things. But I want you to pray for Dorrie Torraway’s getting her head straightened out enough to last her husband a while. And if that doesn’t work, you’d better pray real hard for all of us.”

Back in the main cabin, Kayman strapped himself in his seat and willed himself asleep for the remaining hour or so of the flight to Tonka. Exhaustion triumphed over worry, and he drifted off. He was not the only one worried. We had not properly estimated the trauma Roger Torraway would receive from the loss of his genitals, and we had nearly lost him.

The malfunction was critical. It could not be risked again. We had already arranged for beefed-up psychiatric attendance on Roger, and in Rochester the backpack computer was being recircuited to monitor major psychic stress and react before Roger’s slower human synapses could oscillate into convulsions.

The world situation was proceeding as predicted. New York City was of course in turmoil, the Near East was building up pressures past the safety valves, and New People’s Asia was pouring out furious manifestos denouncing the squid kill in the Pacific. The planet was rapidly reaching critical mass. Our projections were that the future of the race was questionable on Earth past another two years. We could not allow that. The Mars landing had to succeed.

When Roger came out of the haze after his seizure he did not realize how close he had come to dying, he only realized that he had been wounded in all of his most sensitive parts. The feeling was desolation: wiped-out, hopeless desolation. He not only had lost Dorrie, he had lost his manhood. The pain was too extreme to be relieved by crying, even if he had been able to cry. It was the agony of the dentist’s chair without ahesthesia, so acute that it no longer felt like a warning but became merely a fact of the environment, something to be experienced and endured.

The door opened, and a new nurse came in. “Hi. I see you’re awake.”

She came over and laid warm fingers on his forehead. “I’m Sulie Carpenter,” she said. “It’s Susan Lee, really, but Sulie’s what they call me.” She withdrew her hand and smiled. “You’d think I’d know better than feeling for fever, wouldn’t you? I already know what it is from the monitors, but I guess I’m an old-fashioned girl.”

Torraway hardly heard her; he was preoccupied with seeing her. Was it a trick of his mediation circuits? Tall, green-eyed, dark-haired: she looked so very much like Dorrie that he tried changing the field of vision of his great insect eyes, zooming down on the pores in her slightly freckled skin, altering the color values, decreasing the sensitivity so that she seemed to fade into a twilight. No matter. She still looked like Dorrie.

She moved to scan the duplicate monitors at the side of the room. “You’re doing real well, Colonel Torraway,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to bring you your lunch in a little while. Anything you want now?”

He roused himself and sat up. “Nothing I can have,” he said bitterly.

“Oh, no, Colonel!” Her eyes showed shock. “I mean — well, excuse me. I don’t have any right to talk to you like that. But, dear Lord, Colonel, if there’s anybody in this world who can have anything he wants, you’re it!”

“I wish I felt that way,” he grumbled; but he was watching her closely and curiously, he did feel something — something he could not identify, but something which was not the pain that had overwhelmed him only moments before.

Sulie Carpenter glanced at her watch and then pulled up a chair. “You sound low, Colonel,” she said sympathetically. “I guess all this is pretty hard to take.”

He looked away from her, up to where the great black wings were rippling slowly over his head. He said, “It has its bad parts, believe me. But I knew what I was getting into.”

Sulie nodded. She said, “I had a bad time when my — my boyfriend died. Of course, that’s nothing like what you’re doing. But in a way maybe it was worse — you know, it was so pointless. One day we were fine and talking about getting married. The next day he came back from the doctor’s and those headaches he’d been having turned out to be—” She took a deep breath. “Brain tumor. Malignant. He was dead three months later, and I just couldn’t handle it. I had to get away from Oakland. I applied to be transferred here. Never thought I’d get it, but I guess they’re still short-handed from the flu—”

“I’m sorry,” Roger said quickly.

She smiled. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just that there was a big empty place in my life, and I’m really grateful I’ve got something to fill it here.” She glanced again at her watch and jumped up. “The floor nurse’ll be on my back,” she said. “Now, listen, really, is there anything I can get for you? Book? Music? You’ve got the world at your command, you know, including me.”

“Not a thing,” Roger said honestly. “Thanks anyway. How come you picked coming here?”

She looked at him thoughtfully, the corners of her lips curving very faintly. “Well,” she said, “I knew something about the program here; I’ve been in aerospace medicine for ten years in California. And I knew who you were, Colonel Torraway. Knew! I used to have your picture on my wall when you were rescuing those Russians. You wouldn’t believe the active role you played in some of my fantasies, Colonel Torraway, sir.”

She grinned and turned away, stopping at the door. “Do me a favor, will you?”

Roger was surprised. “Sure. What?”

“Well, I’d like a more recent picture. You know what security is like here. If I sneak in a camera, can I take a quick snapshot of you now? Just so I can have something to show my grandchildren, if I ever have any.”

Roger protested, “They’ll kill you if they catch you, Sulie.”

She winked. “I’ll take my chances; it’s worth it. Thanks.”

After she had gone Roger made an effort to go back to thinking about his castration and his cuckolding, but for some reason they seemed less overwhelming. Nor did he have a great deal of time. Sulie came in with a low-residue lunch, a smile and a promise to be back the following morning. Clara Bly gave him an enema, and then he lay wondering while three identical fair-mustached men came in and went over every inch of floor, wall and furniture with metal detectors and electronic mops. They were total strangers, and they stayed in the room, on new-brought chairs, silent and watching, while Brad came in.

Brad was looking not merely ill but seriously worried. “Hi, Roger,” he said. “Jesus, you scared us. It’s my fault; I should have been on tap, but this damn flu bug—”

“I survived,” Roger said, studying Brad’s rather ordinary face and wondering just why he wasn’t feeling outrage and resentment.

“We’re going to have to keep you pretty busy now,” Brad began, dragging up a chair. “We’ve phased out some of your mediation circuits for the moment. When they’re full in again we’re going to have to limit your sensory inputs — let you work up to handling a total environment a little at a time. And Kathleen’s jumping to get you started on retraining — you know, learning how to use your muscles and all that.” He glanced over at the three silent watchers. His expression, Roger thought, was suddenly full of fear.

“I guess I’m ready,” Roger said.

“Oh, sure. I know you are,” said Brad, surprised. “Haven’t they been giving you updates on your readouts? You’re functioning like a seventeen-jewel watch, Roger. All the surgery is over now. You’ve got everything you need.” He sat back, studying Roger. “If I do say so” — he grinned — “you’re a work of art, Roger, and I’m the artist. I just wish I could see you on Mars. That’s where you belong, boy.”

One of the watchers cleared his throat. “It’s getting toward that time, Dr. Bradley,” he said.

The worried look returned to Brad’s face. “Coming right away. Take care, Rog. I’ll be back to see you later.”

He left, and the three government agents followed him, as Clara Bly came in and fussed around the room.

A mystery was suddenly clear. “Dash is coming to see me,” Roger guessed.

“Smart!” sniffed Clara. “Well, I guess it’s all right for you to know. It wasn’t all right for me to know. They think it’s a secret. But what kind of secret is it when they turn the whole hospital upside down? They’ve had those guys all over the place since before I came on duty.”

“When will he get here?” Roger asked.

“That’s the part that is a secret. From me, anyway.”

But it did not stay a secret very long; within the hour, to an unheard but strongly felt “Hail to the Chief,” the President of the United States came into the room. With him was the same valet he had had on the presidential jet, but this time he was obviously not a valet, only a bodyguard.

“Marvelous to see you again,” said the President, holding out his hand. He had never seen the revised and edited version of the astronaut before, and certainly the dully gleaming flesh, the great faceted eyes, the hovering wings must have looked strange, but what showed in the President’s well-disciplined face was only friendship and pleasure. “I stopped off a little while ago to say hello to your good wife, Dorrie. I hope she’s forgiven me for messing up her fingernail polish last month; I forgot to ask. But how are you feeling?”

How Roger was feeling was once again amazed at the thoroughness of the President’s briefing, but what he said was, “Fine, Mr. President.”

The President inclined his head toward the bodyguard without looking at him. “John, have you got that little package for Colonel Torraway? It’s something Dorrie asked me to bring over to you; you can open it when we’ve gone.” The bodyguard placed a white-paper package on Roger’s bedside table and slid a chair over for the President in almost the same motion, just as the President was preparing to sit down. “Roger,” said the President, sharpening the creases in his Bermudas, “I know I can be honest with you. You’re all we’ve got now, and we need you. The indices are looking worse every day. The Asians are spoiling for trouble, and I don’t know how long I can keep from giving it to them. We have to get you to Mars, and you have to function when you get there. I can’t overestimate the importance of it.”

Roger said, “I think I understand that, sir.”

“Well, in a way, I guess you do. But do you understand it in your gut? Do you really feel, deep down, that you’re that one man, maybe two, in a generation who somehow or other gets himself in a position that’s so important to the whole human race that even inside his own mind what happens to him doesn’t measure up in importance? That’s where you are, Roger. I know,” the President went on sorrowfully, “that they’ve taken some mighty sacrificial liberties with your person. Didn’t give you a chance to say yes, no or maybe. Didn’t even tell you. It’s a piss-poor way to treat any human being, let alone somebody who means as much as you do — and somebody who deserves as well as you do, too. I’ve kicked a bunch of asses around here about that. I’ll be glad to kick a lot more. If you want it done, tell me. Any time. It’s better if I do it than you — with those steel muscles they’ve given you, you might damage a few of those pretty behinds on the nurses past the point of repair. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“What? Oh, hell, no, Mr. President.”

“Thanks.” The valet had an open cigarette case in one hand and a glowing lighter in the other as soon as the President stretched out his hand. He took a deep draw and leaned back. “Roger,” he said, “let me tell you my fantasy about what I think is in your mind. You’re thinking, ‘Here’s old Dash, politician to the end, full of bulishit and promises, trying to trick me into pulling his chestnuts out of the fire. He’d say anything, he’d promise anything. All he wants is what he can get out of me.’ Anywhere near right, so far?”

“Why — no, Mr. President! Well… a little bit.”

The President nodded. “You’d be crazy if you didn’t think a little bit of that,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s all true, you know. Up to a point. It’s true I’d promise you anything, tell you any lies I could think of to get you to Mars. But the other thing that’s true is that you have us all by the genial organs, Roger. We need you. There’s a war coming if we don’t do something to stop it, and it’s crazy but the trend projections say the only thing that can stop it is putting you on Mars. Don’t ask me why. I just go by what the technical people tell me, and they claim that’s what the computers print out.”

Roger’s wings were stirring restlessly, but the eyes were intent on the President.

“So you see,” said the President heavily, “I’m appointing myself your hired hand, Roger. You tell me what you want. I’ll make damn sure you get it. You pick up that phone any time, day or night. They’ll put you through to me. If I’m asleep, you can wake me if you want to. If it can wait, you can leave a message. There’s going to be no more fucking you around in this place, and if you even think it’s happening you tell me and I’ll stop it. Christ,” he said, grinning as he started to stand up, “do you know what the history books are going to say about me? ‘Fitz-James Deshatine, 1943 — 2026, forty-second President of the United States. During his administration the human race established its first self-sustaining colony on another planet.’ That’s what I’ll get, Roger, if I get that much — and you’re the only one who can give it to me.

“Well,” he said, moving toward the door, “there’s a governor’s conference waiting for me in Palm Springs. They expected me six hours ago, but I figured you mattered a hell of a lot more than they did. Kiss Dorrie for me. And call me. If you don’t have anything to complain about, call me to say hello. Any time.”

And he left, with a dazzled astronaut staring after him.

Take it any way you liked, Roger reflected, it was really a pretty spectacular performance, and it left him feeling both awed and pleased. Subtracting 99 percent of it as bullshit, what was left was highly gratifying.

The door opened, and Sulie Carpenter came in, looking faintly scared. She was carrying a framed photograph. “I didn’t know what kind of company you were moving in,” she said. “Do you want this?”

It was a picture of the President, signed, “For Roger from his admirer, Dash.”

“I guess I do,” said Roger. “Can you hang it up?”

“When it’s a picture of Dash, you can,” she said. “It has a self-hanging gadget. Right up here?” She pressed it against the wall near the door and stepped back to admire it. Then she looked around, winked and pulled a flat black camera the size of a cigarette pack out of her apron. “Smile at the birdie,” she said, and snapped away. “You won’t rat on me? Okay. I’ve got to be going — I’m not on duty now, but I wanted to look in on you.”

Roger leaned back and folded his hands on his chest. Things were turning out rather interestingly. He had not forgotten the internal pain of the discovery of his castration, and he had not put Dorrie out of his mind. But neither was perceived as pain any more. There were too many newer, more pleasant thoughts overlaying them.

Thinking of Dorrie reminded him of her gift. He opened it. It was a ceramic cup in harvest colors, ornamented with a cornucopia of fruits. The card said, “This is a way of telling you that I love you.” And it was signed Dorrie.

All of Torraway’s signs were stable now, and we were getting ready to phase in the mediation circuits.

This time Roger was well briefed. Brad was with him every hour — after taking a large share of the President’s ass-kicking, he was chastened and diligent. We deployed one task force to oversee the phasing-in of the mediation circuits, another to buffer the readout-readin of data from the 3070 in Tonka to the new backpack computer in Rochester, New York. Texas and Oklahoma were going through one of their periodic brownouts just then, which complicated all machine data handling, and the aftereffects of the flu were still with the human beings on the staff. We were definitely short-handed.

Moreover, we needed still more. The backpack computer was rated at 99.999999999 percent reliable in every component, but there were something like 108 components. There was a lot of backup, and a full panoply of cross-input paths so that failure of even three or four major subsystems would leave enough capacity to keep Roger going. But that wasn’t good enough. Analysis showed that there was one chance in ten of criticalpath failure within half a Martian year.

So the decision was made to construct, launch and orbit around Mars a full-size 3070, replicating all the functions of the backpack computer in triplicate. It would not be as good as the backpack. If the backpack experienced total failure, Roger would have the use of the orbiter only 50 percent of the time — when it was above the horizon in its orbit and thus could interlink with him by radio. There would be a worst-case lag of a hundredth of a second, which was tolerable. Also he would have to stay in the open, or linked with an external antenna otherwise.

There was another reason for the back-up orbiter, and that was the high risk of glitches. Both the orbiting 3070 and the backpack were heavily shielded. Nevertheless they would pass through the Van Allen belts at launch, and the solar wind all through their flight. By the time they got to the vicinity of Mars the solar wind would be at a low enough level to be bearable — except in the case of flares. The charged particles of a flare could easily bug enough of the stored data in either computer to critically damage its function. The backpack computer would be helpless to defend itself. The 3070, on the other hand, had enough reserve capacity for continuous internal monitoring and repair. In idle moments — and it would have many idle moments, as much as 90 percent of its function time even when in use by Roger — it would compare data in each of its triplicate arrays. If any datum differed from the same datum in the other arrays it would check for compatibility with the surround data; if all data were compatible, it would examine all three arrays and make the one aberrant bit conform with the other two. If two did not conform, it would check against the backpack if possible.

That was all the redundancy we could afford, but it was quite a lot. On the whole, we were very pleased.

To be sure, the orbiting 3070 would require a good deal of power. We calculated the probable maximum draw against the probable worst-case supply of any reasonable set of solar panels, and concluded that the margin was too thin. So Raytheon got a preempt order for one of its MHD generators, and crews went to work on Route 128 to modify it for space launch and automatic operation in orbit around Mars. When the 3070 and the MHD generator arrived in orbit they would lock to each other. The generator would supply all the power the computer needed, and have enough left over to microwave a useful surplus down to Roger on the surface of Mars, which he could use both to power his own machine parts as needed or for whatever power-using equipment he might like to install.

Once we had completed all the plans we could hardly see how we had thought we could get along without them in the first place. Those were happy days! We requested, and were promptly given, all the reinforcements we needed. Tulsa went without lights two nights a week so we could have the energy reserves we needed, and Jet Propulsion Laboratories lost their entire space-medicine staff to our project.

The read-in of data proceeded. Glitches chased themselves merrily around both new computers, the backpack in Rochester and the duplicate 3070 that had been rushed to Merritt Island. But we hunted them down, isolated them, corrected them and were keeping right on schedule.

The world outside, of course, was not as pleasant.

Using a home-made plutonium bomb made out of materials hijacked from the breeder reactor at Carmarthen, Welsh nationalists had blown up the Hyde Park Barracks and most of Knightsbridge. In California the Cascade Mountains were burning out of control, the fire-fighting helicopters grounded because of the fuel shortage. An exploding epidemic of smallpox had depopulated Poona and was already out of control in Bombay; cases were being reported from Madras to Delhi as those who were able fled the plague. The Australians had declared Condition Red mobilization, the NPA had called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, and Capetown was under siege.

All of this was as the graphs had predicted. We were aware of all of it. We continued with our work. When one of the nurses or technicians took time to worry, he had the President’s orders to reassure him. On every bulletin board, and placarded in most of the workrooms, was a quote from Dash:

We didn’t need the reassurance, we knew how important the work was. The survival of our race depended on it. Compared to that, nothing else mattered.

Roger woke up in total blackness.

He had been dreaming, and for a moment the dream and the reality were queerly fused. The dream had been of a long time ago, when he and Dorrie and Brad had driven down to Lake Texoma with a few friends who owned a sailboat, and in the evening they had sung to Brad’s guitar while the huge moon rose over the water. He thought he heard Brad’s voice again… but he listened more closely, his brain clearing from sleep, and there was nothing.

There was nothing. That was strange. No sound at all, not even the purrs and clicks of the telemetry monitors along the wall, not even a whisper from the hall outside. However much he tried, with all the enhanced sensitivity of his new ears, there was no sound at all. Nor was there light. Not in any color, not anywhere, except for the dullest of dim red glows from his own body, and a glow equally dull from the baseboards of the room.

He moved restlessly, and discovered he was tethered to the bed.

For a moment terror flooded through his mind: trapped, helpless, alone. Had they turned him off? Were his senses deliberately blacked out? What was happening?

A small voice near his ear spoke again: “Roger? This is Brad. Your readouts say you’re awake.”

The relief was overpowering. “Yes,” he managed. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got you in a sensory-deprivation environment. Apart from my voice, can you hear anything?”

“Not a sound,” said Roger. “Not anything.”

“How about light?”

Roger reported the dim heat glow. “That’s all.”

“Fine,” said Brad. “Now, here’s the thing, Roger. We’re going to let you work in your new sensorium a little bit at a time. Simple sounds. Simple patterns. We’ve got a slide projector through the wall over the head of your bed, and a screen by the door — you can’t see it, of course, but it’s there. What we’re going to do — wait a minute. Kathleen’s determined to talk to you.”

Faint friction sounds and scuffles, and then Kathleen Doughty’s voice: “Roger, this shithead forgot one important thing. Sensory deprivation’s dangerous, you know that.”

“I’ve heard it,” Roger admitted.

“According to the experts the worst part of it is feeling impotent to end it. So any time you begin to feel bad, just talk; one of us will always be here, and we’ll answer. It’ll be Brad, or me, or Sulie Carpenter, or Clara.”

“Are you all there right now?”

“Christ, yes — plus Don Kayman and General Scanyon and, cripes, half the staff. You won’t lack for company, Roger. I promise you that. Now. What about my voice, is that giving you any trouble?”

He thought. “Not that I notice. You do sound a little bit like a creaking door,” he evaluated.

“That’s bad.”

“I don’t think so. You sound kind of that way all the time, Kathleen.”

She giggled. “Well, I’m going to stop talking in a minute anyway. What about Brad’s voice?”

“I didn’t notice anything. Or anyway, I’m not sure. I was sort of dreaming and for a minute I thought he was singing “Aura Lee” along with his guitar.”

Brad cut in. “That’s interesting, Roger! What about now?”

“No. You sound like yourself.”

“Well, your readouts look good. All right. We’ll go into that later. Now, what we’re going to do is give you pure, simple visual inputs to deal with. As Kathleen says, you can speak to us any time and we’ll answer if you want us to. But we won’t speak much for a while. Let the visual circuits work themselves in before we confuse things with simultaneous sight and sound, got it?”

“Go ahead,” said Roger.

There was no answer, but in a moment a pale point of light appeared against the far wall.

It was not bright. With the eyes he had been born with, Roger suspected, he would not have been able to see it at all; as it was, he could make it out clearly, and even in the filtered air of his hospital room, he could see the faint path of light from projector to wall over his head.

Nothing else happened for a long time.

Roger waited as patiently as he could.

More time passed.

Finally he said, “All right, I see it. It’s a dot. I’ve been watching it all along, and it’s still just a dot. I do observe,” he said, turning his head about, “that there’s enough reflected light from it that I can see the rest of the room a little bit, but that’s all.”

When Brad’s voice came, it sounded like thunder: “Okay, Roger, hold on and we’ll give you something else.”

“Wow!” Roger said. “Not so loud, okay?”

“I wasn’t any louder than before,” Brad objected. And in fact his voice had reduced itself to normal proportions.

“Okay, okay,” Roger muttered. He was getting bored. After a moment another point of light appeared, a few inches from the first one. Both held for another long time, and then a line of light leaped into being between them.

“This is pretty dull,” he complained.

“It’s meant to be.” It was Clara Bly’s voice this time.

“Hi,” Roger greeted her. “Listen. I can see pretty well now, in all this light you’re giving me. What are all these wires sticking into me?”

Brad cut in: “They’re your telemetry, Roger. That’s why we had to tie you down, so you wouldn’t roll over and mess up the leads. Everything’s on remote now, you know. We had to take almost everything out of your room.”

“So I noticed. All right, go ahead.”

But it was tedious and remained tedious. These were not the kinds of things that were calculated to keep one’s mind busy. They might be important, but they were also dull. After an interminable stretch of simple geometric figures of light, the intensity reduced so that there was less and less spill of reflection to illuminate the rest of the room, they began feeding him sounds: clicks, oscillator beeps, a chime, a hiss of white noise.

In the room outside the shifts kept changing. They stopped only when the telemetry indicated Roger needed sleep or food or a bedpan. None of those needs were frequent. Roger began to be able to tell who was on duty from the tiniest of signs: the faintly mocking note in Brad’s voice that was only there when Kathleen Doughty was in the room, the slower, somehow more affectionate chirping of the sound tapes when Sulie Carpenter was monitoring the responses. He discovered that his time sense was not the same as that of those outside, or of “reality,” whatever that was. “That’s to be expected, Rog,” said the weary voice of Brad when he reported it. “If you work at it, you’ll find you can exercise volitional control over that. You can count out seconds like a metronome if you want to. Or move faster or slower, depending on what’s needed.”

“How do I do that?” Roger demanded.

“Hell, man!” Brad flared. “It’s your body, learn to use it.” Then, apologetically, “The same way you learned to block off vision. Experiment till you figure it out. Now pay attention; I’m going to play you a Bach partita.”

Somehow the time passed.

But not easily and not quickly. There were long periods when Roger’s altered time sense contrarily dragged his tedium out, times when, against his will, he found himself thinking again about Dorrie. The lift that Dash’s visit had given him, the pleasant concern and affection from Sulie Carpenter — these were good things; but they did not last forever. Dorrie was a reality of his reverie, and when his mind was empty enough to wander it was to Dorrie that it wandered. Dorrie and their joyous early years together. Dorrie, and the terrible knowledge that he was no longer enough of a man to gratify her sexual needs. Dorrie and Brad…

Kathleen Doughty’s voice snapped, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, Roger, but it’s screwing up your vital signs! Cut it out.”

“All right,” he grumbled. He put Dorrie out of his mind. He thought of Kathleen’s rancorous, affectionate voice, of what the President had said, of Sulie Carpenter. He made himself tranquil.

As a reward they showed him a slide of a bunch of violets, in full color.