Man Plus (13 page)
"Would you like to have a cup of coffee with us?" Kayman asked. "In other cups, of course."
Dorrie sighed, straightened a cup into line and said, "No, we might as well just talk.
Come on back to my office." She led the way, and said over her shoulder, "I know why you're here, anyway."
"Oh?" said Kayman.
"You want me to go visit Roger. Right?"
Kayman sat down in a wide armchair, facing her desk. "Why don't you, Dorrie?"
"Cripes, Don, what's the use? He's out cold. He wouldn't know whether I was there or not."
"He's heavily sedated, yes. But he has periods of consciousness."
"Did he ask for me?"
"He asked _after_ you. What do you want him to do, beg?"
Dorrie shrugged, fiddling with a ceramic chess piece. "Did you ever think of minding your own business, Don?" she asked.
He did not take offense. "That's what I'm doing. Roger's our one indispensable man right now. Do you know what's happening to him? He's been on the table twenty-eight times already. Thirteen days! He doesn't have any eyes any more. Or lungs, heart, ears, nose--he doesn't even have any skin, it's all gone, a few square inches at a time, replaced with synthetics. Flaying alive--men have become saints for that, and now we've got a man who can't even have his own wife--"
"Oh, shit, Don!" Dorrie flared. "You don't know what you're talking about. Roger _asked_ me not to come and see him after the surgery started. He thought I wouldn't be able to-- He just didn't want me to see him like that!"
"My impression of you," the priest said thinly, "is that you're made of pretty durable stuff, Dorrie. Would you be able to stand it?"
Dorrie grimaced. For a moment her pretty face did not look pretty at all. "It isn't a question of what I can stand," she said. "Don, look. Do you know what it's like being married to a man like Roger?"
"Why, pretty fine, I would guess," said Kayman, startled. "He's a good man!"
"He is, yes. I know that at least as well as you do, Don Kayman. And he's head over heels in love with me."
There was a pause. "I don't think I understand what you're saying," Sister Clotilda ventured. "Are you displeased by that?"
Dorrie looked at the nun consideringly. "Displeased. That's one way to put it." She set down the chess piece and leaned across the desk. "That's every girl's dream, right? To find a genuine hero, handsome and smart and famous and pretty nearly rich--and have him so crazily in love with her that he can't see anything wrong. That's why I married Roger. I couldn't believe I was that lucky." Her voice went up a half tone in pitch. "I don't think you know what it's like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What's the good of a man who's upside down? Sometimes when we're in bed together I'm trying to get to sleep and I can _hear_ him being awake next to me, not moving, not getting up to go to the bathroom, just so fucking _considerate_. . . . Do you know that when we're traveling together Roger never goes to the bathroom until he thinks I'm asleep, or when I'm somewhere else? He shaves the minute he gets up--he doesn't want me to see him with his hair messed up. He shaves his armpits, uses deodorants three times a day. He--he treats me like I was the Virgin Mary, Don! He's _fatuous_. And it's been that way for _nine years_."
She looked beseechingly at the priest and the nun, who were silent, a little ill-at-ease. "And then," Dorrie said, "you come along and tell me I ought to go see him when they're turning him into something ghastly and ludicrous. You and everybody else.
Kathleen Doughty dropped in last night. She had a skin full; she'd been drinking and brooding and she decided to come over and tell me, out of her bourbon wisdom, that I was making Roger unhappy. Well, she's right. You're all right. I'm making him unhappy.
Where you're wrong is thinking that my going to see him would make him happy. . . . Oh, hell." The phone rang. Dorrie picked it up, then glanced at Kayman and Sister Clotilda.
The expression on her face, which had been almost pleading, condensed into something like the porcelain figures on the table beside her desk. "Excuse me," she said, folding up the soft plastic petals around the mouthpiece that converted it into a hushphone and turning away from them in her chair. She talked inaudibly for a moment, then hung up and turned back to them.
Kayman said, "You've given me something to think about, Dorrie. But still--"
She smiled a porcelain smile. "But still you want to tell me how to run my life. Well, you can't. You've said your piece, both of you. I thank you for coming. I'll thank you, now, to go. There's nothing more to be said."
Inside the great white cube of the project building Roger lay, spread-eagled on a fluidized bed. He had been thirteen days like that, most of the time either unconscious or unable to tell whether he was conscious or not. He dreamed. We could tell when he was dreaming from the rapid eye movements at first, later from the twitches of the muscle endings after the eyes were gone. Some of his dreams were reality, but he could not distinguish between them.
We kept very close tabs on Roger Torraway every second of that time. There was hardly a flexure of a muscle or a flash of a synapse that did not kick over some monitor, and faithfully we integrated the data and kept continuous surveillance of his vital functions.
It was only the beginning. What had been done to Roger in the first thirteen days of surgery was not much more than had been done to Willy Hartnett. And that was not enough.
When all that was done, the prosthetic and surgical teams began doing things that had never been done to any human being before. His entire nervous system was revised and all the major pathways connected with coupling devices that led to the big computer downstairs. That was an all-purpose IBM 3070. It took up half a room and still did not have enough capacity to do all the jobs demanded of it. It was only an interim hookup.
Two thousand miles away, in upstate New York, the IBM factory was putting together a special-purpose computer that would fit into a backpack. Designing that was the most difficult part of the project; we kept revising the circuits even while they were being fitted together on the workbenches. It could not weigh more than eighty pounds, Earth weight.
Its greatest dimension could not be more than nineteen inches. And it had to work from DC batteries which were kept continually recharged by solar panels.
The solar panels were a problem at first, but we solved that one rather elegantly.
They required an absolute minimum surface area of nearly thirty square feet. The surface area of Roger's body, even after it had been revised with various attachments, wasn't large enough, wouldn't have been even if all of it could have been accepting Mars's fairly feeble sunlight at once. The way we solved the problem was to design two great gossamer fairy wings. "He's going to look like Oberon," Brad said gleefully when he saw the drawings. "Or like a bat," grumbled Kathleen Doughty.
They did resemble bat wings, especially as they were jet-black. They would be no good for flying, even in a decently thick atmosphere if Mars had had one. They were thin film, with little structural strength. But they weren't meant for flying or for any kind of load-bearing. They were only meant to preen themselves out automatically, oriented to accept as much radiation as the sun could provide. As an afterthought, the design was changed to include a certain amount of control on Roger's part so he could use the wings as a tightrope walker uses his pole, to balance. All in all, they were an immense improvement over the "ears" we had put on Willy Hartnett.
The solar wings were designed and fabricated in eight days; by the time Roger's shoulders were ready to accept them, they were ready to attach. The skin was almost a stock item by now. So much had been used on Willy Hartnett, both as original equipment and as replacements for damage or for design changes as the project went along, that new grafts were loomed to Roger's shape as rapidly as the surgeons flayed away the integument he was born with.
From time to time he would rouse himself and look at his surroundings with what seemed recognition and intelligence. It was hard to be sure. His visitors--he had a constant stream of them--sometimes spoke to him, sometimes came to regard him as a laboratory specimen to be discussed and manipulated with no more person-to-person concern than they would give a titration flask. Vern Scanyon was in almost every day, staring at the developing creation with growing repugnance. "He looks like hell," he grumbled. "The taxpayers would love this!"
"Watch it, General," snarled Kathleen Doughty, interposing her huge body between the director and the subject. "How do you know he can't hear you?"
Scanyon shrugged and left to report to the President's office. Don Kayman came in as he was going. "Thanks, mother to all the world," he said gravely. "I appreciate your concern for my friend Roger."
"Yeah," she said irritably. "It's not sentiment. The poor sod's got to have some self-confidence; he's going to need it. You know how many amputees and paraplegics I've worked with? And do you know how many of them were certified basket cases that would never walk or move any muscle or even go to the toilet by themselves? It's will power that does it, Don, and for that you need to believe in yourself."
Kayman frowned; Roger's state of mind was still very much in his thoughts. "Are you arguing with me?" Kathleen said sharply, misreading the frown.
"Not in the least! I mean--be reasonable, Kathleen; am I the man to question the transcendence of the spiritual over the physical? I'm just grateful. You're a good person, Kathleen."
"Oh, crap," she grumbled around the cigarette in her mouth. "That's what they pay me for. And besides," she said, "I take it you haven't been in your office yet today? There's a buck-up note for all of us from His Starship the General, so we won't forget how important what we're doing is . . . and a little hint that if we blow our launch date we're for the concentration camps."
"As if we needed reminding," sighed Father Kayman, looking at Roger's grotesque and unmoving figure. "Scanyon's a good man, but he tends to think whatever he does is at the very center of the universe. Only this time he might be right. . . ."
It was at least a colorable claim. To us, there was not much question about it: the most important link in all the complex interrelationships of mind and matter that an earlier generation of scientists had called Gaia was right there, floating on its fluidized bed, looking like the star of a Japanese horror flick. Without Roger Torraway, the Mars launch could not take off on time. Billions of people might question the importance of that. We did not.There was Roger at the hub of everything. Around him, in the bulk of the project building, there were all the ancillary and associated efforts that were going into making him what he had to be. In the surgery room next door Freeling, Weidner and Bradley tinkered new parts into him. Down in the Mars-normal tank where Willy Hartnett had died, those parts were bench-tested in the Martian environment to failure. Sometimes failure time was appallingly short; then they were redesigned if possible, or backed up--or sometimes used anyway, with crossed fingers and prayers.
The universe expanded away from Roger, like the shells of an onion. Still farther in the building was the giant 3070, clicking and whirring as it accreted new segments of programming to match the mediation facilities being built into Roger hour by hour.
Outside the building was the community of Tonka, which lived or died by the health of the project, its principal employer and major reason for being. All around Tonka was the rest of Oklahoma, and spreading out in all directions the other fifty-four states, and around them the troubled, angry world that was busy snapping arrogant notes from one of its capitals to another on the policy level, and clawing for subsistence in each of its myriad personal lives.