Man Plus Read online

  "Yes, I hope so," said the President.

  At the level of the tank, thirty meters into the ground under the room they were in, a graduate student functioning as a lab assistant responded to a cue and opened a valve—not to the external atmosphere, but to the tanks of Mars-normal gas that were mixed and ready in the pressure sink. Gradually the pressure built up to a thin, deepening whistle. The adding on of pressure to the 150-millibar level did not benefit Hartnett's functioning in any way. His redesigned body ignored most environmental factors. It could equally well tolerate Arctic winds, total vacuum or a muggy day at the Earth's equator, with the air at 1,080 millibars and soggy with damp. One was as comfortable to him as another. Or as uncomfortable, for Hartnett had reported that his new body ached, tweaked and chafed. They could just as easily have opened the valves and let the ambient air rush in, but then it would all have had to be pumped out again for the next test.

  At last the whistle stopped and they heard the cyborg's voice. It was doll-shrill. "Thanksss. Hold eet dere, weel you?" The low pressure played tricks with his diction, especially as he no longer had a proper trachea and larynx to work with. After a month as a cyborg, speaking was becoming strange to him, for he was getting out of the habit of breathing anyway.

  From behind Roger, the lab's expert in vision systems said glumly, "They know those eyes aren't made to stand sudden pressure changes. Serve them right if one of them cracks on them." Roger winced, with the fantasied pain of a faceted crystalline eyeball splintering in his socket. His wife laughed.

  "Have a seat, Brad," she said, pulling away from Roger's arm. Absently Roger made room, staring up at the screen. The cadence-counting voice was saying, "On the tick. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Start sequence."

  The cyborg squatted clumsily over the entry plate of a black-finished metal canister. Without haste he slid a blade-thin screwdriver into a nearly invisible slot, made a precise quarter turn, repeated the movement again in another place and lifted off the plate. The thick fingers sorted carefully through the multicolored spaghetti of the internal wiring, found a charred red-and-white-candy-striped strand, detached it, shortened it to remove the burned insulation, stripped it down by simply pinching it through the nails, and held it to a terminal. The longest part of the operation was waiting for the fluxing iron to heat; that took more than a minute. Then the new joint was brazed, the spaghetti stuffed back inside, the plate replaced, and the cyborg stood up.

  "Six minutes, eleven and two-fifths seconds," reported the counting voice.

  The project director led a round of applause. He then stood up and delivered a short address. He told the President that the purpose of the Man Plus project was to so modify a human body that it could survive on the surface of Mars as readily and safely as a normal man could walk across a Kansas wheat field. He reviewed the manned space program from suborbital flight through space station and deep probe. He listed some of the significant data about Mars: land area actually greater than Earth's, in spite of its smaller diameter, because there were no seas to waste surface. Temperature range, suitable for life—suitably modified, to be sure. Potential wealth, incalculable. The President listened attentively, although, to be sure, he knew every word.

  Then he said, "Thanks, General Scanyon. Just let me say one thing."

  He climbed nimbly up to the platform and smiled thoughtfully down at the scientists. "When I was a boy," he began, "the world was simpler. The big problem was how to help the emerging free nations of Earth enter the community of civilized countries. Those were the Iron Curtain days. It was them on their side, locked in, quarantined. And all the rest of us on ours.

  "Well," he went on, "things have changed. The Free World has had bad times. Once you get off our own North American continent, what have you got? Collectivist dictatorships everywhere you look, bar one or two holdouts like Sweden and Israel. I'm not here to rake up ancient history. What's done is done, and there's no point blaming anybody. Everybody knows who lost China and gave Cuba to the other side. We know what administration let England and Pakistan fall. We don't have to talk about those things. We're just looking toward the future.

  "And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen," he said earnestly, "the future of the free human race lies with you. Maybe we've had some setbacks here on our own planet. That's over and done with. We can look out into space. We look, and what do we see? We see another Earth. The planet Mars. As the distinguished director of your project, General Scanyon, just said, it's a bigger planet than the one we were born on, in the ways that are important. And it can be ours.

  "That's where the future of freedom is, and it's up to you to give it to us. I know you will. I'm counting on every one of you."

  He looked thoughtfully around the room, meeting every eye. The old Dash charisma was making itself felt all over the room.

  Then he smiled suddenly, said "Thank you," and was gone in a wave of Secret Service men.

  Three

  Man Becoming Martian

  Time was when the planet Mars looked like another Earth. The astronomer Schiaparelli, peering through his Milanese telescope at the celebrated conjunction of 1877, saw what he thought were "channels," announced them as "canali" and had them understood as "canals" by half the literate population of Earth. Including nearly all the astronomers, who promptly turned their telescopes in the same direction and discovered more.

  Canals? Then they must have been dug for a purpose. What purpose? To hold water—there was no other explanation that saved the facts.

  The logic of the syllogism was compelling, and by the turn of the century there was hardly a doubter in the world. It was accepted as lore that Mars held an older, wiser culture than our own. If only we could somehow speak to them, what marvels we would learn! Percival Lowell mused over a sketching pad and came up with a first attempt. Draw great Euclidean shapes on the Sahara Desert, he said. Line them with brushwood, or dig them as trenches and fill them with oil. Then on some moonless night when Mars is high in the African heavens, set them afire. Those alien Martian eyes that he took to be fixed firmly to their alien Martian telescopes would see. They would recognize the squares and triangles. They would understand that communication was intended, and out of their older wisdom they would find a way to respond.

  Not everybody believed quite as much quite so firmly as Lowell. Some said that Mars was too small and too cold ever to harbor a hugely intelligent race. Dig canals? Oh, yes, that was a simple enough peasant skill, and a race that was dying of thirst could well manage to scratch out ditches, even enormous ditches visible across interplanetary space, to keep itself alive. But beyond that, the environment was simply too harsh. A race living there would be like the Eskimos, forever trapped on the threshold of civilization because the world outside their ice huts was too hostile to grant them leisure to learn abstractions. No doubt when our telescopes were able to resolve the individual Martian face we would see only a brutish mask, stolid and stunned, brother to the ox; able to move soil and to plant crops, yes, but not to aspire to a life of the mind.

  But, wise or brutal, Martians were there—or so thought the best opinion of the times.

  Then better telescopes were built, and better ways were found to understand what they disclosed. To the lens and the mirror was added the spectroscope and the camera. In the eyes and understanding of astronomers Mars swam a little closer every day. At every step, as the image of the planet itself grew more sharp and clear, the vision of its putative inhabitants became more cloudy and less real. There was too little air. There was too little water. It was too cold. The canals broke up, under better resolution, into irregular blotches of surface markings. The cities that should have marked their junctions were not there.

  By the time of the first Mariner fly-bys the Martian race, which had never lived except in the imagination of human beings, was irrevocably dead.

  It still seemed that life of a sort could exist, perhaps lowly plants, even a rude sort of amphibian. But nothing like a man. On the su
rface of Mars an air-breathing, water-based creature like a human being could not survive for a quarter of an hour.

  It would be the lack of air that would kill him most quickly. His death would not be from simple strangulation. He would not live long enough for that to happen. In the 10-millibar pressure of the surface of Mars his blood would boil away and he would die in agony of something like the bends. If he somehow survived that, then he would die of lack of air to breathe. If he survived both of those—given air in a backpack, and a face mask fed with a mixture of gases that did not contain nitrogen, at some intermediate pressure level between Earth- and Mars-normal—he would still die. He would die from exposure to unshielded solar radiation. He would die from the extremes of Martian temperature—at its best, a warmish spring day; at its coldest, worse than Antarctic polar night. He would die from thirst. And if he could somehow survive all of those, he would die more slowly, but surely, from hunger, since there was nowhere on the surface of Mars one morsel that a human being could eat.

  But there is another kind of argument that contradicts the conclusions drawn from objective facts. Man is not bound by objective facts. If they inconvenience him, he changes them, or makes an end run around them.

  Man cannot survive on Mars. However, man cannot survive in the Antarctic, either. But he does.

  Man survives in places where he ought to die, by bringing a kinder environment with him. He carries what he needs. His first invention along those lines was clothing. His second, storable food, like dried meat and parched grain. His third, fire. His most recent, the whole series of devices and systems that gave him access to the sea bottoms and to space.

  The first alien planet men walked on was the moon. It was even more hostile than Mars, in that the vital supplies of which Mars had very little—air, water and food—did not, on the moon, exist at all. Yet as early as the 1960s men visited the moon, carrying with them air and water and everything else they needed in life-support systems mounted on their spacesuits or built into their landing modules. From there it was no trick to build the systems bigger. It was not easy because of the magnitudes involved. But it was straightforward scaling up, to the point of semi-permanent and not far from self-sustaining closed-cycle colonies. The first problem of support was purely logistic. For each man you needed tons of supplies; for each pound of cargo blasted into space you spent a million dollars' worth of fuel and hardware. But it could be done.

  Mars is orders of magnitude more remote. The moon circles the Earth only a quarter of a million miles out. At its very closest, a few times in a century, Mars is more than a hundred times as far.

  Mars is not only distant from the Earth, it is farther than Earth from the sun. Whereas the moon receives as much energy per square inch as the Earth does, Mars, by the law of inverse squares, gets only half as much.

  From some point on Earth, a rocket can be sent to the moon at any hour of any day. But Mars and Earth do not circle each other; both circle the sun, and as they do so at different speeds they are sometimes not very close and sometimes very far. It is only when they are at minimal travel distances that a rocket can efficiently be sent from one to another, and those times occur only once in every period of two years, for one month and some weeks.

  Even the factors in Mars's makeup which make it more like the Earth work against maintaining a colony there. It is bigger than the moon, and thus its gravity is more like Earth's. But because it is bigger and pulls harder a rocket needs more fuel to land on it, and more fuel to take off again.

  What it all comes down to is that a colony on the moon can be supported from Earth. A colony on Mars cannot.

  At least a colony of human beings cannot.

  But what if one reshapes a human being?

  Suppose one takes the standard human frame and alters some of the optional equipment. There's nothing to breathe on Mars. So take the lungs out of the human frame, replace them with micro-miniaturized oxygen regeneration cat-cracking systems. One needs power for that, but power flows down from the distant sun.

  The blood in the standard human frame would boil; all right, eliminate the blood, at least from the extremities and the surface areas—build arms and legs that are served by motors instead of muscles—and reserve the blood supply only for the warm, protected brain. A normal human body needs food, but if the major musculature is replaced by machines, the food requirement drops. It is only the brain that must be fed every minute of every day, and fortunately, in terms of energy requirements the brain is the least demanding of human accessories. A slice of toast a day will keep it fed.

  Water? It is no longer necessary, except for engineering losses—like adding hydraulic fluid to a car's braking system every few thousand miles. Once the body has become a closed system, no water needs to be flushed through it in the cycle of drink, circulate, excrete or perspire.

  Radiation? A two-edged problem. At unpredictable times there are solar flares, and then even on Mars there is too much of it for health; the body must therefore be clothed with an artificial skin. The rest of the time there is only the normal visible and ultraviolet light from the sun. It is not enough to maintain heat, and not quite enough even for good vision; so more surface must be provided to gather energy—hence the great bat-eared receptors on the cyborg—and, to make vision as good as it can be made, the eyes are replaced with mechanical structures.

  If one does all these things to a human being, what is left is no longer precisely a human being. It is a man plus large elements of hardware.

  The man has become a cybernetic organism: a cyborg.

  The first man to be made into a cyborg was probably Willy Hartnett. There was some doubt. There were persistent rumors of a Chicom experiment that had succeeded for a while and then failed. But it was pretty clear that Hartnett was at least the only one alive at this particular moment. He had been born in the regular human way and had worn the regular human shape for thirty-seven years. It was only in the last eighteen months that he had begun to change.

  At first the changes were minor and temporary.

  His heart was not removed. It was only bypassed now and then by a swift soft-plastic impeller that he wore for a week at a time strapped on a shoulder.

  His eyes were not removed either . . . then. They were only sealed closed with a sort of gummy blindfold, while he practiced recognizing the perplexing shapes of the world as they were revealed to him through a shrilly buzzing electronic camera that was surgically linked to his optic nerve.

  One by one the separate systems that would make him a Martian were tested. It was only when each component had been tested and adjusted and found satisfactory that the first permanent changes had been made.

  They were not really permanent. That was a promise that Hartnett clung to. The surgeons had made it to Hartnett, and Hartnett had made it to his wife. All the changes could be reversed and would be. When the mission was over and he was safely back, they would remove the hardware and replace it with soft human tissues again, and he would be returned to purely human shape.

  It would not, he understood, be exactly the shape he had started out with. They could not preserve his own organs and tissues. They could only replace them with equivalents. Organ transplants and plastic surgery would do all they could to make him look like himself again, but there was small chance he would ever again be able to travel on his old passport photo.

  He did not greatly mind that. He had never considered himself a handsome man. He was content to know that he would have human eyes again—not his own, of course. But the doctors had promised they would be blue, and that lids and lashes would cover them again, and with any luck at all, they thought, the eyes could even weep. (With joy, he foresaw.) His heart would again be a lump of muscle the size of a fist. It would pump red human blood to all the ends of limb and body. His lung muscles would take air into his chest, and there natural human alveoli would absorb oxygen and release CO2. The great photoreceptor bat-ears (that gave so much trouble, because their support stre
ngth was up to the demands of Martian gravitation but not terrestrial, so that they were constantly being detached and returned to the shop) would be dismantled and gone. The skin that had been so painfully constructed and fitted to him would be equally painfully flayed off again, and replaced with human skin that sweated and grew hair. (His own skin was still there under the skin-tight artificial covering, but he did not expect it would survive the experiment. It had had to be discouraged from carrying on its normal functions during the time it was buried under the artificial hide. Almost surely it would have lost the capacity for them and would have to be replaced.)

  Hartnett's wife had exacted one promise from him. She had made him swear that as long as he wore the Halloween mask of the cyborg, he would keep out of the sight of his children. Fortunately the children were little enough to be biddable, and teachers, friends, neighbors, parents of schoolmates and all had been made cooperative by hints of stories of jungle rot and skin ailments. They had been curious, but the story had worked, and no one had urged Terry's father to come to a PTA meeting or Brenda's husband to join her at their backyard barbecue.

  Brenda Hartnett herself had tried not to see her husband, but in the long run curiosity drove out fear. She had herself smuggled into the tank room one day while Willy was practicing a coordination test, riding a bicycle around the reddish sands with a basin of water balanced on the handlebars. Don Kayman had stayed with her, fully expecting her to faint or scream or perhaps be sick to her stomach. She did none of those things, surprising herself as much as the priest. The cyborg looked too much like a Japanese horror film to be taken seriously. It was only that night that she really related the bat-eared, crystal-eyed creature on the bike with the father of her children. The next day she went to the project's medical director and told him that Willy must be getting starved for screwing by then and she didn't see why she couldn't accommodate him. The doctor had to explain to her what Willy had not been able to bring himself to say, that in the present state of the art those functions had had to be regarded as superfluous and therefore had been temporarily, uh, disconnected.