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

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

  "I can but try, sir," said Brad genially.

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

  The geniality faded from Brad's face. "What do you want me to say?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "For what?"

  "For trying to warn me today. I appreciate it."

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

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

  Seven

  Mortal Becoming Monster

  Don Kayman was a complex man who never let go of a problem. It was why we wanted him on the project as areologist, but it extended to the religious part of his life too. A religious problem was bothering him, in the corner of his mind.

  It did not keep him from whistling to himself as he shaved carefully around his Dizzy Gillespie beard and brushed his hair into a neat pageboy in front of his mirror. It bothered him, though. He stared into the mirror, trying to isolate what it was that was troubling him. After a moment he realized that one thing, at least, was his T-shirt. It was wrong. He took it off and replaced it with a double-knit four-colored turtleneck that had enough of the look of a clerical collar to appeal to his sense of humor.

  The interhouse phone buzzed. "Donnie? Are you nearly ready?"

  "Coming in a minute," he said, looking around. What else? His sports jacket was over a chair by the door. His shoes were shined. His fly was zipped. "I'm getting absent-minded," he told himself. What was bothering him was something about Roger Torraway, for whom, at that moment, he felt very sorry.

  He shrugged, picked up his jacket, swung it over his shoulder, went down the hall and knocked on the door of Sister Clotilda's nunnery.

  "Morning, Father," said the novice who let him in. "Take a seat. I'll get her for you."

  "Thanks, Jess." As she disappeared down the hall Kayman watched her appreciatively. The tight-fitting pants-suit habit did a lot for her figure, and Kayman let himself enjoy the faint, antique feeling of wickedness it gave him. It was a gentle enough vice, like eating roast beef on Friday. He remembered his parents doggedly chewing the frozen deep-fried scallops every Friday night, even after the dispensation had become general. It was not that they felt it was sinful to eat meat, it was simply that their digestive systems had become so geared to fish on Friday that they didn't know how to change. Kayman's feelings about sex were closely related to that. When the celibacy rule had been lifted, it had not taken away the genetic recollection of two thousand years of a priesthood that had pretended it didn't know what its sexual equipment was for.

  Sister Clotilda came briskly into the room, kissed his freshly shaved cheek and took his arm, "You smell good," she said.

  "Want to get a cup of coffee somewhere?" he asked, guiding her out the door.

  "I don't think so, Donnie. Let's get it over with."

  The autumn sun was a blast, hot air up out of Texas. "Shall we put the top down?"

  She shook her head. "Your hair will blow all over. Anyway, it's too hot." She twisted in the seat belt to look at him. "What's the matter?"

  He shrugged, starting the car and guiding it into the automatic lanes. "I—I'm not sure. I feel as if I have something I forgot to confess."

  Clotilda nodded appraisingly. "Me?"

  "Oh, no, Tillie! It's—I'm not sure what." He took her hand absent-mindedly, staring out the side window. As they passed over a throughway he could see the great white cube of the project building off on the horizon.

  It wasn't his interest in Sister Clotilda that was bothering him, he was pretty sure of that. Although he liked the little tingle of mild wickedness, he was not in any sense willing to flout the laws of his Church and his God. Maybe, he thought, he might hire a good lawyer and fight, but not break a law. He considered his pursuit of Sister Clotilda daring enough, and what came of that would depend on what her order allowed when and if he ever got around to asking her to apply for a dispensation. He had no interest in the wilder splinter groups like the clerical communes or the revived Catharists.

  "Roger Torraway?" she guessed.

  "I wouldn't be surprised," he said. "There's something about tampering with his senses that bothers me. His perceptions of the world."

  Sister Clotilda squeezed his hand. As a psychiatric social worker, she was cleared to know what was happening at the project, and she knew Don Kayman. "The senses are liars, Donnie. That's Scripture."

  "Oh, sure. But does Brad have any right to say how Roger's senses lie?"

  Clotilda lit a cigarette and let him think it out. It wasn't until they were near the shopping mall that she said, "Next turnoff, isn't it?"

  "Right," he said, taking the wheel and turning the car back to manual. He slid into a parking space, still preoccupied with Roger Torraway. There was the immediate problem of Roger's wife. That was trouble enough. But beyond that there was the bigger problem: How could Roger deal with the greatest of personal questions—what is Right, and what is Wrong?—if the information he had to base a decision on was filtered through Brad's mediation circuits?

  The sign over the shop window said PRETTY FANCIES. It was a small shop by the standard of the mall, which had a Two Guys with a quarter of a million feet of floor space and a supermarket almost as big. But it was big enough to be expensive. With rent, utilities, insurance, payroll for three salespeople, two of them part-time, and a generous managerial salary for Dorrie, it meant a net loss every month of nearly two thousand dollars. Roger paid it gladly, although some of our accountancy functions had pointed out to him that it would have been cheaper to give Dorrie the two thousand a month as an allowance.

  Dorrie was stacking chinaware on a counter marked "Clearance Sale—Half Price." She nodded to the visitors politely enough. "Hello, Don. Nice to see you, Sister Clotilda. Want to buy some red teacups cheap?"

  "They look nice," said Clotilda.

  "Oh, they are. But don't buy them for the nunnery. The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison—provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years."

  "Oh, that's too bad. But—you're selling them?"

  "The order isn't effective for thirty days," Dorrie explained, and flashed a grin. "I guess I shouldn't have told that to a priest and a nun, right? But honestly, we've been selling this glaze for years and I never heard of anyone dying."

  "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.

&nb
sp; "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 subje
ct. "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.