Man Plus Page 9

  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.

  The project people had come to close themselves off from most of that world. They didn't watch the television news when they could avoid it, preferred not to read anything but the sports sections of the newspapers. In high gear, they did not have a great deal of time, but that wasn't the reason. The reason was that they simply did not want to know. The world was going mad, and the isolated strangeness in the great white cube of the project building seemed sane and real to them, while the rioting in New York, the tac-nuke fighting around the Arabian Gulf and the mass starvation in what used to be called the "emerging nations" seemed irrelevant fantasy.

  They were fantasy. At least, they did not matter to the future of our race.

  And so Roger continued to change and survive. Kayman spent more and more time with him, every minute he could spare from supervising the Mars-normal tank. He watched with affection as Kathleen Doughty stumped around the room, dropping cigarette ashes on everything but Roger. But he was still troubled.

  He had to accept Roger's need for mediation circuits to interpret the excess of inputs, but he had no answer for the great question: If Roger could not know what he was seeing, how could he see Truth?

  Eight

  Through Deceitful Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And above all, he could feel pain.

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

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

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

  He was seeing again.

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

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

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

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

  "I can see you now," sighed the voice. "At least I guess it's you."

  Brad arrested his hand. "The hell you can—" he began, and then he paused. "What do you mean, you see me? What do you see?"

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

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

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

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

  "That's pretty good, Rog. Anything else?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "Christ, Brad!"

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

  "They're about the only thing that doesn't hurt," sighed Roger.

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

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

  Pause. "I—don't think so."

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

  ". . . Nothing's happening."

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

  "No—well, maybe. A little bit."

  "Can you remember where it hurt?"

  The shape moved uncomfortably on the bed, the great eyes staring into Brad's. "I—think so."

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

  ". . . Nothing. What muscle am I looking for?"

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

  ". . . Nothing."

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

  "That's a comfort," whispered the resentful voice from the bed. "Hey, Brad? You're looking brighter."

  "What do you mean, brighter?" Brad snapped.

  "More bright. More light from your face."

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

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

  Brad shrugged and complied. "Yeah?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Thanks, Brad. So long."

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

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

  "What do they look like to you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The door burst open.

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

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

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

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