Man Plus (15 page)

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 unfamiliar 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.

"They look a little better," she said grudgingly. "I guess it's all right. But what the hell were you doing to yourself?"

"Worrying," he said.

"About what?"

"Where my spleen is. Do you know?"

She stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before she replied. "It's under your lower ribs, on your left side. About where you think your heart is. A little lower down. Are you putting me on, Roger?"

"Well, kind of. I guess I was reminiscing about something I shouldn't have, Clara."

"Please don't do it any more!"

"I'll try." But the thought of Dorrie and Brad was still lurking there, right under the conscious of his mind. He offered, "One thing--I've been trying to close my eyes, and I can't."

She approached and touched his shoulder in friendly sympathy. "You'll do it, hon."

"Yeah."

"No, really. I was with Willy around this time, and he got pretty discouraged. But he made it. Anyway," she said, turning, "I'll take care of it for you for now. Lights-out time.

You've got to be fresh as a daisy in the morning."

He said suspiciously, "What for?"

"Oh, not more cutting. That's over for a while. Didn't Brad tell you? Tomorrow they're going to hook you into the computer for all that mediation stuff. You're going to be a busy boy, Rog, so get some sleep." She turned off the light, and Brad watched as her dark face changed into a gentle glow that he thought of as peach.

Something occurred to him. "Clara? Do me a favor?"

She stopped with her hand on the door. "What's that, honey?"

"I want to ask you a question."

"So ask."

He hesitated, wondering how to do what he wanted to do. "What I want to know,"

he said, working it out in his head as he went along, "is, let's see--oh, yes. What I want to know, Clara, is, when your husband and you are in bed making love, what different ways do you use?"

"Roger!" The brightness of her face suddenly went up half a decibel; he could see the tracing of veins under the skin as hot blood flooded through her veins.

He said, "I'm sorry, Clara. I guess--I guess lying here I get kind of horny. Forget I asked you, will you?"

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was a professional's, no longer a friend's: "Sure, Roger. It's okay. You just kind of caught me off-guard. It's . . . well, it's all right, it's just that you never said anything like that to me before."

"I know. Sorry."

But he wasn't sorry, or not exactly.

He watched the door close behind her and studied the rectangular tracing of light bleeding through from the hall outside. He was careful to keep his mind as calm as he could. He didn't want to start the monitors ringing alarm bells again.

But he wanted to think about something that was right on the borderline of the danger zone, and that was how come the flush he had tricked onto Clara Bly's face looked so much like the sudden brightness that had come onto Brad's when he asked if Brad had been with Dorrie.

We were fully mobilized next morning, checking the circuits, cutting in the stand-bys, insuring that the automatic switchover relays were tuned to intervene at the faintest flicker of a malfunction. Brad came in at 6:00 A.M., weak but clear-headed and ready to work. Weidner and Jon Freeling were only minutes after him, although the primary job for the day was all Brad's. They could not stay away. Kathleen Doughty was there-of-course, as she had been at every step, not because her duty required it but because her heart did.

"Don't give my boy a bad time," she growled over her cigarette. "He's going to need all the help he can get when I start on him next week."

Sounding every syllable, Brad said, "Kathleen. I will do the goddamned best I can."

"Yeah. I know you will, Brad." She stubbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. "I never had any children, and I guess Roger and Willy sort of filled in."

"Yeah," grunted Brad, no longer listening. He was not qualified or allowed to touch the 3070 or any of the ancillary units. All he could do was watch while the technicians and the programmers did their job. When the third recheck had gone almost to completion without a glitch he finally left the computer room and took the elevator up three flights to Roger's room.

At the door he paused to breathe for a moment, then opened the door with a smile.

"You're about ready to plug in, boy," he said. "Feel up to it?"

The insect eyes turned toward him. Roger's flat voice said, "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. What I feel is mostly scared."

"Oh, there's nothing to be scared of. Today," Brad amended hastily, "all we're going to do is test out themediation."

The bat wings shuddered and changed position. "Will that kill me?" asked the maddeningly monotone voice.