Man Plus (17 page)
A second later he shouted a great raw scream of fear and pain. The telemetry monitors all flashed blinding red. In the corridor outside Clara Bly turned in midstep and dashed for his door. Back in Brad's bachelor apartment the warning bells went off a split-second later, tçlling him of something urgent and serious that woke him out of an unsound, fatigued sleep.
When Clara opened the door she saw Roger, curled fetally on the bed, groaning in misery. One hand was cupping his groin, between his closed legs. "Roger! What's the matter?"
The head lifted, and the insect eyes looked at her blindly. Roger did not stop the animal sounds that were coming from him, did not speak. He only lifted his hand.
There, between his legs, was nothing. Nothing at all of penis, testicles, scrotum; nothing but the gleaming artificial flesh, with a transparent bandage over it, concealing the surgery lines. It was as if nothing had ever been there. Of the diagnostic signs of manhood
. . . nothing. The tiny little operation was over, and what was left was nothing at all.
Nine
Dash Visits a Bedside
Don Kayman didn't like the timing, but he had no choice; he had to visit his tailor.
Unfortunately, his tailor was in Merritt Island, Florida, at the Atlantic Test Center.
He flew there worried, and arrived worried. Not only at what had happened to Roger Torraway. That seemed to be under control, praise be to Divine Mercy, although Kayman couldn't help feeling that they had almost lost him and somebody had blundered badly in not preparing him for that last little bit of "minor cosmetic surgery." Probably, he thought charitably, it was because Brad had been ill. But surely they had come close to blowing the whole project.
The other thing he was fretting about was that he could not avoid the secret feeling of sin that seemed to be a realization that internally, in his heart of hearts, he wished the project _would_ be blown. He had had a tearful hour with Sister Clotilda when the probability that he would go to Mars had firmed up into the cutting of orders. Should they marry first? No. No on pragmatic, practical reasons: although there was not much doubt that both could ask for and receive the dispensation from Rome, there was also not much hope that it would come through in less than six months.
If only they had applied earlier . . .
But they hadn't, and both of them knew that they were not willing to marry without it, or even to go to bed together without the sacrament. "At least," said Clotilda toward the end, attempting to smile, "you won't have to worry about my being unfaithful to you. If I wouldn't break my vows for you, I doubt I'd do it for any man."
"I wasn't worried," he said; but now, under the gleaming blue skies of Florida, staring up at the gantries that rose to reach for the fluffy white clouds, he was worrying.
The Army colonel who had volunteered to show him around was aware that something was troubling Kayman, but he had no way of diagnosing the trouble.
"It's safe enough," he said, probing at random. "I wouldn't give a thought to the low-injection rendezvous orbit."
Kayman tore his attention away from his interior and said, "I promise you I wasn't.
I don't even know what you mean."
"Oh. Well, it's just that we're putting your bird and the two support launches into a lower orbit than usual: two twenty kilometers instead of four hundred. It's political, of course. I hate it when the bureaucrats tell us what we have to do, but this time it doesn't really make a difference."
Kayman glanced at his watch. He still had an hour to kill before returning for his last fitting of Mars-suit and spacesuit, and he was not anxious to spend it fretting. He judged accurately that the colonel was one of those happy folk who like to talk about
nothing as much as their work, and that all he need give would be an occasional grunt to keep the colonel explaining everything that could be explained. He gave the grunt.
"Well, Father Kayman," said the colonel expansively, "we're giving you a big ship, you know. Too big to launch in one piece. So we're putting up three birds, and you'll meet in orbit--two twenty by two thirty-five, optimal, and I expect we'll be right on the money--and--"
Kayman nodded without really listening. He already knew the flight plan by heart; it was in the orders he had been given. The only open questions were who the remaining two occupants of the Mars bird would be, but it would only be a matter of days before that was decided. One would have to be a pilot to stay in orbit while the other three crowded into the Mars-lander and went down to the surface of the planet. The fourth man should, ideally, be someone who could function as back-up to pilot, areologist and cyborg; but of course no such person existed. It was time to make the decision, though. The three human beings--the three _unaltered_ human beings, he corrected himself--would not have Roger's capacity for surviving naked on the surface of Mars. They would have to have the same fittings he was going through now, and then the final brush-up training in procedures that all of them would need, even Roger.
And launch time was only thirty-three days away.
The colonel had finished with the docking and reassembly maneuvers and was getting ready to outline the day-by-day calendar of events on all the long months to Mars.
Kayman said, "Wait a minute, Colonel. I didn't quite get that about political considerations. What does that have to do with how we take off?"
The colonel grumbled resentfully, "Damn ecology freaks, they get everybody upset.
These Texas Twin launch vehicles, they're big. About twenty times the thrust of a Saturn.
So they make a lot of exhaust. It comes to something like twenty-five metric tons of water vapor a second, times three birds--a lot of water vapor. And admittedly there's some risk that the water vapor--well, no, let's be fair; we know damn well--excuse me, Father--that what all that water vapor would do at normal orbit-injection altitudes would be to knock out the free electrons in a big patch of sky. They found that way back in. let's see, I think it was '73 or '74, when they put the first Spacelab up. Knocked the free electrons out of a volume of atmosphere that stretched from Illinois to Labrador when it was measured. And of course that's what keeps you from getting sunburned. One of the things. They help filter out the solar UV. Skin cancer, sunburn, destruction of flora--well, they're all real; they _could_ happen. But it's not our own people Dash is worried about! The NPA, that's what bugs him. They've given him an ultimatum that if your launch damages their sky they will consider it a 'hostile act.' Hostile act! What the hell do you call it when _they_ parade five nuclear subs off Cape May, New Jersey? Claim it's oceanographic research, but you don't use cruiser-killer subs for oceanography, not in our Navy, anyway. . . .
"Anyway," the colonel said, bringing himself back to his guest and smiling, "it's okay. We'll just put you into rendezvous orbit a little lower down, out of the free-electron layer. Costs more fuel. Winds up making more pollution, the way I look at it. But it keeps their precious free electrons intact--not that there's any real chance they'd survive across the Atlantic into Africa even, much less Asia. . . ."
"You've been very interesting, Colonel," Kayman said courteously. "I think it's time for me to get back, though."
The fitters were ready for him. "Just slip into this for size." The physicotherapist member of the team grinned. "Slipping into" the spacesuit was twenty minutes of hard work, even if the whole team had been helping. Kayman insisted on doing it himself. In the spacecraft he wouldn't have any more help than the rest of the crew, who would be busy with their own affairs; and in an emergency he wouldn't have any help at all. He wanted to be ready for any emergency. It took an hour, and another ten minutes to get out of it after they'd checked all the parameters and pronounced everything fine; and then there were all the other garments to try.
It was dark outside, a warm Florida autumn night, before he was finished. He looked at the row of vestments laid out on the worktables and grinned. He pointed to the comm-antenna fabric that dangled from one wrist, the radiation cloak for use in solar-flare conditions, the body garment that went under the suits themselves. "You've got me all fixed up. That's the maniple, there's the chasuble, that's my alb. Couple more pieces and I'd be all ready to say Mass." Actually he had included a complete set of vestments in his weight allotment--it had seriously depleted the available reserve for books, music tapes and pictures of Sister Clotilda. But he was not prepared to discuss that with these worldly people. He stretched and sighed. "Where's a good place to eat around here?" he asked. "A steak, or maybe some of that red snapper you people talk about--and then bed--"
The Air Force MP who had been standing by for two hours, glancing at his watch, stepped forward and spoke up. "Sorry, Father," he said. "You're wanted elsewhere right now, and you're due in, let's see, about twenty minutes."
"Due where? I've got a long flight tomorrow--"
"I'm sorry, sir. My orders are to bring you to the Ad Building at Patrick Air Force Base. I expect they'll tell you what it's all about then."
The priest drew himself up. "Corporal," he said, "I'm not under your jurisdiction. I suggest you tell me what it is you want."
"No, sir," the MP agreed. "You're not. But my orders are to bring you, and with all due respect, sir, I will."
The physicotherapist touched Kayman's shoulder. "Go ahead, Don," he said. "I have a feeling you're in pretty high echelons right now."
Grumbling, Kayman allowed himself to be led out and put into a hoverjeep. The driver was in a hurry. He did not bother with the roads, but aimed the vehicle out toward the surf, judged his time and distance and skittered out onto the surface of the ocean between waves. Then he turned south and gunned it; in ten seconds they were doing at least a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Even on high-lift thrust, with three meters of air between them and the average height of the water, the rolling, twisting chop from the waves corkscrewing under them had Kayman swallowing saliva and looking for a throw-up bag against a rather possible need in no time at all. He tried to get the corporal to slow down. "Sorry, sir"; it was the MP's favorite expression, it seemed.
But they managed to reach the beach at Patrick before Kayman quite vomited, and back on land the driver slowed to reasonable speeds. Kayman tottered out and stood in the damp, lush night until two more MPs, radio-alerted to his coming, saluted and escorted him inside a white stucco building.
Before ten minutes had elapsed he was stripped to the skin and being searched, and he realized what high echelons he was indeed moving in.
The President's jet touched down at Patrick at 0400 hours. Kayman had been dozing on a beach chair with a throw rug over his legs; he was shaken courteously awake and led to the boarding steps while refueling tankers were topping off the wing tanks in peculiarly eerie silence. There was no conversation, no banging of bronze nozzles against aluminum filler caps, only the throbbing of the tank truck's pumps.
