Man Plus (2 page)
So most of Roger's work since then had been, well, diplomatic. He played golf with senators on the space committee and commuted to the Eurospace installations in Zurich and Munich and Trieste. He had a modest sale with his memoirs. He served as back-up on an occasional mission. As the space program declined rapidly from national priority to contingency-planning exercises, he had less and less that mattered to do.
Still, he was backing up a mission now, although he didn't talk about it when he was wooing political support for the agency. He wasn't allowed to. This new manned mission, which looked as though it would actually be approved sooner or later, was the first one in the space program that had been classified Top Secret.
We expected a great deal from Roger Torraway, although he was not much different from any of the other astronauts: a little overtrained, a lot underemployed, a good deal discontented with what was happening in their jobs, but very much unwilling to trade them for any others as long as there was still a chance to be great again. They were all like that, even the one that was a monster.
Two
What the President Wanted
The man who was a monster was on Torraway's mind a lot. Roger had a special interest.
He was sitting in the co-pilot's seat at twenty-four thousand meters over Kansas, watching a blip on the IDF radar slide smoothly off the screen. "Shit," said the pilot. The blip was a Soviet Concordski III; their CB-5 had been racing it ever since they had picked it up over the Garrison Dam Reservoir.
Torraway grinned and throttled back another tiny increment. With the boost in relative speed, the Concordski blip picked up a momentum. "We were losing him," the pilot said glumly. "Where do you reckon he's going? Venezuela, maybe?"
"He better be," said Torraway, "considering how much fuel the both of you were burning up."
"Yeah, well," said the pilot, not at all embarrassed at the fact that he had been well over the international treaty limit of 1.5 Mach, "what's happening at Tulsa? Usually they let us come straight in, with a V.I.P. like you."
"Probably some bigger V.I.P. landing now," said Roger. It wasn't a guess, because he knew who the V.I.P. was, and they didn't come any bigger than the President of the United States.
"You fly this thing pretty good," offered the pilot generously. "Want to land it--I mean, when they let us do that thing?"
"Thanks, no. I'd better go back and sort out my junk." But he stayed in the seat, looking down. They had begun the descent, and the patchy field of L-1 cumulus was just below them; they could feel the bumps from the updrafts over the clouds. Torraway took his hands off the controls as the pilot took over. They would be passing over Tonka pretty soon, off to the right. He wondered how the monster was getting along.
The pilot was still feeling generous. "You don't do much flying any more, do you?"
"Only when somebody like you lets me."
"No sweat. What do you do, anyway, if you don't mind my asking? I mean, besides V.I.P.ing it around."
Torraway had an answer all ready for that. "Administration," he said. He always said that, when people asked what he did. Sometimes the people who asked had proper security clearance, not only with the government but with the private radar in his own mind that told him to trust one person and not another. Then he said, "I make monsters."
If what they said next indicated that they too were in the know, he might go a sentence or two farther.
There was no secret about the Exomedicine Project. Everyone knew that what they did in Tonka was prepare astronauts to live on Mars. What was secret was how they did it: the monster. If Torraway had said too much he would have jeopardized both his freedom and his job. And Roger liked his job. It supported his pretty wife in her pottery shop. It gave him the feeling of doing something that people would remember, and it took him to interesting places. Back when he was an active astronaut he had been to even more interesting places, but they were out in space and kind of lonely. He liked better the places he went to in private jets, with flattering diplomats and impressionable cocktail-party women to greet him when he got there. Of course, there was the monster to think about, but he didn't really worry about that. Much.
They came in over the Cimarron River, or the crooked red gully that would be the river when it rained again, bent the jet flow to almost straight down, cut back on the power and eased gently in.
"Thanks," Roger said to the pilot, and went back to collect his gear from the V.I.P.
cabin.
This time it had been Beirut, Rome, Seville and Saskatoon before he got back to Oklahoma, each place hotter than the place before. Because they were expected at the ceremonial briefing for the President, Dorrie met him at the airport motel. He changed swiftly into the clothes she had brought him. He was glad to be home, glad to be getting back to making monsters and glad to be back with his wife. While he was getting out of the shower he had a swift and powerful erotic impulse. He had a clock inside his head that kept track of what pieces of time were available, so he did not need to check his watch: there was time. It would not matter if they were a few minutes late. But Dorrie wasn't in the chair where he had left her; the TV was going, her cigarette was burning out in the ashtray, but she was gone. Roger sat on the edge of the bed with a towel wrapped around him until the clock in his head said there was not enough time left to matter. Then he began to dress. He was tying his tie when Dorrie rapped on the door. "Sorry," she said when he opened for her. "I couldn't find the coke machine. One for you and one for me."
Dorrie was almost as tall as Roger, brunette by choice, green-eyed by nature. She took a brush from her bag and touched up the back and sleeves of his jacket, then touched coke cans with him and drank. "We'd better go," she said. "You look gorgeous."
"You look screwable," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder.
"I just put lipstick on," she said, turning her lips away and allowing him to kiss her cheek. "But I'm glad to see the señoritas didn't use you all up."
He chuckled good-humoredly; it was their joke that he slept with a different girl in every city. He liked the joke. It wasn't true. His couple of generally unsatisfactory experiments at adultery had been more shabby and troublesome than rewarding, but he liked thinking of himself as the sort of man whose wife had to worry about the attentions of other women. "Let's not keep the President waiting," he said. "I'll check out while you get the car."
They did not in fact keep the President waiting; they had more than two hours to get through before they even saw him.
Roger was familiar with the general process of being screened, since it had happened to him before. It wasn't just the President of the United States who was taking 200 percent overlap precautions against assassins these days. Roger had been a whole day getting to see the Pope, and even so there had been a Swiss guard holding a Biretta standing right behind him every minute he was in the papal chamber.
Half of the top brass of the lab was here for the briefing. The senior lounge had been cleaned and polished for the occasion and did not look like its familiar coffee-drinking self.
Even the blackboards and the paper napkins that were used for scratch paper were tucked away out of sight. Folding screens had been set up in the corners and the shades of the nearest windows discreetly pulled down; that was for the physical search, Roger knew.
After that, they would have their interviews with the psychiatrists. Then if everyone passed, if no lethal hypodermic turned up in a hatpin or murderous obsession turned up in a head, they would all go to the auditorium, and there the President would join them.
Four Secret Service men participated in the process of searching, frisking, magnetometering and identifying the male guests, though only two of the men physically took part. The other two just stood there, presumably ready to draw and fire at need.
Female Secret Service personnel (they were called "secretaries," but Roger could see that they carried guns) searched the wives and Kathleen Doughty. The women were searched behind one of the shoulder-high screens, but Roger could read from the expressions on his wife's face the progress of the patting, probing hands. Dorrie did not like being touched by strangers. There were times when she did not like being touched at all, but above all not by strangers.
When Roger's own turn came, he understood some of the cold anger he had seen on his wife's face. They were being unusually thorough. His armpits were investigated. His belt was loosened and the cleft of his buttocks probed. His testicles were palpated.
Everything in his pockets came out; the handkerchief at his breast was shaken open and swiftly refolded, neater than before. His belt buckle and watchband were studied through a loupe.
Everyone had the same treatment, even the director, who gazed around the room with good-natured resignation while fingers combed the kinky hair under his arms. The only exception was Don Kayman, who had worn his cassock in view of the formality of the occasion, and after some whispered discussion, was escorted into another room to take it off. "Sorry, Father," said the guard, "but you know how it is."
Don shrugged, left with the man, and came back looking annoyed. Roger was beginning to feel annoyed too. It would have been sensible, he thought, for them to have passed some of the people on to the shrinks as soon as they had had their search completed. After all, these were high-powered types, and their time was worth money. But the Secret Service had its own system and operated by stages. It was not until everyone had been searched that the first group of three was conducted to the typist rooms, evacuated specially to make room for the interviews.
Roger's shrink was black by courtesy, actually a sort of coffee-cream color by complexion. They sat in facing straightbacked chairs, with eighteen inches between their knees. The psychiatrist said, "I'll make this as short and painless as I can. Are your parents both alive?"
"No, actually neither of them is. My father died two years ago, my mother when I was in college."
"What sort of work did your father do?"
"Rented fishing boats in Florida." With half his mind Roger described the old man's Key Largo boat livery, while with the other half he maintained his twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance of himself. Was he showing enough annoyance at being questioned like this?
Not too much? Was he relaxed enough? More relaxed than enough?
"I've seen your wife," said the psychiatrist. "A very sexy-looking woman. Do you mind my saying that?"
"Not at all," said Roger, bristling.
"Some white people would not like to hear that from me. How do you feel about it?"
"I know she's sexy," Roger snapped. "That's what made me want to marry her."
"Would you mind if I went a step further and asked how the screwing is?"
