Man Plus (22 page)
He shrugged and gave up.
We knew the answer. We had gone to a lot of trouble to find Sulie Carpenter. The critical factors made a long list, and the least important of the items on that list were the color of hair and the color of eyes, since either could be so easily changed.
As the deadline approached, Roger's position began to change. For two weeks he had been meat on a butcher's block, slashed and rolled and chopped with no personal participation and no control over what happened to him. Then he had been a student, following the orders of his teachers, learning the control of his senses and the use of his limbs. It was a transition from laboratory preparation to demigod, and he was more than halfway there.
He felt it happening. For days now he had been questioning everything he was told to do and sometimes refusing. Kathleen Doughty was no longer his boss, capable of ordering him to do a hundred chinups and an hour of pirouettes. She was his employee, retained by him to help in what he wanted to do. Brad, who had become far less offhandedly humorous and far more intense, was now asking Roger for favors: "Try these color discrimination tests for me, will you? It'll look good on my paper about you." Often Roger humored them, but sometimes not.
The one he humored most frequently and surely was Sulie Carpenter, because she was always there and always cared about him. He had almost forgotten how much she looked like Dorrie. He only was aware that she looked very good.
She met his moods. If he was edgy she was quietly cheerful. If he wanted to talk, she talked. They played board games sometimes; she was a highly competitive Scrabble player.
Once, late at night, when Roger was experimenting with the length of wakefulness he could handle, she brought in a guitar and they sang, her pleasant, unobtrusive contralto ornamenting his flat and almost toneless whisper. Her face changed while he looked at it, but he had learned to handle that. The interpretation circuits in his sensorium reflected his feelings when he let them, and there were times when Sulie Carpenter looked more like Dorrie than Dorrie did herself.
After he had finished his day's run in the Mars-normal tank, Sulie raced him back to his room, laughing girl against thudding monster down the wide lab corridors; he won easily, of course. They chatted for a while and then he sent her away.
Nine days to liftoff.
It was less than that, really. He would be flown to Merritt Island three days before the launch, and his last day in Tonka would be devoted to fitting the backpack computer and retuning some of his sensorium for the special Martian conditions. So he had six--no, five--days.
And he had not seen Dorrie for weeks.
He looked at himself in the mirror he had demanded they install: insect eyes, bat wings, dully gleaming flesh. He amused himself by letting his visual interpretations flow,
from bat to giant fly to demon . . . to himself, as he remembered himself, pleasant-faced and youthful.
If only Dorrie had a computer to mediate her sight! If only she could see him as he had been! He swore he would not call her; he could not force her to look at the comic-strip contraption that was her husband.
Having sworn, he picked up the phone and dialed her number.
It was an impulse that could not be denied. He waited. His accordion-pleated time sense prolonged the interval, so that it was an eternity before the raster blaze from the screen and the buzz from the speaker sounded the first ring.
Then time betrayed him again. It seemed forever until the second ring. Then it came, and lasted an eternity, and was over.
She did not answer.
Roger, who was the sort of person who counted things, knew that most persons did not respond until the third ring. Dorrie, however, was always eager to know who the phone was bringing into her life. From a sound sleep or out of the bathtub, she seldom let it ring past twice.
At length the third ring came, and still no reply.
Roger began to hurt.
He controlled it as best he could, unwilling to sound the alarms on the telemetry.
He could not stop it entirely. She was out, he thought. Her husband had turned into a monster and she was not at home sympathizing or worrying; she was shopping or visiting a friend or seeing a flick.
Or with a man.
What man? Brad, he thought. It wouldn't be impossible; he had left Brad down at the tank twenty-five minutes ago by the clock. Time enough for them to rendezvous somewhere. Even time enough for Brad to get to the Torraway home. Perhaps she was not out at all. Perhaps--Fourth ring--
Perhaps they were there, the two of them, naked and coupling on the floor in front of the phone. She would be saying, "Go in the other room, honey, I want to see who it is."
And he would say, laughing, "No, let's answer this way." And she would say--Fifth ring--and the raster blossomed into the colors of Dorrie's face. Her voice said,
"Hello?"
Quick as sound Roger's fist shot out and covered the lens. "Dorrie," he said. His voice sounded flat and harsh again to him. "How are you?"
"Roger!" she cried. The pleasure in her voice sounded very real. "Oh, honey, I'm so glad to hear you! How are you feeling?"
His voice automatically said, "Fine." It went on, without the need of help from his conscious mind, to correct the statement, to say what had been happening to him, cataloging the tests and the exercises. At the same time he was staring into the screen with every sense on high gain.
She looked--what? Tired? Looking tired was confirmation of his fears. She was carousing with Brad every night, heedless of her husband in pain and clownish humiliation. Rested and cheerful? Looking rested and cheerful was confirmation, too. It meant she was relaxing, enjoying herself--heedless of her husband's torment.
There was really nothing wrong with Torraway's brain, in that it had a lifelong habit of analysis and logic. It did not fail to occur to him that the game he was playing with
himself was called "You Lose." _Everything_ was evidence of Dorrie's guilt. Yet no matter how carefully he scanned her image, with what multiplied senses, she didn't look hostile or cloyingly overaffectionate. She only looked like Dorrie.
When he thought that he felt a burst of tenderness that made his voice break. "I've missed you, honey," he said flatly. The only thing that spoke of feelings was that one syllable was retarded a fraction of a second: "Hon . . . ee."
"And I've missed you. I've kept myself busy, dear," she chattered. "I've been painting your den. It's a surprise, but of course it's going to be such a long time till you see it that-- Well, it's going to be peach. With buttercup woodwork and I think maybe a pale-blue ceiling. You like? I was going to make it all ochre and brown, you know, fall colors, Mars colors, to celebrate. But 1 thought by the time you got back you'd be pretty sick of Mars colors!" And quickly, without pause: "When am I going to see you?" The change in her voice caught him by surprise.
"Well, I look pretty awful," he said.
"I know what you look like. Dear God, Roger, do you think Midge and Brenda and Callie and I haven't talked this over for the last two years? Ever since the program started.
We've seen the sketches. We've seen the photos of the mockups. And we've seen the pictures of Willy."
"I'm not exactly like Willy any more. They've changed things--"
"And I know about that too, Roger. Brad told me all about it. I'd like to see you."
At that moment his wife's face changed without warning to a witch's. The crochet hook she held became a peasant twig broom. "You've been seeing Brad?"
Was there a microsecond pause before she answered? "I suppose he shouldn't have told me," she said, "because of security and all. But I wanted him to. It's not that bad, honey. I'm a big girl. I can handle it."
For a moment Roger wanted to snatch his hand away from the lens and let himself be seen, but he was becoming confused, feeling strange. He could not interpret his feelings. Was it vertigo? Emotion? Some malfunction in his machine half? He knew it would be only moments until Sulie or Don Kayman or someone came in, warned by the telltale telemetry outside. He tried to control himself.
"Maybe later," he said without conviction. "I--I think I'd better hang up now, Dorrie."
Behind her their familiar living room was changing too. The depth of field of the phone lens was not very good; even to his machine senses the rest of the room was blurred. Was that a man standing in the shadows? Was it wearing a Marine officer's shirt?
Would Brad be doing that?
"I have to hang up now," he said, and did.
Clara Bly came in, full of questions and concern. He shook his head at her without speaking.
There were no lachrymeal ducts in his new eyes, so of course he could not cry. Even that relief was denied him.
Eleven
Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope
Our trendline projections had shown that the time was right to let the world know about Roger Torraway, warts and all. So it had all gone out, and every TV screen in the world had seen Roger on point in a dozen perfect fouettés, in between the close-ups of the starved dead in Pakistan and the fires in Chicago.
It had the effect of making Dorrie a celebrity. Roger's call had upset her. Not as much as the note from Brad saying that he wouldn't be able to see her again, not nearly as much as the forty-five minutes the President had spent with her impressing on her what would happen if she messed up his pet astronaut. Certainly not as much as the knowledge that she was being followed, her telephone tapped, her home certainly bugged. But she hadn't known how to deal with Roger. She suspected she never would, and did not mind at all that in a few days he would be launched into space, where there would be little necessity for her to worry about their relationship for at least a year and a half.
She also did not mind the sudden glare of publicity.
Now that the newspapers had it all the TV reporters had been to see her, and she had seen her own courageous face on the six o'clock report. _Fem_ was sending someone around. The someone phoned first. She was a woman of about sixty, veteran of the lib years, who sniffed, "We never do this, interviewing somebody just because she's somebody's wife. But they wanted it. I couldn't turn down the assignment, but I want to be honest with you and let you know that it's distasteful to me."
"I'm sorry," Dorrie apologized. "Do you want me to cancel out?"
"Oh, no," said the woman, speaking as though it were Dorrie's fault, "it's not your fault, but I think it's a betrayal of everything _Fem_ stands for. Never mind. I want to come up to your home. We'll do a fifteen-minute spread for the cassette edition, and I'll write it up for the print. If you can--"
"I--" Dorrie began.
"--try to talk about you, rather than him. Your background. Your interests. Your--"
"I'm sorry, but I'd really prefer--"
"--feelings about the space program and so on. Dash says it's an essential American objective and the future of the world depends on it. What do you think? I don't mean answer the question now, I mean--"
"I don't want to have it in my home," Dorrie inserted into the conversation, without waiting for a place for it.
"--think about it, and answer on camera. Not at your home? No, that's not possible.
We'll be over in an hour."
Dorrie was left with a dwindling spot of light to talk to, and then even that was gone. "Bitch," she said, almost absent-mindedly. She didn't really mind having the interview in her home. She minded not being given a choice. That she minded a lot. But there was no choice available to her, except to go out before the _Fem_ person showed up.
Dome Torraway, Dee Mintz as was, felt strongly about having choices. One of the things that had attracted her to Roger in the first place, apart from the glamour of the
