Man Plus (9 page)
date, and also because the President of the United States had to go to the bathroom and two Chinese named Sing and Sun wanted to try a pizza, the history of the world changed.
Jerry Weidner, who was Brad's principal assistant, supervised the slow laborious process of resetting the cyborg's vision systems. It was a fussy, niggling sort ofjob. Like nearly all of the things that had to be done to Willy Hartnett, it was attended with maximum discomfort for him. The sensitive nerves of the eyelid had long since been dissected out; otherwise they would have been shrieking pain at him day and night. But he could feel what was happening--if not as pain, then as a psychically disturbing knowledge that somebody was sliding edged instruments around in a very touchy part of his anatomy.
His actual vision was kept on stand-by mode, so he "saw" only dim moving shadows. It was enough. He hated it.
He lay there for an hour or more while Weidner and the others tinkered with changes in potentials, noted readings, talked to each other in the numbers that are the language of technologists. When they were finally satisfied with the field strength of his perceptual system and allowed him to stand, without warning he almost toppled.
"Sheesssst," he snarled. "Dizzzzy again."
Worried and resigned, Weidner said, "All right, we better ask for vertigo checks." So there was another thirty-minute delay while the balance teams checked his reflexes until he burst out, "Chrisssst, cut it out. I can ssstand on one foot for the nexssst twenty hours, ssso what doesss it prove?" But they kept him on one foot anyhow, measuring how close he could get his fingertips to touching with his vision in stand-by mode.
The balance teams then declared themselves satisfied, but Jerry Weidner was not.
The dizziness had happened before, and it had never been satisfactorily tracked down, either to the built-in mechanical horizon or to the crude natural stirrup-andanvil bones in his ear. Weidner did not know that it stemmed from the mediation system that was his own special responsibility, but he didn't know that it did not, either. He wished Brad would get the hell back from his long lunch.
At that time, halfway around the world, there were these two Chinese named Sing and Sun. They were not characters in a dirty joke. Those were their names. Sing's great-grandfather had died at the mouth of a Russian cannon after the failure of the Righteous Harmony Fists to expel the white devils from China. His father had conceived him on the Long March, and died before he was born, in combat against the soldiers of a war lord allied to Chiang Kai-shek. Sing himself was nearly ninety years old. He had shaken the hand of Comrade Mao, had diverted the Yellow River for Mao's successors and was now supervising the greatest hydraulic engineering project of his career in an Australian town called Fitzroy Crossing. It was his first prolonged trip outside the territory of New People's Asia. He had three ambitions for it: to see an uncensored pornographic film, to drink a bottle of Scotch that came from Scotland rather than the People's Province of Honshu, and to taste a pizza. With his colleague Sun he had made a good start on the Scotch, had found out where to accomplish the viewing of the film and was now desirous of tasting the pizza.
Sun was much younger--not yet forty--and in spite of everything, suffering from respect for his associate's age. There was also the fact that Sun was several echelons lower in social status than the older man, although he was obviously a coming man in the techno-industrial wing of the Party. Sun had just returned from a year of leading a mapping team through all of the Great Sandy Desert. It was not only sand. It was soil--
good, arable, productive soil--lacking only a few trace elements and water. What Sun had mapped had been the soil chemistry of a million square miles. When Sun's soil map and Sing's great uphill aqueduct, with its fourteen great batteries of nucleardriven pumps, came together, they would equal a new kind of life for those million miles of desert.
Chemical supplements + sun-distilled water from the distant seacoast = ten crops a year with which to feed a hundred million ethnically Chinese New Australians.
The project had been carefully studied and contained only one flaw. The Old New Australians, descendants of the populating drives of the post--World War II period, did not want New New Australians coming in to farm that land. They wanted it for themselves.
As Sun and Sing entered Danny's Pizza Hut on Fitzroy Crossing's main street, two Old New Australians, one named Koschanko and one named Gradechek, were just leaving the bar, and unfortunately recognized Sing from his newspaper pictures. Words passed. The Chinese recognized the smell of stale beer and took the truculence to be only drink; they tried to pass, and Koschanko and Gradechek pushed them out of the street door.
Bellicosity began swinging, and the ninety-year-old skull of Sing Hsi-chin split itself open against a curbstone.
At this point Sun drew a pistol he was not authorized to be carrying, and shot the two assailants dead.
It was only a drunken brawl. The police of Fitzroy Crossing had handled thousands of more dramatic crimes, and could have handled this one if they had been allowed to. But it did not stop there, because one of the barmaids was herself a New New Australian of Honanese extraction, recognized Sun, discovered who Sing was, picked up the phone and called the New China News Agency bureau in Lagrange Mission, down on the coast, to say that one of China's most famous scientists had been brutally murdered.
Within ten minutes the satellite network had carried a factually shaky but very colorful version of the story all over the world.
Before an hour was out, the New People's Asian mission to Canberra had requested an appointment with the Foreign Minister to deliver its protest, spontaneous demonstrations were in full blast in Shanghai, Saigon, Hiroshima and a dozen other NPA cities, and half a dozen observation satellites were being nudged out of their orbits to pass over Northwest Australia and the Sunda Islands seas. Two miles outside the harbor of Melbourne a great gray shape swam to the surface of the sea and floated there, offering no signals and responding to none for more than twenty minutes. Then it declared itself the NPA nuclear submarine _The East Is Red_ on a routine diplomatic visit to a friendly port.
The news was received in time to cancel the RAAF air strike that had been ordered against the unknown intruder, but only just.
Under Pueblo, Colorado, the President of the United States was interrupted in his after-lunch nap. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, distastefully sipping a cup of black coffee, when the DOD liaison aide came in with a sitrep and the news that a condition red alert had been declared, in accordance with the prepared responses long since programmed into the North American Defense Command Net. He already had the satellite reports and an on-the-scene account from a military mission to Fitzroy Crossing; he knew about the appearance of the submarine _The East Is Red_, but did not yet know that the air strike had been called off. Summarizing the information, he said to the President, "So it's go or no-go, sir. NADCOM recommends a launch with abort options in fifty minutes."
The President snarled, "I don't feel good. What the hell did they put in that soup?"
Dash was not in a mood to think about China just at that moment; he had been dreaming
about a private poll which showed his popularity down to 17 percent, including both the
"excellent" and "satisfactory" ratings, with 61 percent calling his administration "poor" or
"very unsatisfactory." It had not been a dream. That was what the morning's political briefing had shown him.
He pushed the coffee cup away and glumly contemplated the decision he, alone in all the world, was now required to make. To launch missiles against the major cities of New People's Asia was in theory a reversible choice: they could be aborted at any time before reentry, defused, falling harmlessly into the sea. But in practice the NPA posts would detect the launch, and who knew what those crazy Chinese bastards would do? His belly felt as though he were in the last minutes of pregnancy, and there seemed to be a good chance that he would throw up. His number one secretary said chidingly, "Dr.
Stassen did advise you not to eat any more cabbage, sir. Perhaps we should instruct the chef not to make that soup any more."
The President said, "I don't want lectures right now. All right, look. We'll hold at the present state of readiness until further orders from me. No launch. No retaliation.
Understood?"
"Yes, sir," said the DOD man regretfully. "Sir? I have several specific queries, from NADCOM, from the Man Plus project, from the admiral commanding SWEPAC--"
"You heard me! No retaliation. Everything else, keep going." His number one secretary clarified the point for him. "Our official position," he said, "is this affair in Australia is a domestic matter and not a national concern for the United States. Our action stance does not change. We keep all systems go, but take no action. Is that right, Mr.
President?"
"Right," said Dash thickly. "Now if you can get along without me for ten minutes, I got to go to the john."
Brad did think of phoning in to see how the recalibration was going, but he really liked showering with a girl, with all the fun involved in soaping each other, and the Chero-Strip bathroom armorarium included bath oil beads, bubbles and marvelous thick towels.
It was three o'clock before he decided to think about going back to work.
By that time it was pretty much too late. Weidner had tried to get permission to postpone testing from the deputy director, who wouldn't do it on his own authority but bucked it to Washington, who queried the President's office and received the reply: "No, you cannot, positively cannot, repeat not, postpone this or any other test." The man giving the reply was the President's number one secretary, who was looking at the "risk of war"
projection on the wall of the President's most private study while he spoke. Even as he was talking the broad black bar was bending itself still more steeply up toward the red line.
So they went ahead with the test, Weidner tight-lipped and frowning. It went well enough until it began to go very badly indeed. Roger Torraway's mind was far away until he heard the cyborg call him. He locked in and stood, in skin suit and breathing mask, on the ruddy sands. "What's the matter, Willy?" he demanded.
The great ruby eyes turned toward him. "I--I can't ssssee you, Roger!" the cyborg shrilled. "I-- I--"
And he toppled and fell. It was as quick as that. Roger did not even move toward him until he felt a great thundering hammer of air beat in on him, sending him stumbling toward the recumbent monster form.
From the 7,500-foot equivalent outside the Mars-normal chamber Don Kayman came desperately running in. He had not waited to lock. He had thrown both doors open.
He was no longer a scientist. He was a priest; he dropped to his knees beside the contorted form of what had been Willy Hartnett.
Roger stared while Don Kayman touched the ruby eyes, traced a cross on the synthetic flesh, whispering what Roger could not hear. He did not want to hear. He knew what was happening.
The first candidate for cyborg was now receiving Extreme Unction in front of his eyes.
The lead backup was Yic Freibart, taken off the list by presidential order.
The number two alternate was Carl Mazzini, ruled out because of his broken leg.
The third alternate, and the new champion, was him.
Six
Mortal in Mortal Fear
It is not an easy thing for a flesh-and-blood human being to come to terms with the knowledge that some of his flesh is going to be ripped from him and replaced with steel, copper, silver, plastic, aluminum and glass. We could see that Torraway was not behaving very rationally. He went blundering down the hall away from the Mars-normal tank in great urgency, as though he had a most pressing errand. He had no errand except to get away. The hall seemed like a trap to him. He felt he could not stand to have one person come up to him and say he was sorry about Willy Hartnett, or acknowledge Torraway's own new status. He passed a men's room, stopped, looked around--no one was watching him--and entered to stand at the urinal, eyes glazed, fixed to the shiny chrome. When the door pushed open, Torraway made a great show of zipping and flushing, but it was only a boy from the typing poo1 who looked at him incuriously and headed for a booth.
