Man Plus

by Frederik Pohl

  He waited for them to settle down. "The reason the President was here last night is that a launch target has been approved. Friends, we are now on real time."

  "When?" cried a voice.

  The deputy went on: "A.S.A.P. We've got to complete this job—and by that, friends, I mean complete it: get Hartnett up to optimum performance so that he can actually live on Mars—no back to the workshops if something goes wrong—in time for the launch window next month. Launch time is set for oh eight hundred hours on twelve November. That gives us forty-three days, twenty-two hours and some odd minutes. No more."

  There was a second's pause, then a rush of voices. Even the cyborg's expression visibly changed, though no one could have said in what direction.

  The deputy director continued: "That's only part of it. The date is fixed, it can't be changed, we have to meet it; now I want to tell you why. Lights, please."

  The chamber lights dimmed down, and the deputy's deputy, without waiting for a signal, projected a slide on the end wall of the room where all could see it, even the cyborg in his distant cell. It displayed a crosshatched chart, with a broad black line growing diagonally upward toward a red bar. In bright orange letters at the top it was marked MOST SECRET. EYES ONLY.

  "Let me explain what you're looking at," said the deputy director. "The black diagonal is a composite of twenty-two trends and indices, ranging from the international credit balance to the incidence of harassment of American tourists by government officials abroad. The measure is of probability of war. The red bar at the top is marked 'O.H.,' which I can tell you stands for 'Outbreak of Hostilities.' It is not certainty. But the statistics people tell us that when the upper limit is reached there is a point-nine probability of war within six hours, and as you can see, we are moving toward it."

  The noise had stopped. The room was crypt-still. Finally one voice inquired, "What's the time scale?"

  "The back data covers thirty-five years," said the deputy director. There was some easing—at least the white space at the top would have to be some months, not minutes.

  Then Kathleen Doughty asked, "Does it say anywhere in there who it is we're going to be at war with?"

  The deputy director hesitated, then said carefully, "No, that is not included in the chart, but I think we can all form our own guesses. I don't mind giving you mine. If you've been reading the papers you know that the Chicoms have been talking about the wonders of increased food production they could bring the world by applying Sinkiang Province farming techniques to the Australian outback. Well, no matter what that quisling bunch in Canberra are willing to agree to, I feel pretty sure that this administration is not going to let the Chinks move in. Not if they want to keep my vote, anyway." After a moment, he added, "That's just personal opinion, off the record; do not include it in the minutes of this meeting. I don't know any official answer, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. All I know is what you know now. The trendline forecasts look pretty sour. Now they show nuclear escalation probabilities peaking pretty fast. We've got a date for it. The curve continued shows the point-nine probability in less than seven years.

  "Which means," he added, "that if we don't have a viable Mars colony by then, we may not live to have it ever."

  Alexander Bradley, B.Sc., E.E., M.D., D.Sc., Lt. Col. USMCR (Ret.). While Bradley was leaving the conference and changing from the expression of concern he had worn for the briefing to the more natural open-faced jollity he showed the world, the cyborg was down-pressuring for the Mars-normal tank. His monitors were somewhat concerned. Although they could not read emotion from his face, they could from his heart, breath and vital signs, as telemetered constantly to them, and it appeared to them that he was in some sort of up-tight state. They proposed delaying the test, but he refused angrily. "Don't you know there'sss a war on, almosssst?" he demanded in shrill tones, and would not answer when they spoke to him again. They decided to continue with the tests, but to recheck his psych profile as soon as they were completed.

  When Alexander Bradley was ten years old he lost his father and his left eye. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, the family was driving back from church. It had turned cold. The morning dew had frozen, impalpably thin and slick, in a film on the road. Brad's father was driving with great care, but there were cars in front of him, cars behind him, cars in the other half of the two-lane road going in the other direction; he was constrained to keep to a certain speed, and he was short in his answers when the rest of the family said anything to him. He was concerned, but he was not concerned enough. When the disaster came he could do nothing to avert it. To Brad, sitting beside his father in the front seat, it looked as though a station wagon coming toward them a hundred yards away turned out, slowly and calmly, as though it were making a left turn. But there was no road there for it to turn into. Brad's father stepped on the brake and held it. Their car slowed and slid. And for some seconds the boy sat watching the other car sliding sidewise toward them, themselves skidding gently and inevitably toward it. It was stately and deliberate, and inevitable. No one said anything, not Brad, not his father, not Brad's mother in the back seat. No one did anything, except to hold their rigid poses as though they were actors in a National Traffic Council tableau. The father sat silent and erect at the wheel, staring concentratedly at the other car. The driver of the other vehicle looked wide-eyed and inquiringly toward them over his shoulder. Neither moved until they hit. Even on the ice the friction was slowing them, and they could not have been moving at a combined velocity of much more than twenty-five miles an hour. It was enough. Both drivers were killed—Brad's father impaled, the other man decapitated. Brad and his mother, though they were wearing their safety belts, suffered fractures, cuts and bruises as well as internal injuries; and she lost the flexure of her left wrist forever, while her son lost his eye.

  Twenty-three years later Brad still dreamed about it as though it had just happened. In his sleep it scared him witless, and he awakened sweaty and crying and gasping for breath.

  It was not all loss. He had discovered that considerable advantages had been bought at the cost of an eye. Item, there was the insurance, on the life of his father and on the maiming of everyone concerned. Item, the injury had kept him out of the Army, and had permitted him to join the Marine Corps in an essentially civilian capacity when he wanted field experience in his specialty. Item, it had given him an acceptable excuse for avoiding the stupider risks and more tiresome obligations of adolescence. He never had to prove his courage in violent sports and always was excused from whatever parts of gym he most detested.

  Biggest item of all, it gave him an education. Under the Aid to Handicapped Children provisions of his state's welfare system, it had paid his way through school, college and graduate school. It had given him four degrees and turned him into one of the world's greatest experts on the perceptual systems of the eye. On balance, it was a favorable transaction. Even adding in the negative factor of a mother who had spent the remaining ten years of her life in some pain and a good deal of shortness of temper, it was worthwhile.

  Brad had wound up on the Man Plus project because he was the best they could get. He had chosen to work for the Marine Corps, because nowhere better could one find experimental subjects prepared by shell, claymore and bolo than in the field hospitals of Tanzania, Borneo and Ceylon. That work had been noted in high echelons of the military. They had not accepted Brad, they had drafted him.

  What he was not sure of was that Man Plus was the best he could get. Other recruits had been dragged into the space program by glamour or appeals to duty. It wasn't at all like that with Bradley. As soon as he had grasped what the man from Washington was driving at, the implications and opportunities spread out before him. It was a new track. It meant abandoning some plans, deferring others. But he could see where it would lead: say, three years helping to develop the optic systems of the cyborg. A world reputation coming out of it. Then he could quit the program and enter the limitless lush pastures of private practice. O
ne hundred and eight Americans per hundred thousand had essentially total loss of function in one or both eyes. It added up to better than three hundred thousand prospective patients, every one of whom would want the best man in the field to treat him.

  Working on the Man Plus program would stamp him the best man in his field at once. He could have a clinic of his own before he was forty. Not big. Just big enough to be supervised personally in every detail by him, and run by a staff of juniors trained by him and working under his direction. It would run to, oh, maybe five or six hundred patients a year—a fraction of 1 percent of the prospects. Which fraction of 1 percent would he accept? At least half of them would come from those most solvent and most willing to pay. Also, of course, charity cases. At least a hundred of them a year, everything free, even their bedside phones. While the several hundred who could pay would pay a lot. The Bradley Clinic (already it sounded as time-honored and proper as "Menninger" in his ears) would be a model for medical services all over the world, and it would make him one hell of a lot of money.

  It was not Bradley's fault that the three years had extended themselves past five. It wasn't even his part of the program that caused the delays. Or not most of them, anyway. In any event, he was still young. He would leave the program with thirty good working years ahead of him—unless he chose to retire earlier, perhaps keeping a consultancy and a stock arrangement at the Bradley Clinic. And there were other advantages to working in the space program, in that so many of his associates had married such attractive women. Bradley had no interest in getting married, but he very much liked having wives.

  Back in the seven-room laboratory suite where he ruled, Brad kicked ass on enough of his subordinates to insure that the new retinal mediation link would be ready for transplant within the week, and glanced at his watch. It was not yet eleven. He dialed Roger Torraway on the intercom and got him after a delay. "How about lunch, Rog? I want to go over this new implant with you."

  "Oh, too bad, Brad. I wish I could. But I'm going to be in the tank with Will Hartnett for at least the next three hours. Maybe tomorrow."

  "Talk to you then," said Brad cheerfully, and hung up. He was not surprised; he had already checked Torraway's schedule. But he was pleased. He told his secretary that he would be leaving for an outside conference and then lunch, and would be back after two, then ordered his car. He fed it the coordinates for the corner of the block where Roger Torraway lived. Where Dorrie Torraway lived.

  Five

  Monster Becoming Mortal Again

  As Brad left, whistling, his car radio was full of news of the world. The Tenth Mountain Division had recoiled back to a fortified area in Riverdale. A typhoon had wrecked the rice crop in Southeast Asia. President Deshatine had ordered the U.S. delegation to walk out of the United Nations debate on sharing scarce resources.

  There was much news that was not on the sound-only radio, because the newscasters either didn't know about it or didn't think it was important. For example, not one word was said about two Chinese gentlemen on a mission in Australia, or about the results of certain secret popularity polls the President kept locked in his safe, or about the tests being run on Willy Hartnett. So Brad didn't hear about any of these things. If he had, and had understood their importance, he would have cared. He was not an uncaring man. He was not an evil one, either. He was just not a particularly good one.

  Sometimes that question came up—for instance, when it was time to get rid of a girl or drop a friend who had been helpful on the way up. Sometimes there were recriminations. Then Brad would smile and shrug and point out that it wasn't a fair world. Lancelot didn't win all the tournaments. Sometimes the evil black knight dumped him on the ground. Bobby Fischer wasn't the most lovable chess player in the world, merely the best. And so on.

  And so Brad would confess that he was not a model man by social standards. Indeed he wasn't. Something had gone wrong in his childhood. The bump of ego on his skull had swollen large, so he saw the whole world in terms of what it could give him. War with China? Well, let's see, calculated Brad, there's sure to be a lot of surgery; perhaps I'll get to head my own hospital. A world depression? His money was in farmland; people would always eat.

  He was not admirable. All the same, he was the best person alive to do what the cyborg needed—namely, to provide Willy Hartnett with mediation between stimulus and interpretation. Which is a way of saying that somewhere between the external object the cyborg saw and the conclusions the cyborg's brain drew from it, there had to be a stage where unnecessary information was filtered out. Otherwise the cyborg would simply go mad.

  To understand why this is so, consider the frog.

  Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.

  As vertebrates go, the frog is a dull and simple kind of creature. It has a brain, but not a big one or a very sophisticated one. There's not much excess capacity in the frog brain to play around with, so that one doesn't want to waste any of it on nonessentials. Evolution is always economical. Male frogs do not write poems or torture themselves with fears that their female frogs may be unfaithful. Nor do they want to think about things which do not directly concern staying alive.

  The frog's eye is simple, too. In human eyes there are complexities frogs know not. Suppose a human comes into a room containing a table which bears an order of steak and French fries; even if he cannot hear, cannot taste and has lost the power of smell, he is drawn to the food. His eye turns to the steak. There is a spot on the eye called the "fovea," the part of the eye with which a person sees best, and it is that spot that directs itself toward the target. The frog doesn't do that; one part of its eye is as good as another. Or as bad. Because the interesting thing about a frog's-eye view of what fot a frog is the equivalent of a steak—namely, a bug big enough to be worth swallowing but small enough not to try to swallow back—is that the frog is blind to food unless the food behaves like food. Surround the frog with the most nutritious chopped insect pate you can devise. It will starve to death—unless a ladybug wanders by.

  If one thinks about how a frog eats, this strange behavior begins to make sense. The frog fits a very neat ecological niche. In a state of nature, no one fills that niche with minced food. The frog eats insects, so insects are what he sees. If something passes through his field of vision which is the right size for an insect, and moves at the proper speed for an insect, the frog does not debate whether he is hungry or not or which insects taste best. He eats it. Then he goes back to waiting for the next one.

  In the laboratory this is an antisurvival trait. You can trick a frog with a piece of cloth, a bit of wood on a string, anything that moves properly and is the right size. He will eat them and starve. But in nature there are no such tricks. In nature only bugs move like bugs, and every bug is frog dinner.

  This principle is not difficult to understand. Say this to a naïve friend and he will say, "Oh, yes, I see. The frog just ignores anything that doesn't look like a bug." Wrong! The frog doesn't do anything of the kind. He does not ignore non-bug objects. He simply never sees them in the first place. Tap a frog's optic nerve and drag a marble slowly past—too big, too slow—and no instrument can pick up a nerve impulse. There is none. The eye does not bother to "see" what the frog does not want to know about. But swing a dead fly past, and your meter dials flick over, the nerve transmits a message, the frog's tongue licks out and grabs.

  And so we come to the cyborg. What Bradley had done was to provide a mediation stage between the ruby complex eyes and the aching human brain of Willy Hartnett which filtered, interpreted and generally prepackaged all of the cyborg's visual inputs. The "eye" saw everything, even in the UV part of the spectrum, even in the infrared. The brain could not deal with so vast a
flow of inputs. Bradley's mediation stage edited out the unimportant bits.

  The stage was a triumph of design, because Bradley was indeed extremely good at the one thing he was good at. But he was not there to install it. And so because Brad had a 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.