Man Plus

by Frederik Pohl

  "They look a little better," she said grudgingly. "I guess it's all right. But what the hell were you doing to yourself?"

  "Worrying," he said.

  "About what?"

  "Where my spleen is. Do you know?"

  She stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before she replied. "It's under your lower ribs, on your left side. About where you think your heart is. A little lower down. Are you putting me on, Roger?"

  "Well, kind of. I guess I was reminiscing about something I shouldn't have, Clara."

  "Please don't do it any more!"

  "I'll try." But the thought of Dorrie and Brad was still lurking there, right under the conscious of his mind. He offered, "One thing—I've been trying to close my eyes, and I can't."

  She approached and touched his shoulder in friendly sympathy. "You'll do it, hon."

  "Yeah."

  "No, really. I was with Willy around this time, and he got pretty discouraged. But he made it. Anyway," she said, turning, "I'll take care of it for you for now. Lights-out time. You've got to be fresh as a daisy in the morning."

  He said suspiciously, "What for?"

  "Oh, not more cutting. That's over for a while. Didn't Brad tell you? Tomorrow they're going to hook you into the computer for all that mediation stuff. You're going to be a busy boy, Rog, so get some sleep." She turned off the light, and Brad watched as her dark face changed into a gentle glow that he thought of as peach.

  Something occurred to him. "Clara? Do me a favor?"

  She stopped with her hand on the door. "What's that, honey?"

  "I want to ask you a question."

  "So ask."

  He hesitated, wondering how to do what he wanted to do. "What I want to know," he said, working it out in his head as he went along, "is, let's see—oh, yes. What I want to know, Clara, is, when your husband and you are in bed making love, what different ways do you use?"

  "Roger!" The brightness of her face suddenly went up half a decibel; he could see the tracing of veins under the skin as hot blood flooded through her veins.

  He said, "I'm sorry, Clara. I guess—I guess lying here I get kind of horny. Forget I asked you, will you?"

  She was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was a professional's, no longer a friend's: "Sure, Roger. It's okay. You just kind of caught me off-guard. It's . . . well, it's all right, it's just that you never said anything like that to me before."

  "I know. Sorry."

  But he wasn't sorry, or not exactly.

  He watched the door close behind her and studied the rectangular tracing of light bleeding through from the hall outside. He was careful to keep his mind as calm as he could. He didn't want to start the monitors ringing alarm bells again.

  But he wanted to think about something that was right on the borderline of the danger zone, and that was how come the flush he had tricked onto Clara Bly's face looked so much like the sudden brightness that had come onto Brad's when he asked if Brad had been with Dorrie.

  We were fully mobilized next morning, checking the circuits, cutting in the stand-bys, insuring that the automatic switchover relays were tuned to intervene at the faintest flicker of a malfunction. Brad came in at 6:00 A.M., weak but clear-headed and ready to work. Weidner and Jon Freeling were only minutes after him, although the primary job for the day was all Brad's. They could not stay away. Kathleen Doughty was there-of-course, as she had been at every step, not because her duty required it but because her heart did. "Don't give my boy a bad time," she growled over her cigarette. "He's going to need all the help he can get when I start on him next week."

  Sounding every syllable, Brad said, "Kathleen. I will do the goddamned best I can."

  "Yeah. I know you will, Brad." She stubbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. "I never had any children, and I guess Roger and Willy sort of filled in."

  "Yeah," grunted Brad, no longer listening. He was not qualified or allowed to touch the 3070 or any of the ancillary units. All he could do was watch while the technicians and the programmers did their job. When the third recheck had gone almost to completion without a glitch he finally left the computer room and took the elevator up three flights to Roger's room.

  At the door he paused to breathe for a moment, then opened the door with a smile. "You're about ready to plug in, boy," he said. "Feel up to it?"

  The insect eyes turned toward him. Roger's flat voice said, "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. What I feel is mostly scared."

  "Oh, there's nothing to be scared of. Today," Brad amended hastily, "all we're going to do is test out themediation."

  The bat wings shuddered and changed position. "Will that kill me?" asked the maddeningly monotone voice.

  "Oh, come on, Roger!" Brad was suddenly angry.

  "It's only a question," ticked the voice.

  "It's a crappy question! Look, I know how you feel—"

  "I doubt that."

  Brad stopped, and studied Roger's uncommunicative face. After a moment he said, "Let me go over it again. What I'm going to do is not kill you, it's keep you alive. Sure, you're thinking of what happened to Willy. It isn't going to happen to you. You're going to be able to handle what happens—here, and on Mars, where it's important."

  "It's important to me here," said Roger.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake. When the system is all go you'll only see or hear what you need, understand? Or what you want. You'll have a good deal of volitional control. You'll be able—"

  "I can't even close my eyes yet, Brad."

  "You will. You'll be able to use all of it. But you won't unless we get started on it. Then all this stuff will filter out the unnecessary signals, so you won't be confused. That's what killed Willy: confusion."

  Pause, while the brain behind the grotesque face ruminated. What Roger finally said was, "You look lousy, Brad."

  "Sorry about that. I actually don't feel too good."

  "Are you sure you're up to this?"

  "I'm sure. Hey, Roger. What are you telling me? Do you want to put this off?"

  ''No.''

  "Well, what do you want?"

  "I wish I knew, Brad. Get on with it."

  We were all ready by then; the "go" lights had been flashing green for several minutes. Brad shrugged and said morosely to the duty nurse, "Let 'er rip."

  There were ten hours, then, of phasing in the mediation circuits one by one, testing, adjusting, letting Roger try his new senses on projected Rorschach blots and Maxwell color wheels. For Roger the day raced by. His sense of time was unreliable. It was no longer regulated by everyman's built-in biological clocks but by his machine components; they slowed his perception of time down when there was no stress situation, speeded it up when needed. "Slow down," he begged, watching the nurses whiz past him like bullets. And then, when Brad, beginning to shake with fatigue, knocked over a tray of inks and crayons, to Roger the pieces seemed actually to float to the ground. He had no difficulty in catching two bottles of ink and the tray itself before they touched the floor.

  When he came to think of it after, he realized that they were the pieces that might have spilled or broken. He had let the wax crayons fall free. In that fraction of a second of choice, he had chosen to catch the objects that needed catching and let the others go, without being aware of what he did.

  Brad was highly pleased. "You're doing great, boy," he said, holding to the foot of the bed. "I'm going to take off now and get some sleep, but I'll be in to see you tomorrow after the surgery."

  "Surgery? What surgery?"

  "Oh," said Brad, "just a little touch-up. Nothing compared to what you've already had, believe me! From now on," he said, turning to leave, "you're just about through being born; now all you have to do is grow up. Practice. Learn to use what you've got. The hard parts are all behind you. How are you doing with cutting off vision when you want to?"

  "Brad," rang out the flat voice, louder in amplitude but tonally gray, "what the hell do you want of me? I'm trying!"

/>   "I know," Brad said, conciliating. "See you tomorrow."

  For the first time that day Roger was left alone. He experimented with his new senses. He could see that they might be very useful to him in survival situations. But they were also very confusing. All the tiny noises of everyday life were magnified. From the hall he could hear Brad talking to Jonny Freeling and the nurses going off duty. He knew that with the ears his mother had cultured for him in her womb he would not have been able to perceive even a whisper; now he could make out the words at will: "—local anesthetic, but I don't want to. I want him out. He's got enough trauma to deal with." That was Freeling talking to Brad.

  The lights were more brilliant than before. He tried to diminish the sensitivity of his vision, but nothing happened. What he really wanted, he thought, was a single Christmas-tree bulb. That was plenty of light; these floods of luminosity were disconcerting. Also, he observed, the lights were maddeningly rhythmical; he could perceive each pulse of the sixty-Hertz current. Inside the fluorescent tubes he observed the writhing of a glowing snake of gas. Incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, were almost dark, except for the bright filaments at the center, which he could examine in detail. There was no sense of eyestrain, even when looking at the brightest of lights.

  He heard a new voice in the corridor, and sharpened his hearing to listen: Clara Bly, just coming on duty for the evening shift. "How's the patient, Dr. Freeling?"

  "Just fine. He seems rested. You didn't have to give him a sleeping pill last night?"

  "No. He was fine. Kind of"—she giggled—"kind of randy, though. He made a sort of a pass, which I never expected from Roger."

  "Huh." There was a puzzled pause. "Well, that won't be a problem any more. I've got to check the readouts. Take care."

  Roger thought he would have to be extra nice to Clara; it would not be hard to do, for she was his favorite among the nurses. He lay back, listening to the rustle of his own black wings and the rhythmic sounds from the telemetry panels. He was very tired. It would be nice to sleep—

  He sprang up. The lights had stopped! Then they were on again, as soon as he became aware of it.

  He had learned to close his eyes!

  Satisfied, Roger let himself sink back onto the gently flowing bed. It was true enough; he was learning.

  They woke him to feed him, and then to put him to sleep again for his last operation.

  There was no anesthesia. "We're just going to turn you off," said Jon Freeling. "You won't feel a thing." And indeed he didn't. First he was wheeled into the surgery next door, intensive-care bottles, pipes, drains and all. He could not smell the smell of disinfectant, but he knew it was there; he could perceive the brightness gathered at the cusp of every metallic object, the heat from the sterilizer, like a sunburst against the wall.

  And then Dr. Freeling ordered him out, and we complied. We depressed his sensory inputs one by one; to him it was as though the sounds grew fainter, the lights dimmer, the body touches more gentle. We dampened the pain inputs throughout all his new skin, extinguished them completely where Freeling's knife would cut and needle would pierce. There was a complex problem there. Many of the pain inputs were to be maintained after he recovered. He would have to have some warning system when he was free on the surface of Mars, something to tell him if he was being burned or torn or damaged; pain was the sharpest alarm we could give him. But for much of his body, pain was over. Once we extinguished the inputs we programmed them out of his sensorium entirely.

  Roger, of course, knew nothing of this. Roger just went to sleep and woke up again.

  When he looked up he screamed.

  Freeling, leaning back and flexing his fingers, jumped and dropped his mask. "What's the matter?"

  Roger said, "Jesus! For a minute there I saw—I don't know. Could it have been a dream? But I saw you all around me, looking down, and you looked like a bunch of ghouls. Skulls. Skeletons. Grinning at me! And then you were you again."

  Freeling looked at Weidner and shrugged. "I think," he said, "that that's just your mediation circuits at work. You know? Translating what you see into something you can grasp immediately."

  "I don't like it," Roger flared.

  "Well, we'll have to talk to Brad about it. But honestly, Roger, I think that's the way it's supposed to be. I think it's like the computer took your sensations of fear and pain—you know, what everyone feels when he has an operation—and put them together with the visual stimulus: our faces, the masks, all that stuff. Interesting. I wonder how much of it was in the mediation, and how much was plain postoperative delusion?"

  "I'm glad you find it interesting," Roger sulked.

  But truthfully, he found it interesting too. When he was back in his own room he let his mind roam. He could not summon the fantasy pictures at will. They came when they wanted to come, but they were not as fearsome as that first terrified glimpse of bare mandibles and hollow eye sockets. When Clara came in with a bedpan and left again after he waved it away, he watched her through the closing door; and the shadow of the door became a cave entrance, and Clara Bly a cave bear growling irritably at him. She was still a little annoyed, he realized; some subsonic cue in her face was registering in his senses, and being analyzed by the buzzing 3070 downstairs and displayed as a warning.

  But when she came back she was wearing Dorrie's face. It melted away and reclothed itself in her familiar dark skin and bright eyes, not like Dorrie at all; but Roger took it as a sign that things were all right between them again . . .

  Between Clara and himself.

  Not, he thought, between Dorrie and himself. He gazed at the phone by his bed. The vision circuits were permanently off at his request; he didn't want to call someone and forget what they might see. But he had not used it to call Dorrie at all. Often enough he reached out his hand for the phone, but every time he drew his hand back.

  He didn't know what to say to her.

  How do you ask your wife if she is sleeping with your best friend? You come right out and ask her, that's how, his gut feelings told Roger; but he could not quite make himself do it. He was not sure enough. He could not risk that accusation; he might be wrong.

  The thing was, he couldn't discuss it with his friends, not any of them. Don Kayman would have been a natural for that; it was a priest's function. But Don was so clearly, so sweetly and tenderly in love with his pretty little nun that Roger could not put himself in the pain of discussing pain with him.

  And for most of his friends, the trouble was that they honestly would not have seen what the trouble was. Open marriage was so common in Tonka—in most of the Western world, indeed— that it was the rare closed couple that caused gossip. To admit to jealousy was very difficult.

  And anyway, Torraway told himself stoutly, it was not jealousy that troubled him. Not exactly jealousy. It was something else. It was not Sicilian machismo or the outrage of the property owner who finds someone trespassing in his own fertile gardens. It was that Dorrie should want to love only him. Since he only wanted to love her. . . .

  He became aware that he was slipping into a state of mind that would surely ring the alarm bells on the telemetry readouts. He didn't want that. He resolutely took his mind away from his wife.

  He practiced "closing his eyes" for a time; it was reassuring to be able to summon up this new skill when he wanted it. He could not have described, any better than Willy Hartnett had, what it was he did; but somehow he was able to reach the decision to stop receiving visual inputs, and somehow the circuitry inside his head and down in the 3070 room were able to convert that decision into blackness. He could even dim the light selectively. He could brighten it. He could, he discovered, filter out all but one band of wavelengths or suppress one or cause one or more of the rainbow colors to be brighter than the rest.

  It was quite satisfying, really, although in time it cloyed. He wished he had lunch to look forward to, but there would be no lunch that day, partly because he had had an operation, partly because they were g
radually deaccustoming him to eating. Over the next few weeks he would eat and drink less and less; by the time he was on Mars, he would really need to eat only about one square meal a month.

  He flung back the sheet and gazed idly down at the artifact that his body had become.

  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.