Man Plus

by Frederik Pohl

  "You're going to play for me?"

  "No, Roger. You're going to play."

  "I can't play the guitar, Sulie," he protested.

  She laughed. "I've been talking to Brad," she said, "and I think you're going to be surprised. You're not just different, you know, Roger. You're better. For instance, your fingers."

  "What about them?"

  "Well, I've been playing the guitar since I was nine, and if I stop for a couple of weeks my calluses go and I have to start all over again. Your fingers don't need calluses; they're hard enough and firm enough to fret the strings first time perfectly."

  "Fine," said Roger, "only I don't even know what you're talking about. What's 'fret'?"

  "Press them down. Like this." She strummed a G chord, then a D and a C.

  "Now you do it," she said. "The only thing to watch out for, don't use too much strength. It's breakable." She handed him the guitar.

  He swept his thumb over the open strings, as he had seen her do.

  "That's fine." She applauded. "Now make a G. Ring finger on the third fret of the high E string—there. First finger on the second fret of the A. Middle finger on the third fret of the low E." She guided his hands. "Now hit it."

  He strummed and looked up at her. "Hey," he said. "Nice." She grinned and corrected him. "Not nice. Perfect. Now, this is a C. First finger on the second fret of the B string, middle finger there, ring finger there. . . . Right. And this is a D chord: first and middle finger on the G and E strings, there, ring finger one fret lower on the B. . . . Perfect again. Now give me a G." To his surprise, Roger strummed a perfect G.

  She smiled. "See? Brad was right. Once you know a chord, you know it; the 3070 remembers it for you. All you have to do is think 'G chord,' and your fingers do it. You are now," she said in mock sorrow, "about three months ahead of where I was the first time I tried to play the guitar."

  "That's pretty nice," Roger said, trying all three chords, one after another.

  "That's only the beginning. Now strum a four-beat, you know, dum, dum, dum, dum. With a G chord—" She listened, then nodded. "Fine. Now do it like this: G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, C, C, G, G, G, G, G, G. . . . Fine. Now again, only this time after the C, C do D, D, D, D, D, D. . . . Fine again. Now do them both, one after the other—"

  He played, and she sang with him: "'Kumbaya, my lord. Kumbaya! Kumbaya, my lord. Kumbaya

  "Hey!" Roger cried, delighted.

  She shook her head in mock dismay. "Three minutes from the time you pick up the guitar, and you're already an accompanist. Here, I brought you a chord book and some simple pieces. By the time I get back, you should be playing all of them, and I'll start you on finger-plucking, sliding and hammering."

  She showed him how to read the tabulature for each chord and left him happily puzzling out the first six modulations of the F.

  Outside his room she paused to take out her contacts, rubbed her eyes and marched to the office of the director. Scanyon's secretary waved her in.

  "He's happy with his guitar, General," she reported. "Less happy about his wife."

  Vern Scanyon nodded, and turned up a knob on the comm set on his desk: the sound of the chords for "Kentucky Babe" came from the tap in Roger's room. He turned it down again. "I know about the guitar, Major Carpenter. What about his wife?"

  "I'm afraid he loves her," she said slowly. "He's all right up to a point. Past that point I think we're in trouble. I can bolster him up as long as he's here at the project, but he'll be a long time away and—I'm not sure."

  Scanyon said sharply, "Get the marbles out of your mouth, Major!"

  "I think he'll miss her more than he can handle. It's bad enough now. I watched him while he was looking at that tape. He didn't move a muscle, rigid concentration, didn't want to miss a thing. When he's forty million miles away from her— Well. I've got everything taped, General. I'll run a computer simulation, and then maybe I can be more specific. But I'm concerned."

  "You're concerned!" Scanyon snapped. "Dash will have my ass if we get him up there and he blows!"

  "What can I tell you, General? Let me run the simulation. Then maybe I can tell you how to handle it."

  She sat down without waiting to be asked and ran her hands over her forehead. "Leading a double life takes a lot out of you, General," she offered. "Eight hours as a nurse and eight hours as a shrink isn't any fun."

  "Ten years on staff duty in Antarctica is even less fun than that," Vern Scanyon said simply.

  The presidential jet had reached its cruising altitude of 31,000 meters and slid into high gear—Mach 3 and a bit, grotesquely faster than even a presidential CB-5 was supposed to go. The President was in a hurry.

  The Midway Summit Conference had just ended in disarray. Stretched out on his chaise longue with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep to keep the Senators who had accompanied him out of his hair, Dash bleakly considered his options. They were few.

  He had not hoped for a great deal from the conference, but it had begun well enough. The Australians indicated they would accept limited cooperation with the NPA in developing the Outback, subject to appropriate guarantees, et cetera, et cetera. The NPA delegation murmured among themselves and announced that they would be happy to provide guarantees, since their real objectives were only to provide a maximum of the necessities of life for all the world's people, considered as a single unit regardless of antiquated national boundaries, et cetera. Dash himself shook off his whispering advisers and stated that America's interest in this conference was only to provide good-offices assistance to its two dearly beloved neighbors and sought nothing for itself, et cetera, and for a time there, all of two hours, it had seemed that there might be a substantive, useful product of the conference.

  Then they began getting into the fine detail. The Asians offered a million-man Soil Army plus a stream of tankers carrying three million gallons a week of concentrated sludge from the sewers of Shanghai. The Australians accepted the fertilizer but spoke of a maximum of 50,000 Asians to till the land. Also, they pointed out politely, that as it was Australian land and Australian sunshine that was being used, it would be Australian wheat that would be grown. The man from the State Department reminded Dash of American commitments to Peru, and with a heavy heart Dash rose to insist on at least a 15 percent allocation to good neighbors on the South American continent. And tempers began to rise. The precipitating incident was an NPA shuttle plane that ran into a flock of black-footed albatrosses as it took off from the Sand Island runway, crashed and burned on an islet in the lagoon, in full view of the conference members on the rooftop of the Holiday Inn. Then there were harsh words. The Japanese member of the NPA delegation allowed himself to say what he had previously only thought: that America's insistence on holding the conference at the site of one of the most famous battles of World War II was a calculated insult to Asians. The Australians commented that they had controlled their own gooney-bird populations without much trouble, and were astonished that the Americans had not succeeded in doing the same. And the maximum gain of three weeks of preparation and two days of hope was a tightly worded announcement that all three powers had agreed to further discussions. Sometime. Somewhere. Not very soon.

  But what it all meant, Dash admitted to himself as he tossed restlessly on the chaise longue, was that the confrontation was eyeball to eyeball. Somebody would have to give, and nobody would.

  He got up and called for coffee. When it came there was a scribbled note on Airborne White House stationery from one of the Senators: "Mr. President, we must settle the disaster-area proclamation before we land."

  Dash crumpled it up. That was Senator Talitree, full of complaints: Lake Altus had shrunk to 20 percent of its normal size, tourism in the Arbuckle Mountains was dead because there was no water coming over Turner Falls, the Sooner State Fair had had to be canceled because of blowing dust. Oklahoma should be declared a disaster area. He had fifty-four states, Dash reflected, and if he listened to all the Senators and governors he w
ould be declaring fifty-four disaster areas. There really was only one disaster area. It merely happened to be world-wide.

  And I ran for this job, he marveled.

  Thinking of Oklahoma made him think of Roger Torraway. For a moment he considered calling the pilot and diverting the flight to Tonka. But the meeting with the Combined Chiefs of Staff would not wait. He would have to content himself with the telephone.

  It was not really himself who was playing the guitar, Roger knew, it was the 3070 that remembered all the subroutines involved and commanded his fingers to do whatever his brain decreed. It had taken him less than an hour to learn every chord in the book, and to use them in effortless succession. A few minutes more to record in the downstairs data banks the meaning of time signals on a musical staff; then his inner clocks took over the tempi and he never had to think about the beat again. For melody, he learned which fret on which string corresponded to each note on the staff; once imprinted on the magnetic cores, the correspondence between printed music and plucked string was established forever. Sulie took ten minutes to show him which notes to sharp and which to flat when called for, and from then on the galaxy of sharps and flats sprinkled over the bars at the key signature held no further terrors for him. Finger-plucking: for human nervous systems, it is a matter of two minutes to learn the principle and a hundred hours of practice before it becomes automatic: thumb on the D string, ring finger on the high E, middle finger on the B, thumb on the A, ring on the E, middle on the B and so on. The two minutes of learning sufficed for Roger. From then on the subroutines commanded the fingers, and the only limit to his tempo was the speed at which the strings themselves could produce a tone without breaking.

  He was playing a Segovia recital from memory, from a single hearing of the tape, when the President's phone call came in.

  There was a time when Roger would have been awed and delighted by a call from the President of the United States. Now it was an annoyance; it meant taking time away from his guitar. He hardly listened to what the President had to say. He was struck by the care on Dash's face, the deep lines that had not been there a few days before, the sunken eyes. Then he realized that his interpretation circuits were exaggerating what they saw to call his attention to the changes; he overrode the mediation circuits and saw Dash plain.

  But he was still careworn. His voice was all warmth and good fellowship as he asked Roger how things were going. Was there anything Roger needed? Could he think of an ass to kick to get things goin' right? "Everything's fine, Mr. President," Roger said, amusing himself by letting his trick eyes deck the President's face out in Santa Claus beard and red tasseled cap, with a bundle of intangible gifts over his shoulder.

  "Sure now, Roger?" Dash pressed. "You're not forgetting what I told you: whatever you want, you just yell."

  "I'll yell," Roger promised. "But I'm doing fine. Waiting for the launch." And waiting for you to get off the phone, he thought, bored with the conversation.

  The President frowned. Roger's interpreters immediately changed the image: Dash was still Santa Claus, but ebony black and with enormous fangs. "You're not overconfident, are you?" he asked.

  "Well, how would I know if I was?" Roger asked reasonably. "I don't think so. Ask the staff here; they can tell you more about me than I can."

  He managed to terminate the conversation a few exchanges later, knowing that the President was unsatisfied and vaguely troubled, but not caring much. There was less and less that Roger really cared about, he thought to himself. And he had been truthful: he really was looking forward to the launch. He would miss Sulie and Clara. He was, in the back of his mind, faintly worried about the danger and the duration of the trip. But he was also buoyed up with anticipation of what he would find when he got there: the planet he was made to inhabit.

  He picked up the guitar and started again on the Segovia, but it did not go as well as he would like. After a time he realized that the gift of absolute pitch was also a handicap: Segovia's guitar had not been tuned to a perfect 440 A, it was a few Hertz flat, and his D string was almost a quarter-tone relatively flatter still. He shrugged—the bat wings flailed with the gesture—and put the guitar down.

  For a moment, he sat upright on his guitar chair, straightbacked and armless, inviting his thoughts.

  Something was troubling him. The name of the something was Dorrie. Playing the guitar was pleasant and relaxing, but behind the pleasure was a daydream: a fantasy of sitting on the deck of a sailboat with Dorrie and Brad, and casually borrowing Brad's guitar and astonishing them all.

  In some arcane way all the processes of his life terminated in Dorrie. The purpose of playing the guitar was to please Dorrie. The horror of his appearance was that it would offend Dorrie. The tragedy of castration was that he would fail Dorrie. Most of the pain had lifted from these things, and he could look at them in a way that had been impossible a few weeks before; but they were still there buried inside him.

  He reached for the phone, and then drew back his hand.

  Calling Dorrie was not satisfactory. He had tried that.

  What he really wanted was to see her.

  That, of course, was impossible. He was not allowed to leave the project. Vern Scanyon would be furious. The guards would stop him at the door. The telemetry would reveal at once what he was doing; the closed-circuit electronic surveillance would locate him at every step; all the resources of the project would be mobilized to prevent his leaving.

  And there would be no point in asking permission. Not even in asking Dash; the most that would happen would be that the President would give an order and Dorrie would be delivered, coerced and furious, in his room. Roger did not want Dorrie to be forced to come to him, and he was sure he would not be allowed to go to her.

  On the other hand . . .

  On the other hand, he reflected, why did he need permission?

  He thought for a minute, sitting perfectly still in his straightbacked chair.

  Then he put the guitar carefully away in its case and moved. The first thing he did was bend down to the wall, pull a baseboard plug out of its moorings and stick his finger into it. The copper nail on his finger was as good as a penny any day. The fuses blew. The lights in the room went out. The whickawhicka and gentle whisper of the reels of the recording machines slowed and stopped. The room went dark.

  There was still heat, and that was light enough for Roger's eyes. He could see quite well enough to pull the telemetry leads out of his body. He was out of the door before Clara Bly, pouring cream into a cup on her coffee break, looked around at the buzzing readout board.

  He had done better than he planned with the fuses; the hall lights were out as well. There were people in the corridor, but in the dark they could not see. Roger was past them and taking the fire stairs four at a time before they knew he was gone. He settled into the workings of his body with ease and grace. All of Kathleen Doughty's ballet training was paying off; he danced down the stairs, plié-ed through a door, leaped along a corridor and was out into the cold night air before the security man at the door looked around from his TV set.

  He was in the open, racing down the freeway toward the city of Tonka at forty miles an hour.

  The night was bright with kinds of light he had never seen before. Overhead there was a solid layer of clouds, stratocumulus scudding along from the north and thick middle-level clouds above them; even so, he could see dim glows where the brightest stars filtered some of their radiation through. The Oklahoma prairie on either side was somberly glowing with the tiny residual heat retained from the day, punctuated with splotches of brilliance where there was a home or a farm building. The cars on the freeway were tailed by great plumes of light, bright where they left the exhaust pipe, reddening and darkening as the clouds of hot gas expanded into the chilling air. As he entered the city itself he saw and avoided an occasional pedestrian, each a luminous Halloween figure, dully glowing in his own body heat. The buildings around him had trapped a little heat from the end of t
he day and were spilling more from their own central heating; they glowed like fireflies.

  He stopped at the corner of his own home street. There was a car with two men inside it parked across from the door. Warning signals flashed in his brain, and the car became a tank, howitzer pointed at his head. They were no problem. He changed course and ran through the backyards, scaling fences and slipping through gates, and at his own home he extruded the copper nails in his fingers for purchase and climbed right up the outside wall.

  It was what he wanted to do. Not just to avoid the men in the car outside, but to act out a fantasy: the moment when he would burst in on Dorrie through the window, to catch her at—what?

  In the event itself, what he caught her at was watching a late movie on television. Her hair was sticky with coloring compound, and she was propped up in bed eating a solitary dish of ice cream.

  As he slid the unlocked window open and crawled through, she turned toward him.

  She screamed.

  It was not just a cry, it was instant hysterics. Dorrie spilled her ice cream and leaped out of bed. The TV set toppled and crunched to the floor. Sobbing, Dorrie pressed herself against the far wall, eyes squeezed tight and fists pressed against them.

  "I'm sorry," Roger said inadequately. He wanted to approach her, but reason prevented. She looked very helpless and appealing, in her see-through butcher-boy smock and tiny bikini-ribbon panties.

  "Sorry," she gasped, looked at him, averted her eyes and fumbled her way into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Well, thought Roger, she was not to be blamed; he had a clear notion of what a grotesque sight he had been, coming through a window without warning. "You did say you knew what I looked like," he called.

  There was no answer from the bathroom; only, a moment later, the running of water. He glanced around the room. It looked exactly as it had always looked. The closets were as full of her clothes and his as they had always been. The spaces behind the couches were as empty of lovers as ever. He was not proud of himself for searching the apartment like any medieval cuckold, but he did not stop until he was certain she had been alone.