"Sulie, what's the matter?"
"Nothing's the matter. We're almost ready for orbit, that's all."
He pushed himself backward across the cramped compartment to get a better look at her. She was worth looking at. Her hair had gone back to muddy blond and her eyes were brown without the contact lenses; and even after almost two hundred days of never being more than ten meters from him, she still looked good to Dinty Meighan. "I didn't think you had any surprises left," he marveled.
"You never can tell about a woman."
"Come on, Sulie! What's this all about? You sound as though you've been planning— Hey!" A thought struck him. "You volunteered for this mission—not to go to Mars, but to go to some guy! Right? One of the guys ahead of us?"
"You're very quick, Dinty. Not," she said fondly, "where I don't want you to be, though."
"Who is it, Brad? Hesburgh? Not the priest?—oh, wait a minute!" He nodded. "Sure! The one you were mixed up with back on Earth. The cyborg!"
"Colonel Roger Torraway, the human being," she corrected. "As human as you are, except for some improvements."
He laughed, more resentment than humor. "A lot of improvements, and no balls at all."
Sulie unstrapped herself. "Dinty," she said sweetly, "I've enjoyed sex with you, and I respect you, and you've been about as comfortable to be with as any human being possibly could be on this Goddamned eternity trip. But there are some things I don't want you to say. You're right. Roger doesn't happen to have any testicles, right at this exact moment. But he's a human being I can respect and love, and he's the only one like that I've found lately. Believe me, I've looked."
"Thanks!"
"Oh, don't do this, dear Dinty. You know you're not really jealous. You've already got a wife."
"Next year I do! That's a long way off." She shrugged, grinning. "Ah, but Sulie! There are some things you can't kid me about. You love screwing!"
"I like body contact and intimacy," she corrected, "and I like coming to orgasm. I like both those things better with someone I love, Dinty. No offense."
He scowled. "You've got a long wait, sweetie."
"Maybe not."
"The hell you say. I won't see Irene for seven months. But you—you won't be back any faster than I will; and then it only begins. They've got to put him back together for you. Assuming they can put him back together. It sounds like a long time between fucks."
"Oh, Dinty. Don't you think I've thought this all out?" She patted him in passing, on the way to her own locker. "Sex isn't just coitus. There are more ways to orgasm than with a penis in my vagina. And there's more to sex than orgasm. Not to mention love. Roger," she went on, wriggling into her jump suit, not so much for modesty as for pockets, "is a resourceful, loving person, and so am I. We'll make out—anyway, until the rest of the colonists land."
"Rest?" he struggled. "Rest of the colonists?"
"Haven't you figured it out yet? I'm not going back with all of you, Dinty, and I don't think Roger is either. We're going to be Martians!"
And meanwhile, in the Oval Room of the White House, the President of the United States was confronting Vern Scanyon and a young, coffee-colored man with tinted glasses and the build of a football player. "So you're the one," he said, appraising him. "You think we don't know how to run a computer study."
"No, Mr. President," the young man said steadily. "I don't think that's the problem."
Scanyon coughed. "Byrne here," he said, "is a graduate student on work-study from M.I.T. His thesis is on sampling methodology, and we gave him access to some of the, ah, classified material. Especially public-opinion studies about attitudes on the project."
"But not to a computer," Byrne said.
"Not to a big one," Scanyon corrected. "You had your own desk dataplex."
The President said mildly, "Get on with it, Scanyon."
"Well, his results came out different. According to his interpretations, the public opinion on the whole question of colonizing Mars was, well, apathy. You remember, Mr. President, there was some question about the results at the time? The raw results weren't encouraging at all? But when we played them through analysis they came out positive to—what do you call it?—two sigmas. I never knew why."
"Did you check?"
"Certainly, Mr. President! Not me," Scanyon added quickly. "That wasn't my responsibility. But I'm satisfied that the studies were verified."
Byrne put in, "Three different times, with three different programs. There were minor variations, of course. But they all came out significant and reliable. Only when I repeated them on my desk machine they didn't. And that's the way it is, Mr. President. If you work up the figures on any big computer in the net you get one result. If you work them up on a small isolated machine you get another."
The President drummed the balls of his thumbs on the desk. "What's your conclusion?"
Byrne shrugged. He was twenty-three years old, and his surroundings intimidated him. He looked to Scanyon for help and found none; he said, "You'll have to ask somebody else that one, Mr. President. I can only give you my own conjecture. Somebody's buggering our computer network."
The President rubbed the left lobe of his nose reflectively, nodding slowly. He looked at Byrne for a moment and then said, without raising his voice, "Carousso, come on in here. Mr. Byrne, what you see and hear in this room is top secret. When you leave, Mr. Carousso will see that you are informed as to what that means to you in detail; basically, you are not to talk about it. To anyone. Ever."
The door to the President's anteroom opened and a tall, solid man with a self-effacing air walked in. Byrne stared at him wonderingly: Charles Carousso, the head of the CIA! "What about it, Chuck?" the President asked. "What about him?"
"We've checked Mr. Byrne, of course," said the Agency man. His words were precise and uninflected. "There isn't anything significantly adverse to him—you'll be glad to know, I suppose, Mr. Byrne. And what he says checks out. It isn't only the public-opinion surveys. The war-risk projections, the cost/effectiveness studies—run on the net they come out one way, run on independent calculating machines they come out another. I agree with Mr. Byrne. Our computer net has been compromised."
The President's lips were pressed together as though he were holding back what he wanted to say. All he allowed to come out was, "I want you to find out how this happened, Chuck. But the question now is, who? The Asians?"
"No, sir! We checked that out. It's impossible."
"Bullshit it's impossible!" roared the President. "We know they already did tap our lines once, on the simulation of Roger Torraway's systems!"
"Mr. President, that's an entirely different case. We found that tap and neutralized it. It was in the groundlines cable on a nonsensitive linkage. The comm circuits on our major machines are absolutely leakproof." He glanced at Byrne. "You have a report on the techniques involved, Mr. President; I'll be glad to go over it with you at another time."
"Oh, don't worry about me," said Byrne, smiling for the first time. "Everybody knows the links are multiply scrambled. If you've checked me out, I'm sure you found out that a lot of us graduate students fool around trying to tap in, and none of us make it."
The agency man nodded. "As a matter of fact, Mr. President, we tolerate that; it's good field-testing for our security. If people like Mr. Byrne can't think up a way past the blocks, I doubt the Asians can. And the blocks are leakproof. They have to be. They control circuits that go to the War Machine in Butte, the Census Bureau, UNESCO—"
"Wait a minute!" barked the President. "You mean our machines tie in with both UNESCO, which the Asians use, and the War Machine?"
"There is absolutely no possibility of a leak."
"There's been a leak, Carousso!"
"Not to the Asians, Mr. President."
"You just finished telling me there's one wire that goes out of our machine to the War Machine and another that goes straight to the Asians, with a detour through UNESCO!"
"Even so, Mr. Presi
dent, I absolutely guarantee it's not the Asians. We would know that. All major computers are crosslinked to some extent. That's like saying there's a road from everywhere to everywhere else. Right, there is. But there are roadblocks. There is no way the NPA can get access to the War Machine, or to most of these studies. Even so, if they had done it, we would know from covert sources. They haven't. And," he went on, "in any case, Mr. President, can you think of any reason why the NPA would distort results in order to compel us to colonize Mars?"
The President drummed his thumbs, looking around the room. At last he sighed. "I'm willing to go along with your logic, Chuck. But if it wasn't the Asians that buggered our computers, then who?"
The agency man was morosely silent.
"And," Dash snarled, "for Christ's sake, why?"
Seventeen
A Day in the Life of a Martian
Roger could not see the gentle shower of microwave energy coming down from Deimos, but he could feel it as a luxury of warmth. When he was nearby he preened his wings in it, soaking up strength. Outside the beam he carried part of it with him in his accumulators. There was no reason for him to hoard his strength now. More strength poured down from the sky whenever Deimos was above the horizon. There were only a few hours in each day when neither the sun nor the farther moon were in the sky, and his storage capacity was multiply adequate for those brief periods of drought.
Inside the domes, of course, the metal-foil antennae stole the energy before it reached him, so he limited his time with Brad and Kayman. He didn't mind. It was what he preferred. Every day the gap between them widened anyway. They were going back to their own planet. Roger was going to stay on his. He had not told them that yet, but he had made up his mind. Earth had begun to seem like a pleasant, quaint foreign place he had visited once and hadn't much liked. The pains and perils of terrestrial humanity were no longer his. Not even when they had been his own personal pains, and his own fears.
Inside the dome Brad, wearing G-string undershorts and a demand tank of oxygen, was happily planting carrot seedlings between the stands of Siberian oats. "Want to give me a hand, Rog?" His voice was reedily high in the thin atmosphere; he took frequent sips of oxygen from the mouthpiece that hung next to his chin, and then when he breathed out the voice was fractionally deeper, but still strange.
"No, Don wants me to pick up some more specimens for him. I'll be gone overnight."
"All right." Brad was more interested in his seedlings than in Torraway, and Torraway was no longer very interested in Brad. Sometimes he would remind himself that this man had been his wife's lover, but in order for that to feel like anything he had to remind himself that he had had a wife. It didn't seem worth the effort. More interesting was the challenge of the high cupped valley just over that farther range of hills, and his own private farm plot. For weeks now he had been bringing samples of Martian life back to show Don Kayman. They were not plentiful—two or three together in a clump, perhaps, and nothing else for hundreds of meters around. But they were not hard to find—not for him. Once he had learned to recognize their special color—the hard UV lengths that their crystal caps reflected away from them, to let them survive in the harsh radiation environment—it was reflexive to filter his vision bands to see only that wavelength in color, and then they stood out a kilometer away.
So he had brought back a dozen of them, and then a hundred; there seemed to be four distinct varieties, and it was. not long before Kayman asked him to stop. He had all the samples he needed to study, and half a dozen more of each in formalin to bring back to Earth, and his gentle conserving soul was uneasy at despoiling the ecology of Mars. Roger began replanting some of them near the dome. He told himself it was to see whether the overflow of energy beamed down from the generator did native life forms any harm.
But what it was, he knew in his heart, was gardening. It was his planet, and he was beautifying it for himself.
He let himself out of the dome, stretched luxuriously for a moment in the double warmth of sun and microwave and checked his batteries. They could use topping off; he deftly plugged the leads into his own backpack and the gently whining accumulator at the base of the dome, and without looking toward the lander, said, "I'm going to take off now, Don."
Kayman's voice responded instantly over the radio. "Don't be out of touch more than two hours, Roger. I don't want to have to come looking for you."
"You worry too much," said Roger, detaching the leads and stowing them away.
"You're only superhuman," grumbled Kayman. "You're not God. You could fall, break something—"
"I won't. Brad? So long."
Inside the triple dome Brad looked up over the armpit-high stalks of wheat and waved. His features could not be made out through the filmy domes; the plastic had been formulated to cut out the worst of the UV, and it blurred some of the visual wavelengths as well. But Roger could see him wave. "Take care. Give us a call before you go out of line of sight so we'll know when to start worrying."
"Yes, Mother." It was curious, Roger reflected. He was actually feeling rather fond of Brad. The situation interested him as an abstract problem. Was it because he was a gelding? There was testosterone circulating in his system, the steroid implant they had given him took care of that. His dreams were sometimes sexual, and sometimes of Dorrie, but the hollow despair and the anger he had lived with on Earth had attenuated on Mars.
He was already almost a kilometer from the dome, running along easily in the warm sunlight, each step coming down precisely where it would find secure footing and each thrust lifting him surely an exact distance up and ahead. His vision was on low-energy surveillance mode, taking in everything in a moving teardrop shape whose point was where he was and whose lobe, fifty meters across, was more than a hundred meters in front of him. He was not unaware of the rest of the landscape. If something unusual had appeared—above all if something had moved—he would have seen it at once. But it did not distract him from his musings. He tried to remember what sex with Dorrie had been like. It was not hard to recall the objective, physical parameters. Much harder to feel what he had felt in bed with her; it was like trying to recall the sensuous joy of a chocolate malted when he was eleven, or his first marijuana high at fifteen. It was easier to feel something about Sulie Carpenter, although as far as he could remember he had never touched any part of her but her fingertips, and then by accident. (Of course, she had touched every part of him.) He had been thinking, from time to time, about Sulie's coming to Mars. It had seemed threatening at first. Then it had seemed interesting, a change to look forward to. Now— Now, Roger realized, he wanted it to happen soon, not in four days, when she was due to land after her pilot completed the on-site tests of the 3070 and the MHD generator. Soon. They had exchanged a few casual greetings by radio. He wanted her closer than that. He wanted to touch her—
His wife's image formed in front of him, wearing that same monotonous sunsuit. "Better check in, honey," she said.
Roger stopped and looked around, on full vision mode in the Earth-normal spectrum.
He was almost halfway to the mountains, a good ten kilometers from the dome and the lander. He had been going uphill and the flat terrain had begun to be rolling; he could barely see the top of the dome, and the tip of the antennas of the lander was a tiny spike beyond it. Without conscious effort his wings deployed themselves behind him to make his radio signal more directional, as a shouting man might megaphone his hands around his mouth. "Everything's okay," he said, and Don Kayman's voice answered inside his head: "That's fine, Roger. It'll be dark in three hours."
"I know." And after dark the temperature would plummet; six hours from now it might touch a hundred and fifty degrees below zero. But Roger had been out in the dark before, and all of his systems had performed beautifully. "I'll check with you again when I'm high enough on a slope to reach you," he promised, turned and started once more toward the mountains. The atmosphere was hazier than it had been. He allowed himself to feel his skin recep
tors and realized that there was a growing wind. Sandstorm? He had lived through them, too; if it got bad he would hedgehog somewhere until it stopped, but it would have to be very bad to make that necessary. He grinned inside himself—he had not reliably learned how to do it with his new face—and loped on . . .
At sunset he was in the shadow of the mountains, high enough up to see the dome clearly, more than twenty kilometers away.
The sandstorm was all below him now and seemed to be moving away. He had stopped briefly twice and waited, wings furled around him. But that had been only routine caution; at no time had it been more than an annoyance. He cupped the wings behind him and said through his radio: "Don? Brad? It's your wandering boy reporting in."
The reply inside his head, when it came, was scratchy and distorted, an unpleasant feeling, like gritting one's teeth on emery cloth. "Your signal's lousy, Rog. Are you okay?"
"Sure." But he hesitated. The static from the storm was bad enough so that he had not been sure, at first, which of his companions was talking to him; only after a moment had he identified the voice as Brad's. "Maybe I'll start back now," he said.
The other voice, even more distorted: "You'll make an old priest happy if you do, Roger. Want us to come out and meet you?"
"Hell, no. I can move faster than you can. Go to sleep; I'll see you in four or five hours."
Roger chatted a moment, than sat down and looked around. He wasn't tired. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be tired; he slept an hour or two, most nights, and napped from time to time during the day, more out of boredom than fatigue. The organic part of him still imposed some demands on his metabolism, but the crushing bone-weariness of prolonged exertion was no longer part of his experience. He sat because it pleased him to sit on an outcropping of rock and stare across the valley of his home. The long shadow of the mountains had already passed the dome, and only the peaks on the farther side were still lighted. He could see the terminator clearly; Mars's thin air did not diffuse the shadow much. He could almost see it move.
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