Frederik Pohl - Man Plus

He felt a sudden interior pain swell giddyingly inside him, and leaned back in desolation. Dorrie!

The door burst open.

Clara Bly flew in, bright eyes wide in her dark, pretty face. “Roger! What are you doing?”

He took a deep, slow breath before he spoke. “What’s the matter?” He could hear the flatness in his own voice; it had little tone left, after what they had done to it.

“All your taps are jumping! I thought — I don’t know what I thought, Roger. But whatever was happening, it was giving you trouble.”

“Sorry, Clara.” He watched as she hurried over to the monitors on the wall, studying them swiftly.

“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.