Frederik Pohl - Man Plus

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 gradually 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, tclling 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.

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.

The other thing he was fretting about was that he could not avoid the secret feeling of sin that seemed to be a realization that internally, in his heart of hearts, he wished the project would be blown. He had had a tearful hour with Sister Clotilda when the probability that he would go to Mars had firmed up into the cutting of orders. Should they marry first? No. No on pragmatic, practical reasons: although there was not much doubt that both could ask for and receive the dispensation from Rome, there was also not much hope that it would come through in less than six months.

If only they had applied earlier…

But they hadn’t, and both of them knew that they were not willing to marry without it, or even to go to bed together without the sacrament. “At least,” said Clotilda toward the end, attempting to smile, “you won’t have to worry about my being unfaithful to you. If I wouldn’t break my vows for you, I doubt I’d do it for any man.”

“I wasn’t worried,” he said; but now, under the gleaming blue skies of Florida, staring up at the gantries that rose to reach for the fluffy white clouds, he was worrying. The Army colonel who had volunteered to show him around was aware that something was troubling Kayman, but he had no way of diagnosing the trouble.

“It’s safe enough,” he said, probing at random. “I wouldn’t give a thought to the low-injection rendezvous orbit.”

Kayman tore his attention away from his interior and said, “I promise you I wasn’t. I don’t even know what you mean.”

“Oh. Well, it’s just that we’re putting your bird and the two support launches into a lower orbit than usual: two twenty kilometers instead of four hundred. It’s political, of course. I hate it when the bureaucrats tell us what we have to do, but this time it doesn’t really make a difference.”

Kayman glanced at his watch. He still had an hour to kill before returning for his last fitting of Mars-suit and spacesuit, and he was not anxious to spend it fretting. He judged accurately that the colonel was one of those happy folk who like to talk about nothing as much as their work, and that all he need give would be an occasional grunt to keep the colonel explaining everything that could be explained. He gave the grunt.

“Well, Father Kayman,” said the colonel expansively, “we’re giving you a big ship, you know. Too big to launch in one piece. So we’re putting up three birds, and you’ll meet in orbit — two twenty by two thirty-five, optimal, and I expect we’ll be right on the money — and—”

Kayman nodded without really listening. He already knew the flight plan by heart; it was in the orders he had been given. The only open questions were who the remaining two occupants of the Mars bird would be, but it would only be a matter of days before that was decided. One would have to be a pilot to stay in orbit while the other three crowded into the Mars-lander and went down to the surface of the planet. The fourth man should, ideally, be someone who could function as back-up to pilot, areologist and cyborg; but of course no such person existed. It was time to make the decision, though. The three human beings — the three unaltered human beings, he corrected himself — would not have Roger’s capacity for surviving naked on the surface of Mars. They would have to have the same fittings he was going through now, and then the final brush-up training in procedures that all of them would need, even Roger.

And launch time was only thirty-three days away.

The colonel had finished with the docking and reassembly maneuvers and was getting ready to outline the day-by-day calendar of events on all the long months to Mars. Kayman said, “Wait a minute, Colonel. I didn’t quite get that about political considerations. What does that have to do with how we take off?”

The colonel grumbled resentfully, “Damn ecology freaks, they get everybody upset. These Texas Twin launch vehicles, they’re big. About twenty times the thrust of a Saturn. So they make a lot of exhaust. It comes to something like twenty-five metric tons of water vapor a second, times three birds — a lot of water vapor. And admittedly there’s some risk that the water vapor — well, no, let’s be fair; we know damn well — excuse me, Father — that what all that water vapor would do at normal orbit-injection altitudes would be to knock out the free electrons in a big patch of sky. They found that way back in. let’s see, I think it was ‘73 or ‘74, when they put the first Spacelab up. Knocked the free electrons out of a volume of atmosphere that stretched from Illinois to Labrador when it was measured. And of course that’s what keeps you from getting sunburned. One of the things. They help filter out the solar UV. Skin cancer, sunburn, destruction of flora — well, they’re all real; they could happen. But it’s not our own people Dash is worried about! The NPA, that’s what bugs him. They’ve given him an ultimatum that if your launch damages their sky they will consider it a ‘hostile act.’ Hostile act! What the hell do you call it when they parade five nuclear subs off Cape May, New Jersey? Claim it’s oceanographic research, but you don’t use cruiser-killer subs for oceanography, not in our Navy, anyway…