Frederik Pohl - Man Plus

“Anyway,” the colonel said, bringing himself back to his guest and smiling, “it’s okay. We’ll just put you into rendezvous orbit a little lower down, out of the free-electron layer. Costs more fuel. Winds up making more pollution, the way I look at it. But it keeps their precious free electrons intact — not that there’s any real chance they’d survive across the Atlantic into Africa even, much less Asia…”

“You’ve been very interesting, Colonel,” Kayman said courteously. “I think it’s time for me to get back, though.”

The fitters were ready for him. “Just slip into this for size.” The physicotherapist member of the team grinned. “Slipping into” the spacesuit was twenty minutes of hard work, even if the whole team had been helping. Kayman insisted on doing it himself. In the spacecraft he wouldn’t have any more help than the rest of the crew, who would be busy with their own affairs; and in an emergency he wouldn’t have any help at all. He wanted to be ready for any emergency. It took an hour, and another ten minutes to get out of it after they’d checked all the parameters and pronounced everything fine; and then there were all the other garments to try.

It was dark outside, a warm Florida autumn night, before he was finished. He looked at the row of vestments laid out on the worktables and grinned. He pointed to the comm-antenna fabric that dangled from one wrist, the radiation cloak for use in solar-flare conditions, the body garment that went under the suits themselves. “You’ve got me all fixed up. That’s the maniple, there’s the chasuble, that’s my alb. Couple more pieces and I’d be all ready to say Mass.” Actually he had included a complete set of vestments in his weight allotment — it had seriously depleted the available reserve for books, music tapes and pictures of Sister Clotilda. But he was not prepared to discuss that with these worldly people. He stretched and sighed. “Where’s a good place to eat around here?” he asked. “A steak, or maybe some of that red snapper you people talk about — and then bed—”

The Air Force MP who had been standing by for two hours, glancing at his watch, stepped forward and spoke up. “Sorry, Father,” he said. “You’re wanted elsewhere right now, and you’re due in, let’s see, about twenty minutes.”

“Due where? I’ve got a long flight tomorrow—”

“I’m sorry, sir. My orders are to bring you to the Ad Building at Patrick Air Force Base. I expect they’ll tell you what it’s all about then.”

The priest drew himself up. “Corporal,” he said, “I’m not under your jurisdiction. I suggest you tell me what it is you want.”

“No, sir,” the MP agreed. “You’re not. But my orders are to bring you, and with all due respect, sir, I will.”

The physicotherapist touched Kayman’s shoulder. “Go ahead, Don,” he said. “I have a feeling you’re in pretty high echelons right now.”

Grumbling, Kayman allowed himself to be led out and put into a hoverjeep. The driver was in a hurry. He did not bother with the roads, but aimed the vehicle out toward the surf, judged his time and distance and skittered out onto the surface of the ocean between waves. Then he turned south and gunned it; in ten seconds they were doing at least a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Even on high-lift thrust, with three meters of air between them and the average height of the water, the rolling, twisting chop from the waves corkscrewing under them had Kayman swallowing saliva and looking for a throw-up bag against a rather possible need in no time at all. He tried to get the corporal to slow down. “Sorry, sir”; it was the MP’s favorite expression, it seemed.

But they managed to reach the beach at Patrick before Kayman quite vomited, and back on land the driver slowed to reasonable speeds. Kayman tottered out and stood in the damp, lush night until two more MPs, radio-alerted to his coming, saluted and escorted him inside a white stucco building.

Before ten minutes had elapsed he was stripped to the skin and being searched, and he realized what high echelons he was indeed moving in.

The President’s jet touched down at Patrick at 0400 hours. Kayman had been dozing on a beach chair with a throw rug over his legs; he was shaken courteously awake and led to the boarding steps while refueling tankers were topping off the wing tanks in peculiarly eerie silence. There was no conversation, no banging of bronze nozzles against aluminum filler caps, only the throbbing of the tank truck’s pumps.

Somebody very important was asleep. Kayman wished with all his heart that he was too. He was conducted to a recliner chair, strapped in and left; and even before his WAC hostess had left his side the jet was picking its way to the takeoff strip.

He tried to doze, but while the jet was still climbing to cruise altitude the President’s valet came back and said, “The President will see you now.”

Sitting down and freshly shaved around his goatee, President Deshatine looked like a Gilbert Stuart painting of himself. He was at ease in a leather-backed chair, unfocused eyes peering out the window of the presidential jet while he listened to some sort of tape through earphones. A full coffee cup was steaming next to his elbow, and an empty cup was waiting by the silver pot. Next to the cup was a slim box of purple leather embossed with a silver cross.

Dash didn’t keep him waiting. He looked around, smiled, pulled off the earphones, and said, “Thank you for letting me kidnap you, Father Kayman. Sit down, please. Help yourself to coffee if you’d like it.”

“Thanks.” The valet sprang to pour and retired to stand behind Don Kayman. Kayman didn’t look around; he knew that the valet would be watching every muscle tremor, and so he avoided sudden moves.

The President said, “I’ve been in so many time zones the last forty-eight hours that I’ve forgotten what the real world is like. Munich, Beirut, Rome. I picked up Vern Scanyon in Rome when I heard about the trouble with Roger Torraway. Scared the shit out of me, Father. You almost lost him, didn’t you?”

Kayman said, “I’m an areologist, Mr. President. It was not my responsibility.”

“Cut it out, Father. I’m not assigning blame; there’s plenty to go around, if it comes to that. I want to know what happened.”

“I’m sure General Scanyon could tell you more than I can, Mr. President,” Kayman said stiffly.

“If I wanted to settle for Vern’s version,” the President said patiently, “I wouldn’t have stopped to pick you up. You were there. He wasn’t. He was off in Rome at the Vatican Pacem in Excelsis Conference.”

Kayman took a hasty sip from his coffee cup. “Well, it was close. I think he wasn’t properly briefed for what was going to happen, because there was a flu epidemic, really. We were short of staff. Brad wasn’t there.”

“That has happened before,” the President observed.

Kayman shrugged and did not pick up the lead. “They castrated him, Mr. President. What the sultans used to call a complete castration, penis and all. He doesn’t need it, because there’s so little consumable going into him now that it all gets excreted anally, so it was just a vulnerable spot. There’s no question it had to come off, Mr. President.”

“What about the — what do you call it — prostatectomy? Was that a vulnerable spot too?”

“You really should ask one of the doctors about this, Mr. President,” Kayman said defensively.

“I’m asking you. Scanyon said something about ‘priest’s disease,’ and you’re a priest.”

Kayman grinned. “That’s an old expression, from the days when all priests were celibate. But, yes, I can tell you about it; we talked about it a lot in the seminary. The prostate produces fluid — not much, a few drops a day. If a man doesn’t have ejaculations, it mostly just passes out with the urine, but if he is sexually excited there’s more and it doesn’t all pass out. It backs up, and the congestion leads to trouble.”