“So I noticed. All right, go ahead.”
But it was tedious and remained tedious. These were not the kinds of things that were calculated to keep one’s mind busy. They might be important, but they were also dull. After an interminable stretch of simple geometric figures of light, the intensity reduced so that there was less and less spill of reflection to illuminate the rest of the room, they began feeding him sounds: clicks, oscillator beeps, a chime, a hiss of white noise.
In the room outside the shifts kept changing. They stopped only when the telemetry indicated Roger needed sleep or food or a bedpan. None of those needs were frequent. Roger began to be able to tell who was on duty from the tiniest of signs: the faintly mocking note in Brad’s voice that was only there when Kathleen Doughty was in the room, the slower, somehow more affectionate chirping of the sound tapes when Sulie Carpenter was monitoring the responses. He discovered that his time sense was not the same as that of those outside, or of “reality,” whatever that was. “That’s to be expected, Rog,” said the weary voice of Brad when he reported it. “If you work at it, you’ll find you can exercise volitional control over that. You can count out seconds like a metronome if you want to. Or move faster or slower, depending on what’s needed.”
“How do I do that?” Roger demanded.
“Hell, man!” Brad flared. “It’s your body, learn to use it.” Then, apologetically, “The same way you learned to block off vision. Experiment till you figure it out. Now pay attention; I’m going to play you a Bach partita.”
Somehow the time passed.
But not easily and not quickly. There were long periods when Roger’s altered time sense contrarily dragged his tedium out, times when, against his will, he found himself thinking again about Dorrie. The lift that Dash’s visit had given him, the pleasant concern and affection from Sulie Carpenter — these were good things; but they did not last forever. Dorrie was a reality of his reverie, and when his mind was empty enough to wander it was to Dorrie that it wandered. Dorrie and their joyous early years together. Dorrie, and the terrible knowledge that he was no longer enough of a man to gratify her sexual needs. Dorrie and Brad…
Kathleen Doughty’s voice snapped, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, Roger, but it’s screwing up your vital signs! Cut it out.”
“All right,” he grumbled. He put Dorrie out of his mind. He thought of Kathleen’s rancorous, affectionate voice, of what the President had said, of Sulie Carpenter. He made himself tranquil.
As a reward they showed him a slide of a bunch of violets, in full color.
Ten
The Batman’s Entrechats
Suddenly, amazingly, there were only nine days left.
Outside the clerical condominium Father Kayman shivered in the cold, waiting for his ride to the project. The fuel shortage had worsened a great deal in the past two weeks, with the fighting in the Middle East and the Scottish Freedom Fighters blowing up the North Sea pipelines. The project itself had overriding priorities for whatever it needed, even though some of the missile silos had not enough fuel for topping off their birds; but all the staff had been urged to turn off lights, share rides, turn down their home thermostats, watch less TV. An early snowstorm had dusted the Oklahoma prairies, and outside the condominium a seminary student was sleepily pushing the snow off the walks. There was not much of it, and, Kayman thought, it was not particularly nice-looking. Was it his imagination, or was it tattletale gray? Could the ash from the blazing California and Oregon forests have soiled the snow fifteen hundred miles away?
Brad beeped his horn, and Kayman jumped. “Sorry,” Kayman said, getting in and closing the door. “Say, shouldn’t we take my car next time? Uses a lot less fuel than this thing of yours.”
Brad shrugged morosely and peered into his rear-view mirror. Another hovercar, this one a light, fast sports job, was swinging around the corner after them. “I drive for two anyway,” he said. “That’s the same one that was tailing me on Tuesday. They’re getting sloppy. Or else they want to make sure I know I’m being followed.”
Kayman looked over his shoulder. The following car was certainly taking no pains to be inconspicuous. “Do you know who it is, Brad?”
“Is there any doubt?”
Kayman didn’t answer. Actually, there wasn’t. The President had made clear to Brad that he was not under any circumstances to fool around with the monster’s wife, in a half-hour interview of which Brad vividly recalled every painful second. The shadowing had begun immediately thereafter, to make sure Brad didn’t forget.
But it was not a subject that Kayman wanted to discuss with Brad. He turned on the radio, tuned to a news broadcast. They listened for a few minutes of censored but still overpowering disaster until Brad wordlessly reached out and snapped it off. Then they rode in silence, under the leaden sky, until they reached the great white cube of the project, alone on the desolate prairie.
Inside there was nothing gray: the lights were strong and glaring; the faces were tired, sometimes concerned, but they were alive. In here at least, Kayman thought, there was a sense of accomplishment and purpose. The project was right on schedule.
And in nine days the Mars craft would be launched, and he himself would be on it.
Kayman was not afraid to go. He had shaped his life toward it, from the first days in the seminary when he had realized that he could serve his God in more places than a pulpit and was encouraged by his father superior to continue his interest in all heavens, whether astrophysical or theological. Nevertheless, it was a weighty thought.
He felt unready. He felt the world was unready for this venture. It all seemed so curiously impromptu, in spite of the eternities of work that they had put in, himself included. Even the crew was not finally decided. Roger would go; he was the raison d’etre of the whole project, of course. Kayman would go, that had been decided firmly. But the two pilots were still only provisional. Kayman had met them both and liked them. They were among NASA’s best, and one had flown with Roger in a shuttle mission eight years before. But there were fifteen others on the short list of eligibles — Kayman did not even know all the names, only that there were a lot of them. Vern Scanyon and the director general of NASA had flown to reason with the President in person, urging him to confirm their choices; but Dash, for Dash’s own reasons, had reserved the right of final decision to himself, and was withholding his hand.
The one thing that seemed fully ready for the venture was the link in the chain that had once seemed most doubtful, Roger himself.
The training had gone beautifully. Roger was fully mobile now, all over the project building, commuting from the room he still kept as “home” to the Mars-normal tank, to the test facilities, to any place he cared to go. The whole project was used to seeing the tall black-winged creature loping down a hall, the huge, faceted eyes recognizing a face and the flat voice calling a cheery greeting. The last week and more had been all Kathleen Doughty’s. His sensorium appeared under perfect control; now it was time to learn to exploit all the resources of his musculature. So she had brought in a blind man, a ballet dancer and a former paraplegic, and as Roger began to expand his horizons they took over his tutorial tasks. The ballet dancer was past stardom now, but he had known it, and as a child he had studied with Nureyev and Dolin. The blind man was no longer blind. He had no eyes, but his optic system had been replaced with sensors very like Roger’s own, and the two of them compared notes over subtle hues and tricks of manipulating the parameters of their vision. The paraplegic, who now moved on motorized limbs that were precursors of Roger’s, had had a year to learn to use them, and he and Roger took ballet classes together.