After he had finished his day’s run in the Mars-normal tank, Sulie raced him back to his room, laughing girl against thudding monster down the wide lab corridors; he won easily, of course. They chatted for a while and then he sent her away.
Nine days to liftoff.
It was less than that, really. He would be flown to Merritt Island three days before the launch, and his last day in Tonka would be devoted to fitting the backpack computer and retuning some of his sensorium for the special Martian conditions. So he had six — no, five — days.
And he had not seen Dorrie for weeks.
He looked at himself in the mirror he had demanded they instalclass="underline" insect eyes, bat wings, dully gleaming flesh. He amused himself by letting his visual interpretations flow, from bat to giant fly to demon… to himself, as he remembered himself, pleasant-faced and youthful.
If only Dorrie had a computer to mediate her sight! If only she could see him as he had been! He swore he would not call her; he could not force her to look at the comic-strip contraption that was her husband.
Having sworn, he picked up the phone and dialed her number.
It was an impulse that could not be denied. He waited. His accordion-pleated time sense prolonged the interval, so that it was an eternity before the raster blaze from the screen and the buzz from the speaker sounded the first ring.
Then time betrayed him again. It seemed forever until the second ring. Then it came, and lasted an eternity, and was over.
She did not answer.
Roger, who was the sort of person who counted things, knew that most persons did not respond until the third ring. Dorrie, however, was always eager to know who the phone was bringing into her life. From a sound sleep or out of the bathtub, she seldom let it ring past twice.
At length the third ring came, and still no reply.
Roger began to hurt.
He controlled it as best he could, unwilling to sound the alarms on the telemetry. He could not stop it entirely. She was out, he thought. Her husband had turned into a monster and she was not at home sympathizing or worrying; she was shopping or visiting a friend or seeing a flick.
Or with a man.
What man? Brad, he thought. It wouldn’t be impossible; he had left Brad down at the tank twenty-five minutes ago by the clock. Time enough for them to rendezvous somewhere. Even time enough for Brad to get to the Torraway home. Perhaps she was not out at all. Perhaps—
Fourth ring—
Perhaps they were there, the two of them, naked and coupling on the floor in front of the phone. She would be saying, “Go in the other room, honey, I want to see who it is.” And he would say, laughing, “No, let’s answer this way.” And she would say—
Fifth ring — and the raster blossomed into the colors of Dorrie’s face. Her voice said, “Hello?”
Quick as sound Roger’s fist shot out and covered the lens. “Dorrie,” he said. His voice sounded flat and harsh again to him. “How are you?”
“Roger!” she cried. The pleasure in her voice sounded very real. “Oh, honey, I’m so glad to hear you! How are you feeling?”
His voice automatically said, “Fine.” It went on, without the need of help from his conscious mind, to correct the statement, to say what had been happening to him, cataloging the tests and the exercises. At the same time he was staring into the screen with every sense on high gain.
She looked — what? Tired? Looking tired was confirmation of his fears. She was carousing with Brad every night, heedless of her husband in pain and clownish humiliation. Rested and cheerful? Looking rested and cheerful was confirmation, too. It meant she was relaxing, enjoying herself — heedless of her husband’s torment.
There was really nothing wrong with Torraway’s brain, in that it had a lifelong habit of analysis and logic. It did not fail to occur to him that the game he was playing with himself was called “You Lose.” Everything was evidence of Dorrie’s guilt. Yet no matter how carefully he scanned her image, with what multiplied senses, she didn’t look hostile or cloyingly overaffectionate. She only looked like Dorrie.
When he thought that he felt a burst of tenderness that made his voice break. “I’ve missed you, honey,” he said flatly. The only thing that spoke of feelings was that one syllable was retarded a fraction of a second: “Hon… ee.”
“And I’ve missed you. I’ve kept myself busy, dear,” she chattered. “I’ve been painting your den. It’s a surprise, but of course it’s going to be such a long time till you see it that — Well, it’s going to be peach. With buttercup woodwork and I think maybe a pale-blue ceiling. You like? I was going to make it all ochre and brown, you know, fall colors, Mars colors, to celebrate. But 1 thought by the time you got back you’d be pretty sick of Mars colors!” And quickly, without pause: “When am I going to see you?” The change in her voice caught him by surprise.
“Well, I look pretty awful,” he said.
“I know what you look like. Dear God, Roger, do you think Midge and Brenda and Callie and I haven’t talked this over for the last two years? Ever since the program started. We’ve seen the sketches. We’ve seen the photos of the mockups. And we’ve seen the pictures of Willy.”
“I’m not exactly like Willy any more. They’ve changed things—”
“And I know about that too, Roger. Brad told me all about it. I’d like to see you.”
At that moment his wife’s face changed without warning to a witch’s. The crochet hook she held became a peasant twig broom. “You’ve been seeing Brad?”
Was there a microsecond pause before she answered? “I suppose he shouldn’t have told me,” she said, “because of security and all. But I wanted him to. It’s not that bad, honey. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
For a moment Roger wanted to snatch his hand away from the lens and let himself be seen, but he was becoming confused, feeling strange. He could not interpret his feelings. Was it vertigo? Emotion? Some malfunction in his machine half? He knew it would be only moments until Sulie or Don Kayman or someone came in, warned by the telltale telemetry outside. He tried to control himself.
“Maybe later,” he said without conviction. “I — I think I’d better hang up now, Dorrie.”
Behind her their familiar living room was changing too. The depth of field of the phone lens was not very good; even to his machine senses the rest of the room was blurred. Was that a man standing in the shadows? Was it wearing a Marine officer’s shirt? Would Brad be doing that?
“I have to hang up now,” he said, and did.
Clara Bly came in, full of questions and concern. He shook his head at her without speaking.
There were no lachrymeal ducts in his new eyes, so of course he could not cry. Even that relief was denied him.
Eleven
Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope
Our trendline projections had shown that the time was right to let the world know about Roger Torraway, warts and all. So it had all gone out, and every TV screen in the world had seen Roger on point in a dozen perfect fouettes, in between the close-ups of the starved dead in Pakistan and the fires in Chicago.
It had the effect of making Dorrie a celebrity. Roger’s call had upset her. Not as much as the note from Brad saying that he wouldn’t be able to see her again, not nearly as much as the forty-five minutes the President had spent with her impressing on her what would happen if she messed up his pet astronaut. Certainly not as much as the knowledge that she was being followed, her telephone tapped, her home certainly bugged. But she hadn’t known how to deal with Roger. She suspected she never would, and did not mind at all that in a few days he would be launched into space, where there would be little necessity for her to worry about their relationship for at least a year and a half.