“I know what I look like,” he said.
“It’s still you, though, isn’t it?” Dorrie said to the wall. “Although I don’t remember you ever climbing the outside of a building to get into my bed before.”
“It’s easy,” he said, taking a chance on what was almost an attempt at lightness.
“Well” — she paused for a sip of tea — “tell me. What’s this about?”
“I wanted to see you, Dorrie.”
“You did see me. On the phone.”
“I didn’t want it to be on the phone. I wanted to be in the same room with you.” He wanted even more than that to touch her, to reach out to the nape of her neck and press and caress the tendons into relaxing, but he did not quite dare that. Instead he reached down and ignited the gas flame in the fireplace, not so much for warmth as for a little light to help Dorrie. And for cheerfulness.
“We aren’t supposed to do that, Roger. There’s a thousand-dollar fine—”
He laughed. “Not for you and me, Dorrie. Anybody gives you any trouble, you call up Dash and say I said it was all right.”
His wife took a cigarette from the box on the end table and lit it. “Roger, dear,” she said slowly, “I’m not used to all this. I don’t just mean the way you look. I understand about that. It’s hard, but at least I knew what it was going to be before it happened. Even if I didn’t think it would be you. But I’m not used to your being so — I don’t know, important.”
“I’m not used to it either, Dorrie.” He thought back to the TV reporters and the cheering crowds when he returned to Earth after rescuing the Russians. “It’s different now, I feel as if I’m carrying something on my back — the world, maybe.”
“Dash says that’s exactly what you’re doing. Half of what he says is crap, but I don’t think that part is. You’re a pretty significant man, Roger. You were always a famous one. Maybe that’s why I married you. But that was like being a rock star, you know? It was exciting, but you could always walk away from it if you got tired of it. This I don’t think you can walk away from.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Anyway,” she said, “you’re here, and they’re probably going crazy at the project.”
“I can handle that.”
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “I guess you can. What shall we talk about?”
“Brad,” he said. He had not intended it. The word came out of his artificial larynx, shaped by his restructured lips, with no intervention by his conscious mind.
He could feel her stiffening up. “What about Brad?” she asked.
“Your sleeping with him, that’s what about Brad,” he said. The back of her neck was glowing dully now, and he knew that if he could see her face it would display the revealing tracery of veins. The dancing gas flames from the fireplace made an attractive spectrum of colors on her dark hair; he watched the play appreciatively, as though it did not matter what he was saying to his wife, or she to him.
She said, “Roger, I really don’t know how to deal with you. Are you angry with me?”
He watched the dancing colors silently.
“After all, Roger, we talked this out years ago. You have had affairs, and so have I. We agreed they didn’t mean anything.”
“They mean something when they hurt.” He willed his vision to stop, and welcomed the darkness as an aid to thought. “The others were different,” he said.
“Different how?” She was angry now.
“Different because we talked them over,” he said doggedly. “When I was in Algiers and you couldn’t stand the climate, that was one thing. What you did back here in Tonka and what I did in Algiers didn’t affect you and me. When I was in orbit—”
“I never slept with anybody else while you were in orbit!”
“I know that, Dorrie. I thought that was kind of you. I really did, because it wouldn’t have been fair, would it? I mean, my own opportunities were pretty limited. Old Yuli Bronin wasn’t my type. But now it’s different. It’s like I was in orbit again, only worse. I don’t even have Yuli! I not only don’t have a girl friend, I don’t have the equipment to do anything about it if I did.”
She said wretchedly, “I know all that. What can I tell you?”
“You can tell me you’ll be a good wife to me!” he roared.
That frightened her; he had forgotten what his voice could sound like. She began to cry.
He reached out to touch her and then let his hand fall. What was the use?
Oh, Christ, he thought. What a mess! He took consolation only in that this interview had been here, in the privacy of their own home, quite unplanned and secret. It would have been unbearable in the presence of anyone else; but naturally we had monitored every word.
Twelve
Two Simulations and a Reality
Copper-fingered Roger had blown more than a fuse. He had shorted a whole box of circuit breakers. It took twenty minutes to get the lights on again.
Fortunately the 3070 had stand-by power for its memory, so the cores were not wiped. The computations that were in process were compromised. All of them would have to be done over again. The automatic surveillance was out of service until long after Roger was gone.
One of the first ones to know what had happened was Sulie Carpenter, catching a cat nap in the office next to the computer room, waiting for Roger’s simulation to finish. It didn’t finish. The alarm bells signifying interruption of the information being processed woke her. The bright fluorescent rod-lights were out, and only the red incandescents gave a dim, despairing glow.
Her first thought was her precious simulation. She spent twenty minutes with the programmers, studying the partial printout, hoping that it would be all right, before she gave up and charged out to Vern Scanyon’s office. That was when she found out that Roger had run off.
Power was back by then; it had come on while she was taking the fire stairs two at a time. Scanyon was already on the phone, ordering the people he wanted to blame in for an emergency conference. Clara Bly was the one who told Sulie about Roger; one by one, as the others entered the room, they were brought up to date. Don Kayman was the only major figure who was out of the project; they located him watching television in his clerical condominium. Kathleen Doughty came up from the physiotherapy room in the basement, dragging Brad with her, all pink-skinned and damp; he had been trying to substitute an hour in the sauna for a night’s sleep. Freeling was at Merritt Island, but not needed particularly; half a dozen others came in and slumped, dispiritedly or worriedly, into the leather chairs around the conference table.
Scanyon had already ordered an Air Force spottercopter into the air, in a search pattern all around the project. Its TV cameras were sweeping the freeway, the access roads, the parking lots, the fields and prairie, and displaying what they saw on the wall TV at the end of the room. The Tonka police force had been alerted to watch for a strange devil-like creature running around at seventy kilometers an hour, which had led to trouble for the Tonka desk sergeant. He made a bad mistake. He asked the project security officer if he had been drinking. Ten seconds later, with his head filled with visions of pounding a beat in Kiska, the sergeant was on the police radio to all vehicles and foot patrolmen. The orders for the police were not to arrest Roger, not even to approach him. They were only to find him.
What Scanyon wanted was someone to blame. “I hold you responsible, Dr. Ramez,” he barked at the staff shrink. “You and Major Carpenter. How could you let Torraway get into this sort of action without advance warning?”
Ramez said placatingly, “General, I told you Roger was unstable with regard to his wife. That’s why I asked for someone like Sulie. He needed another object to fixate on, someone directly connected with the project—”