Don Kayman got the message from a Tonka police patrol car. It swooshed up behind him, lights flashing and siren screaming, and pulled him over to order him to turn around and go back to Roger’s apartment.
He knocked on the door with some trepidation, unsure of what he would find. And when the door opened, with Roger’s gleaming eyes peering out from behind it, Kayman whispered a quick Hail Mary as he tried to look past Roger into the apartment — for what? For the dismembered body of Dorrie Torraway? For a shambles of destruction? But all he saw was Dorrie herself, huddled in a wing chair and obviously weeping. The sight almost pleased him, since he had been prepared for so much worse.
Roger came along with no argument. “Goodbye, Dorrie,” he said, and did not wait for an answer. He had trouble fitting himself into Don Kayman’s little car, but his wings folded down. By pushing the reclining seat back as far as it would go he was able to manage, in a cramped and precarious position that would have been hopelessly uncomfortable for any normal human being. Roger, of course, was not a normal human being. His muscular system was content with prolonged overloads in almost any configuration it could bend into at all.
They were silent until they were almost at the project. Then Don Kayman cleared his throat. “You had us worried.”
“I thought I would,” said the flat cyborg voice. The wings stirred restlessly, writhing against each other like a rubbing of hands. “I wanted to see her, Don. It was important to me.”
“I can understand that.” Kayman turned into the broad, empty parking lot. “Well?” he probed. “Are things all right?”
The cyborg mask turned toward him. The great compound eyes gleamed like faceted ebony, without expression, as Roger said: “You’re a jerk, Father Kayman, sir. How all right can they be?”
Sulie Carpenter thought wistfully of sleep, as she might think of a vacation on the French Riviera. They were equally out of the question at that moment. She took two caps of amphetamines and a B-l2 injection, self-administered into the places in her arm she had learned to locate long ago.
The simulation of Roger’s reactions had been compromised by the power failure, so she did it over again from punch-in to readout. We were content that this should be so. It gave us a chance to make a few corrections.
While she was waiting she took a long, hot soak in a hydrotherapy tub, and when the simulation had run she studied it carefully. She had taught herself to read the cryptic capital letters and integers, to guard against programming errors, but this time she spared the hardware no time and went at once to the plain-language readout at the end. She was very good at her job.
That job did not happen to be ward nurse. Sulie Carpenter had been one of the first of the aerospace female doctors. She had her degree in medicine, had specialized in psychotherapy, all the myriad eclectic disciplines of it, and had gone into the space program because nothing on Earth seemed really worth doing to her. After completing astronaut training she had come to wonder if there was anything in space that was worth doing either. Research had seemed at least abstractly worth while, so she had applied for work with the California study teams and got it. There had been a fair number of men in her life, one or two of them important to it. None of them had worked out. That much of what she had told Roger had been true; and after the most recent bruising failure she had contracted her area of interest until, she told herself, she grew up enough to know what she wanted from a man. And there she stayed, sidetracked in a loop off the main current of human affairs, until we turned up her card out of all the hundreds of thousands of punched cards, to fill Roger’s need.
When her orders came, wholly without warning, they were directly from the President himself. There was no way she could have refused the assignment. Actually she had no desire to. She welcomed the change. Mother-henning a hurting human being stroked the feelgood centers of her personality; the importance of the job was clear to her, because if there was any faith in her it was in the Mars project; and she was aware of her competence. Of competence she had a great deal. We rated her very high, a major piece in the game we were playing for the survival of the race.
When she had finished with Roger’s simulation it was nearly four in the morning.
She slept a couple of hours in a borrowed bed in the nurses’ quarters. Then she showered, dressed and put her green contact lenses in. She was not happy with that particular aspect of her job, she reflected on the way to Roger’s room. The dyed hair and the change of eye color were deceptions; she did not like to deceive. One day she would like to leave out the contacts and let her hair go back to its muddy blond — oh, maybe helped out a little with a rinse, to be sure; she did not object to artifice, only to pretending to be something she wasn’t.
But when she entered Roger’s room she was smiling. “Lovely to see you back. We missed you. How was it, running around on your own?”
“Not bad at all,” said the flat voice. Roger was standing by the window, staring out at the blobs of tumbleweed lumping and bouncing across the parking lot. He turned to her. “You know, it’s all true, what you said. What I’ve got now isn’t just different, it’s better.”
She resisted the desire to reinforce what he had said, and only smiled as she began to strip his bed. “I was worried about sex,” he went on. “But you know what, Sulie? It’s like being told I can’t have any caviar for the next couple of years. I don’t like caviar. And when you come right down to it, I don’t want sex right now. I suppose you punched that into the computer? ‘Cut down sex drive, increase euphoria’? Anyway, it finally penetrated my little brain that I was just making trouble for myself, worrying about whether I could get along without something I really didn’t want. It’s a reflection of what I think other people think I should want.”
“Acculturation,” she supplied.
“No doubt,” he said, “Listen, I want to do something for you.”
He picked up the guitar, propped himself against the window frame with one heel against the sill, and settled the instrument across his knee. His wings quietly rearranged themselves over his head as he began to play.
Sulie was startled. He was not merely playing; he was singing. Singing? No, it was a sound more like a man whistling through his teeth, faint but pure. His fingers on the guitar strummed and plucked an accompaniment while the keening whistle from his lips flowed through the melody of a tune she had never heard before.
When he had finished she demanded, “What was that?”
“It’s a Paganini sonata for guitar and violin,” he said proudly. “Clara gave me the record.”
“I didn’t know you could do that. Humming, I mean — or whatever it was.”
“I didn’t either until I tried. I can’t get enough volume for the violin part, of course. And I can’t keep the guitar sound low enough to balance it, but it didn’t sound bad, did it?”
“Roger,” she said, meaning it, “I’m impressed.”
He looked up at her and impressed her again by managing a smile. He said, “I bet you didn’t know I could do that, either. I didn’t know it myself till I tried.”
At the meeting Sulie said flatly, “He’s ready, General.”
Scanyon had managed enough sleep to look rested, and enough of something else, some inner resource or whatever, to look less harried. “You’re sure, Major Carpenter?”
She nodded her head. “He’ll never be readier.” She hesitated. Vern Scanyon, reading her expression, waited for the amendment. “The problem, as I see it, is that he’s right to go now. All his systems are up to operating level. He’s worked through his thing with his wife. He’s ready. The longer he stays around here, the more chance that she’ll do something to upset his balance.”