“Not until I cycle us through his communications net,” said General Scanyon.
“Uh-huh,” said the President slowly, but whatever it had been that he intended to say if the cyborg couldn’t hear him, he didn’t say it. Roger felt a twinge of sympathy. He himself still had to select what he said when the cyborg could hear, and censored what he said even when old Hartnett wasn’t around. It was simply not right that anything that had drunk a beer and fathered a child should be so ugly. All the words that were relevant were invidious.
The cyborg appeared willing to keep up his metronome exercising forever, but someone who had been counting cadence — “one and two, one and two” — came to a halt, and the cyborg stopped too. He stood up, methodically and rather slowly, as though it were a new dance step he was practicing. With a reflex action that no longer had a function, he rubbed the back of a thick-skinned hand against his plastic-smooth and browless forehead.
In the darkness Roger Torraway shifted position so that he could see better, past the famous craggy profile of the President. Even in outline Roger could see that the President was frowning slightly. Roger put his arm around his wife’s waist and thought about what it must be like to be the President of three hundred million Americans in a touchy and treacherous world. The power that flowed through the man in the darkness ahead of him could throw fusion bombs into every hidden corner of the world in ninety minutes’ time. It was power of war, power of punishment, power of money. Presidential power had brought the Man Plus project into being in the first place. Congress had never debated the funding, knew only in the most general terms what was going on: the enabling act had been called “A Bill to Provide Supplementary Space Exploration Facilities at Presidential Discretion.”
General Scanyon said, “Mr. President, Commander Hartnett would be glad to show you some of the capacities of his prostheses. Weight-lifting, high jump. Whatever you like.”
“Oh, he’s worked hard enough for one day,” smiled the President.
“Right. Then we’ll go ahead, sir.” He spoke softly into the communicator microphone and then turned back to the President. “Today’s test is to disassemble and repair a short in the corn unit under field conditions. We’ll estimate seven minutes for the job. A panel of our own shop repairmen, operating with all their tools in their own workshops, averaged about five minutes, so if Commander Hartnett makes it in the optimal time that is pretty good evidence of close motor control.”
“Yes, I see that,” said the President. “What’s he doing now?”
“Just waiting, sir. We’re going to cycle him up to one hundred and fifty millibars so he can hear and talk a little more easily.”
The President said acutely, “I thought you had equipment to talk to him in total vacuum.”
“Well, ah, yes, sir, we do. We’ve had a little trouble with that. At present our basic communication facility at Mars-normal conditions is visual, but we expect to have the voice system functioning shortly.”
“Yes, I hope so,” said the President.
At the level of the tank, thirty meters into the ground under the room they were in, a graduate student functioning as a lab assistant responded to a cue and opened a valve — not to the external atmosphere, but to the tanks of Mars-normal gas that were mixed and ready in the pressure sink. Gradually the pressure built up to a thin, deepening whistle. The adding on of pressure to the 150-millibar level did not benefit Hartnett’s functioning in any way. His redesigned body ignored most environmental factors. It could equally well tolerate Arctic winds, total vacuum or a muggy day at the Earth’s equator, with the air at 1,080 millibars and soggy with damp. One was as comfortable to him as another. Or as uncomfortable, for Hartnett had reported that his new body ached, tweaked and chafed. They could just as easily have opened the valves and let the ambient air rush in, but then it would all have had to be pumped out again for the next test.
At last the whistle stopped and they heard the cyborg’s voice. It was doll-shrill. “Thanksss. Hold eet dere, weel you?” The low pressure played tricks with his diction, especially as he no longer had a proper trachea and larynx to work with. After a month as a cyborg, speaking was becoming strange to him, for he was getting out of the habit of breathing anyway.
From behind Roger, the lab’s expert in vision systems said glumly, “They know those eyes aren’t made to stand sudden pressure changes. Serve them right if one of them cracks on them.” Roger winced, with the fantasied pain of a faceted crystalline eyeball splintering in his socket. His wife laughed.
“Have a seat, Brad,” she said, pulling away from Roger’s arm. Absently Roger made room, staring up at the screen. The cadence-counting voice was saying, “On the tick. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Start sequence.”
The cyborg squatted clumsily over the entry plate of a black-finished metal canister. Without haste he slid a blade-thin screwdriver into a nearly invisible slot, made a precise quarter turn, repeated the movement again in another place and lifted off the plate. The thick fingers sorted carefully through the multicolored spaghetti of the internal wiring, found a charred red-and-white-candy-striped strand, detached it, shortened it to remove the burned insulation, stripped it down by simply pinching it through the nails, and held it to a terminal. The longest part of the operation was waiting for the fluxing iron to heat; that took more than a minute. Then the new joint was brazed, the spaghetti stuffed back inside, the plate replaced, and the cyborg stood up.
“Six minutes, eleven and two-fifths seconds,” reported the counting voice.
The project director led a round of applause. He then stood up and delivered a short address. He told the President that the purpose of the Man Plus project was to so modify a human body that it could survive on the surface of Mars as readily and safely as a normal man could walk across a Kansas wheat field. He reviewed the manned space program from suborbital flight through space station and deep probe. He listed some of the significant data about Mars: land area actually greater than Earth’s, in spite of its smaller diameter, because there were no seas to waste surface. Temperature range, suitable for life — suitably modified, to be sure. Potential wealth, incalculable. The President listened attentively, although, to be sure, he knew every word.
Then he said, “Thanks, General Scanyon. Just let me say one thing.”
He climbed nimbly up to the platform and smiled thoughtfully down at the scientists. “When I was a boy,” he began, “the world was simpler. The big problem was how to help the emerging free nations of Earth enter the community of civilized countries. Those were the Iron Curtain days. It was them on their side, locked in, quarantined. And all the rest of us on ours.
“Well,” he went on, “things have changed. The Free World has had bad times. Once you get off our own North American continent, what have you got? Collectivist dictatorships everywhere you look, bar one or two holdouts like Sweden and Israel. I’m not here to rake up ancient history. What’s done is done, and there’s no point blaming anybody. Everybody knows who lost China and gave Cuba to the other side. We know what administration let England and Pakistan fall. We don’t have to talk about those things. We’re just looking toward the future.
“And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said earnestly, “the future of the free human race lies with you. Maybe we’ve had some setbacks here on our own planet. That’s over and done with. We can look out into space. We look, and what do we see? We see another Earth. The planet Mars. As the distinguished director of your project, General Scanyon, just said, it’s a bigger planet than the one we were born on, in the ways that are important. And it can be ours.