Something occurred to him. “Clara? Do me a favor?”

She stopped with her hand on the door. “What’s that, honey?”

“I want to ask you a question.”

“So ask.”

He hesitated, wondering how to do what he wanted to do. “What I want to know,” he said, working it out in his head as he went along, “is, let’s see — oh, yes. What I want to know, Clara, is, when your husband and you are in bed making love, what different ways do you use?”

“Roger!” The brightness of her face suddenly went up half a decibel; he could see the tracing of veins under the skin as hot blood flooded through her veins.

He said, “I’m sorry, Clara. I guess — I guess lying here I get kind of horny. Forget I asked you, will you?”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was a professional’s, no longer a friend’s: “Sure, Roger. It’s okay. You just kind of caught me off-guard. It’s… well, it’s all right, it’s just that you never said anything like that to me before.”

“I know. Sorry.”

But he wasn’t sorry, or not exactly.

He watched the door close behind her and studied the rectangular tracing of light bleeding through from the hall outside. He was careful to keep his mind as calm as he could. He didn’t want to start the monitors ringing alarm bells again.

But he wanted to think about something that was right on the borderline of the danger zone, and that was how come the flush he had tricked onto Clara Bly’s face looked so much like the sudden brightness that had come onto Brad’s when he asked if Brad had been with Dorrie.

We were fully mobilized next morning, checking the circuits, cutting in the stand-bys, insuring that the automatic switchover relays were tuned to intervene at the faintest flicker of a malfunction. Brad came in at 6:00 A.M., weak but clear-headed and ready to work. Weidner and Jon Freeling were only minutes after him, although the primary job for the day was all Brad’s. They could not stay away. Kathleen Doughty was there-of-course, as she had been at every step, not because her duty required it but because her heart did. “Don’t give my boy a bad time,” she growled over her cigarette. “He’s going to need all the help he can get when I start on him next week.”

Sounding every syllable, Brad said, “Kathleen. I will do the goddamned best I can.”

“Yeah. I know you will, Brad.” She stubbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. “I never had any children, and I guess Roger and Willy sort of filled in.”

“Yeah,” grunted Brad, no longer listening. He was not qualified or allowed to touch the 3070 or any of the ancillary units. All he could do was watch while the technicians and the programmers did their job. When the third recheck had gone almost to completion without a glitch he finally left the computer room and took the elevator up three flights to Roger’s room.

At the door he paused to breathe for a moment, then opened the door with a smile. “You’re about ready to plug in, boy,” he said. “Feel up to it?”

The insect eyes turned toward him. Roger’s flat voice said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. What I feel is mostly scared.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to be scared of. Today,” Brad amended hastily, “all we’re going to do is test out themediation.”

The bat wings shuddered and changed position. “Will that kill me?” asked the maddeningly monotone voice.

“Oh, come on, Roger!” Brad was suddenly angry.

“It’s only a question,” ticked the voice.

“It’s a crappy question! Look, I know how you feel—”

“I doubt that.”

Brad stopped, and studied Roger’s uncommunicative face. After a moment he said, “Let me go over it again. What I’m going to do is not kill you, it’s keep you alive. Sure, you’re thinking of what happened to Willy. It isn’t going to happen to you. You’re going to be able to handle what happens — here, and on Mars, where it’s important.”

“It’s important to me here,” said Roger.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. When the system is all go you’ll only see or hear what you need, understand? Or what you want. You’ll have a good deal of volitional control. You’ll be able—”

“I can’t even close my eyes yet, Brad.”

“You will. You’ll be able to use all of it. But you won’t unless we get started on it. Then all this stuff will filter out the unnecessary signals, so you won’t be confused. That’s what killed Willy: confusion.”

Pause, while the brain behind the grotesque face ruminated. What Roger finally said was, “You look lousy, Brad.”

“Sorry about that. I actually don’t feel too good.”

“Are you sure you’re up to this?”

“I’m sure. Hey, Roger. What are you telling me? Do you want to put this off?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I wish I knew, Brad. Get on with it.”

We were all ready by then; the “go” lights had been flashing green for several minutes. Brad shrugged and said morosely to the duty nurse, “Let ‘er rip.”

There were ten hours, then, of phasing in the mediation circuits one by one, testing, adjusting, letting Roger try his new senses on projected Rorschach blots and Maxwell color wheels. For Roger the day raced by. His sense of time was unreliable. It was no longer regulated by everyman’s built-in biological clocks but by his machine components; they slowed his perception of time down when there was no stress situation, speeded it up when needed. “Slow down,” he begged, watching the nurses whiz past him like bullets. And then, when Brad, beginning to shake with fatigue, knocked over a tray of inks and crayons, to Roger the pieces seemed actually to float to the ground. He had no difficulty in catching two bottles of ink and the tray itself before they touched the floor.

When he came to think of it after, he realized that they were the pieces that might have spilled or broken. He had let the wax crayons fall free. In that fraction of a second of choice, he had chosen to catch the objects that needed catching and let the others go, without being aware of what he did.

Brad was highly pleased. “You’re doing great, boy,” he said, holding to the foot of the bed. “I’m going to take off now and get some sleep, but I’ll be in to see you tomorrow after the surgery.”

“Surgery? What surgery?”

“Oh,” said Brad, “just a little touch-up. Nothing compared to what you’ve already had, believe me! From now on,” he said, turning to leave, “you’re just about through being born; now all you have to do is grow up. Practice. Learn to use what you’ve got. The hard parts are all behind you. How are you doing with cutting off vision when you want to?”

“Brad,” rang out the flat voice, louder in amplitude but tonally gray, “what the hell do you want of me? I’m trying!”

“I know,” Brad said, conciliating. “See you tomorrow.”

For the first time that day Roger was left alone. He experimented with his new senses. He could see that they might be very useful to him in survival situations. But they were also very confusing. All the tiny noises of everyday life were magnified. From the hall he could hear Brad talking to Jonny Freeling and the nurses going off duty. He knew that with the ears his mother had cultured for him in her womb he would not have been able to perceive even a whisper; now he could make out the words at will: “ — local anesthetic, but I don’t want to. I want him out. He’s got enough trauma to deal with.” That was Freeling talking to Brad.

The lights were more brilliant than before. He tried to diminish the sensitivity of his vision, but nothing happened. What he really wanted, he thought, was a single Christmas-tree bulb. That was plenty of light; these floods of luminosity were disconcerting. Also, he observed, the lights were maddeningly rhythmical; he could perceive each pulse of the sixty-Hertz current. Inside the fluorescent tubes he observed the writhing of a glowing snake of gas. Incandescent bulbs, on the other hand, were almost dark, except for the bright filaments at the center, which he could examine in detail. There was no sense of eyestrain, even when looking at the brightest of lights.