Dorrie laughed musically, startling hen husband. (She had been complaining with vicious anger that her nail polish had been ruined.) “They certainly did, Mr. President. Just like my manicurist,” she called.
“Sorry about that. They say that’s to make sure that you don’t have any secret biochemical poisons to scratch me with when we shake hands. Well, you got to do what the man says, I guess. Anyway” — he chuckled — “if you think it’s a nuisance for you pretty ladies, you should see how my old cat acts when they do it to her. Good thing she didn’t really have poison on her claws last time they did it. She scored on three Secret Service men, my nephew and two of her own kittens before she was through.” He laughed, and Roger was a little surprised to find that he and Donrie and the rest were joining in.
“Anyway,” said the President, coming to the point, “I’m grateful for your courtesy. And I am one thousand times more grateful for the way you’re pushing the Man Plus project through. I don’t have to tell you what it means to the Free World. There’s Mars out there, the only piece of real estate around that’s worth having, apart from the one we’re all standing on right now. By the end of this decade it’s going to belong to somebody. There are only two choices. It will belong to them, or it will belong to us. And I want it to be us. You people are the ones that are going to make sure that happens, because you’re going to give us the Man Plus that will live on Mars. I want to thank you deeply and sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, in the name of every living human being in the Free World democratic lands, for making this dream possible. And now,” he said, smothering an attempt at a round of polite applause, “I think it’s time I stopped talking and started listening. I want to see what’s happening with our Man Plus. General Scanyon, it’s all yours.”
“Right, Mr. President.”
Vern Scanyon was director of the laboratory division of the Grissom Memorial Institute of Space Medicine. He was also a retired two-star general and acted it. He checked his watch, glanced at his executive assistant (he sometimes called him his executive officer) for confirmation and said, “We have a few minutes before Commander Hartnett finishes his warm-up tests. Suppose we look in on him on the closed circuit for a minute. Then I’ll try to tell you what’s going to happen today.”
The room darkened.
A TV projection screen lighted up behind the platform. There was a scrape as one of the “waiters” moved a chair for the President to sit in. He muttered something. The chair was moved back, and the President nodded, shadowy in the flicker from the projection screen, and looked up.
The screen showed a man.
He did not look like a man. His name was Will Hartnett. He was an astronaut, a Democrat, a Methodist, a husband, a father, an amateur tympanist, a beautifully smooth ballroom dancer; but to the eye he was none of those things. To the eye he was a monster.
He did not look human at all. His eyes were glowing, red-faceted globes. His nostrils flared in flesh folds, like the snout of a star-nosed mole. His skin was artificial; its color was normal heavy sun tan, but its texture was that of a rhinoceros’s hide. Nothing that could be seen about him was of the appearance he had been born with. Eyes, ears, lungs, nose, mouth, circulatory system, perceptual centers, heart, skin — all had been replaced or augmented. The changes that were visible were only the iceberg’s tip. What had been done inside him was far more complex and far more important. He had been rebuilt for the single purpose of fitting him to stay alive, without external artificial aids, on the surface of the planet Mars.
He was a cyborg — a cybernetic organism. He was part man and part machine, the two disparate sections fused together so that even Will Hartnett, looking at himself in the mirror on the occasions when he was permitted to see a mirror, did not know what of him was him and what had been added.
In spite of the fact that nearly everyone in the room had actually played a part in creating the cyborg, in spite of the familiarity all of them had had with his photos, TV image and his person itself, there was a muffled gasp. As the TV camera caught him he was doing endless effortless push-ups. The view was from a yard or so from the top of his strangely formed head, and as Hartnett locked himself up on his arms his eyes came level with the camera, glinting from the facets that gave him multiple scanning of the environment.
He looked very strange. Roger, remembering the old movies of his childhood hours before the TV, thought that his good old buddy looked a lot weirder than any animated carrot or magnified beetle on the horror shows. Hartnett had been born in Danbury, Connecticut. Every visible artifact he wore had been manufactured in California, Oklahoma, Alabama or New York. But none of it looked human or even terrestrial. He looked Martian.
In the sense that form follows function, Martian he was. He was shaped for Mars. In a sense, too, he was there already. Grissom Labs had the finest Mars-normal tanks in the world, and Hartnett’s push-ups were on iron oxide sands, in a pressure chamber where the weight of gas had been dropped to ten millibars, only 1 percent of the thrust on the outside of the double glass walls. The temperature of the sparse gas molecules around him was held at forty-five degrees below zero, Celsius. Batteries of high-ultraviolet lamps flooded the scene with the exact spectrum of sunlight on a Martian winter day.
If the place where Hartnett was was not truly Mars, it was close enough to fool even a Martian — if there had ever been such things as Martians — in every respect but one. In all but that one respect, a Ras Thavas or a Wellsian mollusk might have emerged from sleep, looked about him and decided that he was indeed on Mars, on a late fall day in the middle latitudes, shortly after sunrise.
The one anomaly simply could not be helped. He was subject to standard Earth gravity instead of the fractional attraction that would be proper for the surface of Mars. The engineers had gone so far as to calculate the cost of flying the entire Mars-normal tank in a jet conversion, dropping it along a calculated parabola to simulate, at least for ten or twenty minutes at a time, the proper Martian weights. They had decided against it on the grounds of cost, and pondering, they had estimated, allowed for and finally dismissed the effects of the one anomaly.
The one thing no one feared might go wrong with Hartnett’s new body was that it might be too weak for any stresses that might be placed on it. He was already lifting five-hundred-pound weights. When he really reached Mars, he would be able to carry more than half a ton.
In a sense Hartnett on Earth was more hideous than he would be on Mars, because his telemetry equipment was as monstrous as himself. Pulse, temperature and skin resistance sensor pads clung to his shoulders and head. Probes reached under the tough artificial skin to measure his internal flows and resistances. Transmitter antennae fanned out like a peasant’s broom from his backpack. Everything that was going on in his system was being continually measured, encoded and transmitted to the 100-meter-per-second broad-band recording tapes.
The President was whispering something. Roger Torraway found himself leaning forward to catch the end of it: “…he hear what we say in here?”
“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.