Sixteen

On the Perception of Perils

Vern Scanyon parked his car any which way across the painted yellow lines that marked his own place, jumped out and held his thumb against the elevator button. He had been awake less than forty minutes, but he was not at all sleepy. What he was, was angry and apprehensive. The President’s appointments secretary had waked him out of a sound sleep with a phone call to say that the President had diverted his flight to stop at Tonka — “to discuss the problems of the perceptual system of Commander Torraway.” To kick ass, more accurately. Scanyon had not known anything about Roger’s sudden attack on Don Kayman until he was in his car, hastening to the project building to meet the President.

“Morning, Vern.” Jonny Freeling looked scared and angry, too. Scanyon brushed past him into his own office.

“Come on in,” he barked. “Now, in words of one syllable. What happened?”

Freeling said resentfully, “It’s not my responsibility to—”

“Freeling.”

“Roger’s systems overreacted a little. Apparently Kayman moved suddenly, and the simulations systems translated it into a threat; Roger defended himself and pushed Kayman away.”

Scanyon stared.

“Broke his arm,” Freeling amended. “It was only a simple fracture, General. No complications. It’s splinted, it’ll heal perfectly — he just has to get by with one functioning arm for a while. It’s a pity for Don Kayman, of course. He won’t be very comfortable—”

“Fuck Kayman! Why didn’t he know how to act around Roger?”

“Well, he did know. He found something that he thought was indigenous life! That was pretty exciting. All he wanted to do was show it to Roger.”

“Life?” Scanyon’s eyes looked more hopeful.

“Some sort of plant, they think.”

“Can’t they tell?”

“Well, Roger seems to have knocked it out of Kayman’s hand. Brad went looking for it afterward, but he couldn’t find it.”

“Jesus,” Scanyon snorted. “Freeling, tell me one thing. What kind of incompetents have we got working for us?” It was not a question that had a proper answer, and Scanyon didn’t wait for one. “In about twenty minutes,” he said, “the President of the United States is going to come through that door and he’s going to want to know line by line what happened and why. I don’t know what he’s going to ask, but whatever it is there’s one answer I don’t want to give him, and that’s ‘I don’t know.’ So tell me, Freeling. Tell me all over again what happened, why it went wrong, why we didn’t think it would go wrong and how we can be damn sure it isn’t going to go wrong again.” It took a little more than twenty minutes, but then they had more; the President’s plane touched down late, and by the time Dash arrived Scanyon was as ready as he knew how to be. Even ready for the fury in the President’s face.

“Scanyon,” Dash snapped at once, “I warned you, no more surprises. This time is one too many, and I think I’m going to have to have your ass.”

“You can’t put a man on Mars without risks, Mr. President!”

Dash stared eye to eye for a moment, then said, “Maybe. What’s the priest’s condition?”

“He’s got a broken radius, but it’s going to be all right. There’s something more important than that. He thinks he found life on Mars, Mr. President!”

Dash shook his head. “I know, some kind of plant. But he managed to lose it.”

“For the moment. Kayman’s a good man. If he said he found something important, he did. He’ll find it again.”

“I certainly hope so, Vern. Don’t slide away from this. Why did this thing happen?”

“A slight overcontrol of his perceptual systems. That’s it, Mr. President, and that’s all it is. In order to make him respond quickly and positively, we had to build in some simulation features. To get his attention to priority messages, he sees his wife speaking to him. To get him to react to danger, he sees something frightening. That way his head can keep up with the reflexes we built into his body. Otherwise he’d go crazy.”

“Breaking the priest’s arm wasn’t crazy?”

“No! It was an accident. When Kayman jumped at him he interpreted it as an actual attack of some kind. He responded. Well, Mr. President, in this case it was wrong, and it cost us a broken arm; but suppose there had been a real threat? Any kind of a threat! He would have met it. Whatever it was! He’s invulnerable, Mr. President. Nothing can ever catch him offguard.”

“Yeah,” said the President, and after a moment, “maybe so.” He stared over Scanyon’s head for a moment and said, “What about this other crap?”

“Which crap, Mr. President?”

Dash shrugged irritably. “As I understand it, there’s something wrong with all our computer projections, especially the polls we took.”

Alarm bells went off in Scanyon’s head. He said reluctantly, “Mr. President, there’s a lot of paper on my desk I haven’t got through yet. You know I’ve been traveling a lot—”

“Scanyon,” said the President, “I’m going now. Before you do anything else, I want you to take a look through the papers on your desk and find that paper and read it. Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, I want you in my office, and then I want to know what’s happening, specifically three things. First, I want to hear that Kayman’s all right. Second, I want that living thing found. Third, I want to know the score on the computer projections, and it better be all right. So long, Scanyon. I know it’s only five in the morning, but don’t go back to bed.”

By then we could have reassured Scanyon and the President about one thing. The object Kayman had picked up was indeed some form of life. We had reconstructed the sampled data through Roger’s eyes, filtered out the simulations, and seen what he had seen. It had not yet occurred to the President or his advisers that that could be done, but it would. It was not possible to make out fine details, because of the limited number of bits available, but the object was shaped rather like an artichoke, coarse leaves pointing upward, and a little like a mushroom: there was a crystalline cap of transparent material over it. It possessed roots, and unless it was an artifact (point zero zero one probability, at most), it had to be a form of life. We did not find that very interesting except, of course, as it would reinforce general interest in the Mars project itself. As to the doubt cast on the computer simulations, we were considerably more interested. We had followed that development for some time, ever since a graduate student named Byrne had written a Systems-360 program to recheck his desk-calculator previous recheck of some of the poll results. We were as concerned about it as the President was. But the probability of any serious consequence there too appeared quite small, especially since everything else was going well. The MHD generator was almost ready for preorbit injection course corrections; we had selected an installation site for it in the crater called Voltaire on the moon, Deimos. Not far behind it was the vehicle that contained the 3070 and its human crew of two, including Sulie Carpenter. And on Mars itself they had already begun construction of permanent installations. They were a little behind schedule. Kayman’s accident had slowed them down, not only because of what it did to him but because what Brad then insisted on doing to Roger: field-stripping his shoulder-pack computer to test for glitches. There weren’t any. But it took two Martian days to be sure; and then, because Kayman begged, they took time to find his life form. They found it, or not it, exactly, but dozens of other specimens of the same thing; and Brad and Roger left Kayman inside the lander to study it while they began building their domes.

The first step was to find an area of Mars which had suitable geology. The surface should be as much like soil as possible, but solid rock had to be not far below. It took half a day of pounding explosive spikes into the ground and listening to echoes to be sure they had that.