Now in sports shirt and slacks, Kayman jumped into his convertible. It was a classic, wheels instead of hoverskirts; it could even be driven off the guided highways. But where was there to go off the highways? He dialed the laboratories, switched on the main batteries and opened his newspaper. Without attention the little car nosed into the freeway, found a gap in the traffic, leaped to fill it and bore him at eighty miles an hour to his job.
The news in the newspaper was, as usual, mostly bad.
In Paris the MFP had issued another blast at the Chandrigar peace talks. Israel had refused to vacate Cairo and Damascus. New York City’s martial law, now in its fifteenth month, had failed to prevent the ambush of a Tenth Mountain Division convoy trying to sneak across the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to the relief of the garrison in Shea Stadium; fifteen soldiers were dead, and the convoy had returned to the Bronx.
Kayman dropped the paper sadly. He tilted the rear-view mirror back, raised the side windows to deflect some of the wind and began to brush his shoulder-length hair. Twenty-five strokes on each side — it was almost as much a ritual with him as the Mass. He would brush it again that day, because he had a lunch date with Sister Clotilda. She was already half convinced that she wanted to apply for relief from certain of her vows, and Kayman wanted to resume the discussion with her as soon, and as often and as long, as suitable.
Because he had less distance to travel, Kayman arrived at the laboratories just behind Roger Torraway. They got out together, turned their cars over to the parking system and went up to the briefing room in the same elevator.
Deputy Director T. Gamble de Bell. As he prepared to juice up key personnel at the morning briefing, the cyborg was thirty meters away, spread-eagled face down and nude. On Mars he would eat only low-residue food and not much of that. On Earth it was thought necessary to keep his eliminatory system at least minimally functional, in spite of the difficulties the changes in skin and metabolism produced. Hartnett was glad for the food, but hated the enemas.
The project director was a general. The science chief was a distinguished biophysicist who had worked with Wilkins and Pauling; twenty years back he had stopped doing science and started doing figureheading, because that was where the rewards were. Neither had much to do with the work of the labs themselves, only with liaison between the operating people and those shadowy outside figures who worked the money switch.
For the nitty-gritty of daily routine, it was the deputy director who did the work. This early in the morning, he already had a sheaf of notes and reports, and he had read them.
“Scramble the picture,” he ordered from the lectern, not looking up. On the monitor above him Willy Hartnett’s grotesque profile broke up into a jackstraw bundle of lines, then turned into snow, then rebuilt itself into its proper features. (Only the head showed. The people in the briefing room could not see what indignity Willy was suffering, though most of them knew well enough. It was on the daily sked sheet.) The picture was no longer in color. The scan was coarser now, and the image less steady. But it was now security-safe (on the chance that some spy had tapped the closed circuit), and in portraying Hartnett the quality of the picture made, after all, very little difference.
“All right,” said the deputy director harshly, “you heard Dash last night. He didn’t come here to get your votes, he wants action. So do I. I don’t want any more screw-ups like the photoreceptor crap.”
He turned a page. “Morning progress report,” he read. “Commander Hartnett is functioning well in all systems, with three exceptions. First, the artificial heart does not respond well to prolonged exercise at low temperatures. Second, the CAV system receives poorly in frequencies higher than medium blue — I’m disappointed in that one, Brad,” he interpolated, looking up at Alexander Bradley, the expert in the perceptual systems of the eye. “You know we’re locked into UV capability on that. Third, communications links. We had to admit to that one in front of the President last night. He didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it. That throat mike doesn’t work. Effectively we don’t have voice link at Mars-normal pressure, and if we don’t come up with a solve we’ll have to go back to plain visual systems. Eighteen months down the drain.”
He glanced around the room and settled on the heart man. “All right. What about the circulation?”
“It’s the heat build-up,” Fineman said defensively. “The heart is functioning perfectly. You want me to design it for ridiculous conditions? I could, but it would be eight feet high. Fix up the thermal balance. The skin closes up at low temperatures and won’t transmit. Naturally the oxygen level in the blood drops, and naturally the heart speeds up. That’s what it’s supposed to do. What do you want? Otherwise he’ll go into syncope, maybe short-change the brain on 02. Then what’ve you got?”
From high on the wall of the room the cyborg’s face looked on impassively. He had changed position (the enema was over, the bedpan had been removed, he was now sitting). Roger Torraway, not very interested in a discussion that did not in any way involve his specialty, was gazing at the cyborg thoughtfully. He wondered what old Willy thought, hearing himself talked about that way. Roger had gone to the trouble of requisitioning the private psychological studies on Hartnett because of curiosity on that point, but they hadn’t been very informative. Roger was pretty sure he knew why. All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered. By now nearly everyone in the labs must have come to do that, either by design or simply as a trained-in reflex. They would make marvelous poker players, he thought; smiling, he remembered poker games with Willy. Covertly he winked at the cyborg and gave him a thumbs-up. Hartnett did not respond. It was impossible to tell, from those faceted ruby eyes, what he saw.
“—we can’t change the skin again,” the integuments man was arguing. “There’s already a weight penalty. If we put in any more sensor-actors he’ll feel like he’s wearing a wet-suit all the time.”
Surprisingly, a rumble from the monitor. The cyborg spoke: “What theee hell do you think it feeeelsss layk now?”
A beat of silence, as everyone in the room remembered it was a living person they were talking about. Then the skin man insisted: “All the more reason. We’d like to fine it down, simplify it, get some of the weight off. Not complicate it.”
The deputy director raised his hand. “You two get together,” he ordered the opponents. “Don’t tell me what you can’t do — I’m telling you what we have to do. Now you, Brad. What about that vision cutoff?”
Alex Bradley said cheerily, “Under control. I can fix. But listen, Will, I’m sorry, but it means another implant. I see what’s wrong. It’s in the retinal mediation system; it’s filtering the extra frequencies. The system’s all right, but—”
“Then make it work,” said the deputy director, glancing at the clock. “How about the communications foul-up?”
“Talk to respiration,” said the hardware man. “If they give us a little more retained air, Hartnett can get some voice. The electronics systems are fine, there’s just nothing for them to carry.”
“Impossible!” shouted the lung man. “You’ve only left us five hundred cc’s of space now! He uses that in ten minutes. I’ve gone over the drill with him a hundred times to practice conserving it—”
“Can’t he just whisper?” asked the deputy director. Then, as the communications man began hauling out frequency-response curves, he added, “Work it out, will you? All the rest of you, looks good. But don’t let up.” He closed the notes into their plastic folder and handed it to his assistant. “That’s that,” he said. “Now let me get to the important part.”