Man Plus

At sunset he was in the shadow of the mountains, high enough up to see the dome clearly, more than twenty kilometers away.

The sandstorm was all below him now and seemed to be moving away. He had stopped briefly twice and waited, wings furled around him. But that had been only routine caution; at no time had it been more than an a

The reply inside his head, when it came, was scratchy and distorted, an unpleasant feeling, like gritting one’s teeth on emery cloth. “Your signal’s lousy, Rog. Are you okay?”

“Sure.” But he hesitated. The static from the storm was bad enough so that he had not been sure, at first, which of his companions was talking to him; only after a moment had he identified the voice as Brad’s. “Maybe I’ll start back now,” he said.

The other voice, even more distorted: “You’ll make an old priest happy if you do, Roger. Want us to come out and meet you?”

“Hell, no. I can move faster than you can. Go to sleep; I’ll see you in four or five hours.”

Roger chatted a moment, than sat down and looked around. He wasn’t tired. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be tired; he slept an hour or two, most nights, and napped from time to time during the day, more out of boredom than fatigue. The organic part of him still imposed some demands on his metabolism, but the crushing bone-weariness of prolonged exertion was no longer part of his experience. He sat because it pleased him to sit on an outcropping of rock and stare across the valley of his home. The long shadow of the mountains had already passed the dome, and only the peaks on the farther side were still lighted. He could see the terminator clearly; Mars’s thin air did not diffuse the shadow much. He could almost see it move.

Overhead the sky was brilliantly beautiful. It was easy enough to see the brighter stars even by daylight, especially for Roger, but at night they were fantastic. He could clearly make out the different hues: steel-blue Sirius, bloody Aldebaran, the smoky gold of Polaris. By expanding his visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet he could see new, bright stars whose names he did not know; perhaps they had no common names, since apart from himself they had been seen as bright objects only by astronomers using special plates. He pondered about the question of name-giving rights; if he was the only one who could see that bright patch there in Orion, did he have the right to christen it? Would anybody object if he called it “Sulie’s Star”?

For that matter he could see what was, for the moment, Sulie’s actual star… or heavenly body; Deimos was not a star, of course. He stared up at it, and amused himself trying to imagine Sulie’s face—

“ROGER, HONEY! YOU—”

Torraway jumped straight up and landed a meter away. The scream inside his head had been deafening. Had it been real? He had no way to tell; the voices from Brad or Don Kayman and the simulated voice of his wife sounded equally familiar inside his head. He was not even sure whose voice it had been — Dorrie’s? But he had been thinking about Sulie Carpenter, and the voice had been so queerly stressed that it could have been either or neither of them.

And now there was no sound at all, or none except for the irregular clicks, squeaks and scrapes that came up from the rock as the Martian crust responded to the rapidly dropping temperature. He was not aware of the cold as cold; his internal heaters kept the feeling part of him at constant temperature and would go on doing so easily all through the night. But he knew that it was at least fifty below now.

Another blast: “ROG — THINK YOU OUGHT—”

Even with the warning of the time before, the raucous shout was painful. This time he caught a quick fugitive glimpse of Dorrie’s simulated image, standing queerly on nothing at all a dozen meters in the air.

Training took over. Roger turned toward the distant dome, or where he thought it had been, cupped his wings behind him and said clearly: “Don! Brad! I’ve got some kind of a malfunction. I’m getting a signal but I can’t read it.”

He waited. There was no response, nothing inside his head except his own thoughts and a confused grumbling that he recognized as static.

“ROGER!”

It was Dorrie again, ten times life-size, towering over him, and on her face a grimace of wrath and fear. She seemed to be reaching down toward him, and then she bent curiously sidewise, like a television image flickering off the tube, and was gone.

Roger felt a peculiar pain, tried to dismiss it as fear, felt it again and realized it was cold. There was something seriously wrong. “Mayday!” he shouted. “Don! I’m in trouble — help me!” The dark distant hills seemed to be rippling slowly. He looked up. The stars were turning liquid and dripping from the sky.

In Don Kayman’s dream, he and Sister Clotilda were sitting on hassocks in front of a waterfall, eating sponges. Not candy; kitchen sponges, dipped into a sort of fondue. Clotilda was warning him of danger. “They’re going to throw us out,” she said, slicing off a square of sponge and impaling it on a two-pronged silver fork, “because you got a C in homiletics” — dipping it in the copper-bottomed dish over the alcohol flame — “and you’ve got to, just got to, wake up—”

He woke up.

Brad was leaning over him. “Come on, Don. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“What’s the matter?” Kayman pulled the sleeping bag over his chest with his good hand.

“I can’t get an answer out of Roger. He didn’t answer. I sent him a priority signal. Then I thought I heard him on the radio, but very faint. He’s either out of line of sight or his transmitter isn’t working.”

Kayman wriggled out of the bag and sat up. At times like this, when first awakening, his arm hurt the most, and it was hurting now. He put it out of his mind. “Have you got a position fix?”

“Three hours ago. I couldn’t get a bearing on this last transmission.”

“He can’t be far off that line.” Kayman was already sliding into the legs of his pressure suit. The next part was the hardest, trying to ease the splinted forearm into the sleeve. Among them they had managed to stretch the sleeve a little, sealing the begi

Brad was already in his suit and throwing equipment into a bag. “Do you think you’re going to perform an emergency operation out there?” Kayman demanded.

Brad scowled and kept on. “I don’t know what I’ll have to do. It’s full night, Don, and he’s up at least five hundred meters. It’s cold.”

Kayman closed his mouth. By the time he was zipped in Brad had long since left the lander and was waiting at the wheel of the Mars vehicle. Kayman clambered aboard painfully, and they were moving before he had a chance to belt himself down. He managed to cling with heels and the one unbendable arm while buckling himself in with the other hand, but it was a close thing. “Any idea of distance?” he asked.

“In the hills somewhere,” said Brad’s voice in his ear; Kayman winced and turned down the volume on his radio.

“Maybe two hours?” he guessed, calculating rapidly.

“If he’s already started back, maybe. If he can’t move — or if he’s moving around out there, and we have to try to track him with RDF—” The voice stopped. “I think he’s all right as far as temperature goes,” Brad went on after a minute. “But I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.”

Kayman stared ahead. Past the bright field of light from the vehicle’s headlight there was nothing to see except that the glittering field of stars was cut off, like the scalloped edge of a doily, at the horizon. That was the mountain ridge. It would be that, Kayman knew, that Brad was using as a guide; aiming always at that lowest point between the double peak on the north and the very high one just to the south. Bright Aldebaran was hanging over that higher peak, a good enough navigation aid in itself, at least until it set in an hour or so.