Man Plus

Kayman keyed in the vehicle’s high-gain ante

There was no answer. Kayman leaned back in the contoured seat, trying to minimize the swaying jolts of the vehicle. It was bad enough, rolling on the basket-weave wire wheels across the flattest part of the terrain. When they began trying to climb, using the stiltlike legs, he suspected he might be thrown clear out of the vehicle, belt and all, and was certain he would at least be sick. Ahead of them the jerking beam of the headlight was picking out a dune, a rock outcropping, sometimes throwing back a lance of light from a crystal face. “Brad,” he said, “doesn’t that light drive you crazy? Why don’t you use the radar display?”

He heard a quick intake of breath on his suit radio, as though Brad had been about to swear at him. Then the suited figure next to him reached down to the toggles on the steering column. The bluish panel just under the sandscreen lit up, revealing the terrain just in front of them; and the headlight winked off. It was easier to see the black outline of the mountains now.

Thirty minutes. At most, a quarter of the way there.

“Roger,” Kayman called again. “Can you hear me? We’re en route. When we get close enough we’ll pick you up on your target. But if you can, answer now—”

There was no answer.

A rice-grain argon bulb began to blink rapidly on the dashboard. The two men looked at each other through their faceplates, and then Kayman leaned forward and clicked the frequency settings to the orbit cha

“Father Kayman? What’s going on down there?”

The voice was female, which meant, of course, Sulie Carpenter. Kayman chose his words carefully: “Roger’s having some transmission trouble. We’re going out to check it.”

“It sounds like more than plain trouble. I’ve been listening to you trying to raise him.” Kayman didn’t answer, and her voice went on: “We’ve got him located, if you want a fix — ?”

“Yes!” he shouted, furious at himself; they should have thought of Deimos’s RDF facility right away. It would be easy for Sulie or either of the orbiting astronauts to guide them in.

“Grid coordinates three poppa one seven, two two zebra four oh. But he’s moving. Bearing about eight nine, speed about twelve kilometers per hour.”

Brad glanced at their own course and said, “Right on. That’s the reciprocal; he’s coming right for us.”

“But why so slowly?” Kayman denianded.

A second later the girl’s voice came: “That’s what I want to know. Is he hurt?”

Kayman said irritably, “We don’t know. Have you tried radio contact?”

“Over and over — wait a minute.” Pause, and then her voice again: “Dinty says to tell you we’ll keep him located for you as long as we can, but we’re getting to a bad angle. So I wouldn’t rely on our positions past — what? Maybe another forty-five minutes. And in about twenty minutes after that we’ll be below the horizon entirely.”

Brad said, “Do what you can. Don? Hold on. I’m going to see how fast this son of a bitch will go.”

And the lurching of the vehicle tripled as Brad accelerated. Kayman fought off being sick inside his helmet long enough to lean forward and study the speedometer. The trip recorder rolling off the strip map along the side of the radar screen told the rest of the story: even if they could maintain their present speed, Deimos would have set before they could reach Roger Torraway.

He switched back to the directional high-gain. “Roger,” he called. “Can you hear me? Call in!”

Thirty kilometers away, Roger was at bay inside his own body.

To his perceptions he was racing back home, at a strange gait like a high-speed heel-and-toe race. He knew his perceptions were wrong. He did not know how wrong; he could not be sure in what ways; but he knew that the brother on his back had tampered with his time sense, as well as with his interpretations of the inputs of his senses; and what he knew most surely of all was that he was no longer in control of what happened to him. The gait, he was intellectually certain, was a ploddingly slow walk. It felt as though he were ru

If so, it was not succeeding.

When the backpack brother took over control it had been terrifying. First he had stood straight up and locked; he could not move, could not even speak. All around him the black sky was rippling with streaks of aurora, the ground itself shimmering like heat waves on a desert; phantom images danced in and out of his vision. He could not believe what his senses told him, nor could he bend a single finger. Then he felt his own hands reaching behind him, palping and tracing the joints where wings came to shoulderblades, seeking out the cables that led to his batteries. Another frozen pause. Then the same thing, feeling around the terminals of the computer itself. He knew enough to know that the computer was checking itself; what he did not know was what it was finding out or what it could do about it when it located the fault. Pause again. Then he felt his fingers questing into the jacks where he plugged in the recharge cables—

A violent pain smote him, like the worst of all headaches, like a stroke or a blow from a club. It lasted only a moment, and then it was gone, leaving no more of itself than an immense distant flash of lightning. He had never felt anything like it before. He was aware that his fingers were gently, and very skillfully, scraping at the terminals. There was another quick surge of pain as, apparently, his own fingers made a momentary short.

Then he felt himself closing the flap, and realized he had failed to do that when he recharged at the dome.

And then, after another momentary stoppage of everything, he had begun to move slowly, carefully down the slope toward the dome.

He had no idea how long he had been walking. At some point his time perception had been slowed, but he could not even say when that had been. All of his perceptions were being monitored and edited. He knew that, because he knew that that section of the Martian terrain that he was traversing was not intrinsically softly lighted and in full color, while everything around was nearly formless black. But he could not change it. He could not even change the direction of his gaze. With metronome regularity it would sweep to one side or the other, less frequently scan the sky or even turn to look back; the rest of the time it was unwaveringly on the road he was treading, and he could see only peripherally the rest of the nightscape.

And his feet twinkled heel-and-toe, heel-and-toe — how fast? A hundred paces to the minute? He could not tell. He thought of trying to get some idea of the time by observing the clearing of the stars above the horizon, but although it was not difficult to count his steps, and to try to guess when those lowest stars had climbed four or five degrees — which would be about ten minutes — it was impossible to keep all of that in mind long enough to get a meaningful result. Apart from the fact that his vision kept dancing away from the horizon without warning.

He was wholly the prisoner of the brother on his back, subject to its will, deceived by its interpretations, and very much a worried man.

What had gone wrong? Why was he feeling cold, when there was so little of him that could feel a sensory reality at all? And yet he yearned for the rising of the sun, dreamed wistfully of basking in the microwave radiation from Deimos. Painfully Roger tried to reason through the evidence as he knew it. Feeling cold. Needing energy inputs: that was the interpretation of that cue. But why would he need more energy, when he had fully charged his batteries? He dismissed that question because he could see no answer to it, but the hypothesis seemed strong. It accounted for the low-energy mode of travel; walking was far slower than his usual leaping run, but in kwh/km terms it was far more cost-effective. Perhaps it even accounted for the glitches in his perceptual systems. If the backpack-brother had discovered before he did that there was insufficient energy for foreseeable needs, it would surely ration the precious store to the most essential needs. Or what it perceived as most essential: travel; keeping the organic part of him from freezing; conducting its own information-handling and control procedures. Which unfortunately he was not privy to.