Man Plus

There were a lot of those seconds. He had multiplied them out often enough. Seven months in orbit to Mars. Seven months coming back. A few weeks at both ends, getting ready for the launch and then debriefing before they would start the process of restoring him to his own body. A few months — no one would tell him exactly how many — while the surgery took place and the replaced parts healed.

The number of seconds, close as he could guess it, was some forty-five million. Give or take as much as ten million. He felt each one of them arrive and linger and reluctantly slip past.

The psychologists had tried to avoid all this by pla

He wished sometimes that he did know how to examine his life. He wished he could understand his reasons for doing what he did.

Why had he volunteered for the mission? Sometimes he tried to remember, and then decided he had never known. Was it because the free world needed Martian living space? Because he wanted the glamour of being the first Martian? For the money? For the scholarships and favors it would mean for the kids? To make Brenda love him?

It probably was in among those reasons somewhere, but he couldn’t remember. If he had ever known.

In any case he was committed. The thing he was sure of was that he had no way to back out now.

He would let them do whatever savage, sadistic torturing they wanted of his body. He would board the spaceship that would take him to Mars. He would endure the seven endless months in orbit. He would go down to the surface, explore, stake claims, take samples, photograph, test. He would rise up again from the Martian surface and live somehow through the seven-month return, and he would give them all the information they wanted. He would accept the medals and the applause and the lecture tours and the television interviews and the contracts for books.

And then he would present himself to the surgeons to be put back the way he was supposed to be.

All of those things he had made his mind up to, and he was sure he would carry them out.

There was only one question in his mind to which he had not yet worked out an answer. It had to do with a contingency he was not prepared to meet. When he first volunteered for the program, they had told him very openly and honestly that the medical problems were complex and not fully understood. They would have to learn how to deal with some of them on him. It was possible that some of the answers would be hard to find or wrong. It was possible that returning him to his own shape would be, well, difficult. They told him that very clearly, at the very begi

But he remembered. The problem he had not resolved was what he would do if for any reason, when the whole mission was over, they could not put him back together right away. What he couldn’t decide was whether he would then simply kill himself or at the same time kill as many as possible of his friends, superiors and colleagues as well.

Four

Group of Probable Pallbearers

Roger Torraway, Col. (Ret.) USAF, B.A., M.A., D.Sc. (Hon.). At the time he woke up in the morning, the night shift finished bench-ru

Roger had slept badly. It was a terrible responsibility, being custodian of mankind’s last forlorn hope for freedom and decency. When he woke up it was with that thought in mind; there was a part of Roger Torraway — it showed itself most commonly in dreams — that was about nine years old. It took all the things the President said at face value, although Roger himself, doubling as diplomat and mission .head, world traveler, familiar of a dozen capitals, really did not think in his conscious mind that the “Free World” existed.

He dressed, his mind in the familiar occupation of resolving a dichotomy. Let’s assume Dash is on the level, and occupying Mars means salvation for humanity, he thought. Can we cut it? He thought of Willy Hartnett — good-looking (or he had been, till the prosthesiologists got at him). Amiable. Good with his hands. But also a little bit of a lightweight, when you came to look at him honestly. Likely to take a drink too many at the club on a Saturday night. Not to be trusted in the kitchen with another man’s wife at a party.

He was not a hero, by any measure Roger could find. But who was? He cast his mind down the list of back-ups to the cyborg. Number One, Vic Freibart, currently off on a ceremonial tour with the Vice President and temporarily removed from the order of succession. Number Two, Carl Mazzini, on sick leave while the leg he had broken at Mount Snow healed up. Number Three: Him.

There was no Valley Forge quality in any of them.

He made his breakfast without waking Dorrie, got the car out and left it puffing on its skirts while he picked up the morning paper, threw it into the garage and closed the door. His next-door neighbor, walking toward his car pool, hailed him. “See the news this morning? I see Dash was in town last night. Some high-level conference.”

Roger said automatically, “No, I haven’t put on the TV this morning.” But I did see Dash, he thought, and I could take the wind out of your sails. It a

As Roger got into the car he remembered that he had not kissed Dorrie goodbye.

He told himself that it did not matter. She would not wake up and therefore would not know; if by any chance she did wake up, she would complain at being wakened. But he did not like to give up a ritual. While he thought about it, however, he was automatically putting the car into Drive and keying his code number for the Lab; the car began to move. He sighed, snapped on the TV and watched the Today Show all the way to work.

Fr. Do

Don Kayman was thirty-one years old and the world’s most authoritative areologist (which is to say, specialist in the planet Mars) — at least in the Free World. (Kayman would have admitted that old Parnov at the Shklovskii Institute in Novosibirsk also knew a thing or two.) He was also a Jesuit priest. He did not think of himself as being one thing first and the other with what part of him was left over; his work was areology, his person was the priesthood. Meticulously and with joy he elevated the Host, drank the wine, said the final redempit, glanced at his watch and whistled. He was ru