Man Plus - Frederik Pohl Page 0,1

radio contact for five days on the far side of the sun and Verna Samuelson came taken down with early labor pains, Dorrie took Verna’s three infants into her own home. None of them was over five years old. Two of them were still in diapers, and she changed them uncomplainingly while other wives took care of Verna’s house and Verna took care of giving birth to her fourth in the NASA hospital. At the Christmas parties Rog and Dorrie never got the drunkest, nor were they ever the first to leave.

They were a nice couple.

They lived in a nice world.

In that they were, they knew, lucky. The rest of the world wasn’t all that nice. The little wars chased themselves all over Asia and Africa and Latin America. Western Europe was sometimes strangled by strikes and often crippled by shortages, and when winter came it usually shivered. People were hungry, and a lot of them were angry, and there were very few cities a person would want to walk in alone at night. But Tonka kept itself unpermissive and pretty safe, and astronauts (and cosmonauts and sinonauts) visited Mercury and Mars as well as the moon, swam into the halos of comets and hung in orbit around gas giants.

Torraway himself had flown five major missions. First he flew in one of the shuttle flights to replenish Spacelab, back in the early days after the freeze, when the space program was just getting on its feet again.

Then he spent eighty-one days in the second-generation space station. This was his big moment, the one that got him the cover of Time. The Russkis had fired off a manned mission to Mercury, and it had got there all right and landed all right and taken off for the return trip all right; but nothing after that was all right. The Russians had always had trouble with their stabilizing thrusters—several of the early cosmonauts had set themselves spinning, had not been able to stop, and had vomited helplessly all over the insides of their spacecrafts. This time they had trouble again and used up their attitude-correction reserves.

So they managed to get themselves into a wide-assed elliptical orbit around Earth, but they had no way to get out of it safely. Or to stay in it safely, either. Their control was only approximate by then, and the periterran point was low enough inside the ionosphere of Earth’s atmosphere to heat them up pretty badly.

But Roger and the other five Americans were sitting there in a spacecraft designed for tug duty, with fuel hoarded for half a dozen more missions. That wasn’t any too much, but they made it do: they matched course and velocity with the Avrora Dva, linked up and got the cosmonauts out. What a spectacle of free-fall bear hugs and bristly kisses! Back in the space tug with what the Russians had grabbed up to bring with them, they had a party—currant juice toasting Tang, pâté traded for cheeseburgers. And two orbits later the Avrora meteored in. “Like a bright exhalation in the evening,” said Yuli Bronin, the cosmonaut who had gone to Oxford, and kissed his rescuers again.

When they got back down to Earth, belted in two to a hammock, closer than lovers, they were all heroes, and they were all adored, even Roger, even by Dorrie.

But that was long ago.

Since then Roger Torraway had done two circumlunar flights, tending ship while the radio-telescope crews conducted their orbital tests on the big new hundred-kilometer radio mirror on the farside. And finally he was on the aborted Mars lander, another time when they were lucky to get everyone back on Earth in one piece. But by then the glamour was gone once more. It had just been bad luck and mechanical failures, nothing dramatic.

So most of Roger’s work since then had been, well, diplomatic. He played golf with senators on the space committee and commuted to the Eurospace installations in Zurich and Munich and Trieste. He had a modest sale with his memoirs. He served as back-up on an occasional mission. As the space program declined rapidly from national priority to contingency-planning exercises, he had less and less that mattered to do.

Still, he was backing up a mission now, although he didn’t talk about it when he was wooing political support for the agency. He wasn’t allowed to. This new manned mission, which looked as though it would actually be approved sooner or later, was the first one in the space