then I expect every one of you to have a report, no more than three minutes long, on where your own area of responsibilities stands, and what we should do.”
Don Kayman got the message from a Tonka police patrol car. It swooshed up behind him, lights flashing and siren screaming, and pulled him over to order him to turn around and go back to Roger’s apartment.
He knocked on the door with some trepidation, unsure of what he would find. And when the door opened, with Roger’s gleaming eyes peering out from behind it, Kayman whispered a quick Hail Mary as he tried to look past Roger into the apartment—for what? For the dismembered body of Dorrie Torraway? For a shambles of destruction? But all he saw was Dorrie herself, huddled in a wing chair and obviously weeping. The sight almost pleased him, since he had been prepared for so much worse.
Roger came along with no argument. “Goodbye, Dorrie,” he said, and did not wait for an answer. He had trouble fitting himself into Don Kayman’s little car, but his wings folded down. By pushing the reclining seat back as far as it would go he was able to manage, in a cramped and precarious position that would have been hopelessly uncomfortable for any normal human being. Roger, of course, was not a normal human being. His muscular system was content with prolonged overloads in almost any configuration it could bend into at all.
They were silent until they were almost at the project. Then Don Kayman cleared his throat. “You had us worried.”
“I thought I would,” said the flat cyborg voice. The wings stirred restlessly, writhing against each other like a rubbing of hands. “I wanted to see her, Don. It was important to me.”
“I can understand that.” Kayman turned into the broad, empty parking lot. “Well?” he probed. “Are things all right?”
The cyborg mask turned toward him. The great compound eyes gleamed like faceted ebony, without expression, as Roger said: “You’re a jerk, Father Kayman, sir. How all right can they be?”
Sulie Carpenter thought wistfully of sleep, as she might think of a vacation on the French Riviera. They were equally out of the question at that moment. She took two caps of amphetamines and a B-12 injection, self-administered into the places in her arm she had learned to locate long ago.
The simulation of Roger’s reactions had been compromised by the power failure, so she did it over again from punch-in to readout. We were content that this should be so. It gave us a chance to make a few corrections.
While she was waiting she took a long, hot soak in a hydrotherapy tub, and when the simulation had run she studied it carefully. She had taught herself to read the cryptic capital letters and integers, to guard against programming errors, but this time she spared the hardware no time and went at once to the plain-language readout at the end. She was very good at her job.
That job did not happen to be ward nurse. Sulie Carpenter had been one of the first of the aerospace female doctors. She had her degree in medicine, had specialized in psychotherapy, all the myriad eclectic disciplines of it, and had gone into the space program because nothing on Earth seemed really worth doing to her. After completing astronaut training she had come to wonder if there was anything in space that was worth doing either. Research had seemed at least abstractly worth while, so she had applied for work with the California study teams and got it. There had been a fair number of men in her life, one or two of them important to it. None of them had worked out. That much of what she had told Roger had been true; and after the most recent bruising failure she had contracted her area of interest until, she told herself, she grew up enough to know what she wanted from a man. And there she stayed, sidetracked in a loop off the main current of human affairs, until we turned up her card out of all the hundreds of thousands of punched cards, to fill Roger’s need.
When her orders came, wholly without warning, they were directly from the President himself. There was no way she could have refused the assignment. Actually she had no desire to. She welcomed the change. Mother-henning a hurting human being stroked the feelgood centers of her personality; the importance of the job was clear to her,