“I don’t—Let me think about this. What do you mean, a metal——”

  “Metal, sure, but what difference does that make. I’m talking about shape. Function. Wait a minute.” The tall figure strode across the room, unlocked a cabinet, came back with rolled sheets of paper. “Look at this.”

  The drawing showed an oblong metal box on four jointed legs. From one end protruded a tiny mushroom-shaped head on a jointed stem and a cluster of arms ending in probes, drills, grapples. “For moon prospecting.”

  “Too many limbs,” said Babcock after a moment. “How would you——”

  “With the facial nerves. Plenty of them left over. Or here.” Another drawing. “A module plugged into the control system of a spaceship. That’s where I belong, in space. Sterile environment, low grav, I can go where a man can’t go and do what a man can’t do. I can be an asset, not a goddamn billion-dollar liability.”

  Babcock rubbed his eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “You were all hipped on prosthetics. You would have told me to tend my knitting.”

  Babcock’s hands were shaking as he rolled up the drawings. “Well, by God, this just may do it. It just might.” He stood up and turned toward the door. “Keep your—” He cleared his throat. “I mean, hang tight, Jim.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  When he was alone, he put on his mask again and stood motionless a moment, eye shutters closed. Inside, he was running clean and cool; he could feel the faint reassuring hum of pumps, click of valves and relays. They had given him that: cleaned out all the offal, replaced it with machinery that did not bleed, ooze or suppurate. He thought of the lie he had told Babcock. Why do you lie to a cancer patient? But they would never get it, never understand.

  He sat down at the drafting table, clipped a sheet of paper to it and with a pencil began to sketch a rendering of the moon-prospector design. When he had blocked in the prospector itself, he began to draw the background of craters. His pencil moved more slowly and stopped; he put it down with a click.

  No more adrenal glands to pump adrenaline into his blood, so he could not feel fright or rage. They had released him from all that—love, hate, the whole sloppy mess—but they had forgotten there was still one emotion he could feel.

  Sinescu, with the black bristles of his beard sprouting through his oily skin. A whitehead ripe in the crease beside his nostril.

  Moon landscape, clean and cold. He picked up the pencil again.

  Babcock, with his broad pink nose shining with grease, crusts of white matter in the corners of his eyes. Food mortar between his teeth.

  Sam’s wife, with raspberry-colored paste on her mouth. Face smeared with tears, a bright bubble in one nostril. And the damn dog, shiny nose, wet eyes . . .

  He turned. The dog was there, sitting on the carpet, wet red tongue out—left the door open again—dripping, wagged its tail twice, then started to get up. He reached for the metal T square, leaned back, swinging it like an ax, and the dog yelped once as metal sheared bone, one eye spouting red, writhing on its back, dark stain of piss across the carpet, and he hit it again, hit it again.

  The body lay twisted on the carpet, fouled with blood, ragged black lips drawn back from teeth. He wiped off the T square with a paper towel, then scrubbed it in the sink with soap and steel wool, dried it and hung it up. He got a sheet of drafting paper, laid it on the floor, rolled the body over onto it without spilling any blood on the carpet. He lifted the body in the paper, carried it out onto the patio, then onto the unroofed section, opening the doors with his shoulder. He looked over the wall. Two stories down, concrete roof, vents sticking out of it, nobody watching. He held the dog out, let it slide off the paper, twisting as it fell. It struck one of the vents, bounced, a red smear. He carried the paper back inside, poured the blood down the drain, then put the paper into the incinerator chute.

  Splashes of blood were on the carpet, the feet of the drafting table, the cabinet, his trouser legs. He sponged them all up with paper towels and warm water. He took off his clothing, examined it minutely, scrubbed it in the sink, then put it in the washer. He washed the sink, rubbed himself down with disinfectant and dressed again. He walked through into Sam’s silent apartment, closing the glass door behind him. Past the potted philodendron, overstuffed furniture, red-and-yellow painting on the wall, out onto the roof, leaving the door ajar. Then back through the patio, closing doors.

  Too bad. How about some goldfish.

  He sat down at the drafting table. He was running clean and cool. The dream this morning came back to his mind, the last one, as he was struggling up out of sleep: slithery kidneys burst gray lungs blood and hair ropes of guts covered with yellow fat oozing and sliding and oh god the stink like the breath of an outhouse no sound nowhere he was putting a yellow stream down the slide of the dunghole and

  He began to ink in the drawing, first with a fine steel pen, then with a nylon brush, his heel slid and he was falling could not stop himself falling into slimy bulging softness higher than his chin, higher and he could not move paralyzed and he tried to scream tried to scream tried to scream

  The prospector was climbing a crater slope with its handling members retracted and its head tilted up. Behind it the distant ringwall and the horizon, the black sky, the pinpoint stars. And he was there, and it was not far enough, not yet, for the earth hung overhead like a rotten fruit, blue with mold, crawling, wrinkling, purulent and alive.

  AFTERWORD

  Theme, if such a thing exists, is the spirit of a story, its ghost, which can be separated from the story only at the cost of the patient’s life. What I think is much more interesting and useful is the idea of a story as mechanism. What is the story supposed to accomplish? What means are used? Do they work? Etc.

  “Masks” was the result of a deliberate effort to make a story about what I call here a TP or “total prosthesis”—a complete artificial body. I wanted to do this because it was topical, in the sense that there had been a lot of discussion of this kind of thing and a good deal of R and D on sophisticated artificial limbs. The subject was one which had a deep attraction for me; I had written about it in two early stories called “Ask Me Anything” and “Four in One,” and again in a collaboration with James Blish, “Tiger Ride.” And, finally, I wanted to do it because it seemed to me that most treatments of the subject in science fiction had been romantic failures, and that to do it realistically would be an achievement.

  I read and thought about prosthetic problems until I was sure I knew how my protagonist’s artificial body would be built and maintained. I realized that it would take a government-funded effort comparable to the Manhattan Project, so I couldn’t put it in the corner of a lab somewhere: the background of the story grew out of this. The other characters were those who had to be there.

  Glimpses of scenes and action came to me spontaneously: the first of these was the one which gave the story its title—the silvery mask worn by the protagonist. As I got deeper into the story, I became more and more convinced that the psychic effect of losing the whole body and having it replaced by a prosthetic system had been too casually shrugged off by previous writers, even C.L. Moore in her beautiful “No Woman Born.”

  The protagonist of my story is the ultimate eunuch: as another character remarks, “This man has had everything cut off.” Such a catastrophic loss can be compensated for only by a massive mental tilt. The man in the story has lost the physiological basis of every human emotion, with one exception. He has no heart to accelerate its beat, no gonads, no sweat glands, no endocrines except the pineal: he can’t feel love, fear, hate, affection. But he can and must accept his own clean smooth functioning as the norm. When he looks at the sweaty, oozing meat that other people are made of, his one possible emotion is disgust, brought to an intensity we cannot imagine.

  Given this, and the fact that the man is intelligent, I saw that the conflict of the story must turn on his effort to conceal the truth about himself, because if it became known the project would be terminated and his life shortened. My problem in writing the story was to hold this back as a revelation, and at the same time to build the story logically, without leaving out anything essential.

  The story is a mechanism designed to draw the reader in, provoke his curiosity and interest, involve him in the argument, and give him a series of emotional experiences culminating (I hope) in a double view of the protagonist, from inside and outside, which will squeeze out of him a drop of sympathy and horror.

  —Damon Knight

  Fortitude

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  This story describes by implication political tyranny in personal terms. The cyborg in question has no self-regulating qualities. All freedom has been forfeited; responses to the environment are highly controlled, and doctors are the ruling gods of life. The heroine’s wants are completely supplied; every possible measure for her physical and mental health is being taken. She need suspend only her freedom of choice, a small loss for the remarkable gains she has made.

  THE TIME: The present, the place: Upstate New York, a large room filled with pulsing, writhing, panting machines that perform the functions of various organs of the human body—heart, lungs, liver, and so on. Color-coded pipes and wires swoop upward from the machines to converge and pass through a hole in the ceiling. To one side is a fantastically complicated master control console.

  DR. ELBERT LITTLE, a kindly, attractive young general practitioner, is being shown around by the creator and boss of the operation, DR. NORBERT FRANKENSTEIN. FRANKENSTEIN is sixty-five, a crass medical genius. Seated at the console, wearing headphones and watching meters and flashing lights, is DR. TOM SWIFT, FRANKENSTEIN’S enthusiastic first assistant.

  LITTLE: Oh, my God—oh, my God——

  FRANKENSTEIN: Yeah. Those are her kidneys over there. That’s her liver, of course. There you got her pancreas.

  LITTLE: Amazing. Dr. Frankenstein, after seeing this, I wonder if I’ve even been practicing medicine, if I’ve ever even been to medical school. (Pointing) That’s her heart?

  FRANKENSTEIN: That’s a Westinghouse heart. They make a damn good heart, if you ever need one. They make a kidney I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

  LITTLE: That heart is probably worth more than the whole township where I practice.

  FRANKENSTEIN: That pancreas is worth your whole state. Vermont?

  LITTLE: Vermont.

  FRANKENSTEIN: What we paid for the pancreas—yeah, we could have bought Vermont for that. Nobody’d ever made a pancreas before, and we had to have one in ten days or lose the patient. So we told all the big organ manufacturers, “Okay, you guys got to have a crash program for a pancreas. Put every man you got on the job. We don’t care what it costs, as long as we get a pancreas by next Tuesday.”

  LITTLE: And they succeeded.

  FRANKENSTEIN: The patient’s still alive, isn’t she? Believe me, those are some expensive sweetbreads. LITTLE: But the patient could afford them.

  FRANKENSTEIN: You don’t live like this on Blue Cross.

  LITTLE: And how many operations has she had? In how many years?

  FRANKENSTEIN: I gave her her first major operation thirty-six years ago. She’s had seventy-eight operations since then.

  LITTLE: And how old is she?

  FRANKENSTEIN: One hundred.

  LITTLE: What guts that woman must have!

  FRANKENSTEIN: You’re looking at ‘em.

  LITTLE: I mean—what courage! What fortitude!

  FRANKENSTEIN: We knock her out, you know. We don’t operate without anesthetics.

  LITTLE: Even so . . .

  FRANKENSTEIN taps SWIFT on the shoulder, SWIFT frees an ear from the headphones, divides his attention between the visitors and the console.

  FRANKENSTEIN: Dr. Tom Swift, this is Dr. Elbert Little. Tom here is my first assistant.

  SWIFT: Howdy-doody.

  FRANKENSTEIN: Dr. Little has a practice up in Vermont. He happened to be in the neighborhood. He asked for a tour.

  LITTLE: What do you hear in the headphones?

  SWIFT: Anything that’s going on in the patient’s room. (He offers the headphones) Be my guest.

  LITTLE (listening to headphones): Nothing.

  SWIFT: She’s having her hair brushed now. The beautician’s up there. She’s always quiet when her hair’s being brushed. (He takes the headphones back)

  FRANKENSTEIN (to SWIFT): We should congratulate our young visitor here.

  SWIFT: What for?

  LITTLE: Good question. What for?

  FRANKENSTEIN: Oh, I know about the great honor that has come your way.

  LITTLE: I’m not sure I do.

  FRANKENSTEIN: You are the Dr. Little, aren’t you, who was named the Family Doctor of the Year by the Ladies’ Home Journal last month?

  LITTLE: Yes, that’s right. I don’t know how in the hell they decided. And I’m even more flabbergasted that a man of your caliber would know about it.

  FRANKENSTEIN: I read the Ladies‘ Home Journal from cover to cover every month.

  LITTLE: You do?

  FRANKENSTEIN: I only got one patient, Mrs. Lovejoy. And Mrs. Lovejoy reads the Ladies‘ Home Journal, so I read it, too. That’s what we talk about—what’s in the Ladies’ Home Journal. We read all about you last month. Mrs. Lovejoy kept saying, “Oh, what a nice young man he must be. So understanding.”

  LITTLE: Um.

  FRANKENSTEIN: Now here you are in the flesh. I bet she wrote you a letter.

  LITTLE: Yes, she did.

  FRANKENSTEIN: She writes thousands of letters a year, gets thousands of letters back. Some pen pal she is.

  LITTLE: Is she—uh—generally cheerful most of the time?

  FRANKENSTEIN: If she isn’t, that’s our fault down here. If she gets unhappy, that means something down here isn’t working right. She was blue about a month ago. Turned out it was a bum transistor in the console. (He reaches over SWIFT’S shoulder, changes a setting on the console. The machinery subtly adjusts to the new setting.) There—she’ll be all depressed for a couple of minutes now. (He changes the setting again) There. Now, pretty quick, she’ll be happier than she was before. She’ll sing like a bird.

  LITTLE conceals his horror imperfectly, cut to patient’s room, which is full of flowers and candy boxes and books. The patient is SYLVIA LOVEJOY, a billionaire’s widow, SYLVIA is no longer anything but a head connected to pipes and wires coming up through the floor, but this is not immediately apparent. The first shot of her is a close-up, with GLORIA, a gorgeous beautician, standing behind her. SYLVIA is a heartbreakingly good-looking old lady, once a famous beauty. She is crying now

  SYLVIA: Gloria——

  GLORIA: Ma’am?

  SYLVIA: Wipe these tears away before somebody comes in and sees them.

  GLORIA (wanting to cry herself): Yes, ma’am. (She wipes the tears away with Kleenex, studies the results) There. There.

  SYLVIA: I don’t know what came over me. Suddenly I was so sad I couldn’t stand it.

  GLORIA: Everybody has to cry sometimes.

  SYLVIA: It’s passing now. Can you tell I’ve been crying?

  GLORIA: No. No. (She is unable to control her own tears any more. She goes to a window so SYLVIA can’t see her cry. camera backs away to reveal the tidy, clinical abomination of the head and wires and pipes. The head is on a tripod. There is a black box with winking colored lights hanging under the head, where the chest would normally be. Mechanical arms come out of the box where arms would normally be. There is a table within easy reach of the arms. On it are a pen and paper, a partially solved jigsaw puzzle and a bulky knitting bag. Sticking out of the bag are needles and a sweater in progress. Hanging over SYLVIA’S head is a microphone on a boom.)

  SYLVIA (sighing): Oh, what a foolish old woman you must think I am. (GLORIA shakes her head in denial, is unable to reply) Gloria? Are you still there?

  GLORIA: Yes.

  SYLVIA: Is anything the matter?

  GLORIA: No.

  SYLVIA: You’re such a good friend, Gloria. I want you to know I feel that with all my heart.

  GLORIA: I like you, too.

  SYLVIA: If you ever have any problems I can help you with, I hope you’ll ask me.

  GLORIA: I will, I will.

  HOWARD DERBY, the hospital mail clerk, dances in with an armload of letters. He is a merry old fool.

  DERBY: Mailman! Mailman!

  SYLVIA (brightening): Mailman! God bless the mailman!

  DERBY: How’s the patient today?

  SYLVIA: Very sad a moment ago. But now that I see you, I want to sing like a bird.

  DERBY: Fifty-three letters today. There’s even one from Leningrad.

  SYLVIA: There’s a blind woman in Leningrad. Poor soul, poor soul.

  DERBY (making a fan of the mail, reading postmarks): West Virginia, Honolulu, Brisbane, Australia—SYLVIA selects an envelope at random.

  SYLVIA: Wheeling, West Virginia. Now, who do I know in Wheeling? (She opens the envelope expertly with her mechanical hands, reads) “Dear Mrs. Lovejoy: You don’t know me, but I just read about you in the Reader’s Digest, and I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my cheeks.” Reader’s Digest? My goodness—that article was printed fourteen years ago! And she just read it?

  DERBY: Old Reader’s Digests go on and on. I’ve got one at home I’ll bet is ten years old. I still read it every time I need a little inspiration.

  SYLVIA (reading on): “I am never going to complain about anything that ever happens to me ever again. I thought I was as unfortunate as a person can get when my husband shot his girlfriend six months ago and then blew his own brains out. He left me with seven children and with eight payments still to go on a Buick Roadmaster with three flat tires and a busted transmission. After reading about you, though, I sit here and count my blessings.” Isn’t that a nice letter?