Promouvoir le projet Man More

"Anyway," said the President, coming to the point, "I'm grateful for your courtesy.

And I am one thousand times more grateful for the way you're pushing the Man Plus project through. I don't have to tell you what it means to the Free World. There's Mars out there, the only piece of real estate around that's worth having, apart from the one we're all standing on right now. By the end of this decade it's going to belong to somebody. There are only two choices. It will belong to them, or it will belong to us. And I want it to be us.

You people are the ones that are going to make sure that happens, because you're going to give us the Man Plus that will live on Mars. I want to thank you deeply and sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, in the name of every living human being in the Free World democratic lands, for making this dream possible. And now," he said, smothering an attempt at a round of polite applause, "I think it's time I stopped talking and started listening. I want to see what's happening with our Man Plus. General Scanyon, it's all yours."

"Right, Mr. President."

Vern Scanyon was director of the laboratory division of the Grissom Memorial Institute of Space Medicine. He was also a retired two-star general and acted it. He checked his watch, glanced at his executive assistant (he sometimes called him his executive officer) for confirmation and said, "We have a few minutes before Commander Hartnett finishes his warm-up tests. Suppose we look in on him on the closed circuit for a

minute. Then I'll try to tell you what's going to happen today."

The room darkened.

A TV projection screen lighted up behind the platform. The screen showed a man. He did not look like a man. His name was Will Hartnett. He was an astronaut, a Democrat, a Methodist, a husband, a father, an amateur tympanist, a beautifully smooth ballroom dancer; but to the eye he was none of those things. To the eye he was a monster.

...