"Yes! No."
He almost made it this time. Crack! went another crystal glass in his closing hand. Argus kept perfect count - with his plastified brain, he could no longer forget.
"That was glass number six-hundred and fifteen," he told the holo-presences of the Kansler, Boulder Pi and Pi's lab team. "I hope you ordered more of them."
A military psychologist severed herself from the crowd of holograms in the training room, and walked closer toward Argus's pitch-black, hulking frame. He gave her a faint smile of appreciation. This woman had been with the team during all his four weeks on the Moon. This time, she had dressed up and showed a little more of her figure - as much as the lab uniform allowed.
"I'd like to suggest a more holistic approach to this exercise. Boulder Pi, sir, if I may speak to Argus in private, non-holographic presence for a minute..."
Boulder Pi glowered at her in an openly jealous manner - not in words but in every deed, he routinely demonstrated that Argus was his "child", the spawn of his intellect.
"What do you have in mind, Amiella? Not one of those primal-scream catharsis sessions you put my team through?"
The group laughed a little; Dr. Amiella Minsky's lips narrowed slightly.
"What I have in mind is a probe of Colonel Clarke's personal drives, his motives for failure and success, and the conflicting tensions this causes in his hands. I can't help but observe how these glasses always crack in the same manner... a psych-probe could isolate the specific neural pathway from hand to brain, and..."
"No psych-probes!" the Kansler broke in. "The pre-cyborgic tests of Colonel Clarke are sufficient. We know him inside out."
"But I -"
"We are team players, Dr. Minsky. Are you?" he asked with the undercurrent of threat that Boulder Pi recognized from every occasion the Kansler felt his prestige challenged.
The doctor's enhanced lips turned pale, and her holo-presence backed away from Argus. The cyborg, who had not forgotten that he wasn't "Colonel Clarke", gave her the top-down "elevator stare". Damn, he thought, if only I could touch her. And inevitably, instantly, his thoughts wandered to another - missing - subject. Argus felt frustration give way to rage. He held out his arms to the retreating hologram of Amiella Minsky.
"You want a hug? Is that it, doctor? A hug? Come on, gimme a hug!"
He wrapped his arms around a pillar of compressed lunar concrete, a substance strong as steel - and squeezed. Grimacing, he increased the pressure to ten tons per square centimeter in a matter of seconds.
The meter-wide pillar cracked up and came crashing down, tumbling slowly in the weak gravity. In spite of their relative safety of holo-presence, the assembled men and women instinctively ducked for cover. All, that is, except the Kansler - and it really was him controlling the hologram this time.
"Temper, temper," he said, shaking his head in mock disappointment. "What you need, Argus, is to let off some steam. Care for some simulated entertainment?"
"What, those things work on cyborgs too?"
"Not until now," the Kansler said matter-of-factly. "The Entertainment Department has developed special simulations for your enhanced nervous system. Full stimulation of the pleasure centers, just like the stuff on Earth. Have a beer, put your feet on the table, have a sim."
Argus thought long and hard about it - it took a second. Now he remembered that word he used to forget, sharp and clear, every time he tried to recall it. Integrity.
"I'd like a dog," he said. Amiella made an incredulous, shocked face. "For company," he said with emphasis. "A Dalmatian. A real one."
Boulder Pi and his crew turned to each other, then to the Kansler, chattering madly about what this statement might mean, and how to accomplish Argus's request.
"Officers are allowed to have pets... Colonel," said the Kansler in a surprisingly soft tone. Argus switched to thermal vision, to check if the commander's sincerity was genuine, then remembered: that wouldn't work on holograms. "Dalmatians are hard to find here on the Moon," the Kansler added. "We'll try our best. Still not keen on that pleasure-sim, Argus? That's fine. We'll leave it in your quarters, should you get restless."
The Kansler put one hand on Dr. Minsky's shoulder, and said: "Doctor, you seem to be in need of relaxing, too. Let me take you to my office, I have some old brandy that'll do you good."
"I... yes... yes, please, Kansler," said the trembling psych-specialist.
No one in the room knew that the Kansler was a regular customer of "The House". Had they known, they might have tried to stop Amiella from following the Kansler. She was reported lost the next day. Argus assumed she had been moved from the project, and didn't think much of it then.
The following week he concentrated even harder on perfecting his training record, eager to get to the next stage. He stopped "sleeping" and used the rest periods for speedlearning, cramming his memory with tactics and military history. But he refused to take the glass-holding test.
At one point, the Kansler had a pugilist robot delivered to Argus for sparring practice. Argus considered his options for a moment - and punched off the robot's head with one blow. He would never have to face a contender to his World Champion title again.
***
One week passed, and Argus agreed to do the champagne-glass test.
"Can I have the glass dry empty this time," he asked - and got it.
There and then, facing his 616th glass, a novel insight came to him. He switched to infrared vision and looked at his own hand. Then, with ultraviolet vision, he looked closely at the glass before him.
Suddenly, it all clicked into place. Argus saw the varying thickness of the glass as colored fields - where it was strongest and would not break. He saw the heat emitted from various tensions in his artificial muscles that caused his grip to twitch. With this insight, he could direct his grip fiber by fiber, until they were all perfectly tuned and their force distributed symmetrically across his fingers.
He closed his artificial eyelids and gently grasped the glass. Its surface was cool, smooth, beautifully rounded; Argus imagined holding one of Amiella Minsky's breasts. The hypersensitive hearing units on his head listened for a cracking noise. He heard only the minute sound of his black surface "skin" against the glass, and dared to look. The glass was whole - in his steady, closed hand. The laughter he heard was his own.
"Another one! With water in it."
It arrived, and he tried again, with his eyes closed. It held. He drank it. So long had he waited for that moment, dreamed of it, that the taste of ordinary recycled Moon-water flowed like rich white wine on his synthetic palate.
The Kansler and Boulder Pi gave out mutual sighs of relief. But they were behind schedule. As Argus received words of congratulation from the lab team, the Kansler gave him new orders.
"No need to continue your physical training at this stage. All you have learned until now you can remember perfectly. It's time to take you to the Fleet's flight-training academy, on the far side of the Moon. There you will learn to fly your personal ship."
Argus's face betrayed his insecurity; he had never flown anything, not even a simple jump-jet pod. The Kansler must have read his face correctly, for he had a reply.
"Forget all you ever knew about space-flight. With you, Argus, begins a new era in orbital combat!"
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