Cyborg 03 - High Crystal

by Martin Caidin

  Finally he turned to face Wells. “Can’t you turn off that damned thing?”

  Wells walked from the stream, shaking his arms. “It doesn’t turn off for ten minutes. You know they need ten minutes for direction finding.”

  “Hand it here, Rudy.”

  “There’s no off-switch.”

  “I know that. Just give it to me.”

  Wells unzipped the inside pocket of his jacket, removed the sealed transceiver. Free of the jacket the sound was louder, more insistent. Wells winced as he handed over the instrument.

  For a moment Austin held it, seeming to feel the weight in his hand. Suddenly the fingers closed, steel pincers squeezing.

  “Steve, don’t do—” Wells cut off his own warning as useless. Austin ground it in his bionics hand and threw it away.

  Wells looked at him. “We can’t just ignore the call.” He didn’t have to say the rest, that the electronic signal was used only by OSO in an emergency. The signal didn’t provide for response with the compact transceiver. It received its radio trigger no matter where its geographic location; the signal was sent from the system of military communications satellites in high orbit. It was always received. When the cornsat signal triggered the deliberately provoking shriek, it also activated a transmitter in the device. The unheard radio signal that flashed back could provide highly accurate triangulation to locate the man carrying the device. The man with this signal equipment was supposed to get to the nearest telephone and call in on a secret number at OSO. Steve Austin obviously was in no hurry to respond to the emergency transmission.

  “Steve,” Rudy Wells began again. “I said we can’t just ignore—”

  “Watch me, Doc. Watch me do the greatest job of ignoring you ever saw. Look, I haven’t had a break for more than a year. Same for you. Every chance we get to move out from under is fouled up by someone yelling emergency. I came here to fish. I am going to fish.” He gestured to the trout still in the net. “And that’s your job right now. Remember? The bet?”

  Wells nodded and set up the fish for cleaning. A banked fire and glowing coals had already been prepared. He decided not to press the issue with Steve. He really couldn’t blame the man. Three times in the last year he’d gone out for OSO.

  The first had been an underwater expedition off the coast of Venezuela using android porpoises, during which Steve had worked his way deep into a Russian submarine cave and had nearly paid with his life for the pictures he’d brought out within his eyesocket camera. He’s been depth-charged, attacked by divers with knives, and shot. He’d made it back with even his overwhelming strength nearly depleted and his bionics systems riddled and failing. Electronic “superman” or not, there were definite nonsuper, very human limits.

  No sooner had he been patched up than McKay at OSO was pushing him back into action. They used Steve for assignments that were likely to be beyond most ordinary men. A brilliant mind, the build of an athlete combined with the bionics systems that made Steve Austin a cybernetics organism. Cyborg. Funny, the way they’d come to accept Steve in that role . . . he was so very human and vulnerable in so many respects.

  There had been relatively conventional years as a test pilot, including three ejections from crippled, burning aircraft. Then openings in the space program and NASA had snapped up his application. Along with his experience and six thousand hours in the air went a master’s degree in geology, another in aeronautical engineering and still another in, of all things, history and cultural studies. After commanding the last Apollo mission to the moon, Steve turned down the Skylab program and came back to the sprawling flight-test center in the California desert.

  The Shuttle program was the program for the future. Nearly everything that would go into space, manned or robot, would make the trip aboard the delta-winged Shuttle emerging from the drawing-boards. There’d be a NASA Shuttle and also an Air Force edition, and Steve Austin wanted in on the ground floor. The Shuttle needed its principles tested in smaller forerunners known as lifting bodies; “flying bathtubs” to those on the projects. Wicked, given to sudden violent rolls to the right or the left, they were intended to breach the barrier reefs in the sky, get the flight and design problems solved so that the future Shuttle could fly in comfort and safety.

  Steve became chief project officer as well as chief test pilot with the M3F5. A B-52 dropped him at 45,000 feet. As he fell away, Steve ignited the rocket chambers in the belly of his flying bathtub. He took her up to 120,000 feet and sailed through a swooping curve from near-vacuum. As he began to bring her out of the high-speed glide she began her crazy rolling motion that was at the heart of the test—to find out what maneuvers by the pilot could damp the oscillations. He held her beautifully until he flared. He had it done, inches from touching down on the hard desert floor. She rolled, snapped to the left. Silver metal thundered across the desert in a flaming, disintegrating shambles, with Steve Austin trapped inside, being mangled by the forces of the tumbling crash. In the long moment until the wreckage came to a smouldering stop, Steve Austin “died.”

  He had been a brilliant test pilot, an astronaut, a warm human being of high intelligence and diverse skills. When the crash crews arrived at the metal wreckage, Rudy Wells with them, that Steve Austin was gone. Crushed, broken, unconscious, he was rushed to the emergency medical facility at Edwards Air Force Base, and to the skill of its Air Force flight surgeons. But only one of those men, a physician and close friend named Rudy Wells, could penetrate through and beyond the medical procedures to keep alive what they had dragged from the wreckage. If they could keep him alive.

  Both legs amputated. The left arm mangled so badly it had been torn from the body in the crash. Ribs shattered, jaw smashed; all to be replaced in a long, tedious and demanding process with metal alloys and ceramics and plastics. The heart had been damaged but it would heal. Not so a main artery and its valve, but in spectacular open-heart surgery the damaged parts were removed and a Hufnagel valve implanted. His left eye was blind. They might replace it with an infrared detector or even a camera, but he would be at least partially blind until they perfected an artificial eye. They were working on it . . .

  Ashburn and Killian were the two surgeons who had performed the near-miraculous work—attended to the skull fracture, concussion, burned skin, lung damage. Dr. Rudy Wells assisted, but he was essential to keep alive not the body but the mind and spirit of Steve Austin. For a while Steve bated him. Steve felt he had become a basket case—one arm and one eye hardly qualified him for the human race. But he survived, precariously, against his mind and will that asked for death. He’d been kept unconscious for weeks. Time, the new healer. Time for shock to ebb slowly from the remaining body and from the mind. Time for the trillions of cells to reform, adapt.

  The Air Force flew him to their new bionics laboratory carved into the flanks of the Colorado Rockies. The lab was engineering and life sciences and biology and cybernetics and surgery and experimentation. Advanced computers held equal place with the skill of human surgeons, for the computer could reproduce the mechanical-electrical equivalent of every element of construction and function of, for example in the case of Steve, the human arm and hand and leg.

  The computer digested what it learned, but was taxed to reduce to intelligible, functional symbols the handiwork of nature. Symbols became numbers, numbers became digits with special meaning to waiting doctors, scientists, technicians and engineers. In those mathematical symbols was the lodestone, blueprints for creating a living simulation of what had been a human arm, leg, elbow, rib, knee or finger.

  Some argued the semantics of living, or life. The human body is no mere mechanical instrument. It does function, though, on messages generated by electrochemical reaction. Nervous energy is electrical energy, even if the intricacy of the human structure calls for a better analogy than an internally powered, mobile battery case.

  Bionics did not contest the semantics. Nor did it seek agreement. The calling of these surgeons under the direction of D
r. Michael Killian was the work itself. The results. Bionics. Bios from the Greek for life; ics, “in the manner after.” A bionics limb was a recreation of the living member. Steve Austin—cyborg—would be the beneficiary of cybernetic computer technology achieving bionic simulation of nature.

  When they finished repairing his heart they turned to his crushed skull. They replaced the bone with cesium and, where needed, new alloys. They designed a spongy center layer and another outer layer to protect the brain case inside. As a result he could endure a direct blow far greater than the sledgehammer shocks that cracked his skull in the first place. The ribs, cracked and splintered, were replaced with flexible metal and wired to the musculature, as nature had originally done, to keep them in place, flexing when needed, providing a protective cage when needed.

  None of this could compare with the wonder of recreated limbs—to the arm with its elbow and its bionics bones and cartilage and the dexterity of wrist and fingers and opposed digit, as well as to the legs with their computer-directed systems.

  It was one thing to construct the limbs that were to receive the nerve impulses flowing to and from the brain, nerve impulses that were literally electrical signals. It was another to mimic the nerve fibers, the systems for transmitting the impulses from the brain into the spinal cord and on down to the message networks. To Steve’s arm stump they double-engaged the bionics and the natural bone to exceed by multiples the original levels of strength and resistance. They connected the severed nerves and muscles with bionics nerves and muscles. The two systems were compatible. The signals came through but were too weak for the bionics system. Science could duplicate the living limb but it could not make it work on the whisper of current sufficient for the natural limb. So within the bionics arm and legs went miniaturized nuclear-powered generators that spun silently at speeds measured in thousands of revolutions per second.

  A signal flashed from Steve’s brain until it reached the part of him that was living because of computer and machine lathe. The signal entered the bionics system, was sensed and flashed to an amplifier within that system. Now it was retransmitted with a current many times stronger than when received. The small nuclear generators fed power through the man-made duplications of nature’s pulleys and cables, which twisted, pulled, bent, contracted, squeezed. But artificial fingertips lacked sensitivity. A cybernetic hand with no more effort than was needed to pulp a rose could do the same to human bone. The need was for discretionary feel, which was achieved through vibrating pads, sensors, amplifiers and feedback. Now the steel-boned hand that with a single transmitted impulse could crush and kill could also caress a woman’s skin.

  For month after month Steve Austin, reborn as cyborg, sought to create a physical and emotional knowledge and acceptance of himself. For months he stumbled and fell, weaved and swayed. His systems shorted and jerked spasmodically; he was clumsy, felt himself a bumbling fool, was filled with the rage of frustration. Finally, thanks especially to the dedication of Dr. Wells, his technicians, and a giant of a man, Marty Schiller, who walked on two artificial legs of his own, Steve made it and discovered there even were compensations.

  If the bionics arm and legs were not quite the same as the original limbs, they were in some ways superior. Steve’s arm was more than the ordinary natural one. It functioned, if needed, as a battering ram, a vise, a bludgeon—a tool and a weapon. His legs had the potentiality of driving pistons. His heart, respiration and circulatory systems benefited from the need to serve a body with two legs and one arm less than before. The bionics systems with their nuclear amplifiers attended to energy needs so that Steve’s potential endurance increased. He was, however, as dependent as ever on his heart and lungs and brain and other unaffected systems.

  But what of the psychology of a man who has, for example, suffered impotence—not through genital injury or damage to the nerve network splicing the spinal column but through fear that no woman could feel anything for a half-man, half-machine. And even that had been overcome, through the superior medicine of a loving woman.

  For all this Steve had a price to pay. To OSO in the person of Oscar Goldman, right hand and alter-ego to Jackson McKay, its director. Goldman was five feet, five inches tall. Somewhere in his past he had been a special-agent paratrooper and ranger. He was skilled in weapons. He was also more than passing shrewd in sizing up people, in recruiting even the reluctant for the Office of Special Operations. He could correlate an enormous quantity of fact from various disciplines. He knew how to put on the squeeze.

  He had begun with Rudy Wells, which was when the project to create a cybog was born. Goldman saw in Steve Austin the promise of a most extraordinary special agent. The Air Force would do everything to make a new life for Steve, but that “everything” had limits. Artificial legs and an arm. A glass eye. Patch and mend and bandage. Some psychiatric treatment. They’d release a man who would doubtless take the first opportunity to finish the job they’d interrupted when they dragged his remains from the wreckage on the California desert.

  Oscar Goldman had promised more. He had come prepared to invest six million dollars, the sum authorized by Jackson McKay. Sympathy? Feeling? None of these, Goldman told Rudy Wells, was to be measured against the offer. Steve Austin would be an experiment. He was more than the torn remains of a man. He had been a man with brilliance and training and knowledge at his command. It could all be brought to life again. And more.

  OSO would pay for the surgery and the bionics development. They would pay for the facilities and the personnel that would be needed to train this new man. And when it was done, they would present their bill.

  To pay it Steve Austin would be obliged to train and perform as a special agent for OSO. Wherever, whatever, whenever. That was the deal, and Rudy Wells had accepted because he had no choice and Goldman knew it.

  Steve’s new body made parts of him potentially killing mechanisms in themselves. With special devices and weaponry integrated with his bionics systems Austin was capable of certain missions on his own that even a company of men could not accomplish.

  OSO proceeded to exact payment from this man, this cyborg. First the mission into the Soviet submarine caverns on the coast of South America. Next a mission into Egypt against Soviet-sponsored Arab extremists, for which he needed his skills as a pilot plus the endurance of the cyborg. A shadow remained from that time; Steve had teamed with a girl he knew only as Tamara, an Israeli special agent, lovely, courageous and intelligent, fired with life. He crossed the treacherous Sinai with an unconscious Tamara lashed to his back. His pistonlike legs carried him and his burden across scorching wastes. He survived once again—but more dead than alive.

  Recuperation took months, but Steve had not forgotten her. He returned to Israel—three days after Tamara had been killed in a border fight. A friend took him to her grave and he stood there alone, trying to cry. The grief went too deep.

  He returned to the States, met by his closest friend. Rudy Wells flew back with Steve to Colorado. More training. New devices and systems to be tested. Drown the grief in challenge. They were near the end of that special program when Jackson McKay sent out the word for Steve to report to OSO headquarters and for months afterward Steve was involved in a double life. After an elaborately stage-managed incident he fled the United States as a fugitive, compounding one felony with another when he and his buddy Marty Schiller stole a Boeing 707 from its maintenance facility and disappeared across the Atlantic, finally to land in Libya. It was an act calculated to bring Steve to the attention of—and able to infiltrate—an organization dealing in the theft, sale and even use of nuclear weapons. In the long months that followed, as he played out his assigned role, he became—though unintentionally—associated with a nuclear blast that took the life of his friend Marty Schiller, and that was to stay a very long time with Steve. Little matter that he had been powerless to prevent it, or that his mission had “succeeded.” He still felt he had blood to wash from his hands, an agony to wash out of his mind.
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  There had been more repairs to his system. Rudy Wells worried that Steve might be turning too deeply into himself, and it was with enormous relief that he heard Steve propose the fishing trip up in Wyoming. A cyborg could be repaired. The man Steve Austin had to heal himself.

  Now, at the end of only their first day at the stream, that electronic signal had gone off. Thinking of it all, Rudy Wells decided Steve was right when he’d crushed the transceiver in his bionics hand. Let them find us.

  He got to his feet. “If you can move that tin butt of yours over here,” he said to Steve, “you can have the greatest trout ever cooked by man.”

  That night, in his sleeping bag underneath the stars, Rudy Wells glanced at Steve already fast asleep and raised the image in his mind of his extraordinary friend: Ex-fighter pilot, former astronaut, six feet one, flat-bellied, lean-muscled. Blue eyes. Check that—one blue eye, natural; one blue eye, plastic. And the dark brown hair had grown on someone else before implantation into the steel shell surrounding Steve’s skull. He looked a lean 180 pounds. With his bionics systems he weighed 240. He carried it with ease. Not at first, but now he did because he’d managed to integrate himself. He was, his friend decided, a very human success. And he was entitled. To hell with them all. We came here to fish . . .

  In the morning the helicopter found them over their breakfast fire.

  CHAPTER 3

  Oscar Goldman looked down at the figures in the small clearing, turned to the pilot and pointed. “Can you take us down there?”

  “No way, Mr. Goldman. We’d never get the rotors within those trees.”

  “Well, take us a bit lower then.”

  The downwash from the powerful turbine Alouette sent the coffeepot flying over on its side, tumbled camp supplies, sprayed the men with gravel.