Cyborg 01 - Cyborg

by Martin Caidin

  “That’s almost exactly what he said.”

  He nodded. “Steve at this moment is impotent,” he told her. “Nothing physical. For Steve Austin, at least right now, masculinity is linked irretrievably with his limbs. His arms and legs, Jean, were the key to his flying, to going to the moon, to his athletic prowess, and they highlighted his appeal to women. I expect it to get better until there will be a shocking realization of what I’ve just passed over lightly. At that point Steve will be absolutely convinced that no woman will ever want him, and impotency will become just as absolute. From there on it’s an uphill battle all over again.”

  “That certainly will be a challenge to some people,” Jean said.

  “Oh?”

  “Not me,” she said quickly. “Kathy. Her feelings are obvious.”

  “Well, Kathy is a beautiful girl, and—”

  “Kathy is stacked, Dr. Wells.”

  “What about his reaction?”

  “He looks right through her. She isn’t even there.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Rudy Wells watched, fascinated, as the man in the bed demonstrated, without the attempt to prove anything, the marvelous flexibility of the human being. Technicians in the bionics machine shop had followed Steve’s engineering drawings to the letter, and among the items he requested was a modification of the wheeled hospital bed-table that can be placed across a bed directly before the patient. Steve’s table was that, and a great deal more. From left to right it featured a series of vises and clamps to give him the gripping or clasping ability now denied to him through the loss of his left arm and hand. At the moment he was preparing a cigar, which he had clamped in a rubber grip. He sliced off the end of the cigar with a razorblade, then removed the wrapper with his right hand. He gripped the cigar in his teeth, lit up with a butane lighter, and blew a cloud of blue smoke in the direction of the doctor . . .

  “Brandy?”

  Rudy Wells nodded, but made no offer to help. Steve reached to his left by crossing his arm over his body—he refused to keep his supplies and equipment entirely to his right—to withdraw a bottle from a cabinet. The bottle went into a clamp and he withdrew the cork, placed two glasses on the table, and poured. Wells held up his glass in a silent toast, sipped, and returned the glass to the table by his side.

  “All right,” Steve said behind another smoke cloud, “I guess school’s on.”

  “If you feel up to it.”

  “Up yours, doc. No games. You know you’re anxious to fill me in so you can pitch your next program to me.”

  “Worked it out that well, have you?”

  Steve’s one eye held his gaze. “How many years do we know each other?”

  Wells shrugged. “You had just gotten your wings the first time we met.”

  “Uh huh. And you were there holding my hand when I went through flight-test school, and—hey, you know the story. So I know when and how you fidget, and it’s time to get on with it.”

  “The liver is as good an example as any,” Wells began, “to get it through your thick head that you’ve enjoyed a succession of miracles. Almost as if you were meant to survive the—”

  “Can the sermon, Rudy,” Steve interrupted, more serious than his expression indicated.

  Wells gestured lightly to dismiss what he had started. “The miracle, then, is that you suffered no more damage than you did. You know what happened to you. There’s grim evidence of that. But internally you went to the wall. You had some liver damage. I want you to understand that. Just some. To the very limit that we could do something about it. I say the limit because had it been any more severe we would have had little hope of bringing you through. The organ is simply too complex for us even to understand its makeup or function as well as we would like to. It handles something like five thousand body functions. No way for us to take over what nature started. Not permanently. But we did take over for a while. It cost us an excellent chimpanzee—”

  “A what?” The cigar stopped midway to Steve’s teeth.

  “A chimpanzee. You owe your life to the animal.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “We kept you alive for two days, about forty-three hours, while we used a chimp’s liver to fill in for yours. Process we call perfusion. We anesthetized the animal and removed his liver, and placed it in a special glass container. Then we made a series of connections between your body and the liver. We needed three of these. They’re cannulas. We attached and inserted them into the vessels of the chimpanzee’s liver, and then we connected the whole shebang to you.

  “Actually, the liver has marvelous powers of recuperation. Almost regeneration, in fact. If, that is, it can have its workload removed for a while. This really is what we did. We took the load off you and your body had the chance to take care of itself. The liver virtually carried on its own regenerative program. We—”

  “How the hell did I live through the liver of a chimp?”

  “After the system was set up,” Wells said a bit more slowly, “and the tubes were ready, we connected the tubes to an artery and a vein in your arm. Your blood was kept pumping by your heart, although we gave it some assistance. It was pumped into a glass reservoir. There we added anticoagulant heparin, and the blood then went to the liver of the animal. There nature took over, doing whatever it does to purify your blood, to rid it of undesirable elements. It went from the chimpanzee’s liver to another reservoir, where the heparin was neutralized, and from there back into your arm and through your system again.”

  “You kept this up for two days?”

  “Two days.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No sermons, remember?”

  Steve studied Wells carefully. “Don’t I recall you saying something about a heart operation?”

  “Not quite that,” Wells said. “We talked about a heart-valve operation. Not the same thing.”

  Wells seemed to withdraw into himself.

  “There was something else, wasn’t there?” Steve pressed the doctor.

  “Yes. I’ve been debating whether or not to tell you.”

  “Rudy, you can be goddamned exasperating, do you know that? Of all the stupid times to play coy, I—”

  “It was back at Edwards,” the doctor broke in. “It’s what I meant when I said you seemed, well, destined to survive all this. Your heart failed on the emergency table.” He paused, then said, “You were dead, Steve. There’s no other way to say it.”

  “For how long, doc?”

  “Seconds. No more than that. We anticipated it and we were ready. We shot a jolt of electricity through you. If we hadn’t . . .”

  “It might have been better if you hadn’t.”

  “I wish you’d knock off that crap, to put it bluntly.”

  “Sorry about that,” Steve said, unconcerned with the doctor’s mood. “But there was more. I mean, right here in the labs, wasn’t there?”

  “There was. When the ship broke up around you, a lot of things became unglued,” Wells said. “A piece of metal—we don’t know what it was—ripped open your rib cage and punctured the area around the heart.”

  Steve waited in silence for Wells to continue.

  “The mitral valve sustained damage. We didn’t know how bad it was until we had you up here. It became progressively worse, in fact. You had barely enough pumping energy to keep up a proper blood flow. To get things back to normal, Steve, we had to replace a part of the cardiac system.”

  “Replace? Another chimp?” He waved the cigar at the doctor. “Or did some other animal, maybe a giraffe or something, get creamed this time?”

  “We wanted a human donor but it didn’t work out that way. There was no opportunity to set up a transplant. We went to an artificial replacement.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “The first thing is to reassure you that your heart is as sound as ever.”

  “Hooray for our side.”

  Wells ignored it. “We—Dr. Killian, that is; I only assisted—performed open-hea
rt surgery. We decided on using a Hufnagel disk valve as a replacement for your own damaged valve.”

  “You mean the damned thing is inside me now?”

  “It is, and it does a better job than the original.”

  “What the devil is it?”

  “It’s made up of a ring of metal rimmed with Teflon, and in the center, within a metal cage, it’s got a white silastic disk that floats around. It’s—”

  “Silastic?”

  “That’s silicone rubber. It’s fastened by sutures. We placed the valve within the left ventricle of your heart. Like I said, it works as well if not better than the original.”

  “Jesus.”

  Wells laughed at the other man’s expression. “We shut down your heart during that operation, by the way. Used what we call the pump. It’s a heart-lung machine. It substituted the pumping action while we took your heart out of the system. I’m sure you know the basic routine. We wired you up—”

  “Wired up what was left of me, you mean.”

  Wells paused. Steve was suddenly on a downslide, his mood altering rapidly, moving into depression. No way out of it, Wells told himself. He went on quickly. “We wired you to monitor the vital functions. Oscilloscopes—it’s all familiar to you from the astronaut program. Then we inserted a tube at the hip into the main artery and used this to return the blood to your body from the heart-lung machine. The pump. You still with me?”

  Steve had been gazing vacantly into the distance. “Yeah, doc. Don’t quit now. I’m all ears for the next thrilling chapter.”

  “We cut open your chest and—”

  “That should have been easy. Plenty of holes there already, right?”

  “We spread several ribs to—I’d better interrupt myself here and tell you we took care of your rib cage at the same time. You now have five vitallium ribs. Special kind of metal. Better than the original . . .

  “We placed two tubes through your heart wall to collect the blood delivered from the main veins of the heart, which was then carried to a blood-oxygenating chamber. Here it picked up oxygen and was pumped through a rather complicated channel system back into your body. Now, when we removed all the blood from your heart, we opened it, removed the damaged valve, and replaced it with the artificial—”

  “Maybe I ought to change my name to Steve Hufnagel.”

  “—valve, closed the heart, and sewed you up.”

  “Very decent of you.”

  “Then we restored circulation. Only one bad moment. Some fibrillation. Quick electrical shock to—”

  “The old ticker must have been used to that by then, right?”

  “It wasn’t unexpected, Steve,” Wells said patiently. “As far as your heart is concerned, you’re as strong and healthy as you ever were.”

  “Boom, boom, boom.”

  Wells didn’t respond. Steve toyed with the cigar, brushed off the ashes carefully, lit up again. “You said Killian did the operation?”

  “Killian and seven other doctors.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “He’s the very best.”

  “Three loud cheers for—”

  “And your attitude stinks.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like being a freak with your shiny new Hufnagel—”

  “No one considers you a freak because of a mechanical heart valve, for God’s sake!”

  “And why the hell not?”

  “Because,” Wells told him quietly, “Michael Killian, to name just this one surgeon, has performed this same heart operation on nearly a thousand people. Before you showed up. If you’re a freak, you’ve got a great deal of company.”

  It wasn’t nearly that easy when they got down to the matter of two legs and an arm. Wells tried to stress the body adjusting to new balances, new tolerances. Steve’s expression promised a difficult period.

  “Few people realize the adult male has more than two hundred bones in his body,” Wells said. “In childhood the number is something over three hundred. These fuse together, become the basis for larger bone networks. And despite common belief to the contrary, there’s less fragility with increasing age. Of course there’s no identical pattern. Like everything else in life it’s a matter’ of variables. When—”

  “Doc, if you don’t mind, just what has all this to do with me?”

  “Bear with me a bit longer. It will fit. I was saying that the bone structure follows a basically similar pattern in the adult male. When the bones don’t fuse, for example, you can end up with an extra rib. Out of every twenty people you’ve met in your life, Steve, at least one of them has an extra rib. This simply reflects on the great flexibility in body construction. Actually, it’s one out of every twenty men, because with women it’s one in sixty. Why, we don’t know. Maybe God is apologizing to us for Adam’s loss.

  “Now, getting closer to home,” Wells continued, “is the specialized bone structure, and medicine’s ability, through bionics, the cybernetics systems, electronics, prosthetics, plastics, all these put together, to duplicate and in some cases to improve on the original.

  “You lost bones, Steve. You lost your legs and an arm. You had other bones damaged. All right. It happened. No way of undoing it. But the human bones were designed by nature to do more than to articulate or function simply as a framework from which to hang the rest of you and create a skintight container for the liquids in your body. Nature designed your bones to act as a buffer, a shield, for your vital organs.

  “And by and large they did their job. The flat plates of your skull, for example, took a terrific pounding. Some pieces were chipped out, and we’ve already replaced them. Then—”

  Steve looked at him coldly. “That’s a new one on me,” he said slowly. “Got any more surprises?”

  “Yes, I do. We’ve been using vitallium as a bone replacement for more than twenty years. We didn’t experiment with you. There are more than a hundred thousand people in this country alone with vitallium now permanently a part of their bone structure, and—”

  “Everybody just clanking right along?”

  Wells leaned forward, looked directly at Steve. “Self-pity? You’re certainly entitled to it, but it’s not very useful. Still—”

  “You go to hell.”

  “More than likely. Steve, what I’m trying to do is to establish the groundwork for what comes next. For example, Steve, your spine was—is—curved. No more and no less curved than it was before we did some repair work. To anyone who flies as a test pilot and pulls the positive g-forces you know so well, anything even a bit out of variance with the spine is of utmost concern. For a while your spine was straight. Think about the spine, what it really means to the body. The thick cables of nerves and muscles and tendons, the architectural bridges, the whole of the incredible structure. Then think of it as being straight instead of its curvature.”

  Steve’s expression was wary. “No one ever said anything about that,” he said slowly. “What happened?”

  “I’ve been trying to make the point that the body adapts, changes and conforms. Your spine, and that of every human child born, is straight at birth. It curves only with growth. And it adapts to modification, whether that alteration is natural or artificial. We did work on your spine; it was necessary. We added elements of vitallium and cerosium, but we went only far enough to return the spine to its shape before your accident. You’ll never know it from the way it acts or feels, and if I hadn’t told you about it now, you might never have known what we did. Again, Steve, the point is adaptation of the body. All this will have relevance when I get to more specifics about you.” Wells turned to the intercom. “Miss Norris? Could you bring some coffee to Colonel Austin’s room? Yes, the works. Thank you.”

  When a side door opened and Kathy Norris came in with a tray holding a coffee pot, a creamer, sugar, and cups, Rudy Wells couldn’t help breaking off his thoughts about Steve to look at the lovely woman who had just entered. Jean Manners was right. Kathy was stacked. A classic body: Great legs, slim waist, firm,
proportional breasts. Wells turned to Steve, who was merely looking at him. Steve hadn’t reacted in the slightest to the presence of this beautiful girl. Except to motion to her to, place the coffee on the table that crossed his bed. Wells noticed also that Kathy crossed the room into the adjacent laboratory, making certain to leave the door open. Good, he thought. Let her learn as much as possible. It would take a benumbed man not to see her reaction to Steve. Which was Steve’s condition at the moment.

  He drank slowly from his cup. One eye peered at Wells over the rim.

  “Steve, what you do with the opportunities we’ll give you is entirely in your own hands—”

  A stump of an arm moved above Steve’s shoulder. “If you don’t mind, Dr. Wells. Singular, please. Let’s be accurate.”

  “Hands,” Wells insisted. “It’s not attached yet. That’s all.”

  “It still makes it one hand. A prosthesis does not a hand make.”

  Wells shook his head, slowly, firmly. “Hands,” he said. “Plural. I’ve seen it. You haven’t. But you’re going to.”

  The sessions went on for hours. They broke for dinner, Wells leaving for home. He hoped Kathy Norris would share the time with Steve. Not even Steve could be indifferent to her for long. But when he returned, Kathy was gone, and Steve made no mention of her being in his room during Wells’s break for dinner. The doctor handed him a long cigar. “Jamaican,” Wells said as Steve sniffed the tobacco. “If you behave, I might even be talked out of a box of them.”

  Steve lit up, leaning back against the angled bed. “Okay, get on with it. It’s obvious you can hardly wait.”

  Wells leaned forward. “Pay attention. We’re going to crawl inside you a bit. Specifically, your left hip bone.”

  “I’m all ears.” He brought his hand around to the left side of his face. “Ear and a half, anyway.”

  Wells ignored it. “In some ways, Steve, you are already an artificial person. In some ways, and your pelvis is one of them.” That woke him up, thought Wells. “You took some damage to your left hip, where the upper part of the femur joins the pelvis. We had to go in there. It’s the joint between the hip and thigh, a ball-and-socket joint. The cartilage was damaged. In future years, if we hadn’t taken the corrective measures now, you would have ended up with excruciating pain. Think of it as a latent and unavoidable stiffness of movement. So we replaced some of the cartilage with molded cerosium, a form of ceramic. Matched the cartilage and cerosium. Not too easy, because natural cartilage is as smooth as glass, and it’s made free from friction by applying synovial fluid to the flexible parts of the joint. That’s your internal lubrication system working. All we needed to add was the cerosium. If I didn’t tell you about it now you would never know we were in there, patching and adding pieces. There was no damage to the femur itself, by the way, and you can be thankful for that.”