Steve wouldn’t reply.
“You can’t shut me out that completely, Steve. I won’t be able to talk with you for several weeks. You know that already. I—”
“That will be a relief.”
Wells sighed. “Look, Steve, can’t you understand this has nothing to do with prosthetics? They’re artificial, certainly. But prosthetics is as much vanity as it is utility, and these will be living limbs. We—”
“What the hell are you going to do? Graft someone else’s legs onto me, for God’s sake? What are you waiting for? Some poor bastard to die so you can cut off his legs and rush them here to stick onto me? Rudy, will you go away and leave me the hell alone? Stick the needle in my arm and put me out so I won’t have to take this shit any more.”
Patience, Wells ordered to himself.
“Steve, a bionics limb has the type of feedback that you will be able to sense. Not sensations as you know them. But you will feel certain things. We’re not copying nature; we’re going to duplicate the processes and you’ll have full, and I mean full, mobility. You’ll be able to—”
“Dance? How about that, Doc? Think I can make it with the now generation? Looka him go, folks, old Bionics Bob to the center of the floor! Looka how he—”
“Goddam you, Austin, I didn’t push you into that cockpit!”
Instantly Wells was sorry. He was here to ease the way for Steve, and instead he lost control over the bitter words of a man who—
“I owe you an apology for that,” he said stiffly, “but this isn’t a social exchange. If you and I are going to discuss this as equals, instead of as a doctor, and a patient who’s afraid to face reality—”
“Screw you.”
“—then we might as well know how it really is. Your body’s been torn up but your psyche is undamaged. A bit twisted, I admit. Maybe more than a bit, and sometimes deliberately savage. But still undamaged, and undaunted. You can be quite a son of a bitch, you know.”
For the first time in days there appeared the trace, the barest trace, of a smile on Steve’s lips. “Touché, Doctor,” he said quietly.
They had prepared for weeks for this moment. For weeks they refined, checked, and adjusted for the thousandth time. They knew every line, every nerve, every sinew, muscle, tendon, bone, every feature and detail of his legs. They had built—no, that wasn’t the word for it. They had created, lovingly, with infinite attention to detail, a bionics and electronics duplicate of what had been the legs of Steve Austin. Elaborate medical records were available on this man since as a test pilot and an astronaut he had undergone exhaustive medical tests and their results had been recorded. Every detail, down to the electrical resistance of his system, the salinity of his liquids, the thickness of his muscle and nerve fibers, all these things were known, and now they added to that knowledge through the extraordinary examinations and tests of their own.
For weeks they had prepared the man. They anesthetized his leg stumps so that they could get in there, remove the skin that had stabilized. They had to by-pass, to cut, to reroute the tubes and the systems through which his body fluids coursed. This they did, sometimes using his own body units they had saved in supercold storage since the crash on the California desert; and where revascularization was not possible, they used plastic and cerosium and Dacron and silastic and whatever else was necessary. Several times it was necessary to measure the electrical currents, the feeble but life-supplied charges that flashed through the body, that ran from the brain down through the thick cabling of the spinal column to his extremities. During such times, Steve Austin slipped into the deep unconsciousness of the electrosleep machine and was gone from the world, either suspended in timeless space or burdened with the dreams that suffused his subconscious. And while he was gone, Dr. Killian and his staff were exposing the critical elements of the legs. They were opening nerves and tendons and preparing bone. They were on the brink of a new world of the human and bionics, of joining living flesh and bone to electronics and steel and vitallium and plastic and tiny, powerful units of nuclear energy.
When finally they were ready for the ultimate moment, the joining of the two worlds through the person of Steve Austin, he was placed even deeper into his unconscious state. For there would be pain now, where there had been none for many months. Where the body had stabilized, they must destabilize. They must open the cables and wires of the human body that carry messages of awareness and pressure and feel, and, of necessity, pain. That was the price. Steve would not have been capable of withstanding the surges of energy, the spasms of twitching, jerking, the convulsions as these elements of his body came alive. Human and human-made were brought together, connected, spliced, wired, sealed. Raw flesh was treated and joined with what was not flesh so that the two might function together as the human entity had performed before the limbs were mutilated and severed.
As he slept, he came back to life. As he swam deep in blackness, electrical probes were applied to his system. His body twisted, his body snapped, as the men attending him worked with feverish anticipation and brooding concern. As he slept they applied pressure to the soles of his bionics feet, and side pressures, twisting forces. They measured the flow of electrical energy from his brain down through the intricate nerve networks. They studied with their sensitive instruments how the feeble electric charge was received at the junction of human and artificial. It was there that what was being transmitted through a living system which had grown now was sensed and picked up by a living system that had been fabricated. The signal was terribly weak, but whisper-sensitive instruments in the bionics limbs picked up the electrical ghosts. The instant the instruments detected the incoming signals they flashed on the word for the signals to be amplified one thousand-fold. The boosted signal went down to intricate, articulated joints that could bend, twist, and flex. A need for power was flashed through the system. Small motors spinning with nuclear energy received the signal, and in their response sent greater energy into the joints. It was the same signal that the legs Steve had been born with received and by which they functioned. The legs moved. The limbs flexed, bent, twisted, articulated. As he slept, his limbs came to life. Then the tests were done.
Nothing more could happen now until the raw connections had time to heal. There could be no movement until fusion became fact; until nature and man’s products joined as one. They blocked off the flow of energy to the limbs. They kept him unconscious. When he awakened he would not be the same man. He would still be missing an arm, still be blind in one eye. But he would no longer be a man without legs. How useful those legs would be was unknown. The doctors had done their best. The bionicists and technicians and scientists had done their best.
The rest would be up to the man. All the others could do now was to wait.
“Jean, you’ll have to be with him almost constantly.”
“I understand.”
“Of course, you’ll need standby help. The technical group will always have somebody here twenty-four hours a day. They’ll be monitoring the instruments.”
She nodded. “Will they have to work directly with him? I mean, with—”
“With his body?” Wells shook his head. “No, not unless something goes wrong.” He made a sour face. He was dog-tired, beaten physically, as were the others. “And that would be a full emergency. No, they won’t have to touch him.”
“I feel better about that.”
He looked at her. Like the others, she was nervous, overtired.
“It’s a feeling, doctor. He needs some privacy, for God’s sake. I’ve got to attend to his needs, and for his sake I’d rather not do that with a bunch of gawking spectators,” she said.
“They’re hardly that, Jean. You’ve got the right feeling,” he said. “Who did you pick for your relief?”
“I thought there’d be no question about that.”
“Kathy?”
“Who else? She won’t let anyone else near him, except me.”
He nodded. “Tomorrow we’ll start to bri
ng him out of it. Only partially, however. We don’t want his system coming full tilt into his rebuilding. The shock could be so severe it might undo everything we’ve accomplished.”
“Kathy says it would be a super short-circuit.”
He saw it again. A simultaneous look. From the cockpit and from the eye of the camera, the zoom lens slamming in tight so he could see every detail, see himself in the cockpit. He could hear it as well. The scream of metal and that gutting cry of flame out on the California desert. A finale at over two hundred miles an hour, with metal churning—and himself right in the middle. Thirty-two years come to its sky-tearing, earth-thudding blossom on a hard desert floor . . .
He was the youngest astronaut to walk on the moon. They had great plans for him. He would be one of nine men to spend up to two months aboard Skylab II, the big space station orbiting the earth at three hundred miles. While the station flight was being readied he went back to test flying. What better program than the wicked lifting bodies preceding the flights of the Orbiters for the shuttle program? Because that put him right in the lead group to go back into space in the late seventies and the early eighties. He’d be younger then, and with far more experience, than was Al Shepard when he touched down on the moon’s dusty surface in Apollo XIV.
People looked for something different in Steve Austin. Something different from what they found in the other astronauts. They looked for it and they were disappointed, because what they discovered was only more of the same. Individualistic as he might be and was, Steve Austin was still outwardly a product of the mold from which test pilots and astronauts were formed. You didn’t earn your qualifications by straying from the hard line of training and necessary experience. If you were that eager to catch the public eye in being artistically different, then you could kiss the moon good-bye, and fast. Deke Slayton, who ran the astronaut office, was interested only in the mission and the best men to fly the mission, and your ass was on the way out when you didn’t tack to the winds required by the astronaut office. The difference that mattered was being a little bit faster, smarter, and better than the best.
One of the keys to success was keeping your individuality concealed from the public. The astronauts were different, one from the other. The seats available to the moon and the Skylab were limited and they fought each other like wildcats and pulled every trick in the book—honest and less so—to shove some other guy out of the way so that they could slap ass into the seat they wanted. That was the name of the game. But to the world you showed the same bland expression. Those were the rules. If you took the records of fifty men who qualified both as test pilots and astronauts you would find an astonishing sameness of the breed. Individually every man would be different, and their variations at times were wide gulfs of personality and typecasting. But not in their professional traits. Their health was excellent (it had to be) and their physical coordination and capabilities no less so (they had to be). They had the basic social amenities. It’s just as easy to pick a man who pleases you as it is a snarling lone wolf when both men are essentially of the same caliber. Screwing up socially under the eyes’ of the news media could get you bounced from a moon ride. It wasn’t worth being a character—even if you were one.
Among themselves, where it couldn’t hurt, Steve Austin’s fellow astronauts considered him close to a genius. Predictably, Steve had earned his masters in aerodynamics and astronautical engineering, but raised eyebrows with a third masters in history. The eyebrows went higher when one considered the time he had to spend away from his intellectual pursuits to manage his levels of skill in the physical activities he favored. He was a star athlete in most sports, but found his greatest challenge, and satisfaction, on the mat—wrestling, judo, and aikido were his favorites. He had applied himself with such energy to these that his trophies included black belts in both judo and aikido. Aikido especially taught control over mind as much as discipline of body. To steel his body with the fluid motions and speed of aikido, he also took up boxing and fencing and rounded things out with acrobatics.
He came to test flying and the astronaut corps along a unique route. Rather than the Air Force, he had selected the Army so that he could become skilled in both fixed-wing and helicopter flight. He flew a gunship in Vietnam, sickened himself with the bloody carnage worked by the hellish firepower of his cannon and rockets, and almost welcomed the burst of machine-gun fire out of a jungle thicket that shattered his rotors and sent the gunship whirling crazily into the trees. Steve had himself the million-dollar wound. Three broken ribs and assorted lacerations that would heal without problem bought his ticket back to the States.
He transferred to the Air Force, breezed through the cadet programs, and slipped into the heady stuff of flying along the edge of the world. Special training, overseas duty, pressure, and good luck carried him into the cockpit of the SR-71, a great razorlike black beast that cruised at two thousand miles an hour twenty miles above the earth—on the edge of it; high enough to see the world curving away its horizons to right and left. The black spaces beyond were seductive, and he slipped into the last selection as a member of the backup crew for Apollo XVII. Lucky break in more ways than one. The lunar-module pilot broke his arm two weeks before liftoff, and Steve Austin was shifted from backup to prime crew and became one of the two of the last men to walk the featherweight gravity of the moon.
There was a question about his returning. But the moon was being abandoned by his country, and until the United States was ready with nuclear engines and a whacking big budget to start the first permanent lunar base, there wasn’t any use holding your breath. You could get awfully blue in the face in ten or more years. The concept of manned flight to Mars tugged at him, but the red planet lay a good many budgets and national priorities away. Still, men would be returning to space and he knew he must one day be in the environment he had found so much to his liking, so completely natural; the incredible weightlessness, the surging marvel of seeing the glowing planet as a dazzling jewel suspended in velvet black. Well, flight testing the lifting bodies was the best answer, and he went after the toughest assignments in the program because that was the only way for him. He slid along the edges of space once more in the vicious aerodynamic bathtubs that skittered like fidgety waterbugs on a shifting lake of thin atmosphere. It was rough. It was the best chance of punching his ticket for the big ride back into vacuum.
There was the “other” Steve Austin. The man the public recognized as a past combat pilot, a test pilot, the youngest of the astronauts, a man who’d been on the moon, who stood six feet, one inch tall, with eyes deep blue; a lean, muscled frame, almost rangy; a laugh filled with warmth; and an animal attraction about him.
His bachelor status brought much conversation and considerable plotting by large numbers of leggy, busty, anticipating women. Not bad; not bad at all. Even the barracudas zeroing in weren’t bad; cool sheets may have been their hunting grounds, but Steve was adept in that territory and elusive beyond the bedroom door.
Until he returned to the flight test center in the California desert. The moon was now behind him. He had proved a good deal to himself. Now was time for a different perspective.
Jan Richards came into that perspective, and ready as he was, the fall was fast and marvelous.
And then . . . that terrible fiery stalk blossoming across the desert. It came back to him again, that shifting veil of memory, and through the unwinking eye of bloody flame he heard his name being called. A deep booming summons, far off, rushing closer and closer to him. Steve, Steve, Steve . . .
The faces swam in a blur before him. He blinked his eye, tried to focus. One face moved, a sickening reel to the side. He closed his eye, forced the world to stop spinning. Try to think, he ordered himself. C’mon, let’s get with it . . .
“It’s me, Steve. Rudy Wells.” He recognized the voice. Something to hang onto. That’ll be better. He opened his eye again, waited for the blurs to dissolve and melt into one another. There. Good old Doc Wells. Clea
r now. And who . . . sure, Dr. Killian. Steve turned his head to the left. Something gold there. Hair. Jean, looking down at him.
“Take it slow, Steve.” Doc’s voice, calm enough. He looked again at the faces. What . . . He voiced his thoughts.
“What is this? A wake?”
Doc smiled. “No, Steve. Anything but. Can you remember what’s been happening?”
He tried. It was like slogging through mud but he was getting there. Sure. The long preparations, then going into that deep, deep sleep.
“Yeah,” he said weakly. “I remember. Nothing different. Just you and me having one of our fireside chats.” He was amazed. Weak; damn, he felt weak.
“Strange,” he murmured.
Wells leaned closer to him. “What was that, Steve?”
“Strange thing, Doc.” He groped for the words. “I—I feel heavy. Crazy, isn’t it?” He held the words back for a while, trying to think.
“Heavy, Steve? That is strange. What do’you mean by that?”
“Don’t know . . . Like I said, crazy feeling. Heavy. I mean heavier than before . . . before sleep . . .”
His face went white, as if they could see the blood draining away. Killian signaled a doctor who stood by for any emergency. Steve saw none of this, saw only Rudy Wells’s face.
“What’s the matter, Steve?”
He was completely white now, his body rigid. His arm came up, grabbed Wells’s wrist.
“Doc!”
The sweat poured from his forehead. Jean Manners started forward with a cloth to wipe it away. Dr. Killian motioned her to stay back.
“Doc, I—”
“What is it, Steve?”
“My God . . . Doc . . .
Cyborg 01 - Cyborg Page 11
