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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 bring 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]