Cyborg by Martin Caidin - Chapter 01

1972 Genre: Vintage Paperback / Tough Guy

STEVE AUSTIN, CYBORG, IS THE WORLD'S DEADLIEST WEAPON

All the resources of N.A.S.A., The Pentagon, and Government Money put the broken pieces of Lt. Col. Steve Austin's shattered body together again. He came out of it more perfect than human. Better than new. A deadly, unstoppable weapon. Now all he needed was to find some human emotion in the tangle of plastic, wire, and atomic metal that was fused to the remains of his flesh ...

CHAPTER 1

LONELY MOUNTAIN took the first harsh whisper of naked sun. Far beyond the ridges of the San Bernardino, the San Gabriel, and the Shadow Mountains, the peak the Spaniards long ago named Soledad glowed against desert morning sky. Earth's horizon dipped lower to cast Lonely Mountain with increasing brilliance. It was a clear sign of blistering heat to come during the day.

Many miles distant from the stone-hard, baked desert floor of Rogers Dry Lake, the sight of the faraway peak brought eyes flicking to wristwatches. The events of the morning were to be measured as a race against a wickedly hot sun and its enervating temperatures. Not so much the heat itself but its thermals wavering in the desert air could snatch dangerously at stub wings already teetering on precarious balance. The time to get things done in the California desert was early in the morning, and that was now.

From the floor of the dry lake, sunrise began with the flaring upthrust of Lonely Mountain. As the men glanced up from their work the saw-tooth edges of near mountain ranges were yielding to light. Silhouetted ramparts in deep shadow rang brightly with the fireball impact of the sun. Etched by early-morning dust, sunlight stabbed through crevices as huge glowing shafts across the vast desert floor. There was now that magic transition between dawn and day. With the sun angle still so low, there was stark contrast; clumps of scattered tumbleweed hid their brambled surfaces in the form of soft puffballs glowing along one side, casting long shadows behind the other. Along a nearby ridge, midget desert flowers shone in purple and yellow. Sagebrush seemed to glow, but above all there rose from the flat tableland the oldest denizens of this desert nowhere, the great cactus trees known as Joshua trees. Some of these grotesquely crooked giants of their kind reared fully thirty feet above the flatness at their base, frozen in some ancient torment, and it was difficult to realize as they accepted the morning sun that they had stood here as long as the towering redwoods had stood farther to the west. Against the hazy blue of dust already shrouding the distant peaks, charged with a mild electrical glow by the ascending disk in the sky, they set a somber mood of stark contrast against the newcomers to this forsaken flatness.

Through most of the night there had been other light here in the Mojave. Along the western rim of the floor of the dry lake, a blue-white incandescence showered upward.

These were brilliant floodlights and under their harsh glare there had been created a small oasis from which night was banished. Great generators howled and thumped and whined through the long hours to power the lights, and their exhausts and vapors, rising slowly, had added to the feeling of an outpost on another world. There were other vehicles; long trailers gleaming whitely beneath the lights, identified in glowing signs and blinking panels of their own. Several large-bodied trucks displayed thick red crosses. Other vehicles were tracked, coated with armor and asbestos, and studded with hand grips and thick hatches. Still others were a garish red, knobbed from bumper to bumper with the ·protuberances of nozzles and hoses; each of these could instantly be transformed into a dragon foaming from half a dozen nozzles and spouting flame-depressing liquid from half a dozen more. A great crane on sixteen massive wheels stood silently by on the perimeter of the island cluster of lights and sound and movement. Long, yellow trucks with cylindrical bodies and chains dragging behind to eliminate static electricity waited patiently to move kerosene fuel into metal-enclosed tanks. Other fueling vehicles were present; these were painted dazzling, international orange, splashed with warning signs, glowing beneath lights flashing the unmistakable signal of danger. There were sedans and station wagons, some Air Force blue, others the white of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On the latter the blue insignia circle of NASA was displayed prominently. Communications vans extended wispy and curving helical antennas high above their bodies. And there were, finally, several personnel trailers, long-bodied enclosures sealed so completely from the outside, air-conditioned and humidity-controlled so carefully that they were literally spacecraft on wheels to sustain their internal environment.

All these, the screaming generators and flashing lights and trucks and cars and vans, were present to meet the needs of two other machines. At first glance only one of these was visible, and not until the sun rose high enough to bathe its vast spread of wing was its true size apparent.

It hulked along the dry desert floor, a brooding monster of many hundreds of thousands of pounds, a technological vulture with wings sagging at their tips nearly to the ground. It was a football field of metal shaped and angled into its present form of wing and body and towering tail, all of it balanced on tandem sets of tires, the far edges of the wing tips teetering in impossibly silly fashion on stick legs of outrigger gear.

Standing close to the right wing the observer had no view of the second machine, which was the reason for this great assembly of machinery and more than two hundred people. This second and smaller machine nestled closely to the underside of the left wing, a blunt dart beneath a great spread of metal, sandwiched in between jet engines and long, external fuel tanks. It appeared to be a thing intended for flight, but rather than wings it had stubby appendages jutting from a rounded body shaped like a bathtub. Three flaring fins marked the aft section, sharply angled metal quivers ending a ridiculously short and stubby metal · arrow. The nose of the strange machine, marked with black lettering that read M3F5, revealed a shaped glassy enclosure that gave it the appearance of a whale with a transparent snout.

Two men wearing bright-orange jumpsuits and white helmets with fluorescent stripes stepped back from a final inspection of the finned bathtub. One glanced at his watch, then turned to study a long, white trailer bearing the rounded NASA insignia. "About that time," he noted.

His companion nodded, saying what they both knew.

"Any minute now."

As if on cue a door in the trailer side opened, a man stepped out quickly, turned about, and stood expectantly by the steps, looking back into the trailer. He appeared nervous, as if wishing that whatever was scheduled to happen would do so quickly. Moments later another man appeared in the doorway, moving with greater deliberation, almost shuffling clumsily within the constraints of a white pressure suit, his face obscured by a gold-opaque sun visor. He might have been an astronaut stepping from a trailer at the foot of a launch pad ·on Cape Kennedy; he wore much the same garment as the men who had voyaged to the moon. He had been one of those men, a member of the last crew to make the voyage between earth and its desolate satellite a quarter of a million miles distant. His name was Steve Austin; he had been a test pilot before his weightless traverse of vacuum and he was now, again, a member of his former profession. No shifting lunar soil awaited this journey, but still, the flight he anticipated to a height of some sixty miles above the floor of the desert held far more danger. The path to the moon had been well established with mathematical certainty before he watched his planet fall away during Apollo XVII. The machine into which he was soon to be sealed lacked such certainty, and in its area of unknowns were dangers unpredictable but predictably lethal. It was a simple rule of thumb. No one had ever been killed on his way to or on his way from the moon. Every year at this sprawling center of test flying in the California desert, every year for the past twenty years, an average of eight good men had been killed.

Austin stood for a moment in the doorway, looking out past the jumble of vehicles, studying the huge winged shape with its wicked little machine suspended beneath the left wing. His gloved hand lifted slowly to slide the opaque visor away from the Plexiglas bubble before his face. Then, satisfied, he nodded his head, an acceptance within himself that it was time to move on. He had worn this clumsy garment often enough to know its restrictions, and he moved his left foot forward, crabbing his body as he did so, leaning into the step in a practiced maneuver.

The man waiting at the foot of the steps reached forward anxiously to support Austin at the elbow, for the test pilot was encumbered with a portable air conditioner in his left hand. Even at this early hour, being sealed within a suit designed for survival in vacuum guaranteed immediate severe perspiration without internal cooling airflow.

Steve Austin took the steps carefully, stopped for a moment as if to test the fit of his heavy garment, then moved off steadily toward the huge airplane. Directly behind him walked his suit technician, a cold-eyed fuss-budget connected by swaying telephone wire to the radio headset in Austin's helmet.

Austin's appearance in the trailer doorway was an unspoken signal for almost all activity in the area to end.

It was, of course, a story familiar to all who were there.

Austin could not move an inch into that waiting black sky far above the earth without their coordinated efforts.

But they would remain well within the comfort of earth-surface gravity, while he was the one to attack the unknown with its inevitable dangers. So they stood, by some unspoken signal, to watch him take his final steps before commitment.

All but one. "Steve!" Her cry caught everyone's attention but his own. Within the pressure helmet he heard only the voice of the man walking behind him, but that man grinned into his headset.

"Colonel, I think someone wants to say good-bye."

As the girl ran to Austin's side, her brown hair flowing from her movement, the suit technician was lifting his headset from about his ears. He cast a swift approving glance-over the lithe figure standing before Austin, then banded her the headset and boom mike. Austin smiled down at her as she fitted the equipment. It was almost impossible not to smile at the sight of Jan Richards.

"Steve, I—I didn't mean to, you know, interfere, but I just had to say something before . . . before you left."

The smile broke into a broad grin. "Say it, then."

She glanced about self-consciously, edging closer to him, whispering the words in the microphone. "I love you, Steve Austin."

He gestured with an easy laugh. "You sure must like privacy."

"Is that all you're going to say?"

She saw his head move inside the helmet, tilted slightly to the side as if appraising her. "Same here."

She thrust her arm about his, glanced behind her at the suit technician eyeing them both. "Can I walk with you to the plane?"

His gloved hand patted her arm. "Sure." He glanced at the suit technician. "Charlie's already having his fit so I guess it doesn't matter."

She moved as close to him as his bulky covering allowed, matching his shuffling pace, the suit technician staying immediately behind with quick, short steps. Jan did her best to keep her words easy.

"It's hard to believe this is the last one for a month, darling." She squeezed his arm, suddenly hating the thick material separating them. "And starting tomorrow . . ."

"Save your strength," he told her. "You're going to need it."

"Breakfast in bed, right?"

"Breakfast and lunch and dinner."

"You'll never make it to dinner. Not when I get through with you."

"Got it all planned?"

She nodded. "I intend to wreck you, my love."

"God," he laughed, "what a way to die."

She glanced at the flying wedge suspended beneath the huge machine. Oh, God, I hate that thing, she thought suddenly. I've been here too long and I've seen too many of them ... She refused to think deliberately of the word die. She turned her eyes from the gleaming metal back to the man at her side.

"I'm afraid I love you more than you deserve." Quickly she removed ' the headset and microphone and handed them to the suit technician trying unsuccessfully to remain at a discreet distance. If she stayed with Steve any longer . . . It wouldn't do to cry, for God's sake. She hurried away without turning back until she was far from the metal that frightened her. When she stopped, finally, she knew Steve would be only a figure in a white pressure suit. She turned as a bearded man approached, and quickly she wrapped his arm in hers. He glanced at the sudden tears.

"Steve see that?"

She shook her head angrily. "No. Just you, you old bastard."

Rudy Wells patted her hand with open affection. "If it makes you feel any better, Jan," he said, "as his flight surgeon I can tell you that Steve Austin is in perfect shape for this—"

"That's how I want him back."

"That's how you'll get him back," he said confidently.

"My God, Jan, I've never seen you with jitters like this.

That man has walked on the moon. The moon," he emphasized.

"This is just a little hop around the old meadow in comparison. You of all people should know that."

"I know it, I know it," she said, almost hissing the words. She pointed to the blunt shape beneath the wing of the giant plane. "But that thing is, well ... Oh, dammit, Rudy, you know what I mean."

"I know." He didn't need to say anymore. Not on that subject. Time to turn to one that was safer. "Everything set for tomorrow?"

"All set. Twelve noon at the base chapel for the marriage ceremony and time for a party afterward. A damned brief party," she added.

She studied the winged machines. "Thank the Lord,"

she whispered aloud, "this is his last one."

He looked at her with affection. "For a month, anyway," he said gently.

"You didn't need to remind me," she said. Her arm went rigid against his. The figure in the white suit was climbing into the swollen belly of the finned dart. They watched in silence.

He paused for a moment, one foot still on the ladder, the other within the cockpit of the M3F5. Paused for that final scan of the horizon, for the telltale signs. Even at this early hour the air, cool and still at sunrise, had changed its temper. The hazy-bright horizon was gone. Now that horizon had fuzzed, thermals dragging dust and vapors from the ground, building a mirage-like effect that made the peaks and ranges appear higher and closer than they really were. The long shadows from the Joshua trees had diminished; soft gray had become intense black greatly foreshortened on the ground with the climbing of the sun.

And there was still another sign to his practiced eyes; the most certain of all omens that the heat of day was blistering the desolate land and casting back its writhing heat.

In the distance, picked out by his keen eyesight, the black shapes of buzzards casually riding the thermals, soaring in wide, sweeping circles higher and higher above the desert floor. Buzzards this early in the morning. It was going to be a bitch with updrafts on the way back.

He half turned for a glance at Jan, standing with Doc Wells. For a moment he thought of that splendid body and the wonder they had found in making love—Steve Austin cut himself short. Get your ass in the cockpit and your head out of your ass, he snapped to himself. The fastest way in this business to get killed, and it was by God the fastest, was to let your mind roam instead of paying attention to what was at hand. When you drifted between earth and moon in that delicious zero-g fall that went on day after day, you could mess up your thinking all you wanted to. Three guys in the cabin, and auto-systems to take care of everything but the laundry. But not in one of these vicious little things. They had hidden reefs and all manner of nasty surprises up there in the sky, and this chunk of angry metal was intended to chart a safe path through those lethal man-traps. Which meant keeping your nose to it. He allowed himself one more extraneous thought.

The lights; the sun was up. What the hell did they need the lights for? A quick smile; the lights went out silently, the pressure helmet hiding the sounds of heated metal shrinking back to normal size.

He grasped the handholds, slid into the contoured seat.

For a moment he sat quietly, not moving, allowing his mind and his body to feel what might be wrong. You look for the things that don't fit. The mind has been trained so that whatever is normal, whatever is right, snaps into place and rings no bells, makes no clamoring warning.

What doesn't fit, what's slipped out of the pattern, then jars you. No bells no lights; it was all there, in place.

He waited a moment as a technician leaned over the side of the cockpit, took hold of the air-conditioning hose.

Austin nodded at him, held his breath. The technician unsnapped the hose, stabbed it into its proper receptacle inside the cockpit to resume the cooling flow of oxygen.

Austin glanced at the gauges, gestured with his raised thumb. The technician slid from view and another face appeared in place of his. They began the long checklist.

Austin checked out his communications circuits with the B-52 pilot, the drop officer, and radar control, and made a final test of the link to the chase planes that would be with him during part of his flight. It was all terribly familiar, as close to home as brushing his teeth in the morning, and yet every step was critical. It went quickly enough, a mechanical, rote procedure, and then it was time for the last man leaning almost into his lap to disappear. Austin took the hand signal to button up, confirmed with the drop officer in the bomber, closed and locked the canopy.

There was now little for him to do; he would wait out the engine start and climb to altitude, becoming progressively more concerned with different gauges as he approached that moment when he would be released from the mother ship.

"Relax." He breathed deeply, slowly. Plenty of time later to be afraid.

She could never watch that huge damned thing moving along the desert floor without feeling her lungs were going to explode. She couldn't help it. Some silly thing in the back of her mind told her that if she held her breath through the long, pounding run on the desert she would be able to help the giant claw its way into the air. Whatever the cause, she was never able to remind herself to breathe. She waited until the thunder rolled slowly down the long desert strip; no movement yet. The giant sat poised, black strength and fury, the engines howling, throwing back swirling plumes of kerosene smoke that built into a great cloud rolling over hard and dusty sand.

Then came that bare shift in sound, the signal that brakes had been released and metal was dragging itself ponderously forward. From this distance she could not see the tiny silver dart beneath the wing, had no view of the terrible little machine her lover was strapped and sealed into.

But at such moments, as the giant rushed closer and closer, she held her breath, sucking it deeply into her lungs, her nails biting into her palms. This time, only one palm would show the signs of her inner strain. Unknowing, her other hand holding the arm of Dr. Wells, she would make him the victim of her gouging nails.

Jan Richards watched the monster rush toward them.

She saw the great wings flexing, the upward bend of metal that told of lift changing the forces on the wing. She knew the signs, had watched this same scene many times before, but no matter how many times, it was always inner torment, with her breath held until she needed desperately to breathe, and did so explosively, her heart pounding.

The takeoffs were almost the worst; only the landings were worse. The seconds dragged on and on, and the great machine seemed to take forever in its sluggish early motion. But now it had speed, and she knew enough of the world of flight to know that at such times speed was everything. It was control and lift, it was life, and she wished speed—Godspeed!—to the great black shape, and then it was almost on them, malevolent in its suddenly swooping approach. Then it was alongside, directly before them, and she saw two things at the same moment, the silver shape of the tiny aerospace machine, with a glimpse of the pressure helmet within—she saw that and she saw the nose wheel of the B-52 rise away from the desert, and the breath rushed out of her. The nose rotated higher, and then daylight showed between the clumsy main gear and the desert floor. Now the thunder crashed back against them, shaking their bodies, and she turned to bury her head in Dr. Wells's shoulder as the stink of kerosene washed over them. When she looked up again the black cloud stretched high into the bright desert air, a winged destroyer at its head. Two black minnows flashed into view, cracking the morning wide with their own thunder.

The chase planes on their way to ride tight formation with Steve Austin until he would outstrip them and arrow away from the planet itself.

"Checklist complete. Over."

Austin nodded to himself within the helmet. "Okay,"

he said. "Stand by, Roadrunner. Cleaning up the office."

"Roger."

Austin stuffed the checklist into its enclosure by his right arm, pressed on the Velcro seal. One last, careful look around the office. Everything in the cockpit was clean. Just about that time.

"Cobra to Roadrunner," he called the drop officer in the bomber. "Ready for final count."

"Right, Steve. Three minutes coming up. Please call off your tank pressures and qualify valves armed."

They went through the final pre-drop checklist quickly.

As they moved down into the last sixty seconds the personal tones faded away. Crisp, no-nonsense exchanges now, broken by a personal touch only when the man in the wicked little M3F5 led the way.

"Cobra," they called Steve Austin. "On my mark, one minute." A pause for five seconds, then: "Mark! Sixty seconds and counting."

"Roger, Roadrunner." Steve Austin flicked his eyes over the gauges, glanced again, swiftly but steadily, at every control and lever and dial. He didn't bother to glance to his sides to check the position of Chase One and Two.

The big, black SR-71 jets would be sitting well to each side, slightly higher and behind the B-52; the moment he dropped away and lit up, they'd be on him like faithful sharks. Until he left them behind.

"Thirty seconds."

"Okay," he said. The bright-orange hand swept around the timer. At ten seconds the drop officer called it out.

At the count of zero he would—

"Drop!"

"Right on the money," Austin said easily, feeling the old gut-sinking feeling as he went from solid gravity to that momentary free fall of dropping away from the giant ship above him. There was a brief glance at the earth nine miles below, a scan of mountains flattened out by height; the scratch-pen pattern of roads and a quilt of irrigated farmland. Only the reassuring glance to orient himself.

The M3F5 dropped away at angles forty-five. He'd allow himself only a drop of one mile. By then he had to have everything on the stove. He hit the final pressure switch with his left hand, moved it to the throttle. Big bastard of an engine back there. Same design they had in the lunar module. Reliable and gutsy. He moved the throttle forward into ignition phase. It came instantly. The invisible hand threw him back against the seat. He nodded in approval, pulled back on the stick just slightly. No need 22 to lose more altitude. Good; he'd dropped only three thousand feet so far. The stick came back some more as the throttle moved inexorably forward under his left hand.

Then he had full power and the thunder howled freely behind him, riding a long flame studded· with diamond shock waves. He arrowed the nose higher and higher, taking up a slant of seventy degrees, booming up and out of atmosphere, and he knew everything was in the slot and behaving when he heard the sounds of his own breathing in his helmet. Other sound was far behind him now;

he felt the vibrations of controlled thunder. And he'd lost the sky. Vanished; gone. Snap your fingers; just like that.

No more blue. Not even dark purple. Black. The black of space. No stars yet; hell, he was still sun-blinded. There was only that velvety, impossible black.

"Cobra, this is Tracker."

"Roger, Tracker," he said easily.

"You're right on the money, Cobra. Smack on."

"Okay."

He was too busy for chatter. Not yet. He still could see only sky. Or what had been sky. He crashed upward into blackness. A moment for a glance to his left. His eyes drank in the sharply curving horizon. God; that sight! He forced himself back to the instruments. No time for sightseeing here.

At 280,000 feet he eased the nose down, began coming back on power, brought her to minimum thrust. Control with the small rocket ports in the tail section and the bow; spatters of energy to move in vacuum. That, and the big engine on its gimbals. Just enough to change the flight path, as he began now, a clumsy but effective turn, a wide sweep above and almost beyond the planet, practicing what other men would soon be doing when they flew the big Orbiters of the shuttle program back from beyond the edge of space.

The fuel alarm light spattered red at his eyes. Right on time. Quickly he eased the throttle back full; shut her down evenly before she could sputter. The latter could tumble him up here like an insane cartwheel, so precariously fine was his balance. He was prepared for anything.

No fun in being a skateboard on sheer ice going out of control. He tensed as a great hollow bang behind him signified clean shutdown. Good; he hit the nitrogen-pressure switch to flood the tanks and dump the volatile fuel through the lines. He was flying now strictly on centrifugal force. He could modify his attitude but it didn't mean a thing if he flew sideways or backwards. Until he hit air, that is. Then he had to be in exact position—the nose up, just so; the silver wedge positioned and balanced in such a way the nose and belly would act as a heat shield to slough off the fiery touch of friction.

But for a few moments now, a precious interlude in the midst of flight-plan demands, this mission was for him.

He topped the great parabolic arc at 328,000 feet, more than sixty miles high, and as he brought the nose down steeply to command the world before him, the horizon curved sharply away on either side to remind him he was back home where he belonged. At the edge of the world and far beyond that. He was light-adjusted now and the brighter stars invited him. Familiar, too; stars by which they had navigated precisely to another world a quarter of a million miles distant. Low over the horizon, a sliver of promising crescent, he saw the edge of the silent rocky globe he had once walked on. The awe returned to him, seeped through his bones and brought the taut feeling.

The cosmos itself . . .

Something tugged at metal outside.

"Christ!" That damn sightseeing again. It was a drug from which he had to tear himself free. He could get in trouble quickly up here; the silver wedge was feeling the first wisps of atmosphere, heating up now. The lights were on. Time for a brief check with the ground before he'd be in the communications blanket, the silver wedge surrounded with a fiery sheath of stripped atoms.

"Cobra to Tracker. Over."

They were sitting on the radio. "Roger, Cobra. Go ahead."

"Confirm start of reentry. Got the heat light on, and the zero-zero-five-g light is also on."

"Roger, Cobra. We confirm start of re-entry."

He permitted himself the small luxury. "I'm bringing this mother home."

Regrettably, the horizon began to flatten.

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