The Bionic Woman by Eileen Lottman - Chapter 01

1976 Genre: Sci-Fi / Robot Ladies

SHE DIED ON THE OPERATING TABLE...but Jaime Sommers, brought back to life by a young doctor who dared to experiment, is now the world's first female cyborg. Her very special body is not only beautiful, it is deadly to enemies of the Office of Strategic Intelligence. Now, she is an instrument to be used against a man whose determination to destroy her is a match for all the super-technological powers at her command. But Jaime's body has already rejected her bionic transplants-it could happen again at any time. And Jaime is strictly on her own now....

Based on the Universal television series THE BIONIC WOMAN

Created for television by Kenneth Johnson Based on the novel CYBORG by Martin Caidin Adapted from the episode WELCOME HOME, JAIME Written by Kenneth Johnson

Chapter One

"Mrs. Austin, I think I'll beat you today," Steve Austin boasted as he and Jaime walked onto the tennis courts.

''Wrong on two counts,'' she replied, laughing. ''I won't be Mrs. Austin for another week. And there's no way you can beat the pro who set Billie Jean back at Forest Hills.'' Her long tawny hair was tied back in a bright ribbon, and her huge gray eyes sparkled with the pure joy of being alive, and in love.

Steve looked at her, a momentary flash of concern.

"You're feeling okay now, huh?"

''Well enough to beat you,'' she replied cheerfully.

But she knew what he was referring to. ''I apologized to your mom this morning. She's such an angel. She said it was just pre-marriage jitters. But—it's just not like me. I don't know what was the matter with me yesterday. I feel awful about snapping at her like that."

''Probably just the anticipation of losing this match to me,'' Steve said lightly.

Jaime grinned. The bright morning sun warmed her and glinted off Steve's dark hair, and she thought for the millionth time how lucky they were, how handsome he was, what a very special and happy pair they made. "We'll see about that," she laughed, and ran on long slender legs to the far court.

"Service," she called. She tossed the ball high and straight, and her right arm came up to smash it down and over.

"Fault," Steve called. "Long."

Jaime Sommers felt a chill rush through her body. It was almost as if an alien force entered, jarring her into a rage over which she had no control.

"What do you mean, long? It was good!" she shouted angrily.

Steve straightened from his receiver's crouch, and shielded his eyes from the sun to peer at her across the court. "No kidding," he said, "it was out—"

"I say it was good," she declared.

Steve shook his head. "Honest, sweetheart—"

She interrupted, furious. "Steve, I'm a ranking pro and you're...I think I know a good serve when I see it."

Puzzled, but figuring it wasn't worth arguing about, Steve shrugged. "Okay, maybe you're right."

Her voice rose to a scream. "Don't patronize me! I don't need that!"

"Jaime, I'm not—"

Her right hand swung the racket in a high arc, and before Steve could finish his thought, she hurled it with incredible force straight at his head. The racket whistled with the speed of a deadly projectile, and he had to drop to the ground with all the agility his special body afforded him to avoid being hit. It sailed a scant inch from his head and knifed through the back fence like an ax, cutting a hole through the steel mesh and soaring out of sight far beyond the courts.

Steve looked up at Jaime. She was standing quietly, looking bewildered. Her fury had drained out of her, and she was as stunned as he was.

"Steve? What happened?"

He picked himself up and moved toward the net.

"Don't you remember?"

Her lovely eyes were soft again, confused and a bit frightened. "We were playing tennis, and—" She looked at her right hand. It was trembling, and her racket was gone. She looked back at Steve and then behind him to the jagged hole in the fence. Tears welled up in her eyes. "Steve, what's happening to me?'' she said, seriously frightened now. Her arm was quivering uncontrollably.

He leaped over the net with one easy motion and dropped his own racket to take her in his arms. She leaned into his strength. His firm tan skin was warm, and his powerful arms were tender.

"Come on," he said gently. She clung to him as he led her off the court.

"You haven't told Rudy, have you, about the little problems you've been having?" he asked her as he drove swiftly over the roads toward the medical complex of the Bionic Research Lab.

Jaime shook her head slowly. "It didn't seem important,'' she said. ''I know you had trouble adjusting, and, well, I thought it was just that. I kept thinking it would go away.'' Her long hair was blowing free in the open-top car, and she looked like a model of perfect health and vitality. Steve glanced at her from time to time as he drove, marveling at her beauty and trying not to let her feel his conviction that there was something very, very wrong.

A few hours later, Steve was seated in the office of Dr. Rudy Wells, waiting for the results of the emergency tests on Jaime. Oscar Goldman was there, too, of course. Oscar was the director of the OSI, the Office of Strategic Intelligence, which was an umbrella organization overseeing an enormous complex of various civilian and military intelligence agencies.

Oscar was the man responsible for Steve's special life, and now Jaime's, too.

Rudy came into the office, finally. He held an X-ray slide in his hand, and, without preamble, he pinned it in the viewing box and switched on the light.

"You can see it here on the picture of her skull," he said, pointing to a smudged area on the slide.

“What is it?'' Oscar asked. His face never revealed anxiety or tension. He was virtually unflappable, but as he leaned forward to peer at the X-ray, his intense energy could be felt almost palpably in the room.

"It's plasma," Rudy answered. "Jaime's body is producing massive amounts of white blood cells to fight off the foreign bodies in her system.''

"You mean she has an infection?" Steve asked.

"No," Rudy answered gravely. "It's her bionics, Steve. Jaime's body is rejecting her bionics."

The world's first and only bionic man sat with his head in his hands, trying to straighten out his thoughts and his emotions. He was responsible for the fact that Jaime was here now. He had begged Oscar to save her from spending the rest of her life as a hopeless cripple after the skydiving accident that smashed her legs and her whole right side. He alone knew what it meant to be a combination of natural human being and man-made computerized replacement parts. What he hadn't anticipated was that the experiment might not work twice.

Steve was nicknamed the ''six million dollar man'' by those few who knew about him. That's how much it had cost to put him together after the crash landing of the rocket plane he had been testing, the crash that left him a basket case until Oscar Goldman got hold of him.

Oscar had been waiting years for such an opportunity, the chance to test the new science of bionics. The word bionic derived from Greek roots, meaning "in a manner approximating life." Bionics was, in a sense, the highest tribute to the success of natural evolution.

Bionic scientists realized that there had never been an instrument more efficient for use in grasping and manipulating than the human hand, with its fingers and apposite thumb. No temperature-regulating device had ever been invented that could be as sensitive and finely tuned as that found in higher mammals. Bionic scientists had it their work to create mechanical and electronic devices which would duplicate exactly the actions of natural body functions. And, though it sounded fanciful, it was quite logical. The fact that a human hand works is ample proof that a properly constructed artificial hand will also work. The key phrase is properly constructed. When it was first developed in the late 1950's, bionics concerned itself with little more than the production of artificial limbs.

But before long, the science grew to include such disciplines as biology, medicine, cybernetics, information theory, and mechanical, electrical, and nuclear engineering. By the mid-1970's, scientists at the Bionic Research Laboratory had the ability to produce a bionic man. The crash of Steve Austin's M3F5 in 1973 brought them the man. Oscar Goldman brought them the money.

There was little excuse for a pure research facility such as the BRL to spend a great deal of money on one man just to prove that it could be done. The nation's veterans' hospitals were already crowded with multiple amputees, many of whom would have eagerly accepted the chance to walk again.

But Steve Austin was special. He was an Air Force colonel with a great deal of flight training. He was an astronaut who, in the final Apollo 17 mission, had spent more time on the moon's surface than any other man from earth. He had a perfect cover for a covert operation. He was not only a scientist in his own right, but also an expert on rockets and other military systems.

There was a catch, of course. Steve Austin, once repaired and made better than ever physically, would devote his life to the work of the OSI. He would be America's newest and most exotic secret weapon.

Dr. Rudy Wells kept Steve unconscious for weeks, using an electro-sleep process. By thus manipulating the astronaut's brain waves, the doctor could perform extensive surgery without running the risks inherent in the use of conventional anesthetics. Steve's torn heart valve was replaced with an artificial one. The fractured part of his skull was removed and replaced by a plate made of cesium, an alkali metal light yet strong, 6 capable of withstanding a blow ten times that which would normally crush human bones. His ribs were replaced with ribs fabricated of vitallium, joined one to the other with artificial tendons. The entire rib cage was extra-joined to the breastbone with silastic, a variant of silicone rubber. The metal ribs were embedded with fine wires, forming an excellent radio antenna.

Steve's jaw was repaired with appropriate applications of metal, ceramics, and plastic. New teeth, made of nylon, were installed. His left eye was bionic, too—based on the theory of the photo-multiplier tube which incorporated a twenty-power zoom lens activated by will and light amplification by a factor of ten million.

And he had three bionic limbs—both legs and his left arm. To the arm and leg stumps Rudy Wells attached bones made of a stainless alloy. The attachment points, as well as key undamaged natural bone points throughout his body, were reinforced with alloy in order to allow the extra strength imparted by the limbs. Actual nerves and muscle were attached to bionic nerves and muscle, the natural nerve impulses amplified to bionic levels by a maze of sensors and generators. Each limb had a miniature nuclear generator creating heat which was then transformed into energy by a Thermopylae. Each limb had thousands of sensors duplicating the touch and temperature-sensing nerves of an actual human limb. These sensors fed impulses into servomechanisms which allowed Steve to apply just as much force as was needed for a certain task. Whether the task was breaking down a concrete wall or lifting a teacup, Steve could do it naturally, without thinking about it, as one does with a natural limb. The entire setup was run by three miniaturized computers, one for each leg and the arm. Surrounding the mechanism was a sheath of alloy, sponge, and plastiskin designed to duplicate the form of Steve's natural limbs. Excess heat from the generators was used to simulate normal skin temperature. Hairs were embedded in the plastiskin, which also received a photo-chemical dye treatment allowing it to tan somewhat when exposed to the sun. When the bionic transformation was complete, all Steve was unable to do was to cut his nails.

But artificial fingertips tend to be insensitive, and a cybernetic hand could crush human bone with no more effort than was needed to pulp a rose. So they had added vibrating pads, delicate super-sensors, transmitters, and feedback. Now the steel-boned hands that could kill with a single transmitted impulse could also gently caress a lover's skin.

Steve, after an initial resentment of being on call to the OSI and Oscar Goldman for the rest of his life, made his emotional adjustment. And after a while, when the bionic equipment had become natural to him and he had been on many missions all over the world, he began to like it.

Then the most important thing of all had happened to him. Steve had fallen in love. She was the girl he had grown up with, but one day they looked at each other with new eyes and they were like any two young people anywhere, convinced that what they had was unique. This time, he and Jaime were no longer children daring each other to mischief, or teenagers dreaming of the world they would conquer someday. Mature and whole, they had fallen deeply in love.

They were both natural athletes and in their courtship they rejoiced in the delights of riding, skiing, surfing, playing hard competitive games together.

They had gone skydiving together, floating and tumbling weightlessly through the air with the earth far below them. And suddenly Jaime's chute had tangled and collapsed a hundred feet over a grove of trees.

When she had landed, both legs and her right arm were shattered. Her right ear had been ripped from her head.

At the hospital, the doctor had told Steve, "It's amazing that she's alive at all. Her legs have so many breaks we still haven't counted them all. The hemorrhaging from her ear seems to indicate damage to the cochlea and the corti—probably a total loss of hearing.

Her right arm and shoulder are torn beyond our power to mend them. I'm sorry, Colonel Austin. We'll try to save her, but there's only so much we can do. Maybe someday we'll find a way to repair bodies so badly broken."

Steve sat by Jaime's bed for hours, willing her to live, to be well again, wishing he could project some of his own overabundant strength into her crushed body.

And then she had regained consciousness, barely.

''I guess... I really... messed... up,'' she said with great effort.

"Hey, cut out that kind of talk," he said, trying to smile. "You'll be okay."

"No... it's... over... over... " Her voice trailed off weakly.

The doctor's words came back to Steve. Someday, the doctor had said. But Steve knew someday was now. He knew what he had to do. He leaned down close to Jaime's pale face.

"Jaime," he whispered, "there may be a way. Will you let me try? Will you trust me? Jaime?'' After what seemed to him like a desperately futile wait, Jaime's eyelids fluttered, and she mustered enough strength to nod, just once, before slipping into unconsciousness again. Steve rose from her bedside and picked up the telephone.

Within the hour, Oscar Goldman was at the hospital.

He and Steve had a heated discussion in the little waiting area down the hall from Jaime's room.

"No, Steve. It's just not possible," Oscar said flatly.

"You know that's not true," Steve said, his blue eyes flashing. "I'm the living proof that it is possible."

"I don't mean the technology. Of course we might be able to repair her body, to put her back together... that might be possible. But there are too many other considerations." Oscar was a wiry six-footer, whose deceptively mild manner was a thin cover for his incredible talents. He was a genius at sizing people up, and a man with an extraordinary grasp of science and its limitless possibilities. His specialty was weapons technology, but he had the rare ability to correlate an enormous range of facts from various disciplines. His authority was as high as anyone in government service, and Steve knew the decision to save Jaime's life was entirely in Oscar's hands.

"I asked you here to help, Oscar, and so far all I've gotten is a handful of red tape.'' Oscar looked uncomfortable. He was the man who called the shots and yet—on this particular team—Steve was his only player. Oscar had run into Steve's IO independent attitude before. He couldn't afford to lose his cooperation.

"There's a woman in there, Oscar, who has been left with two ruined and useless legs, an arm and shoulder crushed beyond repair, and no hearing in one ear—and you have the power to put her back together, better than new, just like you did me,'' Steve went on.

"Steve, bionic limbs cost millions, and it would mean bringing Rudy and the bionics team in here.

How can I justify the expenditure?''

"How did you justify me?"

"That was different. There was a need—"

"There still is." Steve cut him short. "They're always looking for a new angle, a new way to test their theories. Oscar, think of what an asset Jaime could be to you. Her cover as a tennis pro is even better than mine. There are a lot of places she could get into that I might not be able to... ''

''Steve—"

"And she's got the head for it, too. She's bright, clever, well adjusted... "

"Steve, you're in love with her."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Everything. Because right now you'd sell your soul to save her, in fact you'd be willing to commit her and yourself to anything. But later on, if we needed to use Jaime, to send her out on missions, you'd change your mind. You know how dangerous—''

"I won't change my mind, Oscar. I swear it."

There was a long pause. Oscar looked at Steve, and Steve returned his penetrating stare with a steady, serious plea.

"What about Jaime?" Oscar asked finally. "What does she have to say about working with us the rest of her life—''

"She's dying, Oscar," Steve interrupted passionately. "You're the only one who can help. Will you help?"

They looked at each other, two friends who had been through so much together.

"Please," Steve said simply.

Oscar was startled to see tears in the clear blue eyes.

He reached out to touch Steve's broad shoulder in a gesture that said it all.

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