Ed Graczyk sat before his easel in the cool Maine evening, painting the sunset. He had had arms once. In those days he had been a Combine employee, Combine-born. In Titan orbit he had piloted a tiny steering tug, single-handedly orienting monstrous sausage casings for filling from the Titan ramscoop, and then orienting them for the long pull to Earthspace.
Things go wrong. A leaking oxygen tank near the stern of his skeletal craft had thrown it off trim, edgewise into a soft container of endless tonnes of dirty methane. The resulting inferno had cost him a lot of skin, and both arms below the elbow.
The skin they had replaced. The arms were gone forever.
Ed painted a lot. It was good therapy. His prosthetic arms were very good: ingenious metal things which responded to swellings in the muscles in his shoulders. The more he used them the better they would respond. Still, the hands were little better than claws. They were without touch or any but the grossest motion. Ed adapted, and painted, and did software work in his little geodesic dome for a firm in Augusta. He was as content as a man who had been brought back from the dead should have been, but in the deep Maine nights he wished he could see untwinkling stars again.
Evening light would be gone soon. Dusk was robbing his canvas of its color. When Ed heard the unfamiliar whine of a turbine car on his gravel approach, he guessed that the Bipartisan Economic Combine was coming to visit him, and he was right.
"Mr. Graczyk."
"That's me."
The big car emptied itself of two men. Both wore slate grey, the Combine's color. One was a solidly-built fellow with a receding hairline and a healthy tan. He smiled as he approached. The other was shorter, and very thin, and wore a hood tossed over his head. What skin Ed could see was pale, untouched by the sun. Both men walked with the slow, cautious gait of the centrifuge-born and -raised, overcompensating for Coriolis forces which were not there. Ed put his brush down.
"I'm Herb Sussaine. Combine PR," said the smiling man. "This is Thomas Rector, Combine R&D out of Adam Smith Nexus. We're glad to see you've established yourself."
Ed grunted. "It's not what I'd like to be doing."
Efficiency had made the Combine's fortunes, and efficiency drove it. Ed's inborn talent for spacecraft course correction had put his efficiency rating in the top one fiftieth of one percent. Without arms, he could no longer make his talents work for the Combine, and like all unprofitable employees was sent to Earth for the universal welfare state to care for.
Sussaine's smile widened. "We know. It's been a long time, Ed—how many years now? Six? Hardly seems like it. After you left us R&D realized a lot of good men are lost to disability every year. It's a shame to waste a good brain for lack of a good body. We want you back—and R&D will give you arms again."
Sussaine handed Ed a glossy plastic sheet. The instant Ed saw the complicated image for what it was—a blowup of a mechanical arm identical in all outward ways to a human arm—he knew he could never be satisfied with his Earth-given prostheses again.
"I'm impressed."
"I should hope so. This device can do anything an organic arm can do, and more. Forty-nine hydraulic levers in each hand, and sixteen more in each arm. All interlinked through a microprocessor equivalent to some of your better spacetug guidance systems, on a chip three millimeters by two. The chip is interfaced to your nervous system directly. The hands will respond as your old hands used to. About sixty thousand piezothermic diodes embedded in the plastic skin provide touch feedback to your nerves through the processor. On top of that, there will be a direct microwave link from the hands to the ship's computer. Our physiatrists have programmed several thousand basic hand-arm actions into the ship's compiler. The computer will smooth out the kinks from coordinated hand movements when it recognizes a common function being initiated. Even better—" Sussaine pointed to the palm of the hand in the diagram. "—each hand has an 'eye' in its palm, which images in color and three dimensions, to further assist the computer in guiding your actions. Think of the advantages of working in tight spots and with very small objects! It will be like having an extra set of eyes."
Ed scanned the drawing, tracing incredibly fine wires, outlines of tiny hydraulic pumps, the minuscule power supply, the hair-fine diode sensors scattered across the palm and concentrated on each fingertip. He had been nodding as Sussaine explained the various features, and when the lecture was finished he stared into the deepening night. The other man, who had said nothing until then, tossed back his hood.
"Do you want these devices, Mr. Graczyk?" His voice was deep and very soft.
Ed looked at Rector. The man's head was shaven clean in a popular Combine style, ghostly white behind piercing eyes. "Of course I want them. I wanted them when I saw the drawing. I don't need a sales pitch. But you can tell me what you people stand to gain by this. The Combine doesn't make a habit of philanthropy."
"We certainly do not," Rector said. "See it this way: When you pushed blimps for Titan Hydrocarbons, you saved us thousands of tonnes of fuel every year, and hundreds of man-hours of labor. What you did alone is done by a crew of three now. This project has been expensive, but if it enables you to work for us for only six years, your remarkable efficiency rating will absorb all costs. After that it will work wholly to our profit. The computers at Physiology Central give you forty more productive years at .7 G average. The savings that represents is something to consider."
Ed rose, smiling. "That sounds more like the Combine I know. Do I get my old job back?"
Rector shook his head. "We're going to try something new. You'll be flying the tanker King Lear in cislunar orbit, distributing liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and water to several stations and plants we have found awkward to supply by conventional methods. You'll be picking up water from the smaller stations, which use fuel cells, and giving it to the larger fusion-powered plants which generate no water on their own. Your mass will thus be continually changing, and this kind of problem has never been easy to deal with. We trust that your approximations will be better than anyone else's. Aside from your work itinerary, the contract is standard."
Ed looked at the proffered contract. "Hmmm. My signature is poor these days, and I haven't got a thumbprint."
"Toeprint will do. When can you leave, Ed?"
Ed looked away toward his little dome. "Can you wait ten minutes? I never got out of the habit of living out of a footlocker. But first. . . tell me something. Why bring a PR man along? No offense, Herb, but I know your job: You deal with these crazy Earth people. I'm a Combine man. Always have been."
Rector looked up at the first stars. Several of the great orbiting stations and plants were drifting across the sky, brilliant white points. "A precaution. Furloughed Combine employees have picked up some objectionable attitudes down here in the past. Earth can be like that, and we couldn't be sure about you. Herb could tell me if you had grown a little too . . . Earthlike."
Ed chuckled. Night was complete now, a nearly palpable darkness. "Maine is the nearest thing to space that Earth can offer. I never really left."
Ed turned and followed the gravel path back to his dome.
Barefooted and chewing a wad of gum, Ed Graczyk drifted from handhold to handhold in King Lear's crawlspace on his semidaily inspection tour. Docking with Golwing Nozzles Plant 7 was three hours away. Fifty kiloliters of liquid hydrogen to be dropped there, and then it was a leisurely climb to the first of three R&D stations in wide lunar orbit. Ed had the entire schedule committed to memory.
Terminal 19. Last one. Soft plastic flesh gripped the handhold while Ed considered the small hole set into a plate beneath six guarded controls. A jack. For a most unusual sort of plug.
He curled all his fingers but his second-to-last (something he could never have accomplished with their organic forerunners) and plugged the finger firmly into the hole. He closed his eyes and weighed the feelings coming in on the finger. The six monitor voltages which surfaced in Terminal 19 had become a harmony of textures, six separate sensations which Ed could only compare to running each finger of one hand over a material of distinct and different texture. The feeling of harmony was important. If any of the six voltages had changed value, a weird tactile cacophony would alert him to a misadjustment in the system. By adjusting the six controls above the jack, the sensations could be brought back into harmony, and proper operation obtained again.
The adjustments were independent of sight and hearing. Even if blinded and in a vacuum, Ed could service his ship and bring it back to port.
The six textures marched in step. Ed removed his finger from the jack and dusted his hands symbolically. R&D had done a good job. Just below each shoulder a polished steel band encircled each arm. Above each ten-centimeter strip was flesh and blood. Below each was steel and synthetic, but in the minimal light of the crawlspace Ed could see no difference.
Ahh, but when they moved—the hands did not jerk, twitch, or tremble as organic hands did. They flowed. With the ship's computer assisting, every movement of every tiny finger-segment was coordinated to the movement of the whole. And when Ed would reach for a screwdriver, the computer would recognize the action and guide the hand to graceful, perfect completion of the act.
A finger touch against a handhold sent him drifting toward the center of the ship, past a wall of grey panels, beams, and dim light-spots. To the other side of him, behind a thin steel mesh, the ship's centrifuge turned silently. He swung feet-first through the friction-less repulsion bearing at the center of the centrifuge and began the twelve-meter clamber ever more strongly downward.
"King Lear from R&D Six."
Ed settled himself into the control couch. "Come in, Rector. Good copy here. Just got back."
The efficiency engineer seldom wasted energy and bandwidth on video. The screen remained dark. "Our physiatrists just handed me the printout on the latest data set on your arms. They tell me coordination and reaction time have reached the expected plateau. I had hoped they might have kept on improving, but—well, they did better than we predicted. It looks as though nothing we can do will improve the hookup. Do you like them, Ed?"
Ed grinned. "Love 'em. Every sausage-bumper should blow his arms off for a set of these."
"What I should have asked: Will you be able to create that sort of rapport you once had with your spacecraft through the prostheses? That rapport is crucial to regaining your efficiency rating."
Ed flexed plastic fingers on the couch arm. "It's not a matter of 'through' anymore. One way to define machinery is that it's 'out there', and I'm in here." He thumbed at his head to a blind vidicon. "The hands aren't 'out there' anymore. I can think with my fingertips again."
Rector's soft voice sounded pleased. "That's a good deal better than we had hoped. With all your data in, we've gotten most of the glitches out of a mechanical leg and an entire lower torso-leg combination for double amputees. We'll probably never lose a good man to a disabling accident again. What's your ETA at Golwing?"
"Mmm . . . hundred thirty-eight minutes, unless I decide to fine tune again."
"I got a request from Plant Manager Pilsen up there. He's heard about the project and wants to see your hands. Golwing's a fair-risk plant and has its share of disabling accidents. Interest in this sort of thing is high over there. You have the usual half-hour contingency time you never need. Pilsen wonders if you'll stop in for a 'small demonstration.' I told him I would ask, but I warn you, half the plant will be there to gawk."
"Tell him I'll do a video show for the whole plant. Nobody gets left out that way and I get an excuse to stay in here."
"Good. I'll relay. Rector out."
Golwing Seven hung above a waxing Earth, bright steel in the sunlight. Ed watched it grow on his screens. The plant was a thousand-meter cylinder girdled by two centrifuges rotating in opposite directions. Docked at both ends of the cylinder were a scattering of freighters and supply ships. King Lear was approaching from the "north" or receiving end. A small pockmark in the wide expanse of shadowed metal was winking at him with its docking strobes. Ed would insert King Lear's nose in the center of the docking collar, and automatic pumps would withdraw the proper amount of the proper fuel from Lear's huge tanks.
It was not a difficult maneuver. A computer could do a fair approximation, but Ed's courses invariably saved time and fuel.
The docking collar slowly grew to a bright-rimmed hole with a blinking eye in the center. Ed peered at the screen and rubbed his eyes with one hand. Something looked wrong with that collar. There was a dim trace of grey in one side of that central hole.
The scene grew dizzily as Lear bore down. The course programmer fired another set of braking blasts. When the exhaust gases cleared away, Ed saw what was wrong with the collar: a suited human figure was curled inside.
Ed hit three buttons and touched his throat mike. The braking jets fired again. "Golwing, there is somebody in my damned docking collar! What are you going to do about it?" He was less afraid than furiously angry. The laws of physics did not forgive such idiotic behavior.
The com tech was incredulous. "Confirm your message, Lear. 'Someone is in my docking collar.' Is that correct?"
Ed was sweating. "Don't question my sanity! There is a body curled up around the docking strobe of my collar. A million tonnes of tanker is going to plug into that hole in one minute! What the hell are you going to do about it?"
"We can't do anything in a minute. Stop your approach with the full emergency brake program. We'll send out a detail."
Ed saw the scene in his mind: Lear's nose jets a small sun, throwing a six-gee reaction forward toward the collar. Lear would stop in ten seconds. And the detail would find a greasy ash in the collar.
Ed reached to one side of his console and fired a signal flare directly in the course of Lear's travel. The flare struck the plant's plates a meter to one side of the collar. It flared brilliant red for a moment and was gone.
The last of the braking jets fired. Lear coasted slowly toward the collar. The figure shifted in the collar but remained. Ed fired two more flares. At such close range, their concussion must have been heard throughout the plant.
Then the figure moved. In the last seconds to docking Ed watched it clamber up to the edge of the collar. Then the bulk of the ship hid the collar from view. The scene remained in Ed's mind: a human being climbing frantically over the collar's ring of extended docking fingers . . .
Chunnnnnnnnnnnnnnng!
Lear heaved back and forth for several seconds as the ring absorbed the last of the tanker's momentum. Then, red lights flashed on the Unplanned Occurrences board. The computer sized up the situation:
FOREIGN OBJECT WEDGED BETWEEN DOCKING FINGER NINE AND DOCKING COLLAR. DOCKING INCOMPLETE.
"Christ," Ed muttered as he scrambled madly up the ladder toward the airlock.
Less than a minute later, in a special emergency suit that left his plastic hands ungloved, Ed blew the emergency hatch near Lear's nose and bore down on the docking ring. Filling his helmet were screams, throat-racking screams.
The screams of a young woman.
Ed hit the plates feet-first where the woman was trapped, a husky spring-puller in his hands. The woman's left leg was crushed between the jointed docking finger and the mating groove on Lear's nose. Air was silently issuing from her ruptured suit, mingled with tiny spherical droplets of red which soon froze cold pink.
Ed braced his feet against Lear's nose and jammed the spring-puller into the breakaway spring mount. He pried violently to one side. The finger hesitated, then with snapping release gave way and swung outward.
Ed threw the spring-puller away into the void and began unfolding a transparent casualty bag. He stuffed the screaming, thrashing woman into it as though she were a load of laundry, and pulled the pin on the attached cylinder of air. The bag expanded to a fat pillow which rapidly frosted over on the inside.
Pulling his burden by a corner, Ed tramped across the plates on magnetic soles to a cast-wide hatch from which the detail had begun issuing. Ed waved them aside with what looked like a hand exposed to the vacuum of space. Ed pushed the bag ahead of him into the lock and climbed in after it.
When pressure rose in the lock and the anteroom beyond, he heard her screaming: "I want to die! Let me die, damn you!"
Helmet tucked under his arm, he watched medics anesthetize the girl and struggle to reassemble the crushed knee joint and shredded muscles surrounding it. He knew before they began the incision with blue-hot laser pencils that they would have to amputate. Ed had been that way before.
The plant manager approached him, a hunted-looking little man with shaven head and sunken eyes. "Mr. Graczyk, that was incredible. You had her in the bag before we could get a crisis team suited up and out the door. It must have been your hands ..."
"Shut up," Ed snapped, turning on the man. He had begun to tremble so hard he almost let his helmet slip away from him. "How many more potential suicides are working for you? How long will it be before somebody decides to detonate a few ounces of pyroform under his mattress and sets half a centrifuge on fire?"
Pilsen looked down. "She was on probation."
"And now she's off. It almost cost us my tanker. And a lot of machinery on this end of your plant. If it had, she wouldn't have been the only one out of a job."
Ed looked back toward the girl. The ruined leg was gone, the stump covered with a plastic cocoon. The medics were wheeling her away. "There's still lots of ways to die, love," he said under his breath. "Lots."
Out beyond Saturn, Ed's arms were burning again, his entire body wrapped in fiery hell. He thrashed in the void, but the flames would not go out. It was worse than fire; it ate at him to the center of his bones. It stung every blood cell moving through his veins. Fire, he was on fire and falling slowly into the Sun. . . .
Ed Graczyk awoke. But the fire was still there.
He stared at his hands. From the nerves inside the stumps of his arms he could feel the fire coming, creeping in consuming waves from his plastic fingertips to the center of his brain. He twisted the hands around, and stared into the little black spots set into the centers of his palms: his hands' eyes. He almost thought he could see tiny flames flickering inside those dark circles.
Then the fire went out. From the comm console beside his cot, Rector spoke to him.
"Ed, you're awake. What's the matter? We thought we'd never rouse you."
Ed stared at his hands, then looked to the comm console. "You did that? I thought they were going to eat me alive!"
The efficiency engineer spoke calmly. "We rang buzzers, flashed the cabin lights, had the computer sing songs you hate. Nothing worked. You stayed asleep."
Anger roared up in him, like the flames he had felt licking his guts. "So? What if I decide I want another hour's sleep? I don't think I've ever missed an inspection tour in my entire career."
"It's not in the contract."
"It's never been in any contract I've worked under."
Rector said nothing for a long time. "Ed, your contract specifies eight hours sleep per duty period. The itinerary spells out retiring and rising times. It's all there. You signed it."
It was said coldly. Ed forced himself to be as cold. "A contract is an agreement specifying conditions to be met by the contracting parties. I agree to guide this ship to specified points at specified times and do specified tasks along the way. That's my job. You supply my pay. That's your job. I have never derelicted my job. You have not derelicted yours. We, both of us, have kept that contract."
"The itinerary is part of the contract."
"Getting up at 06:00:00 is not a part of my job!"
"No, Ed, not quite that simple. Your job is to maximize output for given input. That is the job of every person who works for the Bipartisan Economic Combine. Human function is an equation with a very large number of variables. Some of those variables we leave up to you—course correction, obviously. If we could do that better than you we would not pay you to do it. Other things—diet, sleep schedules, rest schedules, work schedules—have been plotted very precisely according to your biorhythms. We have men who specialize in such things. We have entire departments devoted to nothing but optimizing sleep schedules. We assume they can do their job better than you can. Or we would not have hired them."
"I'm tired," Ed said. "The Golwing incident shot my nerves."
"There are drugs for that in the medconsole."
It was true. Ed nodded, feeling sheepish. He had never thought of it. Before his next sleep period he took a double tranquilizer, and awoke five minutes late with flames engulfing his dreams. He retched from the pain until he remembered to point the palms of his hands toward his sweating face.
"What the hell do you think I am!" he roared at Rector.
"You're a Combine man. You work for a living. You maintain a high level of competency in keeping with your salary. You forgot to set your alarm."
That, too, was true, but Ed's anger got the better of him. "Fold it five ways, Rector. I'll take a burn-specific before I turn in."
Without warning it struck, for only a moment: a resonance of absolute agony ringing up and down his entire nervous system, as though he were a bell struck by a red-hot hammer, echoing until he wished for death. By the time he could scream it was gone.
His arms tingled coldly, well up into his shoulders. Ed looked, unbelievingly, at the palms of his hands. There was warning in Rector's words:
"We will accept your resignation at any time."
Ed had to bite his lip to keep back what he was thinking. If the hands could watch, they could probably listen as well.
You'll have my resignation, but not the way you think!
Lots of ways to die—the thought came to Ed often as the days passed. It came on the heels of the crazy dream that made him feel alternately exhilarated and ashamed. Rector was wrong in assuming that Ed Graczyk was the same man who had once nudged methane blimps around the solar system. Still, Ed told himself that he was a man, and deserved better.
Indecision made his mouth dry while he browsed through King Lear's engineering manuals. He had done that often before, simply for curiosity's sake, to be better acquainted with his ship. Now he was looking for something, nothing in particular, but he knew that it would announce itself when he found it.
One evening, the crazy dream crystallized on the page of an engineering manual, and left Ed with an agonizing decision. To betray the Combine by his own hands—
He swore, and then laughed. His hands would have nothing to do with it.
Several times each day Ed left the centrifuge for various parts of the ship. To re-enter, he had to pass through the center of the two-meter diameter frictionless magnetic repulsion bearing which held the rotating centrifuge away from the stationary ship's core. It was an automatic action: reach hands into the meter-wide opening, grasp handholds there, and swing body with a clockwise twist into the rotating tunnel within. Ed began adding a new, strange action to the procedure.
Each time he swung his body into the tunnel, he pulled his mouth up against the line where the rotating bearing met the stationary core. With his tongue he pressed a wad of chewing gum into the five-millimeter gap where intense superconducting magnetic fields held the two surfaces apart.
Some weeks later, Ed woke from a deep sleep with crawling nausea wrenching his stomach. Another slow, slithering lurch threw his body against its sleep tethers. A low, nearly subaudible moan came down to him from the center of the centrifuge, and his nose picked up the acrid smell of burning insulation. Moments later the malfunction alarm began sounding, and Ed was climbing out of his cot, trembling all over. No going back now.
He did not have to feign grogginess. Rector's thin, peering face met his at the comm console. It was not like Rector to be using video. Ed felt himself being scrutinized.
"Ed, the centrifuge bearing is beginning to seize up. We don't know what, but something leaked into the gap. Shut down the centrifuge and get on it."
Ed waved a wordless salute. He leaned over, ripped the cover from a guarded switch, and threw it home. As though some velvety hand had grasped the rim of the centrifuge, it slowed to a smooth halt. Ed heard the emergency flywheel coming up to speed with the angular momentum from the centrifuge. His weight lifted away from him, and he gripped a handhold while trying to shake himself awake. Eddy currents induced in the moist chicle had heated, dried, and eventually hardened it until the heat of friction made it burn. Ed had made odds with himself that the coolant control circuitry feeding the superconducting magnets within the bearing would not be able to respond to such an impossible situation, and he was right. It was hard to suppress a smile as he read to Rector a list of micro-circuits which had overheated and burned out.
"Fix those microcircuits first," Rector was saying. "If too much of your coolant bleeds off as gas, you won't have enough to go around. The computer won't work without it."
Ed tried to look worried, but the only thing worrying him was how to make the rest of his liquid helium coolant boil and bleed off into space. He headed for the tool locker.
Every part of Ed Graczyk was shaking except his hands. This was a new Ed, one he himself had never suspected could exist. To damage his own ship ... he shivered, but continued tucking tools into a belt kit. Only his hands didn't know what he was doing. Smoothly, expertly, they executed their motions. Almost by themselves. Ed swallowed hard. The hands did not share his pangs of conscience. Ed finished filling the kit, and clambered barefoot up a crawlspace Ship's Circuitry.
Circuitry itself was a crawlspace of sorts: a narrow channel between wide walls of hexagonal panels, each dimpled with reaction-less bolt wells and printed with a large code number. Ed drifted between the walls, pushing with his fingertips against occasional handholds. Part of his mind was unhurriedly looking for panel VV47. The rest was steeling itself to what it intended to do. The arms were controlled by the ship's computer. The computer had to go. Once it was gone, the computer on Ed's shoulders could take care of the last step in his plan.
The computer was helpless without its main memory, stored in superconducting magnetic bubbles frozen into hair-thin sheets of tellurium. Ed's trick with the gum had caused a good part of Lear's liquid helium to be lost. It hadn't been enough, as Ed had more than half expected. There was another way.
A last finger's touch slowed and stopped him in front of panel VV47. All coolant controls, including main memory's, were behind that one panel. He only had to reach for a tool with one hand, steady himself with the other, while he . . . did what he had practiced so often in his head.
Quickly, smoothly, he plucked the little reactionless bolt driver from his kit and shoved it into one of the hexagonal wells in the corner of the panel. Through his hands he felt the socket inside the driver's nose fit over the head of the bolt in the well while the outside of the nose gripped the sides of the well. One hand easily squeezed the two halves of the handle together, and the bolt came loose.
The computer tie-in, as always, was working very well. Ed felt he need only begin the operation, and the hands would take it from there, almost automatically. They plugged the driver into the second well, squeezed, and repeated the operation for the other wells without Ed having to think about it. Ed was sweating heavily. He could feel drops growing on his forehead, fat drops with no place to fall.
With a grace that was almost poetry, Ed's hands pulled the panel away and stuck it to a velcro patch nearby. Four eyes peered into the crowded space behind the panel. Stack upon stack of tiny microcircuit boards filled the half-meter-wide hole. A sour taste of tension came into Ed's mouth. Nothing but circuit boards. No fat bus lines, no husky switching diodes, none of the components that his memory told him were also behind VV47. The manuals had betrayed him in his own betrayal. And the centrifuge bearing was still full of chewing gum.
Lots of ways to die, he thought, and I bet they know some I don't.
He closed his eyes, forced panic away, and hoped his hesitation would not be noticed by Rector and the hands. When he opened them he found himself looking at the panel immediately above the one he had opened. It read: VU47.
Something in his subconscious started screaming: A U can look like a V. It was there, only one panel away. Perhaps a quick check; preventive maintenance? Hardly; that was what computers were for. It would smell like a month-old egg. That left only the hard way. And he had better start soon.
The reactionless bolt driver was hanging in the air where he had parked it. Ed reached into the hole without hurrying and pulled a stack of boards free of its connector. As it came loose, he let his elbow nudge the driver gently upward.
Ed glared at the drifting driver as it approached his face. He wondered if his hands could hear as well as see. He leaned toward the driver, checking to make sure his palms were down. Now I have to keep them that way.
When his lips brushed the driver's handle, Ed inhaled sharply. He caught the tool in his teeth and worked it around so that he could work the thin split handle between his jaws. Ed bit down, felt it turn easily. The bolts would give him more of a fight.
Two intricate tasks to do at once. Madness! Ed wanted to laugh, but the driver filled his mouth. He peered down past the driver to the stack of circuit boards in his hands. The hands knew what to do. Ed privately thanked the Combine's physiatrists. He started the hands on the action of unclipping the boards from the stack connector. The hands recognized the action and took over. While the stack came free like a deck of cards, Ed leaned forward and plugged the bolt driver into the first bolt-well on panel VU 47.
He bit down hard. The effort made his molars ache, but the bolt came free with a snap. Two more squeezes removed it. He hoped the hands would not notice the lurch as he swung his head to one side and plugged the driver into the second well. That bolt gave up easily.
His hands were smoothly riffling through the freed boards. Ed watched with one eye and half his mind. He was already maneuvering the driver to the fifth bolt well when the proper board appeared. Ed cautiously directed his hands to the belt kit, where they removed the replacement microcircuits and an insertion tool. Simultaneously he jabbed for the fifth well, missed, and then plunged it home. He bit down. Nothing. Another hard bite met only solid resistance and a spreading ache in his jaws. Ed glanced down and helped the hands place the insertion tool over the first bad circuit. All the time he was working the tool further back along his jaw for more leverage. Ed tensed himself and clenched his jaws in a tremendous spasm that was all he felt he could exert. The bolt released, the driver slipped, and Ed bit down hard on his tongue.
Tears welled up in his eyes, and even the hands paused. Ed tasted blood, and swallowed hard. Bad time to scream, and with the driver in his mouth he might choke. His hands effortlessly removed the bad chip. They positioned the new chip and snapped it into place. Ed felt desperation growing with the pain in his mouth. He jabbed the driver into the last well.
And knocked it out of his mouth.
First, panic. Then came the flood of cool analysis that had made him what he had been, once. No space mechanic ever lets his tools get away from him. Rector knew that. Convection currents could make a tool start drifting away. Ed casually reached out his left hand, snatched the driver, and parked it near his shoulder with just enough drift to carry it toward his face. Ed sucked the tool into his mouth and positioned it with a burning tongue. He had the second bad chip out and was positioning the new one. Quickly! Ed forced himself to be calm and inserted the driver into the last hole. The bolt resisted. He noticed a thread of blood and saliva creeping horizontally out of one corner of his mouth. Ed bit savagely, and felt the ragged crunch of a bicuspid chipping against the hard plastic of the driver's handle. The bolt gave way.
Ed simultaneously restacked and clipped the boards and pried the newly freed panel up and out of the way with the metal shank of the bolt driver. The hands knew what they were doing. Through tearing eyes Ed looked at the newly exposed circuitry.
It was all vaguely familiar. Several aluminum bars carried heavy currents to and from the cooling and pumping units handling the liquid helium which cooled the computer's main memory. It had to be the right one, and the decision would have to be made in seconds. The proper bar carried a harmless six hundred amps at five volts, but there were bars carrying two and three hundred volts. Which, which . . .
An inquiring buzz arose in the nerves of his arm-stumps. Rector had sensed something going on. The hands snapped the board stack back into place. The buzz turned into a rasping burr on the edge of discomfort. Ed's anger boiled over.
Now!
Ed clamped his eyes shut and plunged his head forward toward what he hoped with all his heart was the right bus bar. The steel shank clicked against the bar and the tip brushed the frame.
A small explosion echoed in Circuitry. Sparks burned Ed's face and closed eyelids. The driver was welded to both bus bar and frame, sizzling and arcing. The lights around him dimmed. Many went out altogether. Alarms began to wail in the distance.
"Go to hell!" Ed screamed at the alarms, and threw a screwdriver away into the gloom. He heard it caroming from one panel to another.
As though in answer, the hands began to devour him. Lightning coursed down his spine and ate its way back up to the base of his brain. Ed screamed. Molten lava was streaming out of his hands into his shoulders, flowing down to settle in his lungs and diaphragm. Tiny jaws were tearing at every muscle in his body. He curled himself into a foetal position, thrashed blindly between the walls, felt his heels dent the thin metal panels. A fiery yellow cloud congealed at the center of his brain and began eating its way outward, devouring his consciousness as it went. Kill me, then, and waste your damned expensive hands! he thought through electronic agony.
The pain gradually died away. Every muscle in his body ached at its passing. Ed shook his head and slapped his cheeks to clear his mind. Was the computer finally dead? It had to be! But the hands maintained a coarse rasp that pulsed every so often into pain. He knew what they were telling him: Go back to the centrifuge.
Rector's face was at the comm console, angry.
"Sabotage of Combine property is a capital offense, Ed. You'll probably have to prove insanity to save your life now."
Ed's tongue lay thick in his mouth. He swallowed blood. Speech was painful. "Shove off. I've never been saner in my life. If you decide to kill me, I'll just crank open a hatch ..."
Ed saw the foolishness of that. Rector was impassive. "I doubt that."
Ed shrugged. "So I didn't kill the computer?"
The small shrewish face never showed hatred; Ed thought it had grown more intense. "Main memory lost cooling, and blanked when the plates went ohmic for lack of helium. We will beam back what was lost after you've replaced a few more parts."
"Then why do the hands still work?" Ed flexed his fingers. The strange expertise provided by the computer was gone, but they followed orders, from both Ed and his employers.
Rector smiled. "They have an independent radio link to R&D through the Cislunar Repeater Network. We put more into those hands than we mentioned. Now get to work."
The hands pulsed one hot pang for emphasis. Ed's eyes watered, and he turned away from the comm console.
For two days Ed worked without daring to scratch his nose. He knew the Combine had a five-man crew watching every move he made, each with his own individual pain button. Ed had felt it more than once. Sometimes it made him smile. They were frightened of him, based on what he had done. It was a shame he could do nothing more.
He had been a careless saboteur. With a little more planning it might have worked, and he could have been on his way to the Iron Republic of Mars. For bringing in the King Lear he could buy citizenship and a thousand hectares of land—not that he wanted or needed the land. The Iron Republic had nearly as few spacemen as it had ships. Even if Ed had only his nose to guide a ship with, they would let him stay in space.
Now, after repairing his ship, he would report to Curie Station, be arrested, tried, and probably executed. He continued to work only because work was as much a habit as living.
"You know, Rector, I think you're as crazy as I am," Ed said once before beginning a short sleep period. "You spent a fortune making me three-quarters of a superman, and then drove me insane with the fine print of a contract. Is a contract worth the life of a good worker?"
Rector answered without video. "You're not insane, Ed. You're an Earthman. Earthmen don't respect contracts. And contracts are the only things that make the Combine work."
Before dropping into sleep, Ed thought: Yes, he is absolutely right.
Sweating heavily, Ed removed the last bolt from the top plate of the superconducting memory unit. A hiss of helium gas sang around the loosening gasket. Ed pried with a screwdriver. A last gasp of gas, and the lid swung upward.
The unit was a Dewar flask filled with microscopically etched tellurium, chilled to zero resistance by liquid helium. The temperature controls had been ruined, and the unit could not keep itself colder than one hundred degrees Kelvin. Still, a blast of arctic cold met his face as Ed sized up the huge squat pressure tank. The tellurium sheets were arranged like the spokes of a sparkling wheel around the hollow at the center of the tank. That was the liquid helium reservoir, empty now. Thirty centimeters down were the ruined controls.
Ed pulled some tools from his kit and parked them in the steaming air over the reservoir. Pliers in hand, he leaned over the empty space and peered downward. He backed off very quickly.
Wobbling up to meet him was a half-meter bubble of liquid helium.
Ed gasped in surprise. It was the last of several thousand liters of helium which the device was meant to contain. Most had boiled into gas and had bled off into space. The bubble rose on convection currents, cloaked in a veil of condensing water vapor and atmosphere gases. It started to bubble and froth as heat from the air reached it. As much as Ed had depended on liquid helium for computer functions, he had never before seen it. The cold air biting his cheeks seemed almost hot. Cold could destroy as well as flame. Better.
Ed screamed a choking scream of defiance, and plunged his arms to the elbows into the sphere of deadly cold.
Instantly the fires began, roaring out of his arms to wrench and twist his body in unbearable agony. He screamed again, biting his wounded tongue, but focused every jot of concentration in his body on keeping his arms within the steaming bubble. His legs kicked involuntarily. His whole body throbbed to the tune of pain the hands were playing on his body. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the pain, and kept thinking: Die, freeze, die! The yellow cloud of oblivion began to condense in his head again. He could not allow that to happen. Die, damn you!
The feeling crept in from his fingertips: a crawling numbness that devoured the pain which was devouring him. It spread up the tiny golden wires and steel shafts inside the hands. The fingers twitched and twisted for a moment as sudden superconductivity sent false pulses racing through freezing motors. He saw the hands bend in a grotesque clawlike position, and freeze.
The pain was gone. Only cold numbness remained. Ed was breathing fast as he pulled his hands from the boiling helium and stared at them. The pink plastic was frozen a brittle white. Quickly, quickly!
The bubble, much smaller now, had drifted off to one side. Ed raised his right arm over his head, and brought it down as hard as he could on the edge of the thick-walled memory unit. The arm cracked off and continued downward, smashing the delicate tellurium plates. Bright fragments tumbled about in the air. He raised his left arm and brought it down even harder. It shattered into several pieces, which caromed off the memory tank and hit his face. They burned him with their coldness.
Ed stared at the jagged plastic stumps steaming on the ends of his arms.
He was free.
Ed laughed. They were offering him amnesty in return for the King Lear. He had held a video two-way with Rector and Sussaine, the Earth-specialist PR man, for more than twenty minutes. Behind them Ed could see the computing machinery and grey-uniformed tacticians of a Conflict Center. Ed realized grimly that the Combine was a lot for one unarmed man in an unarmed tanker to take on.
But after thinking for a moment, he stopped worrying.
"Come on, Herb," he told Sussaine, who was doing all the talking. "The moment I step clear of my ship I'll get a twenty-one gun salute right through the head. And while we're talking promises I'll make you one: As soon as whatever you have tailing me gets within boarding range I'll blow myself up. Seventy percent of my mass is liquid hydrogen, kerosene #3, lox, and assorted hypergolics. I'll make a nice fireball, and do my damndest to take any followers with me."
Sussaine tried to look smug. "We have three S-class Greystingers on an intersecting course. Their laser cannon are lethal at two hundred kilometers."
Ed shook his head. "Greystingers chasing old Lear? Let's do a little Combine arithmetic. I've been boosting at a constant quarter-G for almost four hours. I have enough fuel to do that almost forever; hell, I'm all fuel. Bringing a Greystinger up to Battle-Green takes two hours, and for three ships costs maybe ten percent of what I'm worth. To catch me with that head start would take two solid strap-on boosters per 'stinger, at a cost of another ten-percent per booster. Paying a 'stinger crew battle grade for a week is another ten percent of Lear's net value. Fuel, wear, and refitting the 'stingers after a long chase would probably be another fifteen or twenty percent. Right there you've already got 120% of what my entire ship and cargo are worth. The Combine would sell its own mother to make a profit, but your contracts forbid you to incur a penny's loss for revenge. That's listed as a 'Nonproductive expense, never justified,' Article IV, Section 14, Paragraph 141 of the General Contractual Regulations. Give up. You lose. I win. Admit it."
Sussaine's face reddened. "You're not going scot-free . . ."
"Stand aside, Herb." Rector pushed ahead of the PR man and looked wearily at Ed. "It'll be a long time before we trust an Earthman again. Yes, you've won. The course you're following is optimal to several decimal places, and you did it in your head. You will get to Iron Republic space hours before we can do anything about it. We lose, and I'm in trouble. It won't happen again." Ed saw Rector begin reaching to terminate the connection. Herb Sussaine caught his arm and pushed back in front of the video pickup.
"Graczyk, you don't have any arms! How in hell do you expect to fly a tanker all the way to Mars?"
Ed chuckled. "Ask Rector," he said, and switched the screen off with his big toe.
Ed sighed and spun his chair around with his other foot. The centrifuge was turning again, more slowly, but enough to keep him comfortable in the long weeks ahead. His stumps were beginning to hurt and his tongue still felt twice its size, but Lear's medconsole would keep him alive long enough to reach Republic space.
His course was perfect. Now there was nothing to do but kill time following it. Ed would be doing a lot of painting before he reached Mars. He slouched in his chair and picked up a brush with his toes. With his other foot he squeezed a bright orange worm of paint onto his palette.
On his easel was the canvas he intended to present to the President of the Iron Republic of Mars upon his investiture as a citizen: A study of Venus de Milo in a space helmet.
Ed Graczyk got to work.