The Hardyman | Page 4

legs paralleled the robot's legs and ended in twin steel platform shoes, upon which the man's feet rested.
The man looked happy, Jack decided. The man may have looked a little nervous, too, Jack had to admit, but probably the man was mostly excited. Besides, the man was strapped in the Hardyman with two safety belts crisscrossed into a protective X over his chest and a seatbelt cinched around his waist. The Hardyman was a man-amplifier--not the other way around. The human operator in the machine's power-frame was the ruler of this master-slave driving system, the framework's joints, limbs, and tools driven by hydraulic sensors that increased a man's muscle-power at a ratio of 25:1. The man in the picture could have picked up a 250-pound Russian soldier on the other side of the Cold War and tossed him halfway to China, if he had so wanted.
Although, Jack knew the image was a fake. The hydro mechanical servo-system in the Hardyman's legs, he had learned, had required fine-tuned, non-stop coordination to maintain their balance. If the man in the hard-hat had attempted to move both legs simultaneously, the Hardyman, it had been reported, would begin lurching and jerking in what had been described ominously as a "violent and uncontrollable" manner. The man would have been torn to pieces as the enslaved robot roughly reclaimed its controls from its former master. But Jack also knew that in 1971, a former railway employee by the name of Ted Hoff had turned himself into the Jesus Christ of modern technology by creating the microprocessor and handing it over to the people of the world like some kind of consecrated techno-wafer.
Jack didn't know everything about engineering, but what he didn't know, he could learn. That night, Jack bent over the still body of the Hardyman and began to work.
6
Every night, Jack submerged himself to the elbows in the Hardyman's guts. Amidst the labyrinth of hydraulic actuators and servo valves, swivel fittings and multi-pin connectors, input sensor sub-assemblies and potentiometers, his fingers crawled as the black tide-line of oil crept further up the length of his arms. Within the machine's armature, Jack worked harder than Hephaestus, orchestrating complex feedback loops and fine ganglia into fluidly functioning systems with which the new microchip brain might be able to resuscitate the Hardyman. Reading in bed late into the night, his body stained black and blue with the fluids of engine workings, Jack read books like Build Your Own Robot! and Bill: The Galactic Hero on the Planet of Robot Slaves.
Several decades previous, it had taken the military 25,000 hours to get one arm on the Hardyman working. Jack had the whole thing twitching inside of six weeks. One day not long after, Jack stood in the garage, cranking a come-along that was connected to a pulley that was attached to a ceiling beam that led to a nylon noose that was slung under the Hardyman's armpits. He was attempting to pull the machine to a standing position. He hoped, at the very least, the contraption and its load wouldn't pull the garage down on his head.
Slowly, Jack maneuvered the Hardyman until it loomed before him. A hard hat from work atop his head, Jack turned his back to the machine. Cautiously, he placed his feet onto the metal boot-plates. Carefully, he leaned his torso against its steel spine. Gently, he raised his head inside its mechanical frame. He strapped the safety-harness across his chest. He unclipped the pulley from the mid-section. He slid his arms into the oversized sleeves. He found the power-switch at his right hand. He inhaled deeply. He flipped the switch.
Around him, the Hardyman hummed to life. Smiling to himself, Jack stretched his arms out to his sides. He lifted his right foot, and, wobbling a little, set it forward. He picked up his left foot, and, teetering somewhat, set it next to his right. Raising one arm, he inadvertently swiped the other arm across his workbench, sending a glue-gun flying out the window with a loud crash. In six giant steps, he had crossed the garage.
Later, Jack stood in the driveway. The Hardyman was tucked safely away in the garage, but he could still feel it reverberating through him. He felt bigger now, it seemed. Meanwhile, dusk had fallen. Across the street, he could see the aging bachelor standing in his driveway, his face pressed against the bars of his gate, his round eyes bulging out from behind the two O's in YOUNGWOOD. The older man waved frantically at Jack, a desperate look on his face. Jack waved absentmindedly back at the other man, turned on his heel, and went inside.
7
After that day, Jack spent little time at his office focused on this work. Now, his job was a place where he went for