The Hardyman | Page 4

air,
as if waving to someone out-of-frame. The other arm was held forward
and out as if prepared for a motorized mano-a-mano with an invisible
opponent. The man's 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