"You know plenty fancy words, bub, I'll give you that," Goldblatt said wonderingly. "But what it works out to is I put a micro-filament tap into your spinal cord, right where it leaves the skull. We use the trial-and-error method for coding the motor nerves. It hurts. When I finish, all I have to do is push a button and the muscle it's wired to contracts-max contraction, more than you could trigger with the voluntary nervous system. Once I've got you wired, I slap you in the frame and strap you up rigid. The frame is articulated, so you get isotonic work along with the 'metrics. Then I work you over like one of them guys in a torture chamber, know what I mean? You'll come out of it screaming for mercy, every muscle in your body yelling for help. You'll turn black and blue all over. This goes on for a week. Then it gets worse." He shook his head. "Like I said, not many fellows can take it."
"How long?"
"Give yourself a break, mister. A few times a year I sell a tank job, not a max but just whatever somebody needs, like a demo player is slowing down, he needs toning up fast; or some of these specialty show people, after a long layoff. And even at that-"
"How many hours a day do I spend inside?"
"A day?" Goldblatt barked. "You work day and night-that's if you're talking minimum time. But that's for lab cases, theory stuff-"
"We'll test the theory."
"You must be in some kind of hurry, mister."
"That's right. And we're wasting time."
Goldblatt nodded heavily. "It's your bones that'll get bent, my friend, not mine. All right, strip down and I'll run you across the 'tab monitor and see what we got to work with."
13
The insertion of the hair-fine electrodes took three hours-three uncomfortable hours of probing in sensitive flesh with sharp-pointed metal, alternated with tingling shocks that made obscure muscles jump and quiver. At the end of it, Bailey touched the coin-sized plastic disk nestled against the base of his skull and winced.
"That's the easy part," Goldblatt said cheerfully. "Now we start the hard work. You know, it's funny," he rambled on as he strapped his victim in position. "They invented this device to take the will power out of physical training. What they forgot was it still takes will power to climb in under the straps, knowing what's coming."
"If you scare me to death, you don't collect," Bailey said. "Those cards are no good without my prints."
Goldblatt grinned. "Ready?" he asked. "Here we go."
Bailey felt his right thigh twitch. He yelled as a full-fledged cramp locked to the rectus femoris-the name popped into his mind-like a red-hot clamp. The limb strained against the straps, quivering.
"… four seconds, five seconds, six seconds," Goldblatt counted off. Abruptly the pressure was gone. The pain receded.
"Hey," Bailey started-and yelled as his left leg jerked against the restraint. Six more endless seconds passed. Bailey lay gasping as a lever moved, flexing his knee to a new position.
"Cry all you want to," Goldblatt said cheerfully. "This baby works over three hundred separate muscles, max contraction, three positions. How you like it, hah? Ready to get some sense now and settle for a toner like I said to begin with?"
Bailey gritted his teeth against the rubber bite protector and endured another spasm.
"Whatever you say, my friend," Goldblatt sighed. "Here we go again…"
14
"Only two and a half hours?" Bailey inquired weakly. "It seemed like two years."
"You build muscle by tearing down muscle," the trainer said. "You just tore down a couple billion cells-and that hurts. But the body's a fast worker. She rebuilds-and then we tear down again. So she works faster. But she hurts. She hurts all the time. For a week. For a month. Max job? Make that three months."
"That's cutting it fine," Bailey said. "Can't you rush it any?"
"Sure-if you want to sleep in the tank," Goldblatt said sardonically.
"If that's what it takes."
"Are you serious? But I don't need to ask, do I? You're a man that's driven, if I ever saw one. What is it that's eating at you, young fellow? You've got a lot of life ahead of you. Slow down-"
"I can't," Bailey said. "Let's get started on what comes next."
In the third week Bailey, out of the tank for his alter-hourly session in the treadcage, paused to look at himself in the mirror. His face was gaunt, knobbed below the jawline with unfamiliar lumps of muscle; his neck was awkwardly corded; his shoulders swelled in sinewy striations above a chest which seemed to belong to someone else.
"I look wrong," he said. "Misshapen. No symmetry. Out of balance."
"Sure, sure. What do you expect, to start with? Some sectors respond quicker, some were in better shape. Don't worry. First we go for tone, then bulk, then definition, then balance. You're doing swell. We start coordination and dynamics next. Another sixty days and you'll look like you were born under that blue tag." He rubbed a hand over his head, eyeing Bailey. "If it wasn't so crazy, I'd think maybe that's the way you were thinking," he said.
"Don't think about it, Hy," Bailey said. "Just keep the pressure on."
15
On the eighty-fifth day, Hy Goldblatt looked at William Bailey and wagged his head in exaggerated wonder.
"If I didn't see it myself, I would never of believed it was the same man."
Bailey turned this way and that, studying himself in the wall mirror. He walked a few steps, noting the automatic grace of his movements, the poise of his stance, the unconscious arrogance of his posture, the way he held his head.
"It'll do, Hy," he said. "Thanks for everything."
"Where you going now? Why not stay on, help out in the gym? Look, I need an assistant-"
"Pressing business," Bailey said. "What do you know about the Apollo Club?"
Goldblatt frowned. "I was in the place once, mat man for a cross-class match. Lousy. Fancy place, fancy people. You wouldn't like working there."
"I might like being a member."
Goldblatt stared at him. "You really think you got a chance-Dutch tag and all?"
Bailey turned, gave the trainer an imperious glare. "Are you questioning me?" he asked in a steely tone. Goldblatt stiffened; then he grinned wryly at Bailey's mocking smile.
"Maybe you do at that," he said.
16
Bailey devoted the next few hours to ablutions: a vacuum-and-pressure steam bath, mani- and pedicure, depilation, tonsure, skin toning and UV, bacterial purge. Then he turned his attention to costume.
The clothes he picked were far from new; but they had been handcut from woven fabric, rich and elegant. Bailey bought them from a doddering ancient whose hand shook with paralysis agitans until the moment when the scissors touched the cloth.
"You don't see goods like this anymore," the old tailor stated in his frail whisper. "Heat-seal plastics, throwaways, trash. Nothing like this." He wagged his hairless skull, holding the tunic against Bailey's chest.
"Where'd you get them?"
"They were found on a corpse," the tailor said. "They brought them to me. Dead men's clothes. Bad business. Man should be decently buried. But they don't even get that nowadays, eh? Into the converter. Save the chemicals. As if a man was no more than a heap of fertilizer. No respect. That's what's gone wrong. No respect."
"How far out of the current style is this outfit?"
"Cutting like this doesn't go out of style," the dodderer said sharply. "People don't understand that. Trash, yes; flash today, junk tomorrow. But quality-real quality-it endures. In this clothing you could be at home anyplace. Nobody could fault you. Of the finest."
17
It was almost dark when Bailey left the shop swinging his swagger stick, his newly altered garments snugged to his new body with a feel he had never known before. People on the sidewalk eyed him aslant and slid aside. In a dark shop with a smell of conspiracy he made a purchase.