We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We’re the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We’ve been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry “Uncle!”
Maybe they’ll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die — without killing that gang of your own people they’ve got imprisoned down there. I wouldn’t know; I’m not a genius, I’m an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job — and I might be some help on it, too.
Maybe someday they’ll get everything nice and tidy and we’ll have that thing we sing about, when “we ain’t a-gonna study war no more.” Maybe. Maybe the same day the leopard will take off his spots and get a job as a Jersey cow, too. But again, I wouldn’t know; I am not a professor of cosmopolitics; I’m an M.I. When the government sends me, I go. In between, I catch a lot of sack time.
But, while they have not yet built a machine to replace us, they’ve surely thought up some honeys to help us. The suit, in particular.
No need to describe what it looks like, since it has been pictured so often. Suited up, you look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons. (This may be why a sergeant generally opens his remarks with “You apes—” However, it seems more likely that Caesar’s sergeants used the same honorific.)
But the suits are considerably stronger than a gorilla. If an M.I. in a suit swapped hugs with a gorilla, the gorilla would be dead, crushed; the M.I. and the suit wouldn’t be mussed.
The “muscles,” the pseudo-musculature, get all the publicity but it’s the control of all that power which merits it. The real genius in the design is that you don’t have to control the suit; you just wear it, like your clothes, like skin. Any sort of ship you have to learn to pilot; it takes a long time, a new full set of reflexes, a different and artificial way of thinking. Even riding a bicycle demands an acquired skill, very different from walking, whereas a spaceship — oh, brother! I won’t live that long. Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.
But a suit you just wear.
Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit — yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pick up an egg without breaking it (takes a trifle of practice, but anything improves with practice), dance a jig (if you can dance a jig, that is, without a suit)—and jump right over the house next door and come down to a feather landing.
The secret lies in negative feedback and amplification.
Don’t ask me to sketch the circuitry of a suit; I can’t. But I understand that some very good concert violinists can’t build a violin, either. I can do field maintenance and field repairs and check off the three hundred and forty-seven items from “cold” to ready to wear, and that’s all a dumb M.I. is expected to do. But if my suit gets really sick, I call the doctor — a doctor of science (electromechanical engineering) who is a staff Naval officer, usually a lieutenant (read “captain” for our ranks), and is part of the ship’s company of the troop transport — or who is reluctantly assigned to a regimental headquarters at Camp Currie, a fate-worse-than-death to a Navy man.
But if you really are interested in the prints and stereos and schematics of a suit’s physiology, you can find most of it, the unclassified part, in any fairly large public library. For the small amount that is classified, you must look up a reliable enemy agent—“reliable” I say, because spies are a tricky lot; he’s likely to sell you the parts you could get free from the public library.
But here is how it works, minus the diagrams. The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push. That’s confusing, but negative feedback is always a confusing idea the first time, even though your body has been doing it ever since you quit kicking helplessly as a baby. Young children are still learning it; that’s why they are clumsy. Adolescents and adults do it without knowing they ever learned it — and a man with Parkinson’s disease has damaged his circuits for it.
The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly — but with great force.
Controlled force … force controlled without your having to think about it. You jump, that heavy suit jumps, but higher than you can jump in your skin. Jump really hard and the suit’s jets cut in, amplifying what the suit’s leg “muscles” did, giving you a three-jet shove, the axis of pressure of which passes through your center of mass. So you jump over that house next door. Which makes you come down as fast as you went up … which the suit notes through your proximity & closing gear (a sort of simple-minded radar resembling a proximity fuse) and therefore cuts in the jets again just the right amount to cushion your landing without your having to think about it.
And that is the beauty of a powered suit: you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to drive it, fly it, conn it, operate it; you just wear it and it takes orders directly from your muscles and does for you what your muscles are trying to do. This leaves you with your whole mind free to handle your weapons and notice what is going on around you … which is supremely important to an infantryman who wants to die in bed. If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier.
Your “eyes” and your “ears” are rigged to help you without cluttering up your attention, too. Say you have three audio circuits, common in a marauder suit. The frequency control to maintain tactical security is very complex, at least two frequencies for each circuit, both of which are necessary for any signal at all and each of which wobbles under the control of a cesium clock timed to a micromicrosecond with the other end — but all this is no problem of yours. You want circuit A to your squad leader, you bite down once — for circuit B, bite down twice — and so on. The mike is taped to your throat, the plugs are in your ears and can’t be jarred out; just talk. Besides that, outside mikes on each side of your helmet give you binaural hearing for your immediate surroundings just as if your head were bare — or you can suppress any noisy neighbors and not miss what your platoon leader is saying simply by turning your head.
Since your head is the one part of your body not involved in the pressure receptors controlling the suit’s muscles, you use your head — your jaw muscles, your chin, your neck — to switch things for you and thereby leave your hands free to fight. A chin plate handles all visual displays the way the jaw switch handles the audios. All displays are thrown on a mirror in front of your forehead from where the work is actually going on above and back of your head. All this helmet gear makes you look like a hydrocephalic gorilla but, with luck, the enemy won’t live long enough to be offended by your appearance, and it is a very convenient arrangement; you can flip through your several types of radar displays quicker than you can change channels to avoid a commercial — catch a range & bearing, locate your boss, check your flank men, whatever.