When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned. Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes-- His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below. "Check motion!" He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside. The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man. A ton of fist opened and closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain. "Check respirators." "Check." The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor. His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors. Joyous, thankful voices--the horror had passed and they were alive again. On the surface it was winter. The methane-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and stone. Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, in the long vistas of unwalled space, in the curve of a far away horizon. He exulted in his machine body, so human in its parts, so more than human in its size and capabilities. The column of the neck, the steel sinews; every muscle, every ligament, every nerve of the human body had its counterpart in the machine. What man could do, the machine did. What affected man, in proportion, affected the machine. Even to pain, the machine was complete. He withdrew his optics and sent his telescope rising ten feet above his head, searching the gray land for the other detachment. A dozen miles away he could see the dome of the ravished farm. The little specks were scurrying to complete their destruction before the dreaded warriors should appear. They had blocked the entrance of the shallow valley in which the farm lay with their artillery. Behind it the gunners would try to hold off the warriors and give the rest time to escape. Not that it mattered. The enemy cared little for his losses.