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his bare feet, his thighs, belly, shoulders. Aglitter to his neck in the electronic snakeskin, he eased his hands carefully, finger by finger, inside the gloves. Then, when he pulled the zipper up past his chest in a single movement, the black mosaic burst into colored lights. A glance verified that this system was the same as in the ordinary ice striders that he had handled in Antarctica, though those didn't compare with the Digla in mass. He reached to the ceiling for a strap, a kind of harness, and put it around him, buckled it tight across his chest. When the buckle clicked shut, the harness lifted him gently, resiliency, so that, supported from under the arms, as in a well-padded corset, he was suspended and could move either leg freely. Checking that the arms were just as free, he felt for the main switch at the neck, found the lever, and threw it all the way. The lights on the cubes doubled in intensity, and at the same time he heard, deep beneath him, the engines of all the limbs. They idled in neutral, making soft sucking noises because there was excess grease on the connecting rods, from the rotary bearings, which had been packed at the Earth shipyard to protect against corrosion.
    Looking down with care, so as not to hit the side of the storage building, he made his first, tentative, small step. In the lining of his suit were thousands of electrodes, sewn in supple spirals. Pressed against the naked body, they gathered the impulses from the nerves and muscles and transmitted them to the Goliath. Just as to each of the skeletal joints of the man there corresponded, in the machine, a magnified, hermetically sealed joint of metal, so for each group of muscles that flexed or straightened a limb there were cannonlike cylinders in which pistons moved, pushed by pumped oil. But the operator did not need to think or even know about all this. He merely moved as if walking, as if treading the ground with his feet, or as if bending his torso to pick up, with outstretched hand, a desired object. There were only two significant differences. First, that of size, since a single human footfall equaled a twelve-meter step by the machine. It was the same with every movement. Thanks to the extraordinary precision of the relays, the machine was able, if the operator wished to demonstrate his skill, to lift a full liqueur glass from a table and raise it to a height of twelve stories without spilling a drop or crushing the crystal stem in the great tongs of its grip. But the colossus was made to lift not little glasses or pebbles but multiton pipes, beams, and boulders. With the appropriate tools put in its hands, it became a drilling rig, a bulldozer, a crane—but always a mighty union of virtually inexhaustible force with human dexterity.
    The giant striders were an extension of the concept of the exoskeleton, which, as an external amplifier of the human body, had been applied in many twentieth-century prototypes. The invention languished, because on Earth no immediate practical use was found for it. What revived the idea was the exploitation of the solar system. Planetary machines arose, adapted to the globes on which they were to work, to the local tasks and conditions. In weight the machines varied, but in inertial mass they were the same everywhere, and therein lay the second important difference between them and people.
    Both strength of construction material and engine power had their limits. The limits were imposed, even at a distance from all gravitational bodies, by the machine's inertial mass. One could not make sudden movements in a strider, just as one could not stop an ocean liner on a dime or spin the arm of a crane like a propeller. Trying that in a Digla would break its girdered limbs. To protect against any such self-destructive maneuver, therefore, the engineers had installed safety cutoffs in each of the branching drive units. The operator, however, could override any or all of these neutralizers if he found himself