The term itself, bionics, still found ready understanding within only a limited area. Originally it was coined by Major Jack E. Steele, who had been a research psychiatrist at the Aerospace Research Laboratory in Ohio. . . . He created the word bionics as a combination of the Greek bios, meaning life, and the suffix ics, meaning after the manner of, or resembling. Steele taught his coworkers that the scientific goal of bionics was to acquire specific biological knowledge, then reduce that knowledge to mathematical terms (again with the indispensable computers) that would be meaningful to an engineer, who would then produce what the doctors, or the bionicists, if the term was preferred, requested. (67)

The story focuses on an Air Force test pilot named Steve Austin who is badly wounded in a plane crash. The Air Force (and a mysterious security agency) decide to rebuild Austin with bionic parts, a task led by the head of the cybernetics laboratory, Dr. Killian:

Killian was to supervise directly, participate intimately in a program to create out of the mutilated human wreck not only a new man but a wholly new type of man. A new breed. A marriage of bionics (biology applied to electronic engineering systems) and cybernetics. A cybernetics organism.
Call him cyborg . . . (55-56; emphasis in original)

The author is quite enthusiastic about the possibilities of cyborg medicine, and his characters defend it as simply a process of restoring the body's natural functions:

[Dr. Killian's] goal was to substitute for what nature had provided, and had then been removed, for those who suffered amputation and severe disfigurement. This was not simply a matter of plastic surgery or prosthetic limbs. That constituted the most piddling of goals compared to what Killian and his staff sought. To Dr. Killian, an artificial leg was a real leg. . . . The new leg had to be as good or better than the real thing. Indeed, it must be the real thing, with the only difference being that the replacement was fabricated rather than created through original living tissue. (64-65)

At the same time, however, the cyborg is equipped with conspicuously mechanical devices. Steve Austin's body is outfitted with an array of James Bond-like gear: a camera in one eye, an oxygen canister stored inside one artificial leg (for underwater expeditions) and a radio transmitter in the other, a dart gun concealed inside a finger. (173-174)

So, how much does it cost to build a state-of-the-art cyborg like this?

"Doctor, tomorrow by this time there will be placed within your fiscal control--nonreturnable so long as this project is under way--six million dollars." (49)