normal handling of a ship, including the items necessary to record
observations and responses. Harper listened to these for a half dozen
cycles. Then, confident that he could breeze through the procedure for
the rest of the day if he had to, he switched off the tape and settled
back to take it easy.
One by one, he watched the meters, noted their information, made the
proper adjustments, added compensations, waited for results, checked and
re-checked--
"He'll go a long time," said Nat Holt confidently. "He's had top
training. If it breaks down, we may find out a few things."
"Cummins had top-drawer training, too," Paul said. "His break point
seemed to have no adequate antecedents. I don't think we're going to
find Harper holding out very long."
After an hour, the attitude of contempt had left Harper's face, and he
was proceeding with obvious boredom. He had made no error yet, but there
was evident a faint trace of anxiety as he concentrated on the
instruments and levers.
At two hours and a half Harper reached for a button and withdrew his
hand in abrupt hesitation. Then it darted out again and pressed
decisively. At three hours he was making two such hesitations every
cycle.
"Not so good," Barker commented. "Not for a man who battles himself the
way Harper does."
Nat Holt remained silent, watching critically the wavering dials and
graphs showing the engineer's physical condition and reaction.
At four and a half hours, Harper's hand reached for a lever in the
center of the board. But it didn't get more than a third of the way. In
mid-air it froze, as if paralysis had suddenly struck it. Harper
regarded it in seeming dumb astonishment. His face grew red, and sweat
broke out upon his forehead as if from the physical exertion of trying
to put his hand to the lever.
Paul grabbed a microphone and switched it on. "Touch the lever," he
commanded. "Draw it toward you."
Harper looked around as if in panic, but he completed the motion. He sat
staring at the panels for a full two minutes while alarm eyes went from
green to yellow to red.
"Alarm red!" Paul exclaimed into the microphone. "Correct course!"
Harper turned and glared about with hate in his eyes as if to find the
source of the sound. He began tearing at the wires and contacts fastened
to his head and body. "To hell with the course!" he cried. "I'm getting
out of here!"
He hurled the wiring harness at the panels. Then, he stood in a moment's
further paralysis and slumped finally into the chair. He put his arms
and head down on the instrument desk and began sobbing deeply.
Paul put away the microphone and moved to the door. "That's the end of
that," he said. "I hope our record is good. Harper might not like to go
through that again."
Nat Holt was still staring through the window at the sobbing engineer.
"I don't understand," he murmured. "What made him break down like that
for no reason at all?"
* * * * *
One by one, the top engineers of the Base went through the breakdown
test. Some broke down with an emotional storm as Harper had, others
simply ended in a swirl of confusion that put lights flashing all over
the panels. But all of them had a breaking point of some kind that could
be measured in a small number of hours.
The test was a stab in the dark. It was based on an old and well-known
principle that repeated tactile contact under command will break down
the motor responses of the body in a matter of hours. Paul did not know
whether it would actually provide a fertile lead to the problem of error
or not, but it seemed the closest possible approach at present.
Nat Holt, however, was astonished at the reaction of the men. He
insisted on trying it himself, determined that he would not break down
no matter what happened. He lasted six hours before the panel lit up
like a Christmas tree.
He subjected the resulting curves to an analyzer, and to his own he gave
the most detailed attention. At the end of a full week of study on it,
he called Paul with an excitement he could not suppress in his voice.
"It looks like you owe that dinner," he said. "We've got what we were
looking for!"
"What are you talking about?" Paul demanded.
"We've got proof that a human being is nothing more nor less than a
simple cybernetic gadget. It's a laugh--people trying to build a
mechanical man all these years. That's the only kind there is!"
"You still aren't making sense."
"Come on over and see for yourself."
Puzzled and irritated, Paul left his office and went down to the
analyzer laboratory. There he found Holt and his staff in a buzz of
excitement.
The multiple recorder sheets were laid out on long tables, being studied
intensely. Paul followed Holt to one series that was separated from the
rest.
"We didn't know we had anything at first," said Holt. "The pulse was so
low in amplitude that it was hard to pick out of the noise, but the
analyzer showed it was consistently present under certain conditions of
the subject."
"What conditions?" said Paul.
"At the exact moment of committing an error! I should say it occurs
between the moment of making the decision to carry out an erroneous act
and the triggering of the motor impulse that executes it."
Paul frowned. "How can you be sure it doesn't occur at any other time as
well?"
"Because we've run every set of charts through the analyzer and this
particular impulse comes out no other place."
"It looks very interesting," Paul said. "But why did you say you've got
proof that a human being is nothing but a cybernetic gadget? I don't see
what this has got to do with it."
"I didn't give you quite all the story," Holt said smugly. "I should
have said that the pulse occurred every time there was an _intent_ to
perform an error. Sometimes that intent was not carried out."
"I don't understand."
"That pulse is nothing more nor less than a feedback pulse indicating
that an action matrix has been set up which is in non-conformity with
the previously chosen pattern of learning or intent. It's a feedback
alarm carrying the information that an error will result if the proposed
action is carried out. When the feedback is successfully returned to the
action matrix a change is made until there is no feedback and a correct
action is taken. When the feedback is blocked or ignored, an error
results. It's as simple as that! Your complex human being is nothing but
a fairly elaborate cybernetic machine operating wholly on feedback
principles. The only time he fails and breaks down is when he ceases to
act like the cybernetic machine that he is!"
* * * * *
Holt's eyes shone triumphantly as he patted the long strips of paper on
the table. Paul followed the motion of his hand and remained staring at
the graphs in a kind of stunned recognition. There must be some mistake,
there _had_ to be. Holt's interpretation was wrong, even if the data
were correct. Man, a feedback response mechanism--! If that were true a
vacuum tube structure could eventually be devised to do _anything_ a man
could do.
"I think we'll hold off on that dinner a while yet," Paul said. "The
data are interesting and, I'm sure, important--but I can hardly agree
with your conclusions." Inwardly, he cursed the stiltedness he felt
creeping into his voice, and his irrational resentment of Holt's
continued smug grin.
"Take all the time you want," Holt said, "but when you're through you'll
come up with the same answers I've got. Man is a machine and nothing
else. Our only job now is to discover why the feedback sometimes fails,
and to set it back on the job."
Paul took the recordings and the analyzer graphs back to his own office.
He called Barker and showed the older man what Holt had found out. "If
this is true," he said, "we don't need to worry about validating Space
Command's pre-chosen conclusions. It has already been done."
Dr. Barker looked puzzled and a little frightened as he sat down at the
desk to examine the charts. After an hour, he looked up. "It's true," he
said. "There's no escaping the fact. Look what we have here--" He
pointed to a corresponding sector of the six charts he'd lined up.
"After the first feedback impulse, there was no attempt to correct," he
said, "or, rather, there was a deliberate effort to suppress the
feedback. This created a second, larger feedback, which, in turn
resulted in increased suppression and a simultaneous enlargement of the
error. The result was a hunting effect in increasingly large amplitude,
like the needle of an autosyn indicator with undamped positive feedback.
"Now, here's another one with the opposite effect. In this case the
hunting shows diminishing amplitude as correction of the effort results
from application of the feedback pulses. One pulse is not sufficient,
but they are applied in decreasing force as the intent is brought into
alignment with the learned pattern. A purely mechanical response!"
Paul turned from the window through which he had been staring toward the
launchers. "Then Space Command is perfectly right," he said bitterly.
"We _can_ give them their errorless, mechanical men--just as soon as we
find ways of correcting the blockage of the feedback pulses!"
Barker leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his moderate
paunch. "I'm afraid that's right. We've been wrong all along in bucking
the mechanical concept of Man. The technologists saw it long ago in a
sort of intuitive way, but they couldn't prove it. Now, they can!"
"And the soul of Man is nothing but a feedback impulse!"
Barker sighed heavily. "What else, Paul?"
* * * * *
Morgan's Caravan appeared that evening and camped at the ten-mile limit
imposed by the military police guards. They posted their signs of
protest and began their picket lines. Oglethorpe sent out his sound
trucks to try to scare them away, but they wouldn't scare.
Paul watched at home the broadcast of the scene, but the fate of the
Base and the Wheel had almost ceased to concern him. He told Betty of
the discovery Holt had made on Superman.
"It leaves nothing to account for the most valued acts of Man," he said.
"It can't account for creativeness, because a cybernetic device cannot
create; it can only follow a pattern. So where is the poetry, the art,
the scientific invention if this is the essence of Man? It can't be, yet
there's no way of getting around this thing."
"Where does the pattern come from?" asked Betty. "Isn't that the created
thing which the cybernetic system tries to follow?"
Paul shook his head. "The pattern we're talking about is no more than a
response to stimuli, a purely mechanical thing also. Holt claims this is
all there ever is, that what we call art, poetry, music inspiration, and
intuition are nothing more than the results of badly functioning
cybernetic systems. The more or less irrational results of errors in
accommodating to the real world. We find pleasure in them because they
tend to excuse our badly malfunctioning circuits.
"The ideal race of Man would be devoid of all this, a smoothly operating
group of individuals unperturbed by emotional or artistic responses,
completely capable of solving any problem in a purely cybernetic
manner."
"And do you agree with it?" Betty asked.
"There's nothing else I can do! The evidence is there." He laughed
shortly and moved to the window where he could see the nearby camp of
Morgan's Caravan. "Human development has moved--is moving--in a
completely different direction from anything I ever dreamed.
Oglethorpe's iron-hard, emotionless machine-men are the only ones who'll
get there. The rest of us who can't match the pace of a technological
society will be shucked off as the waste part in the development of a
species meant to inhabit galaxies instead of a single world."
"If I had ever wondered how you'd sound when you were completely out of
your mind I'd have the answer now," said Betty.
In the morning he turned over to one of the units the task of further
identifying and analyzing the feedback impulse they had discovered. In
the middle of this he was called to Oglethorpe's office. The
investigating Senators had arrived.
They were favorably impressed by the day-long tour that General
Oglethorpe provided for them around the entire Base. But they found in
Paul's announcement the strongest single factor in favor of permitting
Space Command to continue with its work.
"We know now," he said, "and this is something I haven't even had time
to present to General Oglethorpe--we know that a completely mechanical
man is possible."
The General's eyes narrowed as Paul's flat statement continued. "We know
that it is possible to have men at the helm of our ships, who are
incapable of error. We have hopes of producing them within a very short
time if Project Superman is allowed to continue. And when this is done,
there is no technical goal we cannot reach."
This was the thing the Senators had come to find out, and they were
satisfied. "But the public has got to be reassured of this," Senator
Hart said. "We need to get this mob away from your gates for one thing.
The news programs keep them constantly before the public eye and the
whole country is stirred up."
"We'll take care of it at once," General Oglethorpe said. "As Dr. Medick
has indicated, this discovery is so new that even I had not been
informed of it. Morgan's mob will go away as soon as they hear the news.
And that, in turn, will reassure the entire country. We can arrange for
a broadcast by Dr. Medick to the whole nation."
Paul was swept along as arrangements were made to make a statement to
Morgan and his group camped outside the Base, to the press, and to the
public in general.
Oglethorpe cornered him after the meeting with the Committee. "This is
on the level," he said, "not something you cooked up on the spur of the
moment?"
"It's on the level," said Paul. "You were right all along."
When he returned to his office an urgent message from Barker awaited
him. He hurried down to the testing laboratory, where the older man
greeted him in excitement and anxiety.
"It looks like we've got something by the tail and can't let go of it.
Come in and have a look."
Paul followed him and found Captain Harper in an observation room,
writhing on a cot in a storm of tears and emotional fury. He beat
against the walls and the floor with his fists as his sobbing continued
beyond control.
"What happened to him?" Paul demanded.
"We have three others in the same condition," said Barker. "We tried to
determine the effect of a pure feedback impulse, and fed it back to each
of them in amplified form as we found it on their charts. This is what
happened. I'm afraid we may have cost them their sanity, and we don't
know why."
"How could their own feedback do such a thing to them?" he asked in
wonder. "What part of the chart did you take it from?"
"We used the impulse that didn't get through, the one that was blocked
so that error resulted. Apparently this is the alternative to error." He
nodded toward the writhing, sobbing man. "Harper reached a point where
he _had_ to fail or else be subject to this psychic storm."
Paul ran his long, bony fingers through his hair. "This makes less sense
than ever! If that's true, then we've got to take back what we've told
Oglethorpe. His errorless man isn't possible, after all."
"I don't know." Barker shook his head thoughtfully. "Evidently the
production of error is a protection against the admission of this
intolerable feedback impulse. But the question remains: why is it
intolerable, and why does it become so after numerous other feedback
impulses have been passed?
"Yesterday we thought we had it all wrapped up. Now it's blown open
wider than ever before!"
* * * * *
Oglethorpe's public relations man prepared a statement to the effect
that further danger from pilot error in rocket ships and the second
Wheel could be considered as completely eliminated with the new training
processes that would make men incapable of technical errors.
Paul knew it was as ineffectual as the average Government release, but
he made no protest in his concern for Harper and the three other men. He
signed the statement automatically.
He was presented the following day, however, with arrangements to give
it personally to the members of Morgan's Caravan from the top of one of
the sound trucks. He did protest then that any flunky on the Base could
read it to the crowd as well as he. But Oglethorpe insisted he do it
personally.
With official pompousness the big, olive-green truck rolled out from the
Base. Paul rode beside the driver and Metcalf, the public relations man.
He'd not told Oglethorpe about their latest development. If this psychic
reaction to feedback proved an impenetrable barrier there'd be time
enough to give Space Command the bad news. In the meantime a Wheel would
be built, the public would be mollified, and Superman would continue
on--to what unknown ends Paul didn't know.
The massed camp of the fanatic followers of Morgan appeared in the
distance like a discarded rag on either side of the road. Then as they
approached it broke into individual knots of sand-scoured, unwashed
people clustered about their tents. Morgan hadn't given much thought to
adequate facilities before leading them out here.
The truck rolled to a halt in the center of the camp. Morgan himself, a
long, lanky figure in a dusty black suit, came at the head of a group of
his people to meet them. "I hope you have the news we are waiting for,"
he said cordially.
"We have a statement," said Metcalf. "Dr. Medick here, who has made an
important discovery that will enable all of you to return to your homes,
will read it to you."
Paul could have stayed in the cab, but he preferred to climb to the
platform atop the truck to get a look at the crowd Morgan had assembled.
He hesitated a moment with the paper in his hands, then took up the mike
and read the statement Metcalf had prepared. "The United States Space
Command wishes to announce that--"
It fell utterly flat on completely non-understanding ears. Paul looked
over the mass of faces and knew it had failed. Something far more than
this was needed. A little feedback, he thought grimly. A little feedback
of the idiocy of their present situation to correct their course and
return it to normalcy.
"Five hundred years ago there might have been a crowd of people just
like you," he said suddenly in low tones. "There was a harbor, and some
small ships, and a man who believed he could sail them over the edge of
the world. On the shore were people who thought he was a fool and a
blasphemer, and a few who thought he was right--or at least hoped he
was.
"Five hundred years ago was the beginning of a new freedom from the
prison of a tiny, constricted world. Today, another freedom waits our
successful conquest of space. And whenever a freedom has been won there
have been more who jeered against it than have cheered for it. You are
today making a choice--"
He talked for ten minutes, and when he was through he knew that he'd
accomplished his goal. Even before the sound truck pulled out, the cars
of the Caravan were breaking away from the mass and disappearing in the
distance.
"Nice job," Metcalf congratulated, as if he'd been responsible for it
himself.
"Just a little feedback in the right place--" murmured Paul absently.
"Feedback? What's that--new kind of propaganda technique--?"
"Yeah, you might call it that. How could a guy have been so _blind_--?"
he said fiercely, more to himself than to his companions.
He hurried to the laboratory as soon as the truck got him back to Base.
He rounded up Barker and Nat Holt and a dozen of his other top men. "The
answer's been under our noses all the time," he said. "We've been too
busy fighting each other for the sake of our own preconceived notions to
have seen it!"
"What are you talking about?" Holt demanded.
"Feedback. Can't you guess what it is?"
"No."
"Are you willing to let us give you a small dose--something less than
the level given Harper and his men--and then tell us what you find out
about it?"
Nat Holt looked hesitant. "If you think you know what you're talking
about. There's no point in my getting in a condition like Harper's."
"We'll pull you out before you get anywhere near that far."
Still dubious, he took a seat amid the mass of pulse generating
equipment and electro-encephalograph recorders. A single pair of
feedback terminals were fitted to his skull. The generator was set to
duplicate his own feedback impulse taken from a moment of failure.
Paul switched on the circuits and advanced the controls carefully. A
look of pain and regret crossed Holt's face. He cried out with a
whimper. "Turn it off!"
"A second more--," Paul said. He advanced the control a hair and waited.
The technologist began to cry suddenly in a low, sobbing voice.
Paul cut the switch.
For a moment Holt continued to slump in the chair, his shoulders
jerking. Then he looked up, half-bewildered, half-furious. "What did you
do to me?" he demanded.
"You did it to yourself," Paul reminded him. "That's your own feedback
pulse just beefed up a little, remember. How did it feel?"
"Terrible! No wonder a guy dodges that. It's enough to make him wreck a
space station to avoid the full blast of it."
"What would you call it?"
"I don't know--," Holt hesitated. "Grief, maybe. Regret--anxiety. But
regret, mostly, I guess."
"That's your feedback," Paul said as he removed the terminals and turned
to the others. "These feedback pulses we've isolated are nothing but
stabs of pure emotion."
He turned with a faint smile to Holt. "You and Harper and the rest of
the iron-bowelled boys were so convinced that the pure mechanical man
would be utterly devoid of all emotional responses and content! And I
was so sure that a warm, responsive, emotional human being could never
respond like a cold machine!
"And we were both utterly wrong. The human being does both. He operates
on true cybernetic principles. But the content of his feedback control
pulses is sheer emotion!
"A small error, a stab of regret. It's repeated, magnified, or
diminished until the action gets back on the track that brings predicted
results. Ignored, the error builds up until the whole structure goes
smash.
"And we're _taught_ to ignore it! It's the noble, brave and manly thing
to ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be glass,
be electrons--anything but a responsive, emotional human being! That's
the way to be a superman! We've tried to find the way to perfection and
have fought tooth and nail against the only means of achieving it."
Barker's face was glowing with excitement and Holt seemed to be
remembering something afar off. "That _was_ it," he breathed softly. "I
can feel it now--the way it was as I began to get jittery and make
mistakes in the test procedures. I seemed to fight something within
myself--something I thought was making me do it wrong. But it wasn't
that, at all. I was fighting against the emotional feedback the errors
were throwing at me."
"Right," said Paul. "And your iron-hard, errorless Superman is going to
be the most emotionally sensitive creature you can produce."
"How did you catch on to this?" Barker asked.
"We should have seen it in Harper. He's the original iron-man. He's
bottled up and fought his emotions all his life. A concentrated dose of
his own feedback simply shattered the dam.
"But I didn't get it until I watched Morgan's mob reacting to the purely
rational explanation Metcalf prepared to convince them they should go
home. They were on a wrong tack and needed a generous amount of the
right feedback to get them back where they belonged. The cold, logical
approach was a dud. What does it take to move an intractible mob?
Emotion--based on the projected consequences of what they're doing. A
perfect feedback setup when correctly applied. And it worked."
Holt shuddered faintly and moved away from the chair he had sat in to
experience his own feedback. "I'm not quite sure who owes who that
dinner," he said to Paul. "But I think somebody does."
"We'll split it," Paul said. And then he was silent as they listened to
the departure of another cargo ship carrying parts of the second Wheel
to the thousand-mile orbit.
He smiled to himself. Ye of little faith!--he thought. Frightened about
the true nature of a race that had come through three billion years of
the kind of torment that Man had survived!