Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "Thanks."

  "Don't bother thanking me. I expect there'll still be a great deal of difference between us about the basic goals of this project. But once we start I don't want to have to fire you again."

  "Just what is the nature of this project," said Paul, "its goals? Fill me in on the details."

  "There are no details--beyond what you've read and heard--you're going to provide them. The objective is to find a kind of man that will keep the Frank Wests of the future from dying, as those men aboard the Wheel did."

  "What kind of man do you expect that to be?" Paul asked.

  "One who will eliminate, for all time, the damning verdict that has been handed down in tens of thousands of investigations of accident and disaster: human error.

  "We're going to find a kind of man who can be depended on to function without error. One who can undertake a complicated task of known procedure and perform it an infinite number of times, if necessary, without a single deviation from standard."

  Paul Medick regarded the General through narrowed eyes. In spite of his almost agonizing desire to possess the appointment to head up this Project he had to have a clear understanding with Oglethorpe now. He had to risk his chances, if necessary, to make himself absolutely clear.

  He said, "For untold thousands of years the human race has spent its best efforts to reach the goal of perfection without achieving it. Now you propose to assemble all the money in the world, and all the brains and say: give us a perfect man! The United States Space Command demands him!"

  "Exactly." General Oglethorpe's face hardened as he returned Paul's steady gaze. "No other technical problem has been able to stand before such an attack. There is no reason why this one should. And the problem must be solved, or we're going to have to abandon space just as we stand on the frontier, getting our first real glimpse of it."

  "Your world is such a simple, uncomplicated place, General," said Paul slowly. "You want a man with two heads, four arms, and a tail? Order it! Coming up!

  "That's the way you operated when I set up your basic personnel program five years ago. It didn't work then; it won't work now."

  The General's face darkened. "It will work. Because it has to. Men are going to the stars--because they have to. And they're going to change themselves to whatever form or shape or ability is required by that goal. They've done everything else they've ever set themselves to do--life came up out of the sea because it had courage. Men left their caves and struck out across the plains and seas, and took up the whole Earth and made it what it is--because they had courage.

  "But to go to space, courage is not enough. We need a new kind of man that we've never seen before. He's a man of iron, who's forgotten he was ever flesh and blood. He's a machine, who can perform over and over the same kind of complicated procedure and never make an error. He's more reliable and endurable than the best machines we've ever made.

  "I don't know where we'll find him, but he can be found, and you will do it, because you believe, as I do, that Man's frontier must not be closed. And because, in spite of your cynicism, you still understand the meaning of duty to your society and your race. There is no possibility of your refusal, so I have taken steps already to make your appointment official."

  "You must also have prepared yourself," said Paul, "to accept me with the basic philosophy that must guide me in this matter. And my philosophy is that this Project must fail. It has no possibility of success. The man you seek does not exist. An errorless man would be a dead man.

  "Any living man is going to make errors. That's the process of learning: make an approach, correct for error, approach again, correct once more. It's the only way there is to learn."

  The General inhaled deeply and hesitated. "I know nothing about that," he said finally. "You know what I want. Even if what you say were partially true, there remains no reason why that which has been learned cannot be performed without error. I may have to put up with it, but you'll save yourself and all of us a lot of time if you don't spend three months digging up reasons why the Project can't succeed."

  He stood up as if everything had been said that could possibly be said. "Let's go and have a look at your laboratory quarters."

  * * * * *

  In the hot sunlight of the Southwest desert, they walked across the yard from the administration building to a large laboratory which had been cleared to the bare floor and walls. Paul felt a sense of instability returning. But only for an instant. He'd all but insulted the General and told him he had no intention of producing the iron superman the Space Command contemplated. And still he had not been thrown out. They must want him very badly, indeed!

  He had no qualms of conscience about taking the post now. General Oglethorpe had been forewarned and knew what Paul Medick's hopes and intentions were.

  "You can build your staff as big as you need it," the General was saying. "This Project has crash priority over everything else. We've got the machines to go to space. The machines need the men.

  "You can have anybody you want and do anything you like to them. We hope you can put them back together again in reasonable shape, but that doesn't matter too much."

  Paul turned about the bare room that would serve adequately as office space. "All right," he said. "Consider Project Superman begun. Remember, I have no hope of finding a solution in an errorless human being. I'll find whatever answer there is to be found. If you have any objections to my working of those terms, say so now. I don't intend to get fired again with a Project in the middle of its course."

  "You won't be. You'll find the way to give us what we need. I want you to come down to the other end of the building and meet a man who will be working closely with you."

  There had been sounds of activity in the distance, and General Oglethorpe led Paul towards them. They entered a large area in which instrumental equipment was being set up. A tall, thin, dark-haired man came up as they entered.

  "Dr. Nat Holt," said the General, "instrument and electronics expert. This is Dr. Medick, the country's foremost man in psychology and psychometric analysis.

  "Dr. Holt will be your instrument man. He will design and build whatever special equipment your researches call for. Let me know soon what you'll need in the way of furniture and assistants."

  He left them standing in the nearly bare room. Through the window they watched his stiff form march back to his own office.

  Nat Holt shifted position and grinned at Paul. "I may as well tell you that the General has briefed me thoroughly on what he considered your probable reaction to the Project. I'm just curious enough to want to know if he was right."

  "The General and I understand each other--I think," said Paul. "He knows I'm contemptuous of his approach to a problem of human behavior by ordering it solved. But he knows I'll take his money and spend it on the biggest, deepest investigation of human behavior via psychometrical analysis that has ever been conducted."

  "It ought to be enough to buy gold fringed couches for all the analysts in the country."

  Paul raised his brows. "If it's that way with you, then why are you joining me?" he asked.

  "Because I have a stake in this, too! I want to see the problem solved just as much as the General does. And I think it can be solved. But not this way!

  "There's only one way to produce men of superior abilities. The method of adequate training. Hard, brutal discipline and training of oneself. I'm going to convince Oglethorpe of it after he's seen the failure you intend to produce for him."

  "That shouldn't be hard," said Paul. "It's the General's own view. The Project is simply to implement that view.

  "But let's not have any misunderstanding about my intentions. I expect to give honest value in research for every dollar spent. I expect to turn up data that will go a long way toward providing better spacemen for the Command--and to give Captain West the monument he asked for!"

  * * * * *

  Alone in his hotel room that night, Paul stood at the window overlooking the desert. Bey
ond the distant hills a faint glow in the sky marked the location of Space Command Base. He regarded it, and considered the enormity of the thing that was being brewed for the world in that isolated outpost. Now the chance was his to prove that manhood was a quality to be proud of, that machines could be built and junked and built again, but that a man's life was unique in the universe and could never be replaced once it was crushed.

  For years he'd struggled to probe the basic nature of Man and find out what divorces him from the merely mechanical. He'd known there would probably never be enough money to reach his goal. And then Oglethorpe had come, offering him all the money in the world to reach a nebulous objective that Space Command did not know was unobtainable.

  Somebody was going to spend that money. With clear conscience, Paul rationalized that it might as well be him. He'd see that the country got value for what it spent, even if this was not quite what the Space Command expected.

  Nat Holt was going to be a most difficult obstacle. Paul wished the General had let him pick his own technical director, but obviously the two men understood each other. In their separate fields, they were alike in their approach to human performance. Whip a man into line, make him come to heel like a reluctant hound. Beat him, shape him, twist him to the form you want him to bear.

  Discipline him. That was the magic word, the answer to all things.

  Paul turned from the window in revulsion, drawing the curtains on the skyglow of the Base.

  Human error!

  When would Man cease to indulge in this most monumental of all errors? When would he cease to regard himself and his fellows as brute creatures to be beaten into line?

  He had to find the right answer before Oglethorpe and his kind found some flimsy validation for the one they had already chosen long ago.

  He stood up and glanced at the clock, deciding he wanted dinner, after all. Tomorrow he'd wire Betty and the kids to get packed and be on their way. No--he'd phone tonight. She had a right to know immediately the outcome of his interview.

  The dining room was almost empty. He ordered absently and clipped the speaker of his small personal radio behind his ear while waiting. He seldom used it, but here in the desert was a sense of isolation that made him seize almost compulsively upon any contact with the bright, distant world. The music was dull, and the news uninspiring. He was about to turn it off when his order arrived.

  The wine was very bad; the steak, however, was good, so Paul considered it about even. His finger touched the radio switch once more. The newscaster's voice changed its tone of pounding urgency. "Repercussions of the recent crash of the world's first space station are still being heard," he said. "Murmurs of protest against construction of a new Wheel are rising in many quarters. Today they approach the proportions of a roar.

  "The influential New England Times states that it is 'unqualifiedly opposed' to any restoration of the Wheel. 'In its three years' existence the structure proved beyond any question of doubt its utter lack of utility. Now its fall to Earth demonstrates the menace constituted by its presence over every city on the face of the globe.'

  "Senator Elbert echoes these sentiments. 'It was utter folly in the first place to spend billions of dollars to construct this Sword of Damocles in the sky of all the world. I propose that our Government go on record denying any further intention to rebuild such a threat to the peace and well-being of nations who stand now on the threshold of understanding and friendliness which they have sought for so long.'"

  Paul switched it off. He remembered the hours of world-wide tension while the Wheel was falling toward the city of San Francisco. In panic, the whole population of the Bay Area attempted evacuation, but there wasn't time. The bridges became clogged with traffic, and some hysterical drivers left their cars and jumped to the waters below.

  As the wreckage neared Earth, the computers narrowed their circle of error until it was certain at last that the city would not be struck. But the damage was done. The fear remained, and now was congealing in angry determination that another Wheel would not be built.

  Paul finished his meal, wondering what effect this would have on the plans to build a new Wheel--and on Project Superman. Maybe Congress would react in anger that would cut off all appropriations to the Project.

  He wondered, in sudden weariness, if this would not be an unmixed blessing, after all.

  * * * * *

  The next three days were spent in telephone and telegraph communication with members of his profession as he proceeded to recruit a staff.

  On Friday, Betty arrived with the kids. By the end of the following week, laboratory furniture had been installed and the first trickle of potential staff members was coming in to see what Superman was all about. Nat, too, had been busy forming his own staff and setting up basic equipment.

  Paul had the feeling that they were opposing camps setting up on the same site of exploration. He tried to tell himself it was completely irrational, until Nat approached him a few days later.

  "Quite a crew you're getting in here," the technician said. "You'll have to take Oglethorpe up on his offer of new buildings if you expect to find couch space for all your boys."

  "That's what you're here for," Paul suggested mildly, "to do away with couches."

  "Right." Nat nodded. "Anything a couch can do, a meter can do twice as efficiently."

  "Sometimes both are necessary. You forget my specialty is psychometry."

  "No, I'm not forgetting," said Nat. "But that's what makes it so hard for me to figure out. You're attempting to span two completely incompatible fields: science and humanities. Man behaves either as a machine or as a creature of unstable emotion. To function as one you have to suppress the other."

  "Splitting Man in two has never produced an answer to anything. It has been tried even longer than couches--and with far less result."

  "I'll make you a small side bet. We're going to have to work together on Superman, and coordinate all our procedures and results. But I'll bet the final answer turns up on the side of a completely mechanistic man, shorn of all other responses and motivations."

  "I'll take that!" Paul said with a grim smile. "I don't know how much of an answer we'll find, but I know that won't be it!"

  "Let's say a small celebration feed for the whole crew when Superman is completed. Nothing chintzy, either!"

  They shook on it. And afterward Paul was glad the incident had occurred. It left no doubt about the direction Nat Holt would be traveling in his work.

  * * * * *

  Four weeks to the day, from the time Paul had stepped into Oglethorpe's office, he called the first meeting of his staff leaders. Invitations to the General and to Nat Holt were deliberately omitted. He wanted this first get together to be a family affair.

  He felt just a little shaky in the knees as he got up before that group for the first time.

  "I won't repeat what you already know," Paul said carefully. "You all know the background events that produced Project Superman.

  "I am sure that each of you has also caught the two basic errors that have been assumed by the Space Command, first, that an errorless man is possible, and second, that genuine scientific discovery can be secured wholly upon command. General Oglethorpe recognizes that we consider these assumptions erroneous, but he also knows that our professional integrity demands that we pursue vigorously a course which he believes will result in success.

  "We recognize, too, that we are not here to invent or produce anything that does not already exist. But, in a sense, our superiors and some of our co-workers expect us to do exactly that.

  "We can agree, however, that most of Man's potential still remains to be discovered. And for us, who have hoped for a means of understanding that potential, this Project is the fulfillment of dreams. If we fail to take full advantage of it, we will win the condemnation of our profession for a century to come.

  "Space Command has already concluded that a man can be stripped of his humanity and driven to an utterly mechanistic
state with the robotic responses of a machine. Let there be no mistake about it: we have been brought here to validate that conclusion.

  "We will validate it by default, so to speak, unless we can produce a clean-cut analysis and demonstrations of the thing that most of us believe: that the essence of Man is more than a piece of machinery or a collection of bio-chemical reactions.

  "Our science of mind and Man is on trial. If we fail, we give consent to a doctrine that will spread from space technology to all the rest of our society, and bind Man in an iron mold that will not be broken for generations. While we have been hired and will ostensibly work at the task of developing an errorless man, our basic purpose must be to validate the humanity of Man!"

  He waited for their reaction. Outside, far across the open desert at the station, a rocket screamed into the air. They waited until the sound died away.

  Professor Barker stood up. "There is scarcely a human being who has not by now read or heard the words of Captain West's appeal. They will be looking for the day when there will come marching from our laboratories, like a robot, the errorless man he asked for.

  "Do you mean we have to fight the stated objectives of this Project? Can we not discover sufficient understanding to establish some method of training which will accomplish, in another way, the things the Space Command needs?"

  "We are not fighting the Space Command's desire for more adequate men for its ships," said Paul. "We are fighting only against the false conclusions they have already formed concerning the nature of such men.

  "We must solve the problem of human error. We know its purpose in the learning process. We must discover the reason for its existence in a learned process. We have to find out what training actually means.

  "We have to ask how we know when an error has been made. It is obvious, of course, when a spaceship rams a fixed orbit station. But what of the subtler situations, where results are less dramatic, or are postponed for a long time--?