by Various
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 h
e 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.
