Human Error Part 7

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 a.s.sembled.

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 s.p.a.ce Command wishes to announce that--"

It fell utterly flat on completely non-understanding ears. Paul looked over the ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ps, and a man who believed he could sail them over the edge of the world. On the sh.o.r.e 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble, brave and manly thing to ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be gla.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+p 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!

Man had everything that was needed to go to the stars or anywhere else he might want to go. He was safe. Man could never be turned into a robot. The basic mechanisms of his humanity were so interwoven with the structure of his being that they could never be separated.

But they hadn't come very far, Paul knew. They had opened only a small crack in a door that had been irrationally closed from the beginning of time. They had to know fully why that door had never been opened before.

And beyond it might lie a thousand others just as tightly closed and closely guarded.

Yet they had reached a starting point, at last. Project Superman could get about its business of preparing men for the stars.