"Are you crazy? Why would we want to have them come out here and pick our bones to pieces before making final burial?"

"We've got a story to tell them--remember? We've got Superman, that's going to produce for the first time in the world's history a man adequate to go into the dangers of s.p.a.ce. And there's that little story of yours about courage. I think that would go over with them. We'd be out in front if we took the initiative in this instead of just waiting until it rolled over us."

There was a long pause before Oglethorpe spoke again. "I wonder just what you're trying to do," he said finally. "I know you don't mean a word of what you're saying at all--"

"But I do mean it," Paul said earnestly. "I want Superman saved; you want the Wheel. It amounts to the same thing."

"You could be right. You might even be telling the truth. I'll give it some thought."

The officer in charge of the rocket crews and the take-off stand was a young engineer-soldier named Harper. Paul had met him during the first week at Base. His endors.e.m.e.nt of Project Superman was enthusiastic.

After talking with Oglethorpe, Paul took a jeep over to the stand and located Harper. The engineer was overseeing the fueling process on a big rocket.

"Doc Med.i.c.k!" Harper exclaimed. "How's your crew of head shrinkers coming along? We're just about ready for your new breed of pilots."

"What do you mean?"

"This is the nucleus ship. She's going out in orbit tonight with the first batch of supplies and instruments to get ready for the new Wheel.

We're going to need your men awfully fast."

"That's what I came to talk about. Can you spare a few minutes?"

"Sure." Harper led him to the office, where the whining of fueling pumps was silenced. "What can we do for you?"

"I wanted to ask about c.u.mmins. You knew him pretty well, didn't you?"

"Buddies. Just like that." Harper crossed his fingers.

"What went wrong, do you think? I know it's all been hashed over in the investigations, but I'd like your personal feelings about him."

Harper's face sobered and he looked away a moment. "c.u.mmins was as good a guy as they come," he said. "But in a pinch he was just a weak sister.

That doesn't mean he didn't have a lot on the ball," Harper added defensively. "He was a better pilot than most of us ever will be, but he was just human like the rest of us."

"What do you mean, 'human'?"

"Weak, soft, failure when the going gets rough--everything we have to be on guard against every minute we're alive."

"I take it you don't think much of human beings, as such."

Harper leaned forward earnestly. "Listen, Doc, when you've been around ships as long as I have, you'll know what Captain West really meant. The weakest link in any technological development has always been the men involved with its operation. In s.p.a.ce flight our weakness is pilots and technicians. Set a machine on course and it'll go until it breaks down--and flash you a warning before it fails. With a man, you never know when he's going to fail, and you have to be on guard against _his_ breakdown every minute because he won't give any warning.

"Think what it's like to be in our shoes! We take the controls of a few hundred million dollars worth of machinery, and we know that every last man of us is b.o.o.by-trapped with some weakness that can break out in a critical moment and destroy everything. We fight against it; we struggle to hold it in and act like responsible instruments. And we grow to hate ourselves because of the weak things that we are.

"c.u.mmins was like that. He fought himself every waking hour, knowing that he had a weakness of becoming confused in a tight spot. Oh, it was nothing that even showed up on the tests, and he was the best man of any of us on the Base. But he knew it was there, just as we all know our closets bulge with skeletons that we try to keep from breaking out."

"Do you fight yourself the way c.u.mmins did?" Paul asked.

"Sure."

"What would happen if you pulled a blunder that wrecked that ship out there on the stand."

"I'd have had it, that's all. I'd never get within ten miles of a rocket base again as long as I lived. And there wouldn't be much worth living for--"

"It would be pretty wonderful to feel you weren't constantly on the verge of some disastrous blunder, wouldn't it?"

"It would be a rocket man's idea of heaven to handle these ships with that kind of a feeling inside him."

"We're about ready to begin running tests on Superman, and I'd like you to be the first to help us out. Can you arrange it?"

"We're tied up like a ball of string on getting the nucleus ship in orbit. I know Oglethorpe gave orders we were to jump when you called, but I'll have to check on replacements for those of us you take. What kind of test are you going to run on me?"

"I want to find out how long it takes you to make a serious error, and what happens to you when you do!"

Arrangements were made for initiating this series of tests two days later. Paul had designed them, and Nat Holt's crew had built the equipment.

But before they were started, Paul grew increasingly aware of the clamor and public agitation against the Wheel. Instead of dying out after a small spurt of anger, it was acc.u.mulating momentum in every corner of the nation.

A rabble rouser named Morgan in the middle-west had proposed a motor caravan to s.p.a.ce Command Base, where the partic.i.p.ants would go on a sit-down strike until a.s.surance was given that no Wheel would be built again. And on the heels of this came the demand by an increasing number of Senators for a full investigation of the Base.

Paul met Barker after seeing the newscast of Morgan's revivalist type appeal for a caravan of protest against the Base. "This looks like it could get to be something that would be hard to handle," Barker said.

"It doesn't seem reasonable that the near-crash of the first Wheel at San Francisco could be responsible for all this commotion."

"I don't think it is," Paul answered reflectively. "The sinking of a big ocean liner doesn't produce hysterical demands that no more ships be built. The crash of an airship with a hundred people aboard is accepted for what it is, without this kind of reaction. I think these broadcasts and write-ups of Captain West's appeal have sunk in deeper than Oglethorpe or anyone else ever intended.

"For a long time there has been building up a sense of man's inferiority to his machines. Now this incident of the Wheel and the world-wide broadcast of West's final words have triggered that inferiority into a genuine fear. They're afraid to have another Wheel up there over their heads. They're afraid that no man is capable of mastering such a piece of machinery."

Not only the public was infected with this fear, but the very men on whom the operation of the ships depended. Harper was right, Paul thought, as he reached his own office again. It must be terrible to be in their shoes, fighting constantly the conviction that they were poor miserable creatures hardly fit to polish the shining hulls of their creations!

They were trained in the best of military traditions, crushing their weaknesses by sheer force. And they had concluded their own breakdown was inevitable, in spite of their training and traditions. How could such men even hope for the stars!

But where was the flaw in it all? If the answer was not in men who were more nearly like their own machines, where was it?

They needed a year or two to even approach the problem properly, and some kind of answer was demanded within weeks!

Oglethorpe came to the laboratory the morning Harper was to begin his test runs. "We're going on a complete crash-priority basis, with round-the-clock shifts," he said. "It's been a toss-up whether to close Superman and put everything we had on the new Wheel, or leave it open in the hope of getting something out of it.

"For the time being I'm leaving it open, but remember that every hour Harper or one of his men spends here is an hour away from the job on the Wheel.

"We didn't need your suggestion about an investigation. Plenty of other people thought of it first. The Senators will be here in four or five days. You're going to talk to them. You're going to tell them what you proposed to tell them."

"Of course. And what are you going to do about Morgan's cavalcade?"

Oglethorpe spat out an exclamation. "We'll set up barricades that they'd better not cross within ten miles of Base!"

"That won't help," Paul warned. "I think you'd better let me prepare something for them, too."