Paul took the recordings and the a.n.a.lyzer 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 s.p.a.ce 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 rea.s.sured 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. Med.i.c.k 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 rea.s.sure the entire country. We can arrange for a broadcast by Dr. Med.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sed?

"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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.sed 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 cl.u.s.tered 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. Med.i.c.k here, who has made an important discovery that will enable all of you to return to your homes, will read it to you."