Part 2
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--?
"The primary thing to remember at this point is that our basic goal is to prevent any false confirmation of the dogma that Man is no more than a badly functioning machine, which will gain value when he has been tinkered with sufficiently so that he can slip in beside the gears and vacuum tubes and be indistinguishable from them. And to reach this goal we must discover his true nature."
* * * * *
It was two weeks later that General Oglethorpe made his first visit since Superman got under way. The soldier's face seemed more deeply lined and his eyes more tired than Paul remembered seeing them before.
"You seem to have things well in hand," he said. "How soon can you give us some tangible results?"
"Results! We've just started housekeeping. In a year, maybe two, we'll have an idea where to begin a concentrated search for what you want to know."
The General shook his head slowly, his eyes remaining on Paul's face. "You aren't going to have anything like a year. You haven't got time to run down one line of research and then another. Run them all at once--a thousand of them if you want to. Why do you think you've got the budget you have!"
"Some things," said Paul, "like threading a needle--or analysing a human being--don't go much faster when a thousand men work at it than when there's only one."
"They do when there're a thousand needles to thread--or brains to pick. And that's what we're up against here. We need a volume of the kind of men we've been talking about, and we need them quick!"
"We have to find out how to get the first one."
"And you haven't got as much time now as we thought you had when Superman began. They're trying to close us up.
"We hadn't planned to build another Wheel right away, not until some refinements of design had been worked out, and we had some results from Superman.
"Now, all that's been scrapped. We've received orders from Washington that erection of a second Wheel is to begin at once, using the plans of the first one. Fabrication of structures is already under way."
"I don't understand," said Paul.
"If we don't get another one up there within a matter of weeks, this hysterical opposition among the public is liable to prevent us ever getting one there again. We have to act while we still have authority, before the crackpots persuade Congress to take it away. And by the time it's built, I want some men to put in it. Men who can be trusted to not jeopardize it the moment they put their clumsy feet aboard. I want them, Medick, and I intend to have them. That's by way of an order!"
The General rose, but Paul remained seated. "You can't get them that way, and you know it," the latter said. "We'll do all we can, as I've told you before."
"I think you'll do considerably more, now. That was quite a talk you delivered to your boys a couple of weeks ago. We will 'ostensibly work at the task of developing an errorless man', is the way I believe you put it. You're going to do a lot more than ostensibly work at it, Medick. Just how much do you think you can get away with?"
Paul remained motionless in the chair. Only his lips moved. "So you had a report on our little meeting? I hope it was complete enough to give you the rest of the things I said, that my basic purpose was not to produce human robots, but to validate the humanity of man."
Oglethorpe leaned closer, his fists resting on the top of the desk. "The humanity of man be damned! I told you before we want men who've forgotten they were ever human, men of metal and electrons. If I didn't think you were the man who could do it--probably the _only_ man in the whole country--you wouldn't last here another minute. But you _can_ do it, and you're going to.
"Your little lecture was enough to ruin your career in any place you try to run to, if you undermine Superman. Who do you suppose would trust you with any kind of research after that expression of intent to sabotage the Project your Government entrusted you with, and which you agreed to carry out?
"You're finished, Medick, washed up completely in your own profession, unless you give me what I've asked for! I won't take promises any more. The only assurance you can give me from here on out is results! I want those men, and I want them damn fast!"
* * * * *
Professor Barker listened attentively as Paul sat across from him in the administration office and reported Oglethorpe's visit and demands.
"We're caught in a squeeze, and we've got to push both ways," Paul said. "If the Base goes down, Superman goes with it, and we've lost an opportunity that will never come again in our lifetimes. So we've got to do two things: We've got to give active support to the rebuilding of the Wheel, and we've got to develop some kind of show that will convince Oglethorpe that Superman is giving him what he wants. It will mean detouring our basic objectives, but it's necessary in order to have a project at all. I'd like you to take charge of it."
"It'll be a waste of time," Barker said slowly. "I wonder if we'll ever get back on the track."
"We'll have to gamble on it," said Paul. "I don't want you to feel I'm deliberately pushing you up a blind alley, but I think you're the best man for bringing up something we can sell Oglethorpe--while we try to do some real research on some honest goals."
"We can follow the usual lines of so-called training--brute conditioning through shock and fear and pain and discomfort. Most of the men here are already well anaesthetized in that respect. Their breakdown level is high."
"Cummins' was the highest," said Paul, "and he cracked. But work along those lines anyway. Maybe we can find a way to thicken the conditioning armor. At the same time let's push a genuine investigation into the nature of error as hard as we can. For the moment we'll forget broader objectives, until we know the Project is safe."
Barker agreed reluctantly, feeling that they would end up as mere personnel counselors before long. As soon as he left, Paul called Oglethorpe.
"I've got a suggestion," he said. "Let's not get on the defensive about this thing. Why don't you propose a Senatorial investigation of Space Command?"
"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 space. 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 endorsement 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 Medick!" 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 Cummins. 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. "Cummins 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 space 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 booby-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.
"Cummins 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 Cummins 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 accumulating momentum in every corner of the nation.
A rabble rouser named Morgan in the middle-west had proposed a motor caravan to Space Command Base, where the participants would go on a sit-down strike until assurance 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."
"Forget them! Take care of the Senators and the Project and you'll be doing enough."
Harper arrived shortly, nervous in spite of his attempt to appear composed. But he was put at ease when they took him to the laboratory of complex testing equipment assembled by Nat Holt.