Part 4

"And we're _taught_ to ignore it! It's the noble, brave and manly thing to ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be glass, 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 ship 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.