Raymond F. Jones

“ Paul Medick regarded the General through narrowed eyes. In spite of his almost agonizing desire to possess the appointment to head up this Project he had to have a clear understanding with Oglethorpe now. He had to risk his chances, if necessary, to make himself absolutely clear.
He said, "For untold thousands of years the human race has spent its best efforts to reach the goal of perfection without achieving it. Now you propose to assemble all the money in the world, and all the brains and say: give us a perfect man! ”

“ For years he'd struggled to probe the basic nature of Man and find out what divorces him from the merely mechanical. He'd known there would probably never be enough money to reach his goal. And then Oglethorpe had come, offering him all the money in the world to reach a nebulous objective that Space Command did not know was unobtainable.
Somebody was going to spend that money. With clear conscience, Paul rationalized that it might as well be him. He'd see that the country got value for what it spent, even if this was not quite what the Space Command expected. ”

“ 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. ”

“ General Oglethorpe's face hardened as he returned Paul's steady gaze. "No other technical problem has been able to stand before such an attack. There is no reason why this one should. And the problem must be solved, or we're going to have to abandon space just as we stand on the frontier, getting our first real glimpse of it."
"Your world is such a simple, uncomplicated place, General," said Paul slowly. "You want a man with two heads, four arms, and a tail? ”

“ 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 need a new kind of man that we've never seen before. He's a man of iron, who's forgotten he was ever flesh and blood. He's a machine, who can perform over and over the same kind of complicated procedure and never make an error. He's more reliable and endurable than the best machines we've ever made. ”

“ I want to see the problem solved just as much as the General does. And I think it can be solved. But not this way!
"There's only one way to produce men of superior abilities. The method of adequate training. Hard, brutal discipline and training of oneself. I'm going to convince Oglethorpe of it after he's seen the failure you intend to produce for him."
"That shouldn't be hard," said Paul. "It's the General's own view. The Project is simply to implement that view.
"But let's not have any misunderstanding about my intentions. I expect to give honest value in research for every dollar spent. ”

“ There is no possibility of your refusal, so I have taken steps already to make your appointment official."
"You must also have prepared yourself," said Paul, "to accept me with the basic philosophy that must guide me in this matter. And my philosophy is that this Project must fail. It has no possibility of success. The man you seek does not exist. An errorless man would be a dead man.
"Any living man is going to make errors. That's the process of learning: make an approach, correct for error, approach again, correct once more. It's the only way there is to learn." ”

“ 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. ”

“ It's a feedback alarm carrying the information that an error will result if the proposed action is carried out. When the feedback is successfully returned to the action matrix a change is made until there is no feedback and a correct action is taken. When the feedback is blocked or ignored, an error results. It's as simple as that! Your complex human being is nothing but a fairly elaborate cybernetic machine operating wholly on feedback principles. The only time he fails and breaks down is when he ceases to act like the cybernetic machine that he is! ”

“ Man, a feedback response mechanism—! If that were true a vacuum tube structure could eventually be devised to do anything a man could do.
"I think we'll hold off on that dinner a while yet," Paul said. "The data are interesting and, I'm sure, important—but I can hardly agree with your conclusions." Inwardly, he cursed the stiltedness he felt creeping into his voice, and his irrational resentment of Holt's continued smug grin.
"Take all the time you want," Holt said, "but when you're through you'll come up with the same answers I've got. Man is a machine and nothing else. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The objective is to find a kind of man that will keep the Frank Wests of the future from dying, as those men aboard the Wheel did."
"What kind of man do you expect that to be?" Paul asked.
"One who will eliminate, for all time, the damning verdict that has been handed down in tens of thousands of investigations of accident and disaster: human error.
"We're going to find a kind of man who can be depended on to function without error. One who can undertake a complicated task of known procedure and perform it an infinite number of times, if necessary, without a single deviation from standard." ”

“ 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 space station to avoid the full blast of it." ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there'll never be any more, and what we've got is going to go smash unless we correct the one weakness we've never tackled properly. You'll fail again and again as long as men like Cummins can destroy twenty years' work and billions of dollars worth of engineering construction. One man's stupid, moronic error, and all of this goes to destruction, just as if it had never been. ”

“ 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 Space 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ On the ground, a plane crashes—the board puts it down as pilot error and planes go on flying. You can't do that out here! The cost is too great. It's a sheer gamble putting this mountain of machinery and effort into the hands of men we can never be sure of. ”

“ 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 you just don't know.
"We've solved every other technical problem that has stood in our way. Why haven't we solved this one? We've learned how to make a machine that will perform in a predictable manner, and when it fails to do so we can provide adequate feedback alarms and correctors, and we can find the cause of error.
"With a man, we can do nothing. We have to accept him, in the final analysis, on little more than faith.
"A couple of hundred men are going to die because of a human error. Give us a monument! Find out why men make errors. Produce a means of keeping them from it. ”

“ Men are going to the stars—because they have to. And they're going to change themselves to whatever form or shape or ability is required by that goal. They've done everything else they've ever set themselves to do—life came up out of the sea because it had courage. Men left their caves and struck out across the plains and seas, and took up the whole Earth and made it what it is—because they had courage. ”

“ 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 reassured of this," Senator Hart said. "We need to get this mob away from your gates for one thing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We'll save enough fuel to try to do some last minute steering as we approach Earth."
"No!" General Oglethorpe cried. "Use it now! Its effect will be the same as later. Blow the chambers apart! Get back in orbit!"
"We can't make it," West said quietly. "We've gained forward velocity, but I'll bet your computers will show us better than four percent below requirements at this orbit. Spot our crash as accurately as possible on free fall from our present position. We'll save remaining fuel for last minute steering in case we're near a city." ”

“ 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." ”

“ He'd all but insulted the General and told him he had no intention of producing the iron superman the Space Command contemplated. And still he had not been thrown out. They must want him very badly, indeed!
He had no qualms of conscience about taking the post now. General Oglethorpe had been forewarned and knew what Paul Medick's hopes and intentions were.
"You can build your staff as big as you need it," the General was saying. "This Project has crash priority over everything else. We've got the machines to go to space. The machines need the men. ”

“ 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. ”