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!"

Holt's eyes shone triumphantly as he patted the long strips of paper on the table. Paul followed the motion of his hand and remained staring at the graphs in a kind of stunned recognition. There must be some mistake, there had to be. Holt's interpretation was wrong, even if the data were correct. 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. Our only job now is to discover why the feedback sometimes fails, and to set it back on the job."

Paul took the recordings and the analyzer 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 Space 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 Space 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 analyzing 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 Space 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 reassured 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. Medick 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 reassure the entire country. We can arrange for a broadcast by Dr. Medick 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