Human Error Read online

sure that a warm, responsive, emotional human being could neverrespond like a cold machine!

  "And we were both utterly wrong. The human being does both. He operateson true cybernetic principles. But the content of his feedback controlpulses is sheer emotion!

  "A small error, a stab of regret. It's repeated, magnified, ordiminished until the action gets back on the track that brings predictedresults. Ignored, the error builds up until the whole structure goessmash.

  "And we're _taught_ to ignore it! It's the noble, brave and manly thingto ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be glass,be electrons--anything but a responsive, emotional human being! That'sthe way to be a superman! We've tried to find the way to perfection andhave fought tooth and nail against the only means of achieving it."

  Barker's face was glowing with excitement and Holt seemed to beremembering something afar off. "That _was_ it," he breathed softly. "Ican feel it now--the way it was as I began to get jittery and makemistakes in the test procedures. I seemed to fight something withinmyself--something I thought was making me do it wrong. But it wasn'tthat, at all. I was fighting against the emotional feedback the errorswere throwing at me."

  "Right," said Paul. "And your iron-hard, errorless Superman is going tobe 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'sbottled up and fought his emotions all his life. A concentrated dose ofhis own feedback simply shattered the dam.

  "But I didn't get it until I watched Morgan's mob reacting to the purelyrational explanation Metcalf prepared to convince them they should gohome. They were on a wrong tack and needed a generous amount of theright feedback to get them back where they belonged. The cold, logicalapproach was a dud. What does it take to move an intractible mob?Emotion--based on the projected consequences of what they're doing. Aperfect feedback setup when correctly applied. And it worked."

  Holt shuddered faintly and moved away from the chair he had sat in toexperience his own feedback. "I'm not quite sure who owes who thatdinner," he said to Paul. "But I think somebody does."

  "We'll split it," Paul said. And then he was silent as they listened tothe departure of another cargo ship carrying parts of the second Wheelto the thousand-mile orbit.

  He smiled to himself. Ye of little faith!--he thought. Frightened aboutthe true nature of a race that had come through three billion years ofthe kind of torment that Man had survived!

  Man had everything that was needed to go to the stars or anywhere elsehe might want to go. He was safe. Man could never be turned into arobot. The basic mechanisms of his humanity were so interwoven with thestructure of his being that they could never be separated.

  But they hadn't come very far, Paul knew. They had opened only a smallcrack in a door that had been irrationally closed from the beginning oftime. 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 andclosely guarded.

  Yet they had reached a starting point, at last. Project Superman couldget about its business of preparing men for the stars.