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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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