The Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Error, by Raymond F. Jones

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Title: Human Error

Author: Raymond F. Jones

Illustrator: Paul Orbin

Release Date: May 17, 2010 [EBook #32403]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HUMAN ERROR

BY RAYMOND F. JONES

_Illustrated by Paul Orban_

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science
Fiction April 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _The government was spending a billion dollars to convince
the human race that men ought to be ashamed to be men--instead of
errorless, cybernetics machines. But they forgot that an errorless man
is a dead man...._]

During its three years' existence, the first Wheel was probably the
subject of more amateur astronomical observations than any other single
object in the heavens. Over three hundred reports came in when a call
was issued for witnesses to the accident that destroyed the space
station.

It was fortunately on the night side of Earth at the time, and in a
position of bright illumination by the sun. Two of the observers had
movie cameras attached to their ten-inch mirrors. The film in one of
these was inadequate, but the other carried a complete record of the
incident from the moment of the _Griseda's_ first approach, through the
pilot's fumbling attempt to correct course, and the final collision.

The scene was lost for a few seconds as the wreckage drifted out of the
field. The observer had been watching through a small pilot scope,
however, and had wits enough to pan by hand so that he got most of the
remaining fall that was visible above his horizon as the locked remnants
of the Wheel and the _Griseda_ began their slow, spiral course to Earth.

By the time this scene was finished, word of the disaster was already
flashing to Government centers. Joe McCauley, radio operator aboard the
Wheel, had been talking with Ed Harris on the _Griseda_. As a matter of
routine