etic 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