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 i