Breaking Point

E-text prepared by Greg Weeks, Pat A. Benoy, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Transcriber's Note:
Transcriber notes in the text are identified by red dashed underlines . Hovering the cursor over the underlined text will reveal minor typographical errors present in the original text which have been corrected by the transcriber.
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction, March, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
BY JAMES E. GUNN
ILLUSTRATED BY EBEL
The ship was proof against any test, but the men inside her could be strained and warped, individually and horribly. Unfortunately, while the men knew that, they couldn't really believe it. The Aliens could—and did.
They sent the advance unit out to scout the new planet in the Ambassador , homing down on the secret beeping of a featureless box dropped by an earlier survey party. Then they sat back at GHQ and began the same old pattern of worry that followed every advance unit.
Not about the ship. The Ambassador was a perfect machine, automatic, self-adjusting, self-regulating. It was built to last and do its job without failure under any and all conditions, as long as there was a universe around it. And it could not fail. There was no question about that.
But an advance unit is composed of men. The factors of safety are indeterminable; the duplications of their internal mechanisms are conjectural, variable. The strength of the unit is the sum of the strengths of its members. The weakness of the unit can be a single small failing in a single man.
Beep ... boop ...
Gotcha! said Ives. Ives was Communications. He had quick eyes, quick hands. He was huge, almost gross, but graceful. On the nose, he grinned, and turned up the volume.