"Quite a crew you're getting in here," the technician said. "You'll have to take Oglethorpe up on his offer of new buildings if you expect to find couch space for all your boys."
"That's what you're here for," Paul suggested mildly, "to do away with couches."
"Right." Nat nodded. "Anything a couch can do, a meter can do twice as efficiently."
"Sometimes both are necessary. You forget my specialty is psychometry."
"No, I'm not forgetting," said Nat. "But that's what makes it so hard for me to figure out. You're attempting to span two completely incompatible fields: science and humanities. Man behaves either as a machine or as a creature of unstable emotion. To function as one you have to suppress the other."
"Splitting Man in two has never produced an answer to anything. It has been tried even longer than couches—and with far less result."
"I'll make you a small side bet. We're going to have to work together on Superman, and coordinate all our procedures and results. But I'll bet the final answer turns up on the side of a completely mechanistic man, shorn of all other responses and motivations."
"I'll take that!" Paul said with a grim smile. "I don't know how much of an answer we'll find, but I know that won't be it!"
"Let's say a small celebration feed for the whole crew when Superman is completed. Nothing chintzy, either!"
They shook on it. And afterward Paul was glad the incident had occurred. It left no doubt about the direction Nat Holt would be traveling in his work.