"What went wrong, do you think? I know it's all been hashed over in the investigations, but I'd like your personal feelings about him."
Harper's face sobered and he looked away a moment. "Cummins was as good a guy as they come," he said. "But in a pinch he was just a weak sister. That doesn't mean he didn't have a lot on the ball," Harper added defensively. "He was a better pilot than most of us ever will be, but he was just human like the rest of us."
"What do you mean, 'human'?"
"Weak, soft, failure when the going gets rough—everything we have to be on guard against every minute we're alive."
"I take it you don't think much of human beings, as such."
Harper leaned forward earnestly. "Listen, Doc, when you've been around ships as long as I have, you'll know what Captain West really meant. The weakest link in any technological development has always been the men involved with its operation. In space flight our weakness is pilots and technicians. Set a machine on course and it'll go until it breaks down—and flash you a warning before it fails. With a man, you never know when he's going to fail, and you have to be on guard against his breakdown every minute because he won't give any warning.
"Think what it's like to be in our shoes! We take the controls of a few hundred million dollars worth of machinery, and we know that every last man of us is booby-trapped with some weakness that can break out in a critical moment and destroy everything. We fight against it; we struggle to hold it in and act like responsible instruments. And we grow to hate ourselves because of the weak things that we are.
"Cummins was like that. He fought himself every waking hour, knowing that he had a weakness of becoming confused in a tight spot. Oh, it was nothing that even showed up on the tests, and he was the best man of any of us on the Base. But he knew it was there, just as we all know our closets bulge with skeletons that we try to keep from breaking out."
"Do you fight yourself the way Cummins did?" Paul asked.
"Sure."