At four and a half hours, Harper's hand reached for a lever in the center of the board. But it didn't get more than a third of the way. In mid-air it froze, as if paralysis had suddenly struck it. Harper regarded it in seeming dumb astonishment. His face grew red, and sweat broke out upon his forehead as if from the physical exertion of trying to put his hand to the lever.
Paul grabbed a microphone and switched it on. "Touch the lever," he commanded. "Draw it toward you."
Harper looked around as if in panic, but he completed the motion. He sat staring at the panels for a full two minutes while alarm eyes went from green to yellow to red.
"Alarm red!" Paul exclaimed into the microphone. "Correct course!"
Harper turned and glared about with hate in his eyes as if to find the source of the sound. He began tearing at the wires and contacts fastened to his head and body. "To hell with the course!" he cried. "I'm getting out of here!"
He hurled the wiring harness at the panels. Then, he stood in a moment's further paralysis and slumped finally into the chair. He put his arms and head down on the instrument desk and began sobbing deeply.
Paul put away the microphone and moved to the door. "That's the end of that," he said. "I hope our record is good. Harper might not like to go through that again."
Nat Holt was still staring through the window at the sobbing engineer. "I don't understand," he murmured. "What made him break down like that for no reason at all?"
One by one, the top engineers of the Base went through the breakdown test. Some broke down with an emotional storm as Harper had, others simply ended in a swirl of confusion that put lights flashing all over the panels. But all of them had a breaking point of some kind that could be measured in a small number of hours.