"You did it to yourself," Paul reminded him. "That's your own feedback pulse just beefed up a little, remember. How did it feel?"
"Terrible! No wonder a guy dodges that. It's enough to make him wreck a space station to avoid the full blast of it."
"What would you call it?"
"I don't know—," Holt hesitated. "Grief, maybe. Regret—anxiety. But regret, mostly, I guess."
"That's your feedback," Paul said as he removed the terminals and turned to the others. "These feedback pulses we've isolated are nothing but stabs of pure emotion."
He turned with a faint smile to Holt. "You and Harper and the rest of the iron-bowelled boys were so convinced that the pure mechanical man would be utterly devoid of all emotional responses and content! And I was so sure that a warm, responsive, emotional human being could never respond like a cold machine!
"And we were both utterly wrong. The human being does both. He operates on true cybernetic principles. But the content of his feedback control pulses is sheer emotion!
"A small error, a stab of regret. It's repeated, magnified, or diminished until the action gets back on the track that brings predicted results. Ignored, the error builds up until the whole structure goes smash.
"And we're taught to ignore it! It's the noble, brave and manly thing to ignore the human feelings that surge through us. Be steel, be glass, be electrons—anything but a responsive, emotional human being! That's the way to be a superman! We've tried to find the way to perfection and have fought tooth and nail against the only means of achieving it."
Barker's face was glowing with excitement and Holt seemed to be remembering something afar off. "That was it," he breathed softly. "I can feel it now—the way it was as I began to get jittery and make mistakes in the test procedures. I seemed to fight something within myself—something I thought was making me do it wrong. But it wasn't that, at all. I was fighting against the emotional feedback the errors were throwing at me."