"We've solved every other technical problem that has stood in our way. Why haven't we solved this one? We've learned how to make a machine that will perform in a predictable manner, and when it fails to do so we can provide adequate feedback alarms and correctors, and we can find the cause of error.
"With a man, we can do nothing. We have to accept him, in the final analysis, on little more than faith.
"A couple of hundred men are going to die because of a human error. Give us a monument! Find out why men make errors. Produce a means of keeping them from it. Do that, and our deaths will be a small price to pay!"
These were the words of a dead man. They were heard again and again in the committee rooms and investigation chambers. They were printed and broadcast around the world, and they enabled General Oglethorpe to do the thing that became a burning crusade with him.
He would probably have failed in his effort if those words hadn't been spoken by a dying man while a shrieking, white-hot mass plunged through the atmosphere to land, finally, in the waters of the Pacific.
The wreckage missed the city of San Francisco without the necessity of guidance by the rocket fuel so preciously hoarded by West. The Wheel and the Griseda were doomed the moment the pilot, Cummins, decided to shift the position of the ship with respect to the station.
In the anteroom of the Base Commander's office, Dr. Paul Medick rubbed the palms of his hands against his trouser legs when the secretary wasn't watching, and licked the dryness that burned the membrane of his lips.
The secretary remembered him. She probably had been the one to make out his severance papers and knew all about Oglethorpe's firing him.