Ray and Janet were already in their places. Their conversation ceased abruptly as Lynne entered and slid into her lounger and slipped on the collar that keyed her to the machine. She wondered what Janet had been saying about her, what Ray had been replying.
I'm turning into a paranoiac, she thought, managed a smile of sorts and said aloud, "What's today's problem?"
"Feel better, honey?" Ray asked her. Lynne nodded.
Janet, obviously uninterested, said, "Disposal of waste-foods so as to be useful to highway construction in Assam—without disruption of traffic-loads in Patagonia."
"Another of those!" said Lynne with a sigh. But she got to work almost automatically, keying her impulses to fit those of Ray and Janet. For the time being personal and emotional problems were laid aside. They were a single unit—a machine that was part of the greater machine—that was in turn part of the administration of Earth. For this work they had been trained and conditioned all their lives.
Early in the century—some fifty years back—when the cybernetic machine had been regulated to their proper functions of recording and assemblage only, of non-mathematical factors, the use of human teams, working as supplements to the machines themselves, had been conceived and formulated by the Earth Government.
No machine, however complex and accurate, could reflect truly the human factors in a problem of social import. For such functions it possessed the fatal weakness of being non-human. Hence the integration of people and atomo-electrical brains. Thanks to their collars the human factors received the replies of the machine-brains through mental impulses instead of on plasti-tape.
By means of the buttons before them they could key their questions to the portion of the machine desired. For specific requests and interkeying with one another they used, respectively, a small throat microphone attached to their collars and direct oral communication.
Janet was the analyst of the team—it was a detail job, a memory job, one which usually went to a woman. And she was good. She culled from the messages given her by the machine those which bore most directly upon the problem.