erything must have gone wrong then. The decision was a blunder to
begin with. Wrong approach, yes. But it was suicide to attempt such a
detailed maneuver that close to the station. He used his side jets and
slammed the _Griseda_ into the Wheel at a forty-five degree angle,
locking the ship in the wreckage of the rim and in the girders of the
spokes."

"Was there any previous indication of instability in the pilot that you
know of? We'll get a better answer on that from Adler, but we need to
know if you were aware of anything."

"The answer is no! Cummins was checked out before the start of the
flight just three days ago. He was all right as far as any of our means
of evaluation go. As right as any man will ever be--

"Jack, listen to me. Remember when we were back at White Sands and
talked of the days when there would be a Wheel up here, and ships taking
off for the Moon and for Mars?"

"I remember," said General Oglethorpe softly.

"Well, we've got a piece of that dream. But there'll never be any more,
and what we've got is going to go smash unless we correct the one
weakness we've never tackled properly. You'll fail again and again as
long as men like Cummins can destroy twenty years' work and billions of
dollars worth of engineering construction. One man's stupid, moronic
error, and all of this goes to destruction, just as if it had never
been.

"On the ground, a plane crashes--the board puts it down as pilot error
and planes go on flying. You can't do that out here! The cost is too
great. It's a sheer gamble putting this mountain of machinery and effort
into the hands of men we can never be sure of. You think you know them;
you do everything possible to find out about them. But you just don't
_know_.

"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 hea