1In the fifth year after the bomb there lived, in a city of schools on a river in the north of America, a young man named Frank Dolan, who had come home from the war with a steady hand and an unsteady sleep.
2His father built motor cars in the great works at Detroit, standing at the same place on the same line for twenty-six years. Frank was to have stood beside him. But the war took Frank across the sea instead, and set him down on the south coast of England, in the summer when the flying bombs came.
3You have heard of that summer in the book before this one. The bombs had no men in them. They flew straight and fast from the far shore with a sound like a great torn cloth. When the sound stopped, they fell, and a street was gone.
4Frank served a gun there. But it was a new kind of gun, and he did not aim it. An eye made of radio waves found the bomb far out over the water. A box of wheels and currents took what the eye saw and reckoned where the bomb would be when the shell reached it. And the gun swung round by itself, and lifted, and fired.
5And when it missed, it mended its aim. This was the thing Frank could not stop watching. The eye saw how far off the last shot had gone, and that word went back into the box, and the next shot was nearer. No one told it. The gun steered by its own mistakes.
6In the first weeks the gunners brought down one bomb in ten. By the end of the summer they were bringing down most of them. Frank passed shells until his arms shook, and watched a machine do what he had thought only a hunter could do, and he did not know whether to be glad or afraid.
7When the war ended, the country paid for its soldiers to go to school. So Frank went to the great school of engineers on the river, to learn what was inside the box. He was older than the other students. He had a wife, Mary, and a baby daughter, and they lived in a row of tin huts the school had set up for men like him, where the wind came through the walls.
8Now there was at that school a teacher of numbers named Norbert Wiener. Everyone knew him by sight. He was short and round, with a small pointed beard and thick glasses, and he walked the long halls with a cigar, talking to whoever was near. It was said he had gone to college as a child and had been a doctor of learning at eighteen. It was said he could lose his way to his own office.
9In the war Wiener had worked on the very thing Frank had seen: how a gun might follow a flying machine with a man in it who twists and turns. He had seen that the gun, and the gunner, and the flier trying to escape, were all doing one thing. Each acted, and watched what came of it, and let what came of it change the next act. A cat does this when it springs. A hand does it when it reaches for a cup. He saw that it was one law for the flesh and for the metal.
10He made a name for it out of the old Greek word for the man at the tiller of a ship, the steersman. For a steersman does not point his ship once and go below. He holds the tiller all night, and the sea pushes, and he feels the push and leans against it, a little, and again a little.
11Frank sat in that teacher's hall for a season. He understood about half. But the half he understood was the half he had seen with his own eyes on the English coast.
12In the spring of Frank's last year, a letter came to the tin hut. It was from a company on the western sea that built rockets for the army: rockets that would steer themselves, as his gun had steered itself, across a thousand miles, to a place chosen for them. They had heard he knew the old guns and the new numbers both. They named a wage. It was twice what his father had ever made.
13Mary read the letter standing up, with the baby on her hip. "We could have a house," she said. "With a wall that keeps wind out." Then she looked at his face. "What is it?"
14"I don't know yet," said Frank.
15He did know a little. He knew what would be put in the nose of such a rocket. Everyone knew, in that fifth year. The other great country had made its own bomb the autumn before, and now there were two who could close every way at once, and each was building the arm to throw it.
16That week in the school's house of books he went looking for something he had half heard of. He found it in a magazine three years old: a letter that Wiener had written, and let be printed for all to read.
17A man who worked on steered rockets had written to Wiener asking for a copy of his war paper on following a flying target. And Wiener had answered no. He wrote that the bombing of the two cities had shown what became of a scholar's work once it was handed over. He would not put his knowing into those hands again. The letter ended: "I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists."
18Frank read it at the long table, and read it again. He thought: that is well for him. He is a great man with a great chair. He does not live in a tin hut.
19Still, the next day he waited in the long hall until the short round figure came along it, and he fell into step beside him, and said his name and his trouble, plainly, as a soldier does.
20Wiener listened as he walked. He was not a man who looked at you. He looked at the floor ahead and trailed one hand along the wall.
21"I will not tell you what to do," he said at last. "I am a poor steersman of my own life, as my wife will tell you. I can only say what I saw. I saw that we had made machines that take an aim and hold to it. That is all they do. They do not ask whether the aim is good. So the whole weight of asking falls on whoever sets the aim, and that man is very often in a hurry."
22"Somebody will build them," Frank said. "If not me, the next man."
23"Yes. That is always true, and it has never once made a thing right." Wiener stopped at a turning and peered about him as if the building had moved. "Tell me, have you ever steered a boat?"
24"No, sir."
25"You should. One learns a great deal. More than from me." And he went off down the wrong hall, and then came back and took the right one.
26Frank told this to a friend, a navy man named Sal, who kept a small old sailing boat tied up at the river mouth. Sal laughed and said he would take him out that Sunday, and the professor could be blamed for whatever came of it.
27They went out past the harbour islands in a light wind, and Sal gave him the tiller. For an hour Frank made a snake of their wake. The bow swung left, and he pushed hard to bring it back, and it swung past the mark and away to the right, and he pushed hard again. Each swing was wider than the last.
28"You're fighting it," said Sal. "You wait till you're well off, and then you shove. By then it's too late and too much. Feel it sooner. Give it less."
29Slowly his hand learned. A small lean, early. Another. He stopped looking at the tiller and began to look at the far shore, and the wake behind them drew out straight.
30Then, in the afternoon, the fog came in from the sea.
31It came as it does on that coast, all at once, like a door closing. One moment there were islands, and the next there was nothing but grey, and the water under the boat, and their own two faces. The wind fell away with it. The sail hung.
32Sal was not laughing now. "The tide's going out," he said. "It will carry us across the ship road. That is where the big ones come in." As he said it they heard, somewhere in the grey, the long low horn of a freighter, feeling her way toward the port.
33They had no engine. They had one paddle, a breath of air in the sail, and a bell. For out there on a ledge of rock was a buoy with a bell that rang with the swell, and beyond that bell lay shallow water where no freighter could follow.
34"Steer for the bell," said Sal, and took the paddle forward.
35Frank could see nothing. He could only hear. The bell was ahead and a little to the left, he thought. He leaned the tiller. He waited. The bell rang again, and it seemed a little more to the left, so the tide was setting them sideways. He leaned again, a little. He did not shove. He listened.
36The horn sounded, nearer. It was a sound that came from everywhere. He felt the old war fear open in his chest, and with it the wish to do something large: to throw the tiller hard over, to turn and run. He knew, now, what that would do. It would lose him the bell. In fog a man who turns hard has no way of knowing how far he turned.
37So he held his hand small. He listened and leaned, and listened and leaned. He let each ring of the bell tell him how wrong he was, and he was grateful for it. A sound that told him his error was the only friend he had on that water.
38They heard the freighter pass behind them. They never saw her. They heard the wash of her, and the beat of her engine through the water, and then her wave came out of the fog and lifted the little boat and set it down. A few breaths later the bell was beside them, loud, with the green weed swinging on its cage, and Sal had the paddle on the rock.
39They sat on the ledge water till the fog thinned at dusk. Neither said much. Sal's hands were shaking, and Frank's were not, which surprised them both.
40He came home after dark, wet to the knees. Mary had kept his supper. He ate, and then he said: "I am not going to take the rocket work."
41She was a long time answering. She had grown up poor and she was tired of the wind. "Tell me why," she said, "and make it good. You owe me that much."
42"Because of the fog," Frank said. "I steered us in by listening for how wrong I was. A little wrong, mend it. A little wrong, mend it. You can do that as long as there is a next time." He turned his cup round on the table. "The thing they want me to build is the one shot in the world you can't correct. It goes, and that's all. Nobody hears afterward how far off it was. There's no next ring of the bell. I don't know how to build a thing like that and call it steering."
43"And the house?"
44"There will be a smaller house. Later."
45Mary looked at the baby asleep in her box by the stove. "Somebody else will take the work," she said.
46"That's what I told the professor."
47"And what did he say?"
48"That it's always true, and it never made a thing right."
49She laughed, though she did not want to. And the letter went back to the western sea with a no in it.
50He found work that summer in a shop of eleven men, not far from the school, which made the parts that kept breathing-machines steady. Those were the years when the summer sickness struck children and left some of them unable to draw their own breath. Great iron cases breathed for them, in and out, day and night. A case that breathed too hard or too soft could kill. So each one needed a small steersman inside it, which felt the push and leaned against it. Frank made those. The wage was a little more than his father's.
51His father came east to see the baby, and Frank took him to the shop. The old man watched a breathing-case rise and fall with no hand upon it. He did not smile.
52"It runs by itself," he said.
53"Yes, Pa."
54"They'll build my line like that. One day. A line that runs by itself, and watches itself, and mends itself." He said it without anger. He was only looking a long way off. "And where do the men go?"
55Frank had no answer. But he knew that Wiener had asked the same thing, and had not waited to be asked. In the very year Frank left the school, the round man set it all down in a small book for plain readers. He wrote there that the new machines would do the work of hands without wages, and that hands which must compete with such machines would be driven down to nothing, unless people chose otherwise and chose in time. He had even written to the head of the motor workers' union to warn him, and offered his help.
56Frank bought the book and sent it to Detroit. He marked one line in it for his father, a line that had nothing to do with factories and everything to do with fog. The line was: "To live effectively is to live with adequate information."
57His father wrote back on a postcard. I read it. He is a strange bird. But he is the first of your wise men who thought of us before, and not after.
58Now see what had been found, in those few years, by two men who hardly knew each other. Shannon had weighed the message. Wiener had shown what a message is for: it goes out, and the world answers, and the answer comes back and changes the hand. A thing that listens to its own error can hold a course through any sea.
59But hold a course toward what? The gun was given its target. The breathing-case was given its count of breaths. Frank's father was given his place on the line. In every one, the aim came from outside, and the machine asked no questions about it.
60Wiener went on asking until he died. He was not afraid that the machines would hate us. He was afraid that they would do exactly what they were told, by someone in a hurry.
61As for Frank Dolan, he lived long, and never had a large house. He kept on his workbench a small brass bell from a ship-breaker's yard. When a young man came to the shop sure of himself, with a clever design that could not be tested until it was too late to change it, Frank would ring the bell once with his fingernail and say nothing. Most of them understood in time.