The Feeling of Power

A low-grade technician named Myron Aub impresses military and political leaders by demonstrating the lost art of manual computation: using pencil and paper he reproduces computer multiplication step by step, first with 17 × 23 and then with two seven-digit numbers, arriving at correct results that bewilder generals who had always relied on machines. Programmer Jehan Shuman, who discovered Aub’s hobby of reconstructing ancient calculating methods, presents him to authorities to prove that human minds can be taught the exact operations modern computers perform. The immediate scenes emphasize the mechanical clarity of Aub’s rules - breaking numbers into digits, multiplying and carrying in a fixed sequence - and the shock of officials who had never trusted unaided arithmetic.

Congressman Brant seizes the demonstration to argue for a secret initiative, Project Number, to train humans in computation as a strategic weapon in the Denebian War. He frames it as a way to “leapfrog” the deadlock of computer-versus-computer defenses, to create vast numbers of human calculators that would obviate dependence on manufacturing and maintenance of machines, and to free industry for peacetime uses. The president listens, intrigued but cautious, while industrialist Loesser warns that human caprice may not guarantee the repeatability of machines. The debate pivots on whether human replication of computational procedures can reliably replace automatic hardware and whether such a shift would be liberating or dangerously destabilizing.