They'd Rather Be Right (11 page)

For a full half hour, long after he had got the two professors and Bossy safely away from the depot, Joe kept them in the mental framework of considering their quiet discussion there at the restaurant counter a perfectly normal part of their duties.

Then, since Joe was not above a certain sense of humor, he allowed it to occur to each of them, simultaneously, that they had wandered away and left their quarry unobserved. They looked at one another, suddenly wild eyed with consternation, and sprang away from the counter as if it had burned them.

They ran pell-mell down the street to the depot. They searched the place from cellar to roof.

Throwing aside all precautions, they questioned everyone. No one remembered having noticed the two men at all.

They drew together out near the loading docks and began to rationalize and justify their behavior after they had realized the futility of trying to fix the blame each on the others. They were well experienced in devising stories which would convince judge and jury, but their superior had come up through the ranks and would not be so gullible.

Their attempts to account for their decisions and actions grew marvelously ingenious, didactic, logical. Their story began to approach the infallibility of conclusions found in scientific textbooks.

The simple and factual explanation of what had happened was completely outside the potential of their real world framework. And had anyone suggested it, they would have considered him mad.

The Deluxe Hotel, in the heart of skid row, tried to live up to its name by running wooden partitions breast-high between the cubicles before they finished off to the ceiling with the usual chicken wire. It was both a sop to a higher standard of modesty, and slightly more discouraging to pilfering. They changed the sheets on cots between guests, as required by the Board of Health, with a little less than the customary reluctance; but there was no difference at all in the ever present smell of vermin repellant.

Jonathan Billings sat on the edge of his cot with his head in his hands, his elbows propped on bony knees—a tired old man shorn of dignity, sureness, confidence; completely at a loss in these strange surroundings.

He looked over at his companion, Duane Hoskins, formerly Professor of Cybernetics at Hoxworth, who now sat in much the same position on his own cot, and reflected with astonishment that there was nothing in their outward appearance to distinguish them from other bums, winos and bos who lived in this section of San Francisco. Or, how did Joe express it: Men who were on the short line.

“Three days is a long wait,” Billings murmured softly, conscious that anything louder could be overheard. “I wish Joe would get things resolved.”

Hoskins looked up from his own reflections, his face a study in puzzlement and growing resolution.

“I’ve been thinking, Dr. Billings,” he said obliquely. It was characteristic of the two men, even in these surroundings, that they would maintain university protocol and formality. “I’ve been thinking that we are a pair of fools. What are we running from? Why are we—” He broke off the sentence, but his eyes swept the small cubicle which contained their two cots and a small stand, and indicated by his expression he meant the flop house itself, skid row, San Francisco.

“We are under Federal indictment, you know, doc-tor,” Billings reminded him austerely.

“All right!” Hoskins exploded, without realizing the loudness of his voice.

“Break it off, you two!” a voice grumbled thickly from beyond the partition. “Either talk loud enough so I can hear, or be quiet so I can sleep.”

Both men turned and looked at the partition resentfully, and then at one another warningly.

“All right,” Hoskins repeated, and kept his voice to little more than a whisper. “So we’re under indictment. But running and hiding like this makes it worse, not better. We didn’t do anything wrong.

Our conscience is clear. The thing for us to do is face it, get it cleared up. I can’t understand why we bolted in a panic, like crazed animals in a burning stable.”

He paused, reflected, and added an emphasis significantly.

“There’s a great deal about this I do not understand.” He looked at Billings questioningly, almost in a challenge.

Billings looked back at him over his glasses. He was tempted now to tell Hoskins that Joe was a telepath; that Joe knew what he was doing; that if he, himself, had paid sufficient attention to Joe in the past things might be different now. Back at the university he had had no difficulty in keeping Joe’s secret.

There he had been in his own element, and ethical silence was natural. But now things had changed.

He lifted his hands from his knees and massaged the knuckles of one in the palm of the other. He opened his mouth, to speak, and closed it again. Even now, needing the cooperation and comprehension from Hoskins as he did, he could not break confidence. He said nothing.

“Perhaps there’s something to the old wheeze about absent-minded professors, doctor,” Hoskins attempted a wan smile. “We do tend to get wrapped up in our own work, lose touch with what the layman calls reality. But these weeks of running, hiding—and now this. I ask myself why?”

He paused, searching for a comparison.

“It’s like an amateur play, where the actors are doing and saying completely unnatural things; where a bad director is shoving the cast into completely false situations. I’m one of those actors who suddenly realizes just how false the whole position is, how impossible it is to maintain it. Or—I’m that absent-minded professor who comes out of his woolgathering long enough to realize he isn’t lame at all.

He just has one foot in the gutter.” He grinned wryly at the unexpected aptness of his metaphor.

“Conceivable, doctor,” Billings remonstrated in a whisper, and did not realize the incongruity of his concept forms in these surroundings, “your new apperception of reality may be as untenable as the one you wish to avoid.” Then a broken, almost sobbing, sigh escaped him, inadvertently. “There is nothing in the world so terrible as a mob of enraged human be-ings,” he murmured.

He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of man, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance.

“Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “to believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same supersti-tions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence—”

An impatient creaking of cot springs in the next room broke him off, and kept Hoskins from answering. Both men became silent, and stared down at the cold linoleum on the floor. Simultaneously, and along parallel lines, their thoughts went back over the events of the last year or two.

First there had been orders from Washington, trans-mitted, as usual, through the Resident Investigator. The orders were to construct a servomechanism, along the principles of the guided missile, which would prevent one plane from crashing into another, or crashing into a mountainside, to land it always safely, uncontrolled throughout by human pilot or ground crew. A servomechanism, in short, which could foresee the outcome of any probability pattern when necessary.

Apparently the phrases had been tacked on, one after another, by the bright boys there in Washington, without any realization of what they were asking. There was some dim realization that this might be a psychological problem, so Billings had been designated to head the project. The penalty, as usual, for failure was a public whipping by investigation, and imprisonment for contempt if he answered back.

And something strange had happened. It was as if the pressure of human originality, stultified for forty years through opinion control, had burst out of bounds.

Bossy, nicknamed from the machine’s faint resemblance to the head of a cow, became more than an ordinary servomechanism.

The fever of original thinking spread beyond the departments of Hoxworth. The suppressed hunger to think was like an epidemic. Every academic institution, even some industrial laboratories, caught the fire of enthusiasm, contributed to the work. It was as if the scientists were resolved Bossy would be empowered to think in areas where they were forbidden to go. It was as if they felt secure in their obvious defense.

“But this is only a machine,” they would say. “It cannot be held morally responsible for arriving at the only logical answers possible; even though such answers do not support your political bias. Logical rationality is neither subversive nor nonsubversive. It is simply a statement of fact. You may destroy the machine, but your verbal public whippings and pillories cannot incurably damage its psyche. It is only a machine.”

Consciously, and subconsciously, Bossy was the answer of science to the stultification of opinion control.

The news of what Bossy had become leaked out to the public. There was enough truth in the misinterpretations to disturb the public with profound unrest. Bossy could take over any job and do it better than a man. Bossy could replace even management and boards of directors. Bossy’s decisions would be accurate, her judgment unclouded by personal tensions.

Bossy could tell right from wrong!

It was perhaps misinterpretation of this last faculty which shook man off the narrow ledge of reason, and sent him plunging into the depths of blind, superstitious fear. Certainly it was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged.

Opinion control had answered the gauntlet of science.

In the last minutes, before the frenzied mob had broken down the doors of the university, the three last remaining men, Billings, Hoskins and Joe Carter had escaped. Later, Billings learned that Joe and Hoskins, long anticipating this move, had crated and shipped Bossy out of the area.

They had fled in panic.

They had continued to flee, sustained by some vague dream of a quiet sanctuary where they could continue work on Bossy uninterrupted. Typical of their kind, they had no concept of where this might be; or how this new sanctuary might nullify the pressures of mass reaction to their work; or how continued work, even daily living, might be financed. Their whole life had been in the ivory tower. It had never occurred either to Hoskins or Billings that there could be any other kind.

And now they were hiding out in a flop house on skid row. Even more incredible, to Hoskins, they were totally dependent for their next move on a youngster barely twenty-two years old.

“Incredible,” Hoskins said aloud, in disbelief.

“I wonder when Joe will be back?” Billings asked plaintively.

Hoskins looked at him, impatiently, and didn’t an-swer.

The two of them sat facing one another on the edges of their cots, and endured the waiting. Hoskins reached over and took another sandwich from the supply the hotel clerk had brought them at Joe’s orders. Billings wondered if he might safely make the trip down the hall to the community shower and bathe again. He smiled, ruefully, at his apparent compulsion to bathe again and again, a protest against his surroundings. He put the thought out of his mind. The fewer people who saw them, the safer they were.

Joe had told him that the word had gone out along skid row that nobody, and it meant nobody, was to talk to anybody, and it meant anybody, about Joe and those two buddies of his holed up in the Deluxe Hotel. It was a command, a group more. But there were still those with craving for a drink or a snifter of dope, always available for stoolies who might break the ta-boo.

Billings’ self-analysis took him back to the consequences of opinion control, the same consequences which had occurred again and again throughout history. There had been many times when man had been forced to adopt the only right opinion. Each time man’s forward thrust had slackened, vegetated, and died. Once, through the dark ages, the period had lasted almost a thousand years.

There was an odd peculiarity to the scientific mind. Block off an area where it may not go for speculative consideration, and immediately every line of research seems to lead into that area.

A small boy may sometimes survive for hours with no thought for the cookie jar, but forbid him to touch it and he can think of nothing else.

“Such a pity that it happened this time,” Billings said, and did not realize that he was speaking aloud.

“The clue was there in front of us all the time, too. Had we realized Einstein’s coordinate systems were adaptable to all fields of science, not just physics, man would have gone even beyond his own dreams.

Why, in the field of sociology alone—”

There was a loud, protesting creak of bedsprings through the thin wall. It was more than a man merely turning over in bed. There was the slither of hands being slid up the wooden partition. Fingers reached the top and slid through the chicken wire to grasp support. They tensed, showed strain, and there was the sliding noise of a heavier body being pulled up the wall.

The head of hair was first to show, matted and yellow gray. Eyes followed, rheumy and blinking. The shapeless red nose, and then the mouth. The mouth smiled in an expression which the face apparently thought was friendly. It was the placating, conciliatory smile of the long habitual alcoholic.