They'd Rather Be Right (14 page)

At that moment Hoskins reached over to the stand beside his chair and picked up another of the sandwiches. He glanced at Joe obliquely, his curiosity almost overcoming his resentment. Joe chose this moment to look up from his own work.

“Every man surrounds his mind with a framework of screen mesh.” Joe said conversationally, “composed of his prejudgments, preconceptions of what is acceptable to him. Everything he receives must filter through it.”

Hoskins glared at him impatiently, as if a precocious child, age five, had tried to be profound about man and woman in marriage. He flared in sudden anger, and his mind formed the sentence, “What would a young punk like you know about it?” but he was too courteous to say the words.

“So it seems to you,” he spoke flatly.

“So it is, doctor,” Joe said, without deferment. “The first strands of the screen are strung very early.

‘Don’t do this! That’s bad! Now that’s mother’s good little boy! That’s nasty, shame on you! You’re too little to do that alone! That’s over your head, wait until you’re older! Always tell mother when the children are bad to you!’ On and on with things like that.”

“So?” Hoskins questioned with a shrug.

“So a pattern of standards is formed. Everything is judged in relation to that pattern. The stream of commands, admonishments, casual remarks are but-tressed, ingrained, and enforced with emotional im-pact, sometimes with physical shock treatment administered with the flat of the hand where it will do the most good.”

“Then education comes along,” Hoskins debated with a smile, “and tears your screen to pieces.”

“In theory only,” Joe said. “But not in practice.

Even then everything received is modified by the screen. Oh maybe there’s a hole punched here and there, and rewoven with new strands. But new strands are woven, that’s the point. The filtering goes on just the same. Even if a new idea pushes against the screen with such force that it must be considered, it is usually so distorted by the time it has been ‘rationalized through the screen’ that it means just what the receiver wants it to mean.”

“The prime purpose of education, Joe,” Hoskins instructed, “is to insure an open mind, the ability to consider an idea on its own merits, to accept reality without distortion.

“You’ve been wondering, lately, how Bossy came into being,” Joe said abruptly.

Hoskins looked at him curiously, and then over at Billings accusingly. Billings had had no right to discuss their conversation with this immature boy.

“I’m a telepath,” Joe said simply.

“Nuts!” Hoskins exploded disgustedly.

Joe threw back his head and laughed freely.

“You see what I mean, doctor?” he chuckled.

“I see I’ve got enough problems on my hands already, without having you spring a lot of wild-hair notions on me.” Hoskins snapped. Then pityingly, “Joe, I’ve always thought you were a diligent and fair student. I never suspected you harbored ideas about that superstitious guff. Joe! That’s for the credulous, the wild-eyed! It’s ... it’s beneath the notice of rational men.”

“Dr. Rhine didn’t think so,” Joe answered.

“That’s different. That was scientific research under laboratory conditions. However, it is significant that Dr. Rhine never found, nor claimed to have found, a true telepath.”

“Neither have I,” Joe said quietly. He kept his voice normal, not revealing the dark loneliness of life-long solitary confinement, such as might be known by a human who was never once permitted to communicate with one of his own kind.

“At best,” Hoskins continued forcefully, “all he found was some phenomena which exceeded the laws of probabilities. That might mean some trace elements, true. But it could also mean that our notions of the laws of probabilities could stand revision.”

“And your screen mesh prefers the latter,” Joe laughed.

Billings looked over his glasses, and cleared his throat.

“I have known about Joe,” he said hesitantly, “since he was eight years old. Dr. Martin of Steiffel University wrote me. That’s why I brought Joe to Hoxworth. There was sufficient evidence, Duane. I could not deny it. And ... I, too ... tried.”

“You’ve been the victim of some elaborate hoax, Dr. Billings,” Hoskins said harshly.

Joe looked at Hoskins, undismayed.

“Professor,” he asked, “what was it Algazzali wrote about the ‘fourth stage of intellectual development’?”

Instantly, like a man reciting a bit of poetry learned in high school, Hoskins quoted: ... When another eye is opened by which man perceives things hidden in others ... perceives all that will be ... perceives things that escape the perceptions of reason—”

“You didn’t know you remembered that, did you, professor?”

Hoskins shrugged.

“It means nothing,” he said. “Neither the drivel nor the fact that I remembered it. A young college student absorbs a lot of such guff before he gets down to serious work. You’ve run across it somewhere, Joe. It was a safe assumption that I would have, also.”

“But how clearly you recalled it!” Billings teased. “And after all these years, too.”

“That, too, means nothing. We’ve shown in Bossy how a concept may lay idle, never be called into use, until the right harmonics stimulate a pattern where it is required.”

Joe reached over, took a piece of paper and pencil, scribbled a note, folded it, and handed it to Billings. At that moment Hoskins started up from his chair.

“Excuse me.” he murmured in a stricken voice and headed for the bath.

In a few moments he came back into the room. His eyes were watery, his cheeks pale, his nostrils drawn.

“Don’t eat any more of those sandwiches,” he said. “The meat must be tainted. At least in that one I got.”

At Joe’s motion, Billings handed the note to Hoskins. Curiously, Hoskins opened the note and read it.

“Professor Hoskins will need to vomit in less than one minute,” the note said.

Hoskins crumpled the note and threw it in the wastebasket in disgust.

“That’s telepathy?” he asked derisively. “Probably saw me turning green around the gills. Jumped to conclusions again.”

“Even before you felt any discomfort, professor?” Joe laughed. “And how many of these conclusions do I have to jump to before the evidence will penetrate your screen.”

“A great many more,” Hoskins snapped. “I—”

There was a sudden urgent rap on the door.

“Another demonstration, professor,” Joe said dryly, as he got up to open it. “That’ll be Carney. He’ll have Mabel with him. He’s very disturbed. Incidentally, he has your torque amplifier tube. And, gentlemen, he has found out who we are. This is a showdown, so let me handle it.”

When he opened the door, Carney and Mabel stepped through, and Carney shut the door quickly, as if he were being pursued. The old reprobate’s eyes were flashing anger. Mabel’s usually generous friendliness was replaced by a mask of curiosity, wariness. Although Carney had much to say, he seemed at a loss how to begin now that he was here.

“I got the tube,” he opened accusingly, obliquely. “This stuff is real hot. The Feds and local boys have passed the word along to watch for anybody buying it. They’re paying big stoolie dough, too. You guys are hot, too hot!”

He turned to Joe, his voice a compound of anger and disappointment.

“You tricked me,” he burst out with what was really bothering him. “I didn’t know you guys was Brains. I didn’t know you was them three from that eastern college the whole country is looking for.”

Billings and Hoskins looked at him curiously, and then at Joe who stood easily beside the closed door and said nothing.

Carney turned to Mabel.

“I swear, Mabel,” he said apologetically, “I didn’t know these guys was Brains when I asked you to rent them this place. I just thought they were in a counterfeiting racket or something.” Then he added bitterly, “But I guess I ought to have known. The way Joe picked up the code when he worked with me in the act. I just thought maybe he was psychic or something. I didn’t know he was a Brain.”

Joe glanced at Hoskins with a suppressed smile.

“See what I mean about prejudice screens, doctor?” he asked. “Now it would be all right with Carney if I were merely psychic. But to have a trained mind—that’s something to arouse antagonism.”

“But you’re not our kind of people at all,” Carney argued, his anger arising again. “You don’t belong with us. And you tricked me.”

Help came from an unexpected source, and without any effort from Joe.

“Who are we, Carney,” Mabel asked slowly, “to point the finger at anybody?”

“But these guys are the ones who invented that machine which is gonna blow up the world, Mabel,”

Carney shouted. “They’re the ones that thought out that thing which is gonna make slaves of all the peo-ple when it takes over the world and runs it. They built Bossy!” He cast a fearful look toward the back room.

“I’ll bet it’s that Bossy thing they’ve got in that back room, not a counterfeit press at all! These guys want to wipe humans off the face of the earth, and we’re helping them!”

Both Hoskins and Billings started to protest the string of clichés picked up from yellow journalism, but Joe silenced them with a warning look. Let the boil-over run its course. You couldn’t get into a man’s mind with reason while it was inflamed with anger; the prejudice screen was at its very strongest then. It was the old clash of ignorance without learning and ignorance with it.

Only Mabel seemed able to surmount the conflict.

“I’ve always said,” she commented, “that a person does what he has to do. Maybe Joe and the professors can’t help being what they are—any more than you and I could help being what we were.”

Joe watched her intently. He knew now that she could qualify for his intended use of Bossy, as he had suspected she might. He had been wise in choosing skid row. Only here, among these broken by accusation, could be found those unwilling to accuse. Only here, among the victims of a too narrow sense of right could be found those who were not fatuously confident of their special endowments for defining it. The same conclusion had been reached once before, two thousand years ago.

“It’s not for us to say, Carney,” Mabel added firmly.

She stood there, a shapeless hulk in her old red sweater and black skirt. Her swollen feet were planted far apart. The red joints of her rheumatic fingers opened and closed painfully. The mask make-up on her face, meant to conceal the age and pain lines, could not conceal her quality. Mabel was—people.

For almost a week Joe avoided everyone as much as possible, allowing the change of status to settle itself into acceptable relationships. He knew that Billings and Hoskins were having many long conversations about his psionic ability, that Hoskins was gradually rationalizing the idea that Billings had not been hoaxed after all.

“I mean,” Billings said at one point in their conversations, “we must be willing to go beyond the present frontiers of physics to understand Joe’s psionic traits. We must get a notch above the concept that for a thing to be scientific it must have visible wheels.”

“The frontiers of physics—.” The phrase appealed to Hoskins, helped him to view this dark trait with something nearer acceptance.

“I have no doubt,” Billings pressed his advantage, “that the answer lies in some order of energetics not yet explored. We do have to go beyond the mere par-roting of the words of Einstein’s coordinate systems and think in terms of genuine practical application.”

“I’m not sure I see how that can be done here,” Hoskins objected.

“The eye is no more than a cellular mechanism activated by the wave field of energy we call light,”

Billings reasoned. “The encephalograph reveals the brain generates its own wave field of energy. Some obscure area of Joe’s brain has taken a mutant leap and is activated by that wave field, so that he can perceive thought directly, as the eye perceives light. Such an area might be present in every brain, but rudimentary in the way of light sensitive cells in primitive life.”

It was not the complete theory which Joe held, but it served to orient Hoskins to the idea that Joe was no more than an eugenic mutant. It brought the idea out of the areas of metaphysics into the realms of physics.

But even with such rationalization, the emotional implications of living in the presence of a telepath were too much for Hoskins to accept immediately. Man, even the most brilliant of men, is not all intellect.

No man is without skeletons in his closet, those little quirks, those dark little actions and mean motives, shameful little things which he does not even reveal to his doctor, his confessor, his psychoanalyst.

Hoskins resolutely faced such things in himself, and as resolutely turned away from them. His mind refused the idea that Joe could see them clearly.

“How could you continue to respect me if you knew these things about me?”

He had not yet arrived at the knowledge that Joe would have seen thousands of carbon copies of such traits in others, would have grown up with them, accepting them from the first as being no more than normal to any human being. That in the balance scale of a man’s life, achievement was even more splendid because it did gain ascendancy over the furtive quirks; that man was even nobler in that, at the same time, he was so reprehensible.

Hoskins would arrive there, but it would take time.

Carney progressed in his own adjustments much more easily. His resentment changed to admiration, partly helped by Joe’s unsuspected somatic assurances, partly through the example set by Mabel. The tender-loin stratum has an almost universal contempt for the organized hypocrisy of society. Unable to accept it, become a part of it, they are broken by it. They seldom become enough detached to see it is this very pretense of man to be better than he is which drives him to convert his pretense to reality.