They'd Rather Be Right (23 page)

His curiosity transferred itself to Joe when it was that young man who asked, almost immediately, to see Mabel. His curiosity was heightened when both Billings and Hoskins seemed to take it for granted that

Joe had the prior right to see her. Along with the rest of the world, he had always assumed the student in the case, Joe Carter, was a nonentity.

The attitudes of the two professors toward Joe caused a rapid shift in his evaluations.

At a confirming nod from Super Jones, Mabel’s attending doctor opened the door for Joe to enter her apartment. Mabel had been asleep when she was transported from the ambulance to his care. She had slept all through the day. His orders had been to confine himself to her physical needs, should any arise; but he did not lack desire to know more about her. He took it for granted he would be present, as attending physician, through Joe’s interview.

It took a repetition from Super Jones of orders from Kennedy’s office, that Carter was to be given every cooperation with no questions asked, to get his agreement to stay outside.

Joe closed the door behind him and stood alone in the small sitting room of an apartment which had been fitted for the convalescent needs of a very important person. Both his mind and his physical eyes were on the doorway to the bedroom. He was about to walk across the room and go through the doorway to sit by her bed, when Mabel appeared. She was wrapped in a bright dressing gown which flowed about her perfect body in iridescent color. Her short mahogany curls picked up the light and seemed to glisten in accompaniment to the sparkle of her eyes.

“I’ve slept,” she greeted him simply. “And this time, I know I’m awake. I’m still not quite sure whether I was before.”

She said it, but her lips did not move!

Her mind crept into Joe’s—and fitted there as trustingly as a child’s hand.

Banished since childhood, along with his self-pity for his loneliness, the tears sprang into Joe’s eyes and misted his physical vision. His psivision swooned with an incredible delight. It was as if he had heard a true human voice for the first time in his entire life, as if music he had always known should exist flooded his being. It was as if he suddenly had wings to zoom him to dizzying heights in perfect intricate and controlled designs of flight. It was as if—There was no vocabulary, none at all.

“Not so fast,” she laughed delightedly, and a little fearfully; the way a child laughs when it is tossed in the air by its father in the nightly coming-home game. “I’m not very expert yet. I got the impulse. I thought I would try. Bossy hasn’t much material on multi-valued physics, and single-valued physics doesn’t provide for telepathy at all. So I can’t—”

Joe stepped over and took her hands physically in his. Mentally they had already joined hands. He was excited to find, even in the midst of his greater excitement, that he received two separate pleasure sensations from the two kinds of contacts with her.

There were two distinct levels of thought, too. There was the psi exploration, now tentative and careful after that first exultation. Her mind was as cool and clear as mountain spring water sparkling over rocks in the sunlight. Her mind was as mysterious as a mountain pool found unexpectedly in a grove of trees and ferns, a pool shading deeper and deeper blue to a bottomless depth.

The other level of thought was verbal. “Multi-valued—single-valued physics?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

They stood in the middle of the floor, their hands clasped, looking into one another’s eyes.

“Neither do I, completely,” she said. “Neither does Bossy. There isn’t sufficient data. But Bossy postulates multi-valued physics as being necessary to avoid the confusion and enigmas of singles values.”

“I’ll have to ask Bossy about that,” he smiled.

He could feel her mind probing his, a little awkwardly, a little timidly, as if she were not quite sure
she
would be welcome. She, too, was functioning on at least two levels. With a skill he had never known he possessed, he opened his mind wide, like a door flung open in glad welcome.

And easily, naturally, she came into his arms.

The following morning they were visited by one of Howard Kennedy’s publicity experts.

“I’m Steve Flynn,” he told them, and shook hands heartily with Billings, then Hoskins, and, because a good publicity man never overlooks a bet, with Joe. “We’re letting one of the wire services scoop the world by having their master-mind sleuths discover you boys and Bossy are responsible for this immortality deal. My assistant is bringing them in a few minutes for some exclusive pictures. Don’t try to do any explaining of anything. I’ll hand out what we want them to know.”

“I don’t think publicity is advisable—” Billings demurred.

Steve Flynn looked at him incredulously.

“Oh, brother,” he groaned. Then, as if reasoning with a small child, “The boss promises you he’s going to quash the indictments against you—right? He tells the Legal Department to get it done—right?

But even the old man can’t tell the United States government what to do—right? The boss knows we got to take certain steps. The Legal Department will get the indictments quashed as per orders, but they got to have something to work with. We got to make you popular with the public. There’s got to be a spontaneous, grass-roots demand for justice. How do you think spontaneous demands for justice get going?”

“But won’t we be arrested immediately when the story breaks?” Hoskins asked.

Flynn turned his high-powered personality on the cyberneticist.

“Look,” he said reasonably, “the wire services don’t jump through the hoops for us publicity boys because they love us. They got to get something out of the deal, too. They think it’s time to bring up the issue of freedom of the press. They’ve been looking for something big to hang it on. This is made to order. They’ll stand on their rights to keep their sources se-cret. They’ll get their big hoopla, some politicians will get their names in headlines trying to make them tell, we’ll get our publicity, and you’re snug and safe. Everybody’s happy—right?”

“I am not happy,” Billings objected. “All this publicity! It’s ... it’s hardly in the best of professional ethics.”

“Oh, brother!” Steve Flynn groaned again. He spread his legs apart, and leaned forward earnestly. It was obvious he had been triggered on one of his favorite topics.

“Look, you guys,” he said irreverently. “Why don’t you scientists come down out of the clouds? You got to have publicity, man. Look ... look what happens. You guys spend half, three quarters of your life holed up somewhere. Then you finally discover something. Maybe it’s important,” he shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t. I wouldn’t know. So you make a timid little announcement to a couple dozen long hairs, at some meeting.”

He took out a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter which made a loud snap.

“Then you go back to your hole and die quietly. Nine times out of ten that’s the last of it. But, say you’re lucky. Say it’s picked up by some desperate newspaper science reporter. Say you’re still lucky, that you hit a long shot. Say the commentators pick it up. Now these commentators, they just about know a test tube from an aspirin tablet. But they got opinions. Got opinions? They make opinions, brother!”

He spread his hands wide before the fascinated eyes of Billings and Hoskins. Clearly the gesture covered a vast area.

“All over the country, all over the world, maybe, they rush to the microphone to tell people what to think about this discovery. They hash it over, forwards and backwards. Maybe they think it is good for a full thirteen minutes; maybe only to lead up to the first commercial. And each one of them has his own opinion—right? What happens?”

He shrugged again, as if the answer were self-evi-dent, and because he saw by their expressions it was not, he spelled it out for them.

“The people get confused at hearing these different opinions. The more they hear the more they get confused. When you get people confused, they get sore. Best way on earth to make a guy sore, give him a slow burn. But they don’t get sore at the commentators. They get sore at the idea, itself. They get sore at science, itself. They get sore because somebody says he can think straighter than they can. They get very sore when you tell them that. They don’t like it. They don’t like the guy who can do it.”

He grinned then, and winked at them—man to man.

“Besides sex, the one thing the public does best is get sore. When you get sore you look around to find something to be sore at. So either they get sore at you, or they get sore at the guys who’re against you. But you got to tell them which it is to be, because they don’t know. Trouble with you scientists is, you don’t know anything about people, not anything at all.”

He waved his burning cigarette in the air.

“You know what?” he asked conversationally. “Every time there’s a grant for research, they ought to make as big a one for the publicity to sell it to the public. That’s the only way you’re ever going to make thinking popular. How are you going to make thinking popular unless you popularize it? It stands to reason. You got to get out there in front and give your pitch along with the television queens, and politicians, and cigarettes, and razor blades. Otherwise, how’s the pub-lic going to know? How’s it going to make up its mind?”

He blew an exasperated breath.

“Oh, brother!” he exclaimed once more.

“We’ll cooperate, Steve,” Joe grinned.

“All right,” Steve Flynn subsided. “Now don’t you worry. We’ll make the public like you. Now that we’re in on it, that’s as certain as death and taxes.” He stopped, and grinned a little self-consciously. “As taxes, anyway,” he amended.

“Speaking of people and how they react,” Joe said. “Here’s something you’d better be prepared to meet.”

Flynn looked at him tolerantly. He was playing along with these Brains because that was his job, but if they thought they could tell him anything about how the public would react “The one big consolation of all the people,” Joe said slowly, “the consolation of the stupid, the ignorant, the moronic, the vicious, everybody—is that death gets us all. It’s the big equalizer. That’s the time when the little man is just as important as the big man. They’re not going to like it when they realize they’ve been robbed of that one great satisfaction; that they won’t be able to get even, after all.”

Steve caught it immediately.

“Sa-a-ay,” he breathed. “Oh, brother!” He snapped his fingers. Then his face cleared. “I’ll think up something. Meanwhile, I’ll stall. They won’t realize it for quite a while—they never do. But somebody will think of it and start spreading it around. And when they do—oh, brother!”

Then, with the quality which made him a good publicity man, he squared his shoulders, and dismissed the negative thought as if it had never been. A man couldn’t afford to think negative, it crept into his work, gave it a downbeat. Always got to think happy, going great, couldn’t be better.

“It’ll be all right,” he said reassuringly. “Just don’t think about it. That’s the way to handle these downbeat ideas. Just don’t think about them.”

He looked at his watch.

“The boys should be waiting outside by now,” he said crisply. “Now in these shots, look earnest and noble, like great scientists. And, maybe you’d better look a little stupid, too. You’re great scientists, but you’re just plain folks—right?”

“What is multi-valued physics?”

Joe, Billings, and Hoskins sat in front of

Bossy’s screen where their eyes could pick up her words faster than ears could have sorted out the sounds from her vocoder.

Hoskins reached over and snapped on the printer to record her answer on paper for further study.

The question, itself, indicated that the most careful reflection would be required. Never petty by temperament, the events of the past two years, and particularly the past two weeks, had turned Hoskins into a firm advocate of trying to see beyond inadequate semantics to meanings instead of seizing gleefully upon bad semantics to destroy the concept. He had read a line somewhere which he never forgot: “The scientist who would rather refute than comprehend demonstrates he has chosen the wrong calling.”

And Billings had once said at a meeting back at Hoxworth—before Hoskins had known that it was Joe who was knocking down the barriers of antagonism and ego supremacy among them: “It is natural that a new concept, however valid, will be questioned. The semantic vocabulary has not yet been built up to convey the idea comprehensively. It is necessary that we search with great effort to find meanings which words, as yet, are inadequate to con-vey. Naturally the tongue will stumble in trying to form concrete pictures from new abstractions. Naturally, any illustration must prove inadequate for if the reality had come into actual being it would not be a new concept.

“The scientist who derides an idea because it is not put in the language he would require is like the peasant who is convulsed with laughter when a stranger is trying to tell the peasant his barn is on fire.”

Hindsight is easy. What Eighteenth Century scientist could have known that the radical, revolutionary and totally silly idea that matter and energy were inter-changeable would produce nuclear fission?

The concept paves the way for the fact.

What would the silly idea that there could be multi-values in physics produce?