They'd Rather Be Right (6 page)

That added up to nothing when Billings tried it. Suggestions from various departments, working piece-meal, ranged all the way from pinhead size transistors, to city block long banks of cybernetic machines. Even though they had the knowledge, if they did, to build a separate machine to take care of each possible pattern which might arise in the piloting of a plane, it would create an accumulation large enough to fill the old Empire State building.

In exasperation, Billings called Joe to account in his office. They were alone, and Billings minced no words about the way Joe was dragging his feet.

“Why do you want to build this machine, doctor?” Joe asked abruptly. “You’re not afraid of the consequences if you fail?”

Billings had not expected this attack from Joe. As the weeks had passed, he had felt a growing urgency to succeed, but he had not tried to put his feelings into words. To answer Joe, he tried now.

“Every man, who thinks, wants there to be a meaning to his life,” he said carefully, for he sensed that this was the critical point. “I’ve spent my life trying to know, to understand. Everything I’ve ever learned seems to come together in this one thing. Say I’m looking for a monument, that there should be an apex, a crowning achievement. Every man would like there to be something remaining after him, which says, ‘This is the meaning of his life.’”

Joe was silent, and looked at him steadily. Billings realized he had expressed only a part of it, perhaps the most insignificant part. He picked up a cigarette, lit it, and took another approach.

“A civilization, too,” he said. “Each one of them has produced some one great achievement, one specialty. There’re not all the same and with the same goals. But each succeeding civilization seems to adopt what results it can use from past achievements. It syn-thesizes them into its own special achievement. Our specialty has been technological advance. Never mind that everything else is borrowed and doesn’t fit us—we have achieved that. But what we have achieved could be meaningless to some future civilization unless we give it meaning now. Here, again, this thing would sum up and embody in one object the total of our technology.

“If man’s advance is toward a broader intellect, it seems we should sum up his intellect to this point—if we can, and in our own language, that of technology. It’s the only one we speak without an accent.”

Still Joe sat in silence, and picked absently at a frayed thread in the drape which hung near his chair.

Though he meant them to be constructive, Billings realized that to Joe such arguments were futile, hopeless, destructive. An old man may think with detachment about thousand-year periods of history, and view with little concern the infinitesimal part his own life plays out of all the trillions of people who may live. But a young man is impatient with such maundering. He wants the answers to his own life, the drive which will give purpose to his own acts. And the purpose was there, too, enough to satisfy even—a Joe.

“No man watches happily,” Billings said, “while his civilization passes and sinks back into the Dark Ages. Every man has the tragic feeling that it need not happen; that if some eventual civilization is to endure, then why not his own? True, most civilizations had one spurt which made them shine for a while before they flickered out again. But some had several spurts. Some new thing entered the life of the people. They found the energy to meet the new challenge and solve its problem.”

Joe’s head came up at this, and he stopped pulling at the string on the curtain.

“According to you, Joe,” Billings said in final argument, “this thing may destroy man. It may also bump him up to the next step of evolution.”

“You’d be willing to face personal danger for that, doctor?” Joe asked suddenly.

The room grew very still. Billings did not answer lightly, for he suspected Joe saw farther beyond the door than he could.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Of course.”

That was the turning point in Joe’s attitude toward the project, but it had no effect upon the various scientists, of course. They still operated on the basis of a separate machine for every requirement, and the list of requirements was endless.

Superficially, to anyone who had not thought it through, the problem seemed not too difficult, as Washington had stated. A self-aiming gun, a self-guided missile which fastened upon a distant object, plotted its course to intersect the object, and changed its course to compensate for the change in the fleeing object’s maneuvers—these should certainly show the way.

And back of that there had been pilotless radio-controlled planes. And back of that the catapult and the bow and arrow.

But whether it was a self-guided missile, or a spear, there was a human mind back of it which had already predicted, used judgment, set the forces in motion according to that judgment.

Human mind? What about the monkey who threw the coconut from the tree at its enemy? What about the skunk with its own version of the catapult? Well, mind of some kind.

Even the amoeba varied its actions to suit the circumstances. There couldn’t be much of a brain in one cell. Yet it did react, within its limits, through variable patterns. Any psychosomaticist knows that every cell has a sort of mind of its own. But certainly a cybernetic machine has capacity for varied patterns, too, according to the circumstances. But preset, man, precho-sen! But didn’t blind and reasonless environment present and prechoose what an amoeba would do? Need it be a mind, as we think of mind?

Billings was not the only one whose thoughts went around and around in this vein, exploring the possible concepts; not the only one who found a yea for every nay. All the scientists, singly and in groups, inescapably followed the same train of reasoning; and came up against the same futility. In spite of Billings’ instructions to keep their concepts mechanical, if they were to duplicate the results of judgment between the best courses of action among the many courses of action a plane or an automobile might take, then they had to think about the processes of judging; and the nature of choosing.

Unfortunately, each of them had had courses in psychology, absorbed its strange conclusions, allowed themselves to be influenced by its influence on man’s thinking. They arrived nowhere in their analyses. They made the mistake of judging it by the other sciences, assumed it had its foundation based in fact; and felt it must be their own fault when its results gave them nothing.

Yet Billings remembered that Joe had told him they knew enough to build the machine. Still, what was the use of the finest watch if one had no concept of the measurement of time? One might build endless and complex speculation on the way its metal case flashed in the sun, or how it ticked with a life of its own against the ear, in the way that psychology and philosophy speculated endlessly and built complex structures of pointless word games about the nature of man.

Billings smiled with wry amusement at the position in which he found himself. He was like a student who has been given a knotty problem to solve, knows there must be a solution but can’t find it. For he did not doubt the conviction of Joe’s statement.

Like the bewildered student, he went to teacher. He was sincere enough and had sufficient stature that he could disregard the disparity of their ages, positions, experience, credentials. He was not too proud to accept knowledge, wherever he may find it.

“It’s inability to communicate with each other,” Joe answered his question. “It’s like the spokes of a wheel, without any bridging rim connecting them. The hub is basic scientific knowledge. Specialized sciences radiate out from that, and in moving outward they build up their own semantics.”

“I’ve heard the analogy before,” Billings objected. “It’s not a good one; because, if you think about it, you’ll see that none get very far out from the hub without the assistance of the others. The concepts of one must be incorporated into the other before any of them can progress very far.”

“They use one another’s products, doctor,” Joe corrected without emphasis. “Whether those products be gadgets or ideas, they’re still the result of another’s specialized thinking. A mechanical engineer uses the product of the petroleum engineer without more than superficially knowing or caring about how its molecules were tailored. Say the product doesn’t work. The mechanical engineer doesn’t drop everything and spend a dozen years or so trying to find the proper lubricant. He goes back to the petroleum engineer, puts in his beef, describes the conditions which the lubricant must meet. The petroleum engineer goes away, polymerizes and catalyzes some more molecules, brings back a new sample, and now the mechanical engineer can go a little farther out on his spoke. But he doesn’t communicate except at the product use level.”

“Then how are we going to get these men to use each other’s products, Joe?” Billings asked impatiently. “This thing is all out of hand. It isn’t taking shape at any point. The more we think about it the less it resolves itself, the more chaotic it becomes.”

He turned to Joe and spoke levelly, almost accusingly.

“You seem to know what needs to be done, but you don’t do anything about it, Joe. I counted on you. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. It seemed to me that this thing was a solution for you as well as for me. You’ve never known how to put your talent to use constructively, and you must have wanted that. Well, here’s your chance.”

He saw Joe’s face turn pale, and a mask of no expression settle over it. But his irritation and frustration made Billings plunge in where consideration had held him back before.

“Why can’t you do that, Joe?”

“That would mean going into their minds,” Joe said slowly, through stiff lips. “Taking over portions of their thinking, directing their actions. I haven’t done that since I played around with it as a child, before I realized what I was doing. It isn’t right for one human being—and I do think of myself as human—to control another human being.”

Billings threw back his head and laughed with sud-den relief.

“Joe!” he exclaimed. “You’re the living example that special talent or knowledges does not bring with it special wisdom or common sense! Don’t you realize that every time we ask somebody to pass the salt at the table, or honk our horn at someone on the street, or buy a pair of socks, or give a lecture, that we are controlling the thought and action of others?”

“It isn’t the same,” Joe insisted. “You normals are blind and fumbling and crude about it. You just bump into one another in your threshing about. And you can always refuse to obey one another.”

“Not really, Joe,” Billings said. “How long would a man last in his freedom if he refused to do the million things society required of him? I doubt if there’s much essential difference in the kind of pressure you could bring, and the kind which the whole society brings upon a man. You say we fumble, while you could do it expertly. I think I’d rather have an expert work on me than a fumbler. What is the difference in your planting the thought of what these scientists should do, and my sending them a written order?

Great Scott, boy, if you can get them to accomplish this thing, then you must go ahead.”

“Whatever I think needs to be done to accomplish it, doctor?”

“Whatever the project requires to carry it to comple-tion,” Billings defined, “remembering that this thing can be the solution for mankind, push him up to the next evolutionary rung.”

Joe was silent for a little while, and then spoke slowly.

“But they mustn’t know. Outside of a man’s own isolated field of knowledge, he’s as superstitious as all the rest. They’ve got all kinds of the wildest ideas about how dangerous and evil a telepath might be.

They mustn’t know. You’ve got to remember that san-ity in a person or a civilization is like a small boat on the surface of an ocean. If the subterranean depths get roiled up enough, the boat capsizes and there’s nothing but the storming chaos of madness.”

“Is that the way we appear to you, Joe?”

“That’s the way man is,” Joe said simply.

“Then if you can keep from rocking the boat when you direct their thinking on this project, you can de-pend on me to keep it secret, Joe.” Billings said reassuringly.

“It’s perfectly ethical, all right, for me to control their thinking on this project, then?”

“Perfectly all right, Joe,” Billings said with emphasis. And he thought he meant it.

The door opened wider.

It was Hoskins, in charge of the cybernetic aspects, who put the general feeling into words a few days later.

“I’ve often observed,” Hoskins said to no one in particular, as several of them sat around the general meeting room, “that you’ll be faced with a problem which looks completely unsolvable—there’s just no point at which you can grab hold of it—then suddenly, for no reason at all, the whole thing smooths out.”

Billings darted a quick look at Joe, but that young man, busy at a small table over in the corner of the room, did not look up from his job of assembling various reports into order.

Another, perhaps even more significant piece of evidence became apparent, that the men were incorporat-ing the problem into their thinking normally. The thing acquired a name—Bossy. Suddenly everyone was us-ing it. The animal husbandry department had supplied it.