They'd Rather Be Right (8 page)

They were not sure just what process had occurred which made Bossy distinguish safe hands from unsafe hands. She had the sense receptors to observe the outside world. She had the codes, a great many and more being added constantly, whereby through keyed harmonics she associated new perception with old. Some moves had been made to key her with similarities and differences. The mechanism was there to compare the new with the old and to determine the identities and the differences.

And now she had demonstrated that she could distinguish through the sense perceptors and the established coding.

Further, she had demonstrated that she could take automatic action.

The men cautioned one another, again and again, that they must not fall into the habit of thinking the machine could do anything they hadn’t keyed it to do. It had no sense. None at all. Really, this throwing up the bars to keep alien hands out was no more than any selenium cell would do—well, modified by coding.

Even without Joe’s warning glance, Billings felt they were reassuring one another on this point perhaps a little too much. He noticed, too, that the gender changed overnight from it to she. But it was several days before he noticed that Gunther had begun to stammer the name to B-b-b-ossy, each time he said it, although the man never stammered on anything else. And Hoskins always hesitated with an audible “ah” before saying the name.

The shadows beyond the door began to stir and swell, and seemed to writhe around one another.

Spring came, and then it was June. Commencement exercises were no more than a reluctant interlude from the work. Billings watched Joe throw off his graduat-ing cap and gown, and in almost the same movement start assembling the requests for student deferments from compulsory military service. A summer session extraordinary had been declared that no time be lost in the work on Bossy, and the entire university was humming on a factory schedule.

A new respect had been gained for a baby’s mind. Ordinarily adults thought of the newborn baby as just lying there, inert mentally, accomplishing little learning beyond finding out that a cry would summon attention, a nipple placed between its lips would start the reflex of sucking. Now they realized the multitudes of unrelated sense impressions that mind must be storing, the repeated patterns which impressed themselves upon its brain—and prediction of the future.

“If I cry, there will be approaching footsteps. I stop my crying to listen for them. If I do not hear them, I cry again. Soon there will be comforting hands and I will be dry and warm again.”

And any young mother knows this is accomplished in a few weeks. One by one the patterns are learned, the sensation relationships repeat themselves, a word is spoken in connection with an object or an action. Always the word and the object appear simultaneously—they are conjoined, one produces the other. Relationships become vaguely apparent. Cause and effect emerge as an expectancy.

If it were not that a baby was human, one might set up certain laws of procedure. An outside world datum makes an impact upon a sensory receptor. This is accompanied by other impacts of other data.

There is a relationship of each to the other. And long before there is any concept of self, as an entity, there is a realization of self to the data. Not all the data appear each time and in the same order. But if enough data appear to strike up the harmonics of association with a previous experience—judgment is assumed. Through repetition of patterns of trial and error, some reflex and some calculated, action upon judgment takes place.

But the baby is human, and therefore mysterious, and we may not simplify the awful metaphysics of an awakening human mind into a set of mechanical steps. The human mind is set apart, the human mind could not contemplate itself as being no more than an operation of an understandable process.

But it was different with Bossy. Bossy was a machine, and therefore the processes which would substitute for thought must be approached mechanically. Bossy recognized solely through mechanical indexing—no different in principle from the old-fash-ioned punched card sorter. This and this and this is the same as that and that and that—therefore these two things have a relationship to one another.

Comparison of new data with old data, a feedback process of numerous indexed impulses and these to the external sense receptors and their stream of new impulses—really it was quite trivial.

It was only coincidence that it seemed, here and there, to duplicate the results of an infant mind. Only coincidence that as new experience and new data were being constantly applied, new areas of experience exposed to Bossy, that she should seem to follow the process of the learning child.

Strictly coincidence, and one must not be fooled by coincidence.

As Billings watched Joe assemble the lists of deferments, he wondered about the young man. Since their conversation, when he had asked Joe to use his talents to further the project, they had talked no more than the work required. Billings was no closer to knowing Joe than he had ever been, and Joe volunteered nothing. He did not know what Joe had done to clear away the mental blocks which had prevented the scientists from grasping the problem, he had only the overt evidence that something had been done.

Really this project was all he had claimed it would be. Attempt to reduce it to simplicity though they may, it still remained that all of man’s science up to the present had been required to produce it. Bossy’s accomplishment was for all time the monument to the triumph of science, the refutation that science exists only through the indifferent tolerance of the average man, the refutation also that man has never used his intellect except to rationalize, justify and decorate with high-sounding phrases the primitive urges he intended to foster anyway. For it had taken intellect to produce Bossy, intellect of a high order, reaching up to—detachment.

“Oh, by the way, doctor,” Joe looked up from his work at the desk and interrupted Billings’ thinking, “have you been following the articles on witchcraft?”

“Why ... why no, Joe,” Billings answered. “I hadn’t noticed. What about them?”

“There’s a trend,” Joe said. “At first the articles started out faintly deploring, and then explaining.

Now there is the current theory that scientists and thinkers generally tend to get off the right track. That there is a mass wisdom for doing the right thing for mankind, embodied in the masses of people. That mankind has proved steadily and progressively he knows what is best for him; and therefore the so-called witchcraft suppression was simply man’s way, an instinctive inherent rightness, to keep from being led into the wrong ways of thinking.”

“That is a very common line of thinking,” Billings said without much interest. “How are you coming along with that roster of deferments?”

He saw Joe throw him a quick, appraising look, and then turn back to his work again. Probably nothing significant about Joe’s remarks. Young men tended to become much too horrified as they realized the terrible stupidity of mankind. As one grows older, one doesn’t expect so much; loses some of the idealism of what man should be.

“It’s pretty extensive, doctor,” Joe said in a colorless voice. “When I think that a similar list is being prepared in every college throughout the country ... well, the military isn’t going to like not being able to harvest its new crop. There’ll be an investigation.”

Billings hardly heard him. His mind continued along the track of comparison of Bossy and a child.

Every day new sensations fed into the child, new admonitions, corrections, approvals, patterns fed into stored accumulation of past sensations and conclusions. Sensations on the order of billions, perhaps trillions—no wonder that thought seemed complex, ungraspable. But as with so many problems the difficulty was size and bulk—and complexity was no more than superim-posure of simple upon simple.

But human beings did not learn fast, most of them required many repetitions of a pattern before they grasped it. The man was rare, indeed, who could mem-orize a book in scanning it once. Really now, a very poor job had been done in tailoring the molecular structure of Bossy required only once. Perhaps Joe was right. Perhaps man was still evolving. Perhaps his brain was no more than a rudimentary light-sensitive cell as compared with the eye. Perhaps that was why his brain gave such a poor performance, it had not evolved into its potential.

Billings sat, gazing out of the window at the elm trees and the sky.

“Yes,” he murmured, moments later to Joe’s comment. “No doubt there will be an investigation.”

He wondered, vaguely, what there would be an investigation about—but no matter, there were always investigations.

Surely it would have nothing to do with Hoxworth University, or himself. For the assignment had succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings. Perhaps it was immodest, but surely the success of Bossy would be emblazoned across the pages of history for a thousand years—the greatest achievement of all time; and his name would be that of its author.

Man! Know thyself!

“We must not allow ourselves to become fascinated with the sensation mongering of these investigations, Joe,” he said chidingly. “We are thinkers, and we have work to do.”

Again he felt the quick, questioning look from Joe, but dismissed it and continued with his development of vision. Plainly. Joe still lacked wisdom.

Through the weeks that followed another tension began to assume proportions too great to be ignored. As long as there had been such a recognized thing as science, itself, here had been a controversy concerning one aspect of it. A thing is composed of numerous properties which a theory or an equation must take into account if a satisfactory solution is to be attained. Some of these properties are intangible, but none the less real, such as friction, or gravity. Some are still variable and unpredictable. Thus one of the real and inescapable properties of a thing is—human reaction to it. An automobile could not be called a satisfactory invention if no one would drive it; an electric light could not be called a solution to illuminating darkness if man smashed it in frenzied rage each time he saw it. Since man can know a thing only through the mind of man, then the mind of man is one of its inherent properties. So said a school of philosophy.

This pro school held that human reaction to a thing was as real as gravity or friction; that a scientist who ignored it was like a mechanical engineer who persisted in ignoring the effects of friction, a structural engineer who ignored gravity. On the con side, it was considered that the physical scientist had plenty to do in measuring physical forces and properties; that the force of human reaction, if it existed, belonged in someone else’s problem basket.

The pro school held this was not true; that the phar-maceutical chemist did assume responsibility for the effect of his concoctions upon human mind and tissues, the structural engineer did assume some responsibility for the end use of his houses or bridges, the mechanical engineer did assume some responsibility for people using his motor; that no arbitrary line could be drawn separating responsibility from nonresponsibility.

The con school, in the vast majority because it is easier to evade responsibility than to assume it, still passed the buck.

And because this real property of things continued to be ignored, the gap between the scientist and the man in the street widened, and widened, and stretched out farther and farther. Any physical scientist knows that regardless of theory, there is a practical limit to the elasticity of a material. There is also a limit to the elasticity of human reaction to a science it can not understand, and therefore fears.

It became also apparent, in these weeks, that there was a serious leak of details on the progress of Bossy. No project as widespread as the work on Bossy could be kept entirely under security. Even where trained scientists possess only scraps and portions of the whole knowledge, misconceptions will occur. And multitudes of those working on some phase of Bossy were not yet trained scientists. They were students. Students, for all the grave respect they hold for the weight and importance of their knowledge, are notorious for misconceptions. There is a dividing line between effective scientist and student, but it has nothing to do with graduation exercises. Too many remain students, multiplying misconception upon misconception. An astonishing number of these, unable to make their way in the laboratory, turn to teaching for their living. The gap between science and superstition widens.

Beyond a serious central leak, which was becoming apparent, there were widespread rumors and bits of information leaking out. Each, in itself, was perhaps a harmless thing—if properly weighed and stripped of its exaggerations and misinterpretations. But human beings, generally, are not noted for their ability to weigh judiciously, discount exaggerations, and allow for possible misunderstanding. People like sensationalism, and in the telling add their bit to it.

Bossy, at first ignored as being the business of the scientists and having no relationship to bread and bed, suddenly became a topic of conversation everywhere. Everyone found he had an opinion.