They'd Rather Be Right (9 page)

Ready-made opinions by the score poured through the news columns and over video. Bossy began to assume proportions of concern, dread, then outright fear.

When you stop to think of it, some of the more articulate would say, the most inefficient, unpredictable, costly and exasperating machine used in industry is the human being. The only advantage it has over other machines, the only reason an industrialist uses it, is its wide flexibility of adaptation to numerous conditions, the ease of replacement if it doesn’t function properly.

But now there was Bossy.

It did not take long for the sensationalists to predict manless factories, manless shops and stores, manless utility and transportation services. Once the coals were breathed into flame, it did not take
long
for the fire to gather fuel and spread in white heat. And like a gaso-line poured into the flames was the wholesale student deferment.

Some of this reaction trickled, much diffused, into the ivory towers. Billings tried to offset it. He made a personal appearance on a national hook-up, but he mistook fire for water and poured oil on the waves to quiet them.

“There is nothing to fear,” he said. “The brain of Bossy is no more than a compound of synthetic pro-teins, colloids, enzymes, metallic salts, fatty acids—each molecule designed and shaped to do a specific task, picking up codified impulse charges to complete their structure, and then combining into a threadlike substance for storage and release.”

If he had spoken in Hottentot, it would have been as comprehensible and less dangerous. For without conveying the slightest understanding, and even in his attempts to show this thing was not human, he heightened the dread.

Bossy was truly a machine, a synthetic thing. Its inventor, the famous Billings, had said so, himself.

Had it been alive, man might have understood it better, even though alien and inimical it would have shared with him the mystery of life and thought.

As he droned on and on through his talk, as he described the lenses, the diaphragms, the metallic, glassite, plastic receptors, showing how they saw and felt and tasted and heard, he confirmed all the rumors. Bossy
was
capable of replacing man.

And Bossy had no soul.

Letters by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, poured into Congress. Congress, far more receptive to the will of the people than is generally realized, tried to act. But it was the Administrative Department who had cut the orders for work on Bossy. The Administrative Department unfortunately chose this issue as a battle arena to show Congress it could no longer be shoved around so easily. The resultant conflict, the raw tempers which flared into print and over national hookups, served merely to heighten the tension throughout the country. There was something to it!

The quiet and doubtful words of the mollifiers, the advocates of let’s wait and see, the admonishers of you’re not hurt yet, their voices were lost in the angry outpourings of revolt against this manufacture of a soulless machine to replace man, this deferment of favored young men, these irresponsible scientists—science itself.

In damning the very idea of science, it never occurred to most that they were using the products of science to get their message into every corner of the land, into every mind.

The first overt move came from a small band of men who chose to have a parade of protest. It was national news. They fed upon the publicity. The parade re-grouped and formed into a march—a march across two states toward Hoxworth University. The ranks of the marchers swelled. Other marchers started.

And in the village of Hoxworth, near the university, the residents decided they did not need to be reminded of their duty by people from other communities.

There sprang from the mind of a fanatic, and couched in the lyrical language so often used by the psychotic, a huge placard that was set up at the corner of the library park one night. In one corner of it, there was a copy of young Tyler’s cartoon of Billings. And in bold lettering: HIDE! HIDE! WITCH! THE GOOD FOLK COME TO BURN THEE!

All day there was a crowd around it. In the strange manner of disturbed people, some stood for hours just looking at it, letting its message seep into the bottom fibers of their beings—awakening ancestral memories.

But during the small hours of the night, some student, perhaps equally psychotic in his bitterness against such medieval reaction, added another placard below with these scornful words: THEIR KEEN ENJOYMENT HID BENEATH THE GOTHIC MASK OF DUTY!

It was a most unfortunate thing, for it struck deep into the roots of guilt, and even where some had hung back, now they raged and stormed with the rest when it was discovered the next morning.

A pall of quietness, inactivity, hung over Hoxworth University. A miasma of gloom, apprehension, like the somatics within a prison, filled the grounds and seeped through the halls. Classes were sparsely attended, and instructors found themselves straying away from the subject of their lectures. Most of the students had gone home in the weeks before.

All work on Bossy had ceased at the orders of the Board of Governors of the University. She had been dismantled and her parts stored away. The activated brain floes had been carefully lifted out of its case and folded into a thin aluminum box. No one was sure what damage even this handling might do, and no one had the urge to test and experiment to find out.

“I tried to warn you, Dr. Billings,” Joe said once, in the dean’s office.

“But if you knew this, Joe!” Billings exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Each time I tried, doctor,” Joe said quietly, “you told me to mind my own business, that I lacked wis-dom. I didn’t know for sure what would happen, or I’d have forced you to listen. I knew only that men of science have failed to bring the people along with them, that human beings are capable of terrible things when they are terrified. You told me, many times, that scientists are not concerned with these things; that scientists don’t want to hear about doom consequences; that scientists are quite certain everything will be all right if they’re just permitted to do as they please.”

“People have predicted doom at every single advance of science, Joe,” Billings admonished him.

“Look at all the doom written around the time of atomic discovery. It never happened.”

“I know,” Joe said. “It’s case of ‘Wolf, wolf’ being cried too often, isn’t it? Too bad. But your history should tell you, doctor, there always comes a time when the wolf really does come.”

There wasn’t any more conversation along this line. There wasn’t anything more that either of them could say. Joe went back to his work at his desk in the corner of the room, trying to fill in the new batch of questionnaires Rogan had received from Washington. Rogan had taken them from his silver incrusted brief case, wordlessly, and laid them on Joe’s desk. Rogan was as grim and apprehensive as all the rest.

He had followed orders all the way, but it had gone wrong. Rogan could see only one thing; he would be blamed for it all—and yet he had merely followed orders.

Billings was a little glad when Joe finished his work and left the room. He realized he had been stupid.

He had had an instrument at his hand, a delicately tuned instrument capable of picking up facts far beyond the range of his own senses, Joe, a telepath, and he had chosen to ignore the readings of the instrument, to depend upon his own
crude
and dull
senses.
The guilt of his stupidity weighed heavily upon him. He was glad that Joe did not like to look into the mind of a normal. He hoped Joe had not looked too deeply into his. The vague discomfort he felt when Joe was around was heightened now.

He sat behind his desk, alone, and reflected with profound disappointment upon scientists, collectively and individually, himself included. They could tear apart the atom and milk it of its strength, they could reconstruct the molecules of nature and improve upon them, they could design instruments far beyond the range of man’s senses, solve the riddles of the universe, and, yes, reconstruct the very processes of thought.

Yet they were powerless against the most ignorant of men. Against the most primitive flares of superstition and dread of the unknown, they had no defense. Weakly, in such a situation, they would try to explain, to reason, to appeal to rationality and logic—against minds preset against all explanations, never having learned reason, alien to rationality and logic.

Was this intelligence? To use against one’s most bitter foe a weapon which they knew, in advance, would not touch him?

And knowing that, knowing the potential of it which is always present, still they said with impatient superiority, “Spell us no evil consequences of our acts. We are tired of hearing about doom.”

A fresh newspaper, a regular city daily, had been laid on his desk. He pulled it toward him, flipped open its pages, and looked at another cartoon of himself.

Yes, it was signed by young Tyler—but a glance showed it had not been drawn by him.

And suddenly he knew where the central leak had been. Young Tyler had been in the thick of everything; but young Tyler was a violent and arrogant young man. He seemed to thrive on trouble, to generate it, to know that in mischief or crime itself his father would rescue him. Billings had been blind to that potential, too.

The central figure in the cartoon, himself, was drawn in massive impressiveness, almost Michelan-gelo in treatment, dressed in classical flowing robes, holding Bossy up in one hand, and surrounded by a glowing nimbus. The cartoon needed no title nor identification.

Every expert line of it was innuendo—Billings’ pretense at nobility, transcendency. Every expert line revealed the blasphemy. In it was the age-old message that it was forbidden to eat of the tree of knowledge, to reach for the stars. In it was the stern admonitions driven into the innermost fiber of almost every child’s being.

“You’re too young to know! Keep your hands off of that! Mother and Daddy know best! That’s none of your business! That’s over your head! Wait till you’re older! That’s too deep for you to understand!”

The message of defeat, weakness, dependency upon higher authority, driven
in
day by day and hour by hour into the child’s basic structure of reaction. And to offset that solid bedrock, a few mumbling teachers said occasionally that the child should think for himself.

It was no wonder that there was a suppressed desire in most small boys’ hearts to burn down the school-house which tried to make them learn, when their whole world and all that was safe in it had been composed of not learning. When the very act of knowing, meant punishment. “You
know
better than to do a thing like that, young man!” And the obvious conclusion drawn by the child, “If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t be punished.”

What could be done when the very act of knowing brought penalty?

In anger, Billings crumbled the paper and threw it in the wastebasket. It occurred to him that, in like manner, he had just crumpled his whole life and thrown that, too, in the wastebasket. He leaned forward and flipped on his desk radio. He listened, almost without comprehension, to a trained and professional rabble-rouser shouting into a microphone, down in the village below.

.. Torn stone from stone ... so that we may wipe out this evil from our midst ... Let us not wait for others to show us our duty ... let us march upon it ... now ...”

“What a miserable string of worn-out clichés,” Billings murmured in amusement. Then he realized, with a shock, they were talking about Hoxworth University.

He flipped off the switch, cupped his chin in his fingers, and stared at the wall.

Well, let them come. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He smiled in self-scorn when he realized
he
could say this because he was quite sure they would not come, that reason would prevail, always prevail.

How unrealistic can a man get? What guarantee was there that they would not come? Had man’s basic nature changed since yesterday? What had happened before would happen again, in endless repetition. The cycle would repeat itself.

Primitive man, who knows no step taken beyond that of his father’s—the bright and courageous dawn of reason—the rise to a comprehension beyond that of his father’s—the brief hesitation at the height of the
cycle
when sanity and rationality soared—the beginning of the downward curve of revolt against sanity and rationality—the retrogression of comprehension—the final dying embers of reason—and, again, the primitive man who knows no step taken beyond that of his father’s.

The circle was endless, enduring on and on for a million years now since dawn man emerged. It would endure on and on for

How long?

Was there no solution? Was man doomed to follow in the circle endlessly, like a two-dimensional animal bounded by a carelessly thrown thread, unable to conceive of a third dimension whereby it might change direction and crawl
upward?

Was Joe’s idea the right one? That man was just biding his time, slowly evolving, that psionics would mark the next stage, that it was a spiral and not a circle? He must talk further with Joe about this. Now, for the first time, perhaps, he was prepared to listen to something he had not thought of himself. Had he been like the kind of scientist he scorned, refusing to listen to anything which did not fit in with his already formed conceptions?