by Mark Clifton
Billings looked back at him over his glasses. He was tempted now to tell Hoskins that Joe was a telepath; that Joe knew what he was doing; that if he, himself, had paid sufficient attention to Joe in the past things might be different now. Back at the university he had had no difficulty in keeping Joe’s secret. There he had been in his own element, and ethical silence was natural. But now things had changed.
He lifted his hands from his knees and massaged the knuckles of one in the palm of the other. He opened his mouth, to speak, and closed it again. Even now, needing the cooperation and comprehension from Hoskins as he did, he could not break confidence. He said nothing.
“Perhaps there’s something to the old wheeze about absent-minded professors, doctor,” Hoskins attempted a wan smile. “We do tend to get wrapped up in our own work, lose touch with what the layman calls reality. But these weeks of running, hiding—and now this. I ask myself why?”
He paused, searching for a comparison.
“It’s like an amateur play, where the actors are doing and saying completely unnatural things; where a bad director is shoving the cast into completely false situations. I’m one of those actors who suddenly realizes just how false the whole position is, how impossible it is to maintain it. Or—I’m that absent-minded professor who comes out of his woolgathering long enough to realize he isn’t lame at all. He just has one foot in the gutter.” He grinned wryly at the unexpected aptness of his metaphor.
“Conceivable, doctor,” Billings remonstrated in a whisper, and did not realize the incongruity of his concept forms in these surroundings, “your new apperception of reality may be as untenable as the one you wish to avoid.” Then a broken, almost sobbing, sigh escaped him, inadvertently. “There is nothing in the world so terrible as a mob of enraged human beings,” he murmured.
He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of man, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance.
“Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “to believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same superstitions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence—”
An impatient creaking of cot springs in the next room broke him off, and kept Hoskins from answering. Both men became silent, and stared down at the cold linoleum on the floor. Simultaneously, and along parallel lines, their thoughts went back over the events of the last year or two.
First there had been orders from Washington, transmitted, as usual, through the Resident Investigator. The orders were to construct a servomechanism, along the principles of the guided missile, which would prevent one plane from crashing into another, or crashing into a mountainside, to land it always safely, uncontrolled throughout by human pilot or ground crew. A servomechanism, in short, which could foresee the outcome of any probability pattern when necessary.
Apparently the phrases had been tacked on, one after another, by the bright boys there in Washington, without any realization of what they were asking. There was some dim realization that this might be a psychological problem, so Billings had been designated to head the project. The penalty, as usual, for failure was a public whipping by investigation, and imprisonment for contempt if he answered back.
And something strange had happened. It was as if the pressure of human originality, stultified for forty years through opinion control, had burst out of bounds.
Bossy, nicknamed from the machine’s faint resemblance to the head of a cow, became more than an ordinary servomechanism.
The fever of original thinking spread beyond the departments of Hoxworth. The suppressed hunger to think was like an epidemic. Every academic institution, even some industrial laboratories, caught the fire of enthusiasm, contributed to the work. It was as if the scientists were resolved Bossy would be empowered to think in areas where they were forbidden to go. It was as if they felt secure in their obvious defense.
“But this is only a machine,” they would say. “It cannot be held morally responsible for arriving at the only logical answers possible; even though such answers do not support your political bias. Logical rationality is neither subversive nor nonsubversive. It is simply a statement of fact. You may destroy the machine, but your verbal public whippings and pillories cannot incurably damage its psyche. It is only a machine.”
Consciously, and subconsciously, Bossy was the answer of science to the stultification of opinion control.
The news of what Bossy had become leaked out to the public. There was enough truth in the misinterpretations to disturb the public with profound unrest. Bossy could take over any job and do it better than a man. Bossy could replace even management and boards of directors. Bossy’s decisions would be accurate, her judgment unclouded by personal tensions.
Bossy could tell right from wrong!
It was perhaps misinterpretation of this last faculty which shook man off the narrow ledge of reason, and sent him plunging into the depths of blind, superstitious fear. Certainly it was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged.
Opinion control had answered the gauntlet of science.
In the last minutes, before the frenzied mob had broken down the doors of the university, the three last remaining men, Billings, Hoskins and Joe Carter had escaped. Later, Billings learned that Joe and Hoskins, long anticipating this move, had crated and shipped Bossy out of the area.
They had fled in panic.
They had continued to flee, sustained by some vague dream of a quiet sanctuary where they could continue work on Bossy uninterrupted. Typical of their kind, they had no concept of where this might be; or how this new sanctuary might nullify the pressures of mass reaction to their work; or how continued work, even daily living, might be financed. Their whole life had been in the ivory tower. It had never occurred either to Hoskins or Billings that there could be any other kind.
And now they were hiding out in a flop house on skid row. Even more incredible, to Hoskins, they were totally dependent for their next move on a youngster barely twenty-two years old.
“Incredible,” Hoskins said aloud, in disbelief.
“I wonder when Joe will be back?” Billings asked plaintively.
Hoskins looked at him, impatiently, and didn’t answer.
The two of them sat facing one another on the edges of their cots, and endured the waiting. Hoskins reached over and took another sandwich from the supply the hotel clerk had brought them at Joe’s orders. Billings wondered if he might safely make the trip down the hall to the community shower and bathe again. He smiled, ruefully, at his apparent compulsion to bathe again and again, a protest against his surroundings. He put the thought out of his mind. The fewer people who saw them, the safer they were.
Joe had told him that the word had gone out along skid row that nobody, and it meant nobody, was to talk to anybody, and it meant anybody, about Joe and those two buddies of his holed up in the Deluxe Hotel. It was a command, a group more. But there were still those with craving for a drink or a snifter of dope, always available for stoolies who might break the taboo.
Billings’ self-analysis took him back to the consequences of opinion control, the same consequences which had occurred again and again throughout history. There had been many times when man had been forced to adopt the only right opinion. Each time man’s forward thrust had slackened, vegetated, and died. Once, through the dark ages, the period had lasted almost a thousand years.
There was an odd peculiarity to the scientific mind. Block off an area where it may not go for speculative consideration, and immediately every line of research seems to lead into that area.
A small boy may sometimes survive for hours with no thought for the cookie jar, but forbid him to touch it and he can think
of nothing else.
“Such a pity that it happened this time,” Billings said, and did not realize that he was speaking aloud. “The clue was there in front of us all the time, too. Had we realized Einstein’s coordinate systems were adaptable to all fields of science, not just physics, man would have gone even beyond his own dreams. Why, in the field of sociology alone—”
There was a loud, protesting creak of bedsprings through the thin wall. It was more than a man merely turning over in bed. There was the slither of hands being slid up the wooden partition. Fingers reached the top and slid through the chicken wire to grasp support. They tensed, showed strain, and there was the sliding noise of a heavier body being pulled up the wall.
The head of hair was first to show, matted and yellow gray. Eyes followed, rheumy and blinking. The shapeless red nose, and then the mouth. The mouth smiled in an expression which the face apparently thought was friendly. It was the placating, conciliatory smile of the long habitual alcoholic.
“Would you really attempt to apply physical quantum laws of space-time continua to sociology?” the mouth asked. The words were blurred; the flaccid lips had long since forgotten how to form crisp, incisive speech.
Billings and Hoskins had been watching the apparition arise, above the partition. Billings was first to recover himself. The question restored his position in the academic world.
“Unquestionably, it should be considered,” he answered.
The eyes closed. The whiter lids accentuated the grime on the face. They opened again.
“I wonder now,” the mouth asked, “why that possibility had never occurred to me in my reflections? Perhaps I may blame it on the times we live in. Yes, certainly worth considering.”
The head began to disappear behind the partition again, then came up. The face had an eager expression this time.
“I would offer you gentlemen a nightcap—if I had one,” the mouth said hopefully.
“I’m afraid we don’t have any spirits either,” Billings said regretfully.
The eyes regarded them, searching their expressions for truth. Apparently the face grew satisfied that they were not selfishly hoarding.
“Then you, also, are broke,” the mouth said with a twist of philosophic humor. “Distressing, isn’t it? But thank you, gentlemen, for a new idea. It amply repays me for this disturbance of my rest.”
The head sank quickly out of sight, and this time it did not reappear. In a few minutes there were gentle snores coming through the partition, an accompaniment to the louder ones from down the hall.
“Imagine that,” Hoskins whispered finally. “Imagine finding a mind like that in a place like this.”
“My good Dr. Hoskins,” Billings whispered back with asperity, “we’re here, aren’t we?”
CHAPTER III
It was three o’clock in the morning when Joe checked them out of the Deluxe Hotel. He had paid for their room in advance, of course, and checking out meant no more than dropping their cubicle key at the desk. The night clerk picked it up without question, without comment, without speculation. He had seen everything in his time and had lost all curiosity about men on the short line. Guided by the grapevine command, it was easy for him not to notice that this was an old geezer, a middle-aged bum, and a young punk.
The lobby was discreetly darker than the street outside. At the door, before stepping out, Joe touched Hoskins on the elbow and spoke in a low voice.
“I’ll go first. You follow a quarter of a block behind. Hang onto one another, as if you’d had too much wine, but don’t overdo it.”
Hoskins started to speak and then nodded grimly.
“What about police?” Billings asked softly. “Aren’t we in danger?”
Joe looked the two men over critically, and smiled.
“You look too seedy to be able to pay a fine, so the locals probably won’t bother you. The Federals have had a shake-up in the last couple of days. Seems Some of their men were derelict in their duty. And they’re still working the better-class sections. It’s too early in the normal pattern for you to have come as far down as skid row, yet. Just follow along behind me.”
Out on Third Street, the wind off the harbor was chill and sharp. The fog was so heavy it was like fine rain. A few gray shadows of men wandered aimlessly up and down the sidewalk, looming up out of the fog a half block away and then disappearing again.
Joe hunched his shoulders and shuffled toward the corner of Howard Street. He waited there until he saw the two familiar figures lurching along behind. He steeled himself against the somatic effects of dejection and misery, and sampled the minds of those men still out on the street. Everything seemed to be normal. Some of the men were drunk; others, lacking the price of a flop house, were drugged with weariness and lack of sleep. A pair of cops were working the street two blocks up, routing such men out of doorways or alley corners where they were trying to sleep. But they were already beyond Joe’s destination.
He waited again at the entrance to an alley, until the professors were almost up to him. They were doing very well with their act, and when they followed him into the alley it might have been no more than the act of any normal human being seeking food from a garbage can, or hunting redeemable bottles thrown away by some more fortunate wino.
Joe stood in the darkness of the alley, waiting until they had come up to him. He made a quick survey of the minds in the vicinity and detected no evidence that any of them had been noticed. He took a key from his pocket and opened a door. He led them down some steps, cautioning them to feel their way carefully in the blackness. He took another key and opened another door at the bottom of the steps.
He led them into the even deeper blackness of a room, closed the door behind them, heard the click of the latch, and snapped on a light. After the darkness, the light dazzled all of them for a moment, and then they began to see. They were in a small and neatly furnished living room.
In front of them there stood a slight little man who stared unwinkingly at Joe. Heightened by flared up eyebrows, the eyes might have been those of an owl.
“I see you made it, kid,” he said in a dry, brittle voice. He turned and called into another room, “Mable, they’re here.”
The side door to the room opened, and a huge woman waddled in. Her hair had been dyed a flaring crimson, but showed a full two inches of gray at the roots. Her face appeared to be coated with varicolored enamels.
“Quick trip, son,” she said approvingly. “Coffee isn’t even ready yet.”
“Mabel… Doc Carney…meet my friends, Professor Billings and Professor Hoskins.” It never occurred to him to fumble for Mabel’s last name, or that Doc Carney might have any other. It never occurred to anybody. Their identities were complete and understood.
He watched both Hoskins and Billings bow slightly in the direction of Mabel. Here, in a more familiar kind of habitation, some of their dignity came back to them, and they wore it well.
“Sa-a-ay,” Mabel boomed at them in her hoarse voice, “you’re people.”
Joe was pleased to see a look of comprehension, orientation, come into Hoskins’ eyes. Perhaps that ivory tower had not been so sheltering, after all. Naturally he had never looked in to see, since that aspect of Hoskins was none of his concern. But Billings was completely bewildered. His expression seemed to say that naturally they were people.
“The word ‘people’,” Joe instructed in a dry, didactic manner, “used in this context at this ethnological stratum contains a specialized semantic content, signifying respect, approval, classifying you as superior in the humanities attitudes.”
Thus translated into simple English, Billings grasped the idea quickly. He took a step forward and held out his hand.
“You’re people, too,” he murmured. “That is not difficult to apprehend.”
“My-y,” she bridled in admiration, and shook his hand up and down heartily.
“You’re entirely right about that…er…professor,” Doc Carney said with approval. “Mabel wa
s a hundred-dollars-a-night girl in her day. She’s real class.”
“You don’t say,” Billings murmured, without any comprehension at all.
Mabel threw him a quick look, then flicked her glance suspiciously at Hoskins. Hoskins gave her a broad grin, and with a wink indicated that Billings was not wise to the life. Mabel took it then as it was meant, a compliment. Joe hurried quickly, before he burst into laughter, into the adjoining kitchenette where the coffee had begun to percolate. The somatics in the room were wonderful. He hadn’t needed to supplement with broadcasted reassurance at all.
“And did I understand that you were introduced as Doctor?” Billings turned toward Carney after they were all seated and asked. “What field, may I ask?”
Joe heard the question and came to the doorway with the percolator in his hand.
“Doc is an honorary title,” he told Billings. “He’s a carney.”
“I beg your pardon, Joe?” Billings asked.
“Doc Carney was a practicing psychologist” Joe explained. “A mentalist at traveling carnivals. He had an act. From the stage he told you things about yourself. I was his shill in the audience one summer while I was on vacation. That’s how I got to know him. We rolled ’em in the aisles.”
“Never saw anybody pick up the codes faster than Joe,” Carney commented. “Tried to get him to stick with me, we’d have made barrels of money.”
Mabel was in her element. It had been a long time since gentlemen had sat around in her parlor, talking in high-class voices. She sat in an elegant pose in her old red sweater, and surreptitiously glanced at a wall mirror to see if her bright orange face powder and flaming lipstick were wearing well. In a provocative gesture of old, she flicked her long jet earring back and forth at the side of her cheek with her finger, and tried to shrink her broad and shapeless thighs into something like seductiveness. With the forefinger of her other hand she scraped idly and futilely at a dirt spot on her old black skirt.
