by Mark Clifton
The room fell suddenly silent, and all of them welcomed the steaming cups of coffee Joe carried in on a tray. All of them sipped slowly, appreciatively. Mabel alternately straightened her little finger and tucked it in again, unable to remember which was considered the more fashionable. It had been a long time since she was a hundred-dollars-a-night girl. A very long time.
“Now to business,” Joe said crisply, and set his cup down on an end table beside his chair.
Hoskins and Billings were past any stage of astonishment. It seemed quite natural to them that Mabel was their landlady; that she owned half of the property on the short line; that she had documents, letters, inscribed jewelry, and memories of former days which protected her against shake-down and blackmail.
“I could tell you plenty about these sanctimonious old geezers who tell the rest of the world how to be good,” she boomed. “But I leave them alone and they’re glad to leave me alone. It’s the same with my tenants. As long as you boys treat me fair, pay your bills, and don’t get me mixed up in your troubles, I leave you alone. I don’t know what you’re doing here. I don’t want to know. It’s none of my business. I don’t pry and snoop. I don’t have to. I’ve already seen everything.”
“She means it, too,” Joe said. “Mabel doesn’t pretend to be respectable, you know. So she doesn’t need to get her kicks out of peeking and spying and being scandalized and righteously indignant.”
Mabel turned and looked at him with shrewd eyes.
“What would you now about it, son?” she asked. “You’re not even dry behind the ears yet.”
Joe winked at her and pulled his mouth into an expression of self-mockery.
“Why, Mabel,” he said, teasing her, “you’ve heard about this terrible younger generation. I might even be able to tell you a few things.”
She threw back her head and roared with a hearty laughter. They went back to business.
Doc Carney was to be their outside contact man, buying all their supplies for them. Hoskins and Billings wouldn’t need to go outside at all. There was a big room, beyond the bedrooms to this apartment, which could be fitted into their workshop. Long ago power lines had been cut into the trunks under the street. It was never exactly mentioned, but it gradually became clear that the former tenants, who had paved the way for them, were counterfeiters.
It became apparent also, as Joe had planned, that Mabel and Carney assumed they were also counterfeiters. Obviously Billings was the engraver, no doubt some old renegade who had once worked for the Treasury. Hoskins must be the mechanic, the handy man, the chemist. Joe was the front for the outfit. And now that Mabel and Carney had seen them all, Joe was probably the brains of the outfit, too. These other two were putting on a good show at being college teachers, but it wasn’t all show. they really were out of this world, and didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
When they began listing some of the things they needed, Carney’s suspicions were confirmed, although his eyes opened wide at the list of electronic and chemical equipment they felt they might need. His expression indicated he thought these boys were really going first-class.
“You can’t buy this stuff with queer money,” he said at one point coming right out into the open with his suspicions. “I can get all this stuff cheap. The boys heist it from warehouses, or highjack it, or lift it from labs and plants. Most of this stuff is hard to dispose of, so it’ll be cheap. They got no sense about what will move fast. Their fingers stick to everything. Still, you got to play fair with them. Pay them with queer, and you cut off your own nose.”
“The money will be good, Carney,” Joe reassured him. “This is a square deal all around.”
“That’s all I want to know,” Carney answered with relief. “How you pass the stuff and get good money for it to pay the boys is your business.”
“I haven’t said I was going to pass any queer,” Joe reminded him.
“That’s right, son,” Mabel interrupted. “Never tell anything.”
“But just how will we get the money?” Hoskins asked. “It will take a great deal. And we’re not working on subsidy now.”
“It won’t take as much as you think,” Joe said. “We’re almost through. Just a few additions and conversions to be made now. I’ve been playing the races for it. I’ve got a system.”
Carney looked at him with admiration. The kid thought of everything. That would answer any questions about where the money came from. It was an old blind, but a good one. He threw back his head and laughed.
Mabel thought Joe was kidding them, and laughed along with Carney. Anybody knows that systems are for the lambs who want to be fleeced. Hoskins considered that Joe had rebuked him for discussing it in front of strangers. He laughed to cover his faux pas.
“I am not certain that one can be assured of winning on such wagers,” Billings said doubtfully, seriously.
They all laughed then.
“Don’t worry about it,” Joe said. “Any of you. That’s my job.”
“Just keep your nose clean, son,” Mabel boomed.
Everyone sat and admired everyone else. Everyone was quite certain he understood everyone else. And Joe knew none of them understood anything at all.
For he had not yet told Billings and Hoskins what he intended to do with Bossy. Their realization had not yet come that he had been using them this last year; using the facilities of Hoxworth; the facilities of all the institutions who had helped on Project Bossy; using the subsidies from Washington. He had been using them selfishly, with determination, with practical application of psychology to serve his own purpose.
He had no sense of guilt about this. It was certainly normal and well-established practice for individuals to divert tax monies to their own advancement. It was one of the many survivals of savage custom working in modern society. The tribesmen paid their tithes to the chieftains, the elders, the witchdoctors—as always.
And, without even attempting to rationalize it into the end justifying the means, it was an obvious bargain for both sides. For the human race there was now a thinking machine, one which could use discrimination and judgment, and act. When the troglodytes got over their superstitious fear of flame, they would find fire quite useful.
And for him, it was deliverance.
For him the long loneliness would be ended. He was already quite clear on how the psychosomatic therapy knowledge of Billings could be incorporated in the machine, how the machine could interact with a human being to get down to the bedrock of every fixation, inhibition, repression of a person. How these would be supplanted with orderly rationalization.
From the machine, in due course, a man or a woman would emerge—a real man or woman; not the twisted warped, pitiful deformity which passes as human.
And, if his reasoning were correct—another telepath.
CHAPTER IV
For a week, almost day and night, Duane Hoskins worked on the reassembly of Bossy. Now that the parts were in his hands again, and he had a place to work undisturbed, he pushed conflict with his circumstances into the background and gave all of his thought to the task of bringing Bossy back to her original state of function. He assured himself that when his job was done, then he would attempt to get a more realistic approach to his relationships with government and other people.
The reassembly took all of his thought. He started out on the task as if it were no more than a routine nuisance which he must endure, since he had been all over this ground in the first assembly. But as the subassemblies began to accumulate into their proper relationships again, he grew more and more excited.
Guided as he was by a rigid intellectual honesty, that one faculty which makes the scientist differ from any other calling, he found himself freely acknowledging that Bossy was not his creation. Bossy was not even a true product of cybernetics—at least not as that science had been conceived before the start of this project.
Somewhere, somehow, they had surmounted the thin and narrow conceptions of their predecessors. Only now, with the a
ccomplished fact before him, did he realize just how thin and self-restricting those concepts had been.
More important, and more incomprehensible, they had surmounted the sterility of opinion control. Although, in the narrow sense, his field was far from the dangerous social sciences; early in his career Hoskins had realized that no field of science is remote from the affairs of men, that there is a sociological implication inherent even in the simple act of screwing a nut on a bolt.
Of course he had never expressed this in a classroom. Outwardly he had held to the prevalent opinion that the physical scientist has no responsibility to man for what he achieves. As with all other instructors, he knew that in each class there were bound to be at least two or three students who, in preparation for careers to come, had set themselves up as the supra analysts of what was the only right opinion. These were diligent in reporting to pressure groups, or directly to Resident Investigators.
The consequence was that even the brightest of students were becoming no more than cookbook engineers. This had always been regrettably true of ninety-five per cent of engineering students. But before opinion control there had been at least five per cent whose minds were fertile enough to conceive a variant idea.
Now, for almost half a century, there had been nothing new. There was an apparent progress, of course. The cookbook engineers were still able to mix up new batches from old ingredients. There was still enough gadgetry invention to confound any criticism. But there was no exploration of new areas, hunting for new frontiers.
In his own field of cybernetics, he had studied the mid-century experiments with ultra high-speed computers, the automatic chess players, the visible speech mechanisms, and the like. He had discovered how close the followers of Baggage and Vannevar Bush had come to their dream of the second industrial revolution. But here, in the closing decade of the century, cybernetics was still playing mechanical games with the same concepts.
Only Bossy was different.
As he continued with the reassembly, Hoskins grew deeply troubled. At times he felt as if he were on the verge of some vast concept not quite grasped; as if he caught hazy glimpses of an outline of a totally unknown continent where, always before, all science had assumed there were only empty seas. He cursed the sterility, the rote memorization which passed for learning. He bitterly accused his own mind of being like a wasted muscle, long unused, now incapable of a task which should be accomplished with ease.
Not that he was failing in the reassembly. Complex as it was, he remembered each step in perfect order. And, laid out before him as it was, he knew the theory and purpose of each part. What he failed to grasp was how it had been conceived in the first place.
He recalled well, in the early days of the project, the consternation, the blank incomprehension between one department of science and another. The legendary Tower of Babel was a miracle of understanding by comparison. As is to be expected when men are deeply disturbed by a sense of inadequacy, each branch of science had withdrawn into itself, become more and more esoteric, more ritualistic. As the inadequate man looks for and seizes upon differences so as to establish his superiority, so each science had moved farther from the common purpose of science—which is to know. And that was the way this project had begun, in spirit and in practice, back there at Hoxworth.
Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, men understood one another; problems were solved; old jealousies forgotten; prejudices discarded. Everywhere in the university the departments were caught up in the spirit usually known only to a few men—the desire to go beyond apparent differences, to understand what is really meant, to regard with pitying impatience those who would still value personal ascendancy over comprehension.
And, most astonishing of all, everyone took it for granted. No one seemed to have realized what had happened or much less why. He, himself, had not realized it until now; when the act of reassembling Bossy forced him into a minute review of each stage of the work. Only in its totality did it reveal its logical impossibility.
He tried to question Billings during the afternoon when they were working together installing the random synaptic selectors which would respond to sensory code patterns.
“Dr. Billings,” he said carefully “while it is apparent that no individual part of Bossy was unknown to science, even fifty years ago, the blending of the parts, and, above all our concept of what happens in the process of thought, is new. How did we manage it? You were the head of the project. You ought to know.”
He saw the same hesitancy, the same film of concealment that usually came over Billings’ candid blue eyes when this topic had been discussed before back at Hoxworth.
“Probably no more than fortuitous circumstance,” Billings answered evasively.
“I don’t believe that, and neither do you,” Hoskins stated bluntly. He pointed to the hydrogen ion concentrators, to the wave-field harmonics receptors. “These are accident?” he questioned with disbelief amounting to derision. “It was accident that the Department of Music was able to give us the clue to search activators in pattern selection? That the department of Synthetic Textiles was able to show us how to polymerize and catalyze strings of molecules into the material which became Bossy’s concept storage unit?”
In nervous tension, he paced up and down the room, and puffed at his cigarette as if in agony.
“That Bossy is able to take part patterns,” he continued in the same incredulous voice, “and fill in the missing pieces from probability selection through her proprioceptors? That we were able to recognize this as the treasured and mysterious process of reasoning?”
He stopped his pacing and pounded softly and slowly on the edge of the work bench with the heel of his hand.
“Above all,” and now his voice was almost querulous, “it was sheer accident that we were able to understand one another, go beyond semantic differences to the real core of meaning—when, as you know, our usual pattern was a gleeful destruction of the other fellow’s attempts at comprehension? Dr. Billings, I am neither a child nor a fool. I cannot accept the theory of fortuitous circumstance!”
“We did it,” Billings answered shortly, and wondered why Joe had permitted this question to arise in Hoskins’ mind at this time. Joe should have told him, should have cued him on what to do. This was conflict, and Bossy was not yet completely assembled. “We did it,” he repeated futilely. “Isn’t that the only important thing?”
Hoskins glared around the room, at the bare pinewood floor, the stained cement walls of the basement room, the harsh overhead lights, the door to their bedrooms which was the only source of fresh air.
“What am I?” he asked hoarsely. “No more than a handy man? Is that why I’ve placed myself in jeopardy, taken all these risks; just to hold a job as subordinate mechanic—without pay? Are we working as a team, doctor? Do we have one another’s confidence; or don’t we?”
“I don’t know how to answer you, Duane,” Billings said slowly, and Hoskins noticed that his first name had been used in their conversations for the first time. “I don’t know why you’ve been permitted to think of these things.”
“Permitted to think of them!” Hoskins exploded.
Billings fluttered his hands in the air, as if to ward off violence.
“You will have to ask Joe,” he said weakly.
CHAPTER V
The three men sat in the small living room of their basement quarters, having a late sandwich before going to bed. The somatics in the room were tense.
Hoskins pored over the schematic of the multiple feedback system, alternately fretting over whether Carney would be able to find the right tube for the torque amplifier, which had been cracked in transit, and stewing over the indignity of having been referred to Joe for the answers he felt he must have.
Billings mused over the problem, given to him by Joe days before, on how automatic psychosomatic therapy mechanisms could be installed in Bossy, what the most effective electrode contact with human subjects might be, and how reverie review
s could be taken down to cellular level, as Joe had insisted they must.
Joe worked at the small desk, extending the probabilities of his system to the end of the Tanforan meet, to tailor his bets to the amount of money they would need until the next racing season. The system was imperfect in that jockeys sometimes changed their minds in the heat of the race, extended their horse when they were not supposed to, won when they were not supposed to win. Reserves had to be set aside to cover a streak of these. Still, it was the safest method of getting enough money without calling attention to himself.
The scene was much the same as it had been back at Hoxworth, when he was secretary on Project Bossy; but the circumstances, both overt and somatic, were different.
He was aware that Hoskins was facing a crisis, one which had been maturing for the past two weeks, that if he let it go on, Bossy, herself, might be threatened. He could have avoided it, of course, just as he had avoided it all those months at Hoxworth. Delicately, he could have implanted the right impulses in Hoskins, so that revealment would come as no shock. But he had a sound reason for doing otherwise. Hoskins had a first-rate brain, and Joe had come to realize that blind acceptance of his extrasensory perceptions would give him no clue as to how the same gifts might be installed in Bossy. It was necessary that Hoskins fight it out on a cerebration level.
Further, he felt the same loyalty toward Hoskins that he felt toward Billings. And he wanted Hoskins to have the full benefit which Bossy could eventually give. That meant Hoskins had to grow up, willingly, of his own volition.
At that moment Hoskins reached over to the stand beside his chair and picked up another of the sandwiches. He glanced at Joe obliquely, his curiosity almost overcoming his resentment. Joe chose this moment to look up from his own work.
“Every man surrounds his mind with a framework of screen mesh.” Joe said conversationally, “composed of his prejudgments, preconceptions of what is acceptable to him. Everything he receives must filter through it.”
