They'd Rather Be Right

by Mark Clifton

  Over the operating table, suspended on a track which allowed several feet of lateral movement, was the lens and head of a television camera. The camera could be focused by remote control so as to keep every inch of the table under observation.

  Other cameras were situated to pick up the celebrities as they appeared, to catch world-shaking remarks of wisdom. But, as if they had rehearsed their parts, the pearls of unsupportable wisdom were not forthcoming. As the celebrities came through the door, and were identified for the delectation of the watching world, they maintained a uniform attitude of thin-lipped “wait and see.” At a signal from Steve Flynn, the glib ad lib boys gave up asking the scientists what they thought about it all, and simply identified them in voices which grew less and less wildly enthusiastic. The tempos reduced from the mood of a gala sporting event to one of almost decorum.

  Three consulting physicians were already on duty. They didn’t know quite what they were to be consulted about, but they were all properly attired in white masks, gowns and hoods. They lacked only shining scalpels in their hands, and seemed to feel a little undressed without them. Their credo of “When in doubt, cut and find out,” seemed inappropriate here. They would try to make up for it by being extra skeptical of the experiment.

  One side of the room was given over to glass-walled booths for the planned relays of commentators, press reporters and photographers.

  When Joe entered with Mabel and Carney, the entire battery of television lenses turned upon them, and for a moment the commentators seemed to feel they were announcing the Kentucky Derby with the two favorites running neck and neck at the finish line. The eyes of the assemblage did not share the enthusiasm. They remained fixed upon Mabel, coldly scrutinizing; and the minds behind the eyes were of a pattern with that of the jail psychiatrist.

  Steeled as she was against the shock, Joe felt her reel, almost lose control, under the battering of the blows upon her. With all his power he reassured her, warded off the sharpest of the thrusts. It was not so much the cynicism and unbelief; that was bearable. It was the preset conviction that this could not be, which hit hardest.

  “I can’t stand it, Joe,” she put the thought in his mind.

  “They’ll be expecting you to show a woman’s artifices in playing on their sympathy,” he tried to bolster her strength.

  She pulled away from his arm, as they were about to enter a roped off section reserved for them, and stepped to the center of the arena. More terrible than the wild beasts facing the gladiators were the blood-hungry Romans who sat in tiered seats of safety, secure in their solid and forever unchanging right to turn thumbs up, or thumbs down.

  The cameras were all upon her. Four hundred million people watched, ready to turn thumbs up, or thumbs down.

  “Gentlemen,” she said clearly, “I am no fake.”

  She turned then, and walked out of the room, alone. Joe obeyed her mental wish and did not try to accompany her.

  The roomful of men heard her words with their ears, but not with their minds. Like the psychiatrist, they had not needed to see the evidence to know the truth about this matter. Believed, because they cannot remember the spate of ignorant admonitions which set the patterns while they were still crawling about the floor of the nursery, they were convinced that man has within him the inherent gift of knowing right from wrong. With or without this bit of theatricalism, which would fool no one, they already knew the truth.

  They did not remember, because it was not convenient to remember, that almost word for word, action for action, this had taken place at least once before, when anesthesia was shown for the first time. It was not convenient for them to remember that the body of orthodoxy had been able to show the utter falseness and deliberate charlatanism of every step forward man had made in his slow climb toward comprehension. They were experts. Had any of these things been possible it is natural that they, being the experts, would have known about it first.

  As Joe and Carney took their seats, Joe wondered if any one of them had ever read even one page of history. But then, of course, how could they? They were quite blind, and would have seen only the printed words.

  In spite of his turmoil, he found amusement in the feelings of the little Dane who sat just beyond Carney. The doctor from Copenhagen wanted to be kind, but not conspicuous. He was conscious that the television cameras had picked him out when they followed Joe and Carney into the row of seats. Should he speak? Or should he ignore them? It was obvious they were principals in this farce because they had been with that…that woman. On the other hand, what would four hundred million people think if he turned his back?

  “Je suis tres heureux de faire voire connaisance,” he said formally to Carney. It seemed a fair compromise of the dilemma, not to speak the mother tongue of either of them.

  “That’s O.K. by me,” Carney grunted back at him with the arrogance of the ill at ease.

  The Dane was quite happy that he had been snubbed; now he would not need to be drawn into further conversation. He started to speak to his companion on the other side, but his and all the eyes in the amphitheater were pulled to the doorway of the anteroom where Hoskins and Superintendent Jones were coming through.

  Hoskins took his place beside Bossy, feeling somewhat like a teenager who didn’t know what to do with his hands and feet. He was some of Flynn’s window-dressing, like the consulting physicians; he knew it, he resented it, and he showed his resentment by scowling at the camera lenses.

  Superintendent Jones, a superior major domo, stepped to the microphone, glanced at the wall clock which showed precisely 8:00 A.M., smirked for the benefit of the four hundred million watchers, and bowed appreciatively to his peers.

  With labored dignity, with the pedantic reserve so dear to the clan, and in its own way as theatrical as any bump girl at the burlesque, he welcomed the distinguished gentlemen who had come from all over the world for this momentous occasion.

  “Isn’t he an ass?” Howard Kennedy whispered into Joe’s ear. The old man had slipped in, unnoticed, as Hoskins and Jones were attracting the camera. He was beaming with pride at the superintendent’s performance. It was precisely what would appeal to the distinguished gentlemen.

  Joe smiled his appreciation at Kennedy’s shrewdness, but at that moment Billings stepped into the dark frame of the doorway. Not quite as skilled in theatrics, he had stepped on Jones’ last line by appearing too suddenly. The superintendent had intended to direct the cameras to the doorway at the proper time with a practiced wave of the hand, but they found it without his aid.

  Billings was in a dressing robe, and slippers. Except for one quick glance at Hoskins, and one searching glance in the direction where Joe sat, he kept his eyes on the floor. One of the doctors guided him to the table in approved operating room fashion.

  The cameras went mad, showing side shots, under shots, over shots, closeups, and montages.

  Billings stepped to the microphone.

  “I want you gentlemen to understand,” he said clearly, “that this is like any other experiment in science. I would have preferred that many experiments be run before this demonstration. There are so many factors which we do not yet understand that all this is premature, vastly premature.”

  He was capturing the balcony audience. This was language they understood and approved. In sampling the somatics of the room, Joe felt there was a lessening of the skepticism.

  “In the first stages of any new advance in science, there is never any guarantee of success,” Billings went on. “It is only after we have isolated the impurities and variances and learned to compensate for them that we can predict an outcome. In this instance we have the variance of the human being, himself. We do not know, yet, what the constants are which will cause a positive result, and what the variants which will cause a negative.”

  A few of the men in the balcony nodded in approval. This was a little more like it.

  “Whether the results here are positive or negative does not really matter very much. Whi
chever way it goes, please reserve your final judgment”

  He stepped away from the microphone to the table where he was to lie, and removed his dressing gown and slippers. As a concession to the still pitifully warped tensions of some of his audience who were so revolted by their own salacious attitudes toward the human body that they could not bear to look at it, he kept on a pair of white trunks.

  Dr. Billings looked all of his seventy-two years. His skin was blue-white and hung in festoons about his frame, as if the constant pull of gravity through all those years had won out against its natural tautness. His whole body sagged as if it could no longer hold up against the insidious and constant pull of gravity.

  “I’m ready, Duane,” he told Hoskins.

  Hoskins nodded brusquely, and made a swift motion to one of the doctors. They helped Billings onto the table. Hoskins began to help Billings connect the network of electrodes. At each ankle where the pulse beats near the surface, at the inside points of the thighs, at the wrists, at the temples, below the occiput where the spine joins the skull, at each point an electrode was placed against the skin and fastened.

  “You are to apply the same kind of therapy used on Mabel,” Billings said to Bossy.

  There was a gasp from the audience. He had spoken as if to another doctor! The open-mindedness created by his cautious words when addressing them was canceled out. One does not speak casually to a machine about medical therapy. One sets rheostats, pushes levers, pulls knobs, focuses views, sets timers, or at least feeds in a pre-punched tape of instructions.

  “Wait a minute!” commanded one of the attending physicians. “What have you done to the machine in advance?”

  “Nothing,” Hoskins said shortly. “Nothing at all. Bossy learned the process of therapy from Dr. Billings when it was applied to Mabel. Bossy retains and applies what she learns. There’s been a plethora of publicity on how she does that.”

  Every observer in the room leaned forward, following the exchange of words.

  The consulting physician subsided, but he was not convinced. Obviously they had tinkered with the machine in advance, and were now using the rawest kind of quackery to impress the credulous. A machine that could take over anything so complex as psychosomatic therapy upon a simple command! Preposterous!

  Billings sank back on the table. Bossy was silent, except for a faint, high whine. Billings closed his eyes. The meters on the walls showed that his pulse was slowing, his breathing becoming deeper and less frequent. The encephalograph recorder began to show the rhythmic patterns characteristic of hypnosis.

  And any doctor in the house could have told how all this could be faked.

  For an hour nothing happened. The audience was becoming restive. What was there to see? A man lay on the table, with some wires attached to him. A machine sat beside him. It was very poor entertainment.

  Steve Flynn became more restive than anyone else. When you produce a miracle for the public, they want to see fireworks. He, personally, left his seat and went down into the arena.

  “What’s happening?” he asked Hoskins.

  Hoskins shrugged.

  “Well, isn’t there any way of finding out?” Flynn asked.

  Hoskins turned to Bossy.

  “Can you give a progress report?”

  “No progress,” Bossy flashed back instantly.

  This visual message shot out to the world. There was a sigh of uneasiness. Had they sat glued to their television screens for a whole hour for nothing?

  Flynn shook his head in exasperation. He had had detailed plans for every move up to this point, and some pretty clear plans for the time when Billings bounded off the table, a lithe and vibrant youth. But the time of therapy had been vague in his mind. He had supposed there would be a great deal of activity, with doctors speaking crisply about scalpels, sutures, cotton, forceps. He had visualized machine breakdowns at critical moments with Hoskins working frantically to restore Bossy to working condition, with perhaps a breathless attitude of wondering if the jury-rigging would hold past the crisis.

  But this—nothing!

  A half hour later, at 9:30, Hoskins repeated his question. The answer was the same.

  “No progress.”

  At eleven o’clock Billings stirred and sat up. His face was drawn, his eyes were filled with grief of failure.

  “Let’s try it from the beginning again,” he said slowly.

  He lay back down.

  “What is happening?” Flynn asked Hoskins.

  “I don’t know,” Hoskins answered.

  There was a subdued gasp from the audience. A scientist was expected to know.

  Flynn turned desperately toward his boss, Kennedy. His eyes fell on Joe.

  “Mr. Carter,” he said suddenly, “can you tell us what is happening?”

  For an instant, Joe was on the verge of refusing. Then he decided they would have to know sometime, it might as well be now.

  He stood up, stepped past Kennedy’s knees. He faced the microphone, and the television eyes.

  “All of the learned gentlemen in this room know, but for the benefit of those in the television audience who do not know, psychosomatic therapy is applied through a form of mild hypnosis, wherein the patient is conscious but rendered cooperative with the therapist. The therapist does not have complete command of the patient. If at any point the patient is commanded to let loose of a conviction which he believes more important than the cure, the therapist is defeated. There can be no progress.

  “Apparently Dr. Billings is unable to give up some firm convictions which he believes to be right.”

  He did not elaborate further. The doctors would know, they had had patients they could not help. Each of them who had practiced psychotherapy of any kind would have had patients who preferred their own interpretation rather than adopt the doctor’s. As for the general public, they’d better be given the chance to think about this for a while.

  He walked back to his seat.

  Kennedy watched him with narrowed eyes.

  “That’s what you meant about me,” he mumbled as Joe sat down.

  Joe sighed.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can’t you step up the juice a little?” Flynn was asking Hoskins. “If that’s all it is, just turn on more power and make him give up his convictions.”

  Joe stood up again and spoke from his seat.

  “That kind of therapy, the use of force to make a man give up his convictions, has been tried since the dawn of history. I think we should have learned by now that it won’t work.”

  The audience shifted uneasily. This young man, whoever he was, was taking too much authority upon himself.

  At that point Billings sat up again, and slowly began to disconnect the electrodes from his body. Four words were printed on Bossy’s communication screen which told the whole story.

  “No progress is possible.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  Joe, Steve Flynn and Howard Kennedy sat in the industrialist’s office, and were silent. Kennedy sat with his back to the huge desk and stared out of the picture window which looked out over the city and the bay. Steve Flynn perused the papers with an almost masochistic zeal, searching out even minor comment from the back pages, as if, having had salt poured into his wounds, to have it all done at once.

  Joe sat back in his chair, comfortable and resting, waiting until some plan of procedure would begin to jell in the other men’s minds.

  He knew that the danger to man’s progress does not come from the scientist who constructs and verifies a structure of theory and methodology, but from that man’s followers. Whatever the university attended, whatever the degree obtained, the simple fact, as he had observed it in men’s minds, was that most men, even scientists, do not have the courage to follow the basic tenets of science; that even though they may call it science they actually stand upon a structure of faith. And having had one structure taken out from under them, they seize upon another and guard it with a desperate frenzy, lest it, t
oo, be threatened.

  Speculative theory then becomes canonized law; suggested procedure becomes ritual; tentative statements become rote. And if their practice of it makes them successful, it becomes impossible for them to conceive of any other truth but their own. It works, therefore it is right. The originator, having had the flexible intelligence to vary from the old and create a new, might have been able to conceive of still yet another structure than his own; but his followers have the proof of their own infallibility always before their eyes.

  Joe was aware of the obvious; that any theory is true within the framework where it applies; and any theory is false outside its own coordinate system. He knew, and now Bossy had proved his knowledge, that it is never the accuracy of the theory as an absolute, but rather the persistence of applying it and staying well within the boundaries of its framework which brings success.

  So the growing organism of speculative consideration hardens into the ironclad coffin of orthodoxy.

  And orthodoxy was having its day.

  Bossy was something new. Bossy did not fit into their theory structure therefore Bossy was, per se, wrong. They would gladly go to their graves, firm and proud to the last expiring breath of how right they were.

  “Listen to what Dr. Frederick Pomeroy says,” Steve spoke up, and read aloud without waiting for a response.

  “We should remember that Bossy was never intended to be more than an accident-prevention device on our faster military planes. The imputation of therapeutic qualities is a travesty on our intelligence. When the truth of the Mabel Monohan case is finally uncovered—and it will be uncovered, never fear—we shall undoubtedly find that a shameful fraud has been perpetrated on the public.’”

  Flynn flicked the page with his fingertip.

  “That just about sums up most of the comment,” he said. “Unless you’d like to hear what Dr. Eustace Fairfax, consulting psychologist for the San Francisco Police Department, has to say?”