They'd Rather Be Right

by Mark Clifton

  Billings threw back his head and laughed with sudden relief.

  “Joe!” he exclaimed. “You’re the living example that special talent or knowledges does not bring with it special wisdom or common sense! Don’t you realize that every time we ask somebody to pass the salt at the table, or honk our horn at someone on the street, or buy a pair of socks, or give a lecture, that we are controlling the thought and action of others?”

  “It isn’t the same,” Joe insisted. “You normals are blind and fumbling and crude about it. You just bump into one another in your threshing about. And you can always refuse to obey one another.”

  “Not really, Joe,” Billings said. “How long would a man last in his freedom if he refused to do the million things society required of him? I doubt if there’s much essential difference in the kind of pressure you could bring, and the kind which the whole society brings upon a man. You say we fumble, while you could do it expertly. I think I’d rather have an expert work on me than a fumbler. What is the difference in your planting the thought of what these scientists should do, and my sending them a written order? Great Scott, boy, if you can get them to accomplish this thing, then you must go ahead.”

  “Whatever I think needs to be done to accomplish it, doctor?”

  “Whatever the project requires to carry it to completion,” Billings defined, “remembering that this thing can be the solution for mankind, push him up to the next evolutionary rung.”

  Joe was silent for a little while, and then spoke slowly.

  “But they mustn’t known. Outside of a man’s own isolated field of knowledge, he’s as superstitious as all the rest. They’ve got all kinds of the wildest ideas about how dangerous and evil a telepath might be. They mustn’t known. You’ve got to remember that sanity in a person or a civilization is like a small boat on the surface of an ocean. If the subterranean depths get roiled up enough, the boat capsizes and there’s nothing but the storming chaos of madness.”

  “Is that the way we appear to you, Joe?”

  “That’s the way man is,” Joe said simply.

  “Then if you can keep from rocking the boat when you direct their thinking on this project, you can depend on me to keep it secret, Joe.” Billings said reassuringly.

  “It’s perfectly ethical, all right, for me to control their thinking on this project, then?”

  “Perfectly all right, Joe,” Billings said with emphasis. And he thought he meant it.

  The door opened wider.

  It was Hoskins, in charge of the cybernetic aspects, who put the general feeling into words a few days later.

  “I’ve often observed,” Hoskins said to no one in particular, as several of them sat around the general meeting room, “that you’ll be faced with a problem which looks completely unsolvable—there’s just no point at which you can grab hold of it—then suddenly, for no reason at all, the whole thing smooths out.”

  Billings darted a quick look at Joe, but that young man, busy at a small table over in the comer of the room, did not look up from his job of assembling various reports into order.

  Another, perhaps even more significant piece of evidence became apparent, that the men were incorporating the problem into their thinking normally. The thing acquired a name—Bossy. Suddenly everyone was using it. The animal husbandry department had supplied it.

  “Anybody who has ever handled cows knows they can be the most onery, cantankerous, stubborn critters you ever saw one minute, and completely gentle and obedient the next,” one of the men from that department said.

  And that about described their feelings toward Bossy at this time.

  Billings had been trying for some time to find a descriptive name, using the familiar method of initials of descriptive words—sensory—apperceptor—indexer—appraiser—comparer—extrapolator—predictor—chooser—activator—He bogged down, not only in that the initials seemed to add up to nothing pronounceable, but the list of terms themselves merely added to the confusion. He, too, called it Bossy. Somehow that was best—for Bossy was, in spite of her contrariness, domesticated, inferior to man, controllable—and gave milk. Quite consciously, he was comforted by the semantics of the name.

  Rogan, too, accepted the name. He was a little scandalized and as yet Washington hadn’t give any reaction which would guide his attitude, but unless the meat or dairy industry objected, there seemed to be nothing subversive about it.

  A third evidence, stronger than the other two, was that everyone began talking about sensory receptors. They reasoned that if a pilot sees and hears and feels the external world about him, even though instruments are measuring these things more accurately than he can determine them, then Bossy must also have the receptors to bring sight and sound and feeling.

  First, as a joke, and then no longer kidding about it, they decided to give her taste and smell while they were about it. And then someone spoke out in the commons room and said they were pikers. They’d give her sight that a human pilot couldn’t have, such as radar. They’d give her sensitivity such as no human being could feel—like the seismograph. They’d give her gyroscopic balance that would make the inner fluid of the human ear less than mentionable. They’d give her—

  The talk of what they would give Bossy, all the delicate ways man has evolved to detect things beyond the range of his crude dull senses, went on far into the night.

  Sensory receptors were not too difficult to manage. It was rather astonishing, when one assembled them all together, how widely man had already duplicated human sense receptors. For sight, in the human visual range, there was the electronic camera, the light sensitive film of the photographic plate, the selenium cell, and other. Beyond the normal eye range there was radar, and other infrared and violet-light detectors. There was a wealth of sound-sensitive instruments; and a plethora of touch and feel instruments used by industry in product inspection and analysis. The taste and scent instruments were not so well developed, but there were some, and, approaching it through chemical effect, there could be others.

  It was common knowledge, too, that all these instruments converted the external senses to electrical impulse—not too far removed from the way the nerves carry the impact of the sense receptors to the brain.

  No one seemed to be bothered about what they would do when they got that far: that an electronic camera could pick up light rays and convert them into electrical impulses until it fogged its lenses, but the picture would have no meaning until the human eye viewed it and gave it meaning.

  They went about their job, instead, in the way a skilled artisan goes about his—knowing that problems may arise which he hasn’t yet worked out, but also confident that he can handle them when they do arise.

  Their work, at this point, was the reduction of size, greater sensitivity, combining the principles of many instruments into one. The human eye contains a hundred and thirty million light sensitive cells. It would be nice if they could get their camera orifices as tidy and sensitive.

  Each of the departments put its best students to work on its own problem, until the entire university was coordinated into working on some aspect of the job. The singleness of purpose, the drive for accomplishment was as much as could be asked by any industrialist.

  Rogan, too, was caught up in the enthusiasm, and surveyed the activity with a certain approval—for busy hands have no time for mischief. And he found himself with new duties, strange for a Resident Investigator. Hoxworth University did not have all the talent and equipment it needed for this project, not by any means. Rogan found himself assuming the role of a go-between with Washington, requesting, requisitioning, requiring services and specialists not only from other schools, but from industry itself.

  Operation Bossy became a familiar term in the administrative offices of Washington, and throughout the industrial and educational life of the nation. As with most other top-secret projects, everybody knew about it and was talking about it. The stories grew with the telling, and Joe’s insistence to Billings that it
be kept in the mechanical language began to have reason behind it. It was merely another form of the guided missile. No one realized what was really happening, not even the men working at its central core—not even Billings.

  Things were happening too fast for that. It was as if the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, cast carelessly upon a table, began to assemble themselves at various places, without much regard for one another, or where each would fit into the whole once the picture was done.

  Although no one had thought of synthetic textiles as being more than remotely connected with the project, it was that laboratory which came up with the impulse-storing ribbon. Yet they were the most logical to accomplish this. That field knows probably more than any other how to tailor and alter molecules to suit their purpose. Sound had long been stored on plastic tape; light, too, in photographic plastic.

  Without a hitch, Hoskins of cybernetics, began working in the synthetic textiles department, finding in its ability to polymerize and catalyze molecules the ideal opportunity for memory storage units. Again, the elimination of grossness became a major concern, and from the apertures there began to spew a thread, all but invisible, not more than a few molecules in breadth and thickness, with each molecule tailored to pick up and store its own burden of electrical impulse.

  Bossy began to take shape, and, oddly enough, the box took on a faint resemblance to a cow. Perhaps this was mainly due to the two eyestalks which sprouted out from near its upper surface, like horns topped with dragonfly eye lenses. None of this poor human vision for their Bossy. The diaphragm for picking up sound on the front of the box was vaguely like the blaze on an animal’s face, the apertures for air entrance where scent and taste could be sampled where like nostrils.

  It was as if there was an unconscious determination to see that the thing remained Bossy.

  A stream of specialized molecules poured past each sense receptor, picked up the electronic vibration, combined to make a thread, in the way that a motion-picture film picks up light and sound, so that when played back they coincide, and stored itself at the bottom of the case.

  They had not yet arrived at any point where a new basic principle needed to be found. Although, at this point, they had no more than a superior sense-recording machine. The thread could be played back, but that was all. And no one worried about it.

  It was music, another unlikely department, who gave the clue to the next step. A note struck on one key of the piano will, through the principle of harmonics, vibrate the strings at octaves above so that they also give off sound. Shouldn’t there be a vibronic code signal inherent in each sense stream, so that like things will activate harmonically with other like things? Wasn’t that how recognition took place through harmonically awakened association with like experience in the past?

  It was.

  Outwardly, Bossy ceased to take shape. To codify every sound, every shape, every vibration translated into touch and feel and scent and taste, every degree of light and color density was a monumental task—in terms of detail work, although its organization was not difficult. To translate these into electrical code impulses was difficult. But here again, no new principle was needed. Here again, man had merely the task defining the world in terms of symbol—and symbol in terms of code impulse.

  Nor was it too difficult to again tailor the molecules to carry electrical current, which, theoretically, would keep these code impulses vibrating in harmonics with those passing the sense receptor apertures.

  And still it was no more than an impulse storage bank. Only in theory was a new impulse activating its counterpart in old impulses. They had no way of testing it in practice. And felt supremely confident that a way would be found.

  No one who has not directed a large scale activity, coordinated the work of thousands of people and synthesized their results could fully comprehend the mass of work which fell upon Billings and his immediate staff. Many times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle, that the scope of activity had got out of hand. Yet inquiries and suggestions came from everywhere, and many of them were pertinent and valuable.

  It was as if the whole academic life of the nation had been swept up in the same urgency which had compelled him; as if men had something to think about which, for the moment, was unimpeded with restrictions and investigations.

  Yet, in spite of the weight of administrative detail, he had the feeling that he had full grasp of everything that was happening, and with a clarity of mind he had never experienced before he was able to see the relation of concepts one to the other.

  Perhaps it was this clarity which made him call a halt to the coding as it was developing, scrap much of what had been done, and start over. For it should have been obvious all along that identical things receiving identical codes was not enough. This had been the stumbling block of all cybernetic machines in the past. A tabulating pattern combined only identicals. They could combine the symbols for two apples and six apples correctly into eight apples, but when it came across one apple, it broke this out into a separate category, for the latter symbol differed from the former in that the letter “s” was missing. The cybernetic machines in the past had no sense, were not keyed to vagaries of grammar, spelling mistakes, variations which a child of eight would know were not really variations.

  A way must be found to duplicate the dull stupidity of the human mind which could not detect differences unless they were glaring, and yet retain the fine sensitivity of the cybernetic machine.

  It became apparent that not only must there be a code impulse for each isolated aspect of the external world, there must also be an interlocking code for activation to bring back the total picture. Remembrances are by association, one thing leads to another.

  A symbol of a square must not only activate any previous experience of the symbol of a square but also the circumstances in which that symbol was experienced. Yes, there must be a horizontal interlocking of codes, as well as vertical. For was not that the way decisions were made? In terms of how things, similar things, under similar circumstances, worked out in the past?

  Much had been written that the patterns of life duplicate themselves again and again and again; that the intelligent man recognizes this duplication even though it may be in a different guise, while the unintelligent and the machine do not and must solve each thing as if it were new.

  While they were setting up the new system of coding, the art department threw the worst curve of all. There was the matter of foreshortening. A square on a card looks square when faced head-on, but looks rectangular if the card is turned at an angle. The human mind learns to make adjustments for foreshortening, so shouldn’t Bossy? They asked it blandly, and perhaps a little maliciously, for they had not been consulted up to this point.

  Billings was dismayed at this obvious difficulty, and his spirits were not lifted either by the knowledge that it took over three thousand years of art painting for man to move from the side view of the foot, as portrayed by the Egyptians, to the front view, as discovered by the Greeks. And almost another five hundred years to move from the profile of the face to a front view.

  It would be difficult to achieve this for Bossy. Still, there was no new principles involved, simply a coding method which would tell Bossy that one object was truly a rectangle seen head-on, and another which appeared to be the same was really a square seen at an angle. It was the same kind of lateral coding which would solve this.

  The key to Bossy’s first overt reaction to stimuli came from one of the younger assistant professors one night in the common room. He was ruefully telling how his new baby responded to his wife’s hands with contentment and to his hands with fright. The baby was much too young to recognize the difference between mama and papa. It must be familiarity versus unfamiliarity in the manner of touch.

  A few days later, safety guards were installed around Bossy. They had long since installed the yes-no principle to be found in other cybernetic machines. There was jubilation and something approaching awe when Bossy demons
trated it could learn—and learn with only one trial. The safety guards were keyed to the reject pattern, but when Hoskins, who installed the guards, depressed the accept key for his own hands, thereafter the machine threw up its guards when approached by alien hands, but left them down for Hoskins’ hands. Perhaps it was mass, or shape codes. Perhaps it was color. Perhaps it was scent, for Hoskins had been working around the machine when scent codes were being fed into it. Still Hoskins had no code of his own scent as differeing from others. Scent was out, for the machine had no equipment whereby it might do its own coding.

  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 fail 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.