They'd Rather Be Right

by Mark Clifton

  Spring came, and then it was June. Commencement exercises were no more than a reluctant interlude from the work. Billings watched Joe throw off his graduating cap and gown, and in almost the same movement start assembling the requests for student deferments from compulsory military service. A summer session extraordinary had been declared that no time be lost in the work on Bossy, and the entire university was humming on a factory schedule.

  A new respect had been gained for a baby’s mind. Ordinarily adults thought of the newborn baby as just lying there, inert mentally, accomplishing little learning beyond finding out that a cry would summon attention, a nipple placed between its lips would start the reflex of sucking. Now they realized the multitudes of unrelated sense impressions that mind must be storing, the repeated patterns which impressed themselves upon its brain—and prediction of the future.

  “If I cry, there will be approaching footsteps. I stop my crying to listen for them. If I do not hear them, I cry again. Soon there will be comforting hands and I will be dry and warm again.”

  And any young mother knows this is accomplished in a few weeks. One by one the patterns are learned, the sensation relationships repeat themselves, a word is spoken in connection with an object or an action. Always the word and the object appear simultaneously—they are cojoined, one produces the other. Relationships become vaguely apparent. Cause and effect emerge as an expectancy.

  If it were not that a baby was human, one might set up certain laws of procedure. An outside world datum makes an impact upon a sensory receptor. This is accompanied by other impacts of other data. There is a relationship of each to the other. And long before there is any concept of self, as an entity, there is a realization of self to the data. Not all the data appear each time and in the same order. But if enough data appear to strike up the harmonics of association with a previous experience—judgment is assumed. Through repetition of patterns of trial and error, some reflex and some calculated, action upon judgment takes place.

  But the baby is human, and therefore mysterious, and we may not simplify the awful metaphysics of an awakening human mind into a set of mechanical steps. The human mind is set apart, the human mind could not contemplate itself as being no more than an operation of an understandable process.

  But it was different with Bossy. Bossy was a machine, and therefore the processes which would substitute for thought must be approached mechanically. Bossy recognized solely through mechanical indexing—no different in principle from the old-fashioned punched card sorter. This and this and this is the same as that and that and that—therefore these two things have a relationship to one another. Comparison of new data with old data, a feedback process of numerous indexed impulses and these to the external sense receptors and their stream of new impulses—really it was quite trivial.

  It was only coincidence that it seemed, here and there, to duplicate the results of an infant mind. Only coincidence that as new experience and new data were being constantly applied, new areas of experience exposed to Bossy, that she should seem to follow the process of the learning child.

  Strictly coincidence, and one must not be fooled by coincidence.

  As Billings watched Joe assemble the lists of deferments, he wondered about the young man. Since their conversation, when he had asked Joe to use his talents to further the project, they had talked no more than the work required. Billings was no closer to knowing Joe than he had ever been, and Joe volunteered nothing. He did not know what Joe had done to clear away the mental blocks which had prevented the scientists from grasping the problem, he had only the overt evidence that something had been done.

  Really this project was all he had claimed it would be. Attempt to reduce it to simplicity though they may, it still remained that all of man’s science up to the present had been required to produce it. Bossy’s accomplishment was for all time the monument to the triumph of science, the refutation that science exists only through the indifferent tolerance of the average man, the refutation also that man has never used his intellect except to rationalize, justify and decorate with high-sounding phrases the primitive urges he intended to foster anyway. For it had taken intellect to produce Bossy, intellect of a high order, reaching up to—detachment.

  “Oh, by the way, doctor,” Joe looked up from his work at the desk and interrupted Billings’ thinking, “have you been following the articles on witchcraft?”

  “Why…why no, Joe,” Billings answered. “I hadn’t noticed. What about them?”

  “There’s a trend,” Joe said. “At first the articles started out faintly deploring, and then explaining. Now there is the current theory that scientists and thinkers generally tend to get off the right track. That there is a mass wisdom for doing the right thing for mankind, embodied in the masses of people. That mankind has proved steadily and progressively he knows what is best for him; and therefore the so-called witchcraft suppression was simply man’s way, an instinctive inherent rightness, to keep from being led into the wrong ways of thinking.”

  “That is a very common line of thinking,” Billings said without much interest. “How are you coming along with that roster of deferments?”

  He saw Joe throw him a quick, appraising look, and then turn back to his work again. Probably nothing significant about Joe’s remarks. Young men tended to become much too horrified as they realized the terrible stupidity of mankind. As one grows older, one doesn’t expect so much; loses some of the idealism of what man should be.

  “It’s pretty extensive, doctor,” Joe said in a colorless voice. “When I think that a similar list is being prepared in every college throughout the country…well, the military isn’t going to like not being able to harvest its new crop. There’ll be an investigation.”

  Billings hardly heard him. His mind continued along the track of comparison of Bossy and a child. Every day new sensations fed into the child, new admonitions, corrections, approvals, patterns fed into stored accumulation of past sensations and conclusions. Sensations on the order of billions, perhaps trillions—no wonder that thought seemed complex, ungraspable. But as with so many problems the difficulty was size and bulk—and complexity was no more than superimposure of simple upon simple.

  But human beings did not learn fast, most of them required many repetitions of a pattern before they grasped it. The man was rare, indeed, who could memorize a book in scanning it once. Really now, a very poor job had been done in tailoring the molecular structure of—

  Bossy required only once. Perhaps Joe was right. Perhaps man was still evolving. Perhaps his brain was no more than a rudimentary light-sensitive cell as compared with the eye. Perhaps that was why his brain gave such a poor performance, it had not evolved into its potential.

  Billings sat, gazing out of the window at the elm trees and the sky.

  “Yes,” he murmured, moments later to Joe’s comment. “No doubt there will be an investigation.” He wondered, vaguely, what there would be an investigation about—but no matter, there were always investigations.

  Surely it would have nothing to do with Hoxworth University, or himself. For the assignment had succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings. Perhaps it was immodest, but surely the success of Bossy would be emblazoned across the pages of history for a thousand years—the greatest achievement of all time; and his name would be that of its author.

  Man! Know thyself!

  “We must not allow ourselves to become fascinated with the sensation mongering of these investigations, Joe,” he said chidingly. “We are thinkers, and we have work to do.”

  Again he felt the quick, questioning look from Joe, but dismissed it and continued with his development of vision. Plainly, Joe still lacked wisdom.

  Through the weeks that followed another tension began to assume proportions too great to be ignored. As long as there had been such a recognized thing as science, itself, here had been a controversy concerning one aspect of it. A thing is composed of numerous properties which a theory or an equation must take into ac
count if a satisfactory solution is to be attained. Some of these properties are intangible, but none the less real, such as friction, or gravity. Some are still variable and unpredictable. Thus one of the real and inescapable properties of a thing is—human reaction to it. An automobile could not be called a satisfactory invention if no one would drive it; an electric light could not be called a solution to illuminating darkness if man smashed it in frenzied rage each time he saw it. Since man can know a thing only through the mind of man, then the mind of man is one of its inherent properties. So said a school of philosophy.

  This pro school held that human reaction to a thing was as real as gravity or friction; that a scientist who ignored it was like a mechanical engineer who persisted in ignoring the effects of friction, a structural engineer who ignored gravity. On the con side, it was considered that the physical scientist had plenty to do in measuring physical forces and properties; that the force of human reaction, if it existed, belonged in someone else’s problem basket.

  The pro school held this was not true; that the pharmaceutical chemist did assume responsibility for the effect of his concoctions upon human mind and tissues, the structural engineer did assume some responsibility for the end use of his houses or bridges, the mechanical engineer did assume some responsibility for people using his motor; that no arbitrary line could be drawn separating responsibility from nonresponsibility.

  The con school, in the vast majority because it is easier to evade responsibility than to assume it, still passed the buck.

  And because this real property of things continued to be ignored, the gap between the scientist and the man in the street widened, and widened, and stretched out farther and farther. Any physical scientist knows that regardless of theory, there is a practical limit to the elasticity of a material. There is also a limit to the elasticity of human reaction to a science it can not understand, and therefore fears.

  It became also apparent, in these weeks, that there was a serious leak of details on the progress of Bossy. No project as widespread as the work on Bossy could be kept entirely under security. Even where trained scientists possess only scraps and portions of the whole knowledge, misconceptions will occur. And multitudes of those working on some phase of Bossy were not yet trained scientists. They were students. Students, for all the grave respect they hold for the weight and importance of their knowledge, are notorious for misconceptions. There is a dividing line between effective scientist and student, but it has nothing to do with graduation exercises. Too many remain students, multiplying misconception upon misconception. An astonishing number of these, unable to make their way in the laboratory, turn to teaching for their living. The gap between science and superstition widens.

  Beyond a serious central leak, which was becoming apparent, there were widespread rumors and bits of information leaking out. Each, in itself, was perhaps a harmless thing—if properly weighed and stripped of its exaggerations and misinterpretations. But human beings, generally, are not noted for their ability to weigh judiciously, discount exaggerations, and allow for possible misunderstanding. People like sensationalism, and in the telling add their bit to it.

  Bossy, at first ignored as being the business of the scientists and having no relationship to bread and bed, suddenly became a topic of conversation everywhere. Everyone found he had an opinion. 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 gasoline 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 proteins, 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 comer 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 regrouped 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 mias
ma 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 wisdom. 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 comer 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.