They'd Rather Be Right (25 page)

The background, the buildup and the setting for Bossy’s second experiment gave Steve Flynn the material for what he began to call his masterpiece.

The first announcement after the promise of demonstration was that Howard Kennedy Enterprises held Bossy in trust. This reassured the public further. His fairness, his philanthropy, his scorn of graft and corruption were well known. The public was far more reassured than if Bossy had been in the hands of the government. He did not claim to own Bossy, he held it in trust until its ownership could be determined.

The second announcement was that Jonathan Billings, the world renowned scientist who had been the key figure in Bossy’s development, would undergo the second experiment. It was fitting that the machine’s creator should undergo its test. He was old, very old; and he was great, very great. If anyone deserved restoration, renewal, perpetuation, immortality—he did. The public, which had been ready to flay him, burn him at the stake for witchcraft, now wept with joy.

“I’ve done a lot of things,” Steve Flynn confided to Joe. “I’ve taken no-talent girls from Corncob, Kansas, and made them into sultry eyed stars of TV. I’ve turned income tax chiselers into great hearted philanthropists. My campaign of making a public enemy into a governor, and a governor into a public enemy was a thing of sheer beauty. But this is my best, Joe. This is my masterpiece. This will always stand as the best of Steve Flynn.”

“What if it’s too good?” Joe asked.

“Huh?”

“What if you sell the people more than Bossy can deliver?”

“Are you kidding? Bossy has already delivered. She’s turned an old hag into a lovely doll. The public wants to see that happen again, and when they do—oh, brother! Kennedy could turn every production line he owns into a stream of Bossies and there still wouldn’t be enough!”

“It may not work this time,” Joe said slowly. “Bossy may not be able to help Dr. Billings.”

Steve Flynn stopped astride the television cables which were being strung across the floor to the Clinic’s huge amphitheater. He squinted thoughtfully at Joe.

“What are you getting at, kid?” he asked.

“Kennedy has been good to me,” Joe answered. “I don’t want you to build this thing up to the point where he will get hurt.”

Flynn, standing in wide-legged stance across the cables, threw back his head and shouted his laughter.

“Kid,” he said, in between gasps of laughter, “you Brains kill me. Now you’re smart, I’ll give you that. I’ve been watching you. It didn’t take me long to see you ran this little show around here. But you’re kind of looking through the wrong end of the telescope. You’ve been handling a couple of misty minded professors ... oh they’re great men, I’ll give you that ... but, honestly, they haven’t got enough sense to come in out of the rain. Don’t let it give you big britches. Howard Kennedy is something else again.”

“Just so you’re both prepared for anything that could happen,” Joe murmured.

Steve Flynn stepped across the cables and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“You let us worry about that. We’ve been in and out of more scrapes than you’ve got days in your life. You just stick to your little show, and we’ll stick to ours.”

Flynn was right. They were the experts in molding public opinion. Joe was limited to individuals about him. He knew that the public, like an individual, once triggered into a given response, followed out the pattern of sequent responses with clocklike fidelity. But Steve Flynn was the expert on how to pull the trigger to get a given mass reaction. To carry out the plan which had now begun to crystallize in his mind, Joe needed this expert service, just as he had needed the physical scientists in creating Bossy. The science of one was as intricate as the science of the other.

And both of them led to the two-dimensional entry of Bossy.

Flynn left him with the admonition, and became engrossed with his assistants in the center of the amphitheater. Joe watched as he pointed up to the encircling tiers of seats which would soon be filled with the world’s leading medical men and scientists.

It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. At eight, the next morning, the experiment was to begin.

Joe stretched out on his bed and tried to compose himself for dinner with Billings and Hoskins. Their relationships with him were a little strained, since it had be-come obvious to them that Joe and Mabel were deeply in love. They were a couple possessed with one another to the exclusion of everyone around them, not knowing or caring who saw.

Billings was wavering between amused tolerance and bewilderment. The younger generation did seem to give way to its impulses these days without restraint. In his day there had been suitable lapses of time, some attention to common advantage, testing for assurances—and just general respectability.

Hoskins wavered among more elemental thoughts. It seemed quite obvious to him that in one respect at least old Mabel had not changed. She still showed no signs of being inhibited in her reactions to a man—or, he amended, to Joe. And, on the other hand, he burned with a resentment against Joe for having taken such quick and irresponsible advantage of an innocent young girl. Since these two concepts were diametrically opposed and self-contradictory, Hoskins succeeded in maintaining the state of mind usual to most people most of the time.

But, in common with the usual attitude of the male sex, that portion which has kept a reasonably healthy pattern, both men kept telling themselves it was none of their business. In this latter concept, Joe agreed with them.

But he was concerned for Mabel’s reactions. He had been born, apparently, with this mutated insight into the thoughts and reactions of others. From the first, he had accepted it as a normal attribute of his life. He had never been accustomed to anything except that thin tissue of semi-rationality stretched over a tangled, seething, maggoty mass of putrefaction.

But Mabel’s awareness was sudden. Psi sight alternately dazzled her with delight and horrified her.

Joe kept a portion of himself in her mind all the time soothing her, comforting her, buffeting away the shocks. The photography had been an ordeal which had sickened her. She was unable to comprehend why man had done these things to himself. She was totally unable to adapt to a society which permitted the frustrated and psychotic to set up the laws and mores of behavior which resulted in the mass crippling of the whole human race.

After the session with the photographers, she kept to her room where the contacts were less shocking, and where under the influence of Joe she began to accustom herself to the world in which she now lived. She began to see the things Joe pointed out to her—the wonderful things man had accomplished, the tremendous courage he had, the beauty of the dawning intellect working to overcome the almost insuperable hazard of the submind.

Billings did not oppress her; and surprisingly, neither did Carney. She sensed that both of them, each in his own way, were trying, as she did, to find an equilibrium in a new status of things. She filled in her days with sleeping a great deal, a reaction to the exhaustion of psi shock. Her waking hours were spent in pondering the many things she had learned and was still learning, with short visits by Billings and Carney, for even these men who intended greatest gentleness exhausted her quickly.

Waking or sleeping, she was with Joe all the time. She was sleeping now, completely enraptured with Joe down in the deep, clear pool of her mind.

He withdrew a portion of himself and switched on the radio.

The strident syllables of the newscaster hammered on his ears in sudden shock.

“... Four hundred million people to be watching and listening while the venerable Dr. Billings regains his youth ... the great tragedy of life that a man barely begins to grasp his subject before death overtakes him now averted at last ...”

Joe switched off the set in sudden disgust. The thought was too shallow to waste time on, and no doubt the newscaster thought it was profound! But this was probably all a part of Steve Flynn’s pulling the trigger. It was strictly single-valued logic.

At dinner, Joe was appalled to learn that Billings shared the newscaster’s view.

“Among the three of us,” Billings said, “I know that Joe is more responsible for Bossy than anyone else.”

“It was our knowledge that Joe adapted,” Hoskins countered. “Not discounting what you’ve done, Joe, but regardless of side effects of telepathy, you can’t abstract something from a mind if it isn’t there.”

“That’s right,” Joe said instantly. “I’m perfectly content that public credit should be given to Dr.

Billings and to you. Actually, I don’t think any one of us can claim more credit than any other person who contributed directly or indirectly to Bossy. Without every bit of the technique and skill, Bossy wouldn’t have worked, or wouldn’t have been superior to any other cybernetic machine.”

“To me,” Billings said slowly, “the issue of real importance is that now a man need never again be oppressed by the knowledge that his lifetime of work will be canceled out. Think of the great benefit to mankind through perpetuating a trained and skilled mind indefinitely.”

Joe closed his eyes to conceal his sudden grief. Now he knew that Billings was not yet ready for Bossy. And yet, could he be entirely sure of that? Did Billings really believe this? Or did he merely think he believed it? Under the genuine test of Bossy, herself, would he see the fallacy? He tried to probe the future, but failed. The flashes of prescience came seldom, and never when really needed.

Or was his own concept wrong? He could not be sure. Who was he, Joe Carter, to set up arbitrary conditions for renewal? He thought he had grasped a point which all of them apparently overlooked, but could he be sure?

And Bossy? She had shown no signs of it, but was she, too, afflicted with the all too human taint of piling fallacy upon fallacy until a whole logical and seemingly unassailable structure was developed?

What if she, too, carried the skill to reconcile anything—the apparent ideal of current logical thought?

What if she failed? What if she accepted Billings instead of rejecting him?

They finished their dinner in silence. Billings left the table early. He appeared both anxious to get away, and to linger. He had the impulse to make a little farewell speech and cast about for some little remark both casual and significant.

Hoskins resolutely maintained a clinical attitude. Joe flashed Billings a smile and a warm wave of somatic encouragement. It suddenly occurred to Billings that he was being slightly theatrical about it. He left the room hurriedly, to prevent making a fool of himself.

Hoskins went to look at Bossy once more, to make sure that her metal shone, to view her from various places in the amphitheater. This was the real debut of his pride and joy. He regarded her as a sort of child prodigy. He hoped she would perform well at her first public concert. It never occurred to him that what Joe would consider Bossy’s failure would be interpreted by everyone else as a huge success.

Joe tried to conceal his uncertainty from Mabel, but it was no use. This time it was he who was the comforted and she the comforter. In the feedback flight of their ecstasy she drew further comfort from giving it.

Perhaps Steve Flynn was the only one of the central group who slept well during that night. The public mind was like a giant console organ. By touching the proper stops, he could play any quality of tune on it he wished. As always, he slept easily in the certainty of his skill.

Breakfast, with Billings, Carney, Hoskins, Joe and Mabel, was no more than half over when Steve Flynn burst in upon them, as full of stage management as a scout mother. Mabel was trying to harden herself to withstand the somatic torture of mental tensions about her, but she was able to bear only a few minutes of Flynn. She did promise him that she would make an appearance in front of the scientists; but then she had to leave the room to rest in preparation for the ordeal.

She was beginning to learn the reality of what Joe had told her—that an esper has to develop a level of strength and courage completely unknown to the normal; that, at times, simply to be in the same room with certain normals was a drain on endurance almost beyond bearing; that no outward sign of this might show lest it rouse the uncomprehending contempt of the normals and add to the burden; that apparently one had to harden into it the way a long-distance runner or swimmer would train.

Flynn’s eyes followed her as she went out of the room, but Joe knew the look was professional. He was mentally posing her, photographing her, composing catchy paragraphs about her, displaying her to the pub-lic like a piece of exotic merchandise. She was a doll, all right, but he had seen so many dolls in his time, he would rather look at a horse.

Carney’s eyes followed her, too. His mind was filled with bewilderment, puzzlement. he did not know her now, and he felt a sense of irreparable loss; more than if she had died. He could have understood and reconciled to that; but this had thrown him completely. He was glad that Joe had agreed to let him watch the renewal of Billings, perhaps that would help him to understand Mabel once more. He felt as if he should be doing something to find Mabel, as if she were lost, and he didn’t know any way of going about it.