They'd Rather Be Right (31 page)

All around them, wherever they walked, was the clamor of man’s thoughts about immortality. In the fashion of a catch phrase which unaccountably sweeps the country, everyone knew that only five per cent of human beings were worth perpetuating.

At a bus stop, two homeward-bound businessmen were being practical about the whole problem.

“The things we’ve gotta watch,” one of them said, “is to see that some bunch of subversives don’t get control of this thing. What we need is a committee of sound-thinking people in each community to decide on who should get immortal.”

“Yeah,” the other agreed instantly. “You know as well as I do that only about five per cent of any community take hold of their responsibilities. The rest are dead weight.”

“Yeah, that’s been proved by statistics. Now you take you and me, Henry. We’re successful businessmen. How many people can make the grade? Only about five percent! And you and me, we gotta carry all the rest of the people on our backs.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the university, and saw three students, coming down the sidewalk toward him. He lowered his voice: “And I don’t mean just employees, either. You take all them high and mighty professors up there.

Where would they be if us businessmen didn’t carry them on our backs?”

Henry pursed his lips judiciously.

“Well, you’re right, Harry. But we gotta be big about this thing. Can’t afford to be narrow-minded and not see the other fellow’s point of view. Takes all kinds of people to make a world you know.”

“Oh, sure, sure, Henry. But on the other hand birds of a feather flock together and too many cooks spoil the soup. When you boil it all down there’s still only about five per cent of the people that aren’t completely worthless.”

They fell silent as the three young people came within earshot.

Mabel and Joe both gasped at the sudden spasm of laughing mischief which flooded Jeff’s mind.

“No, Jeff,” Joe murmured aloud. “Don’t.”

But Jeff lacked Joe’s lifetime of caution and concealment. He spoke just loudly enough to be overheard, and in the learned accents of the scholar which practical men find so insufferable.

“I tell you we must be careful who is allowed immortality. Some attention must be given to the appearance of the human race.”

He seemed to become conscious that the two men were watching them.

The
three passed the two on the
sidewalk. Each group was silent so as not to be eavesdropped upon. Each group eyed the other with a compound of con-temptuous and amused hostility which usually separates one generation from another.

“Think what the human race would look like,” Jeff continued, still in earshot, “if a couple of tubs of lard like those two were given immortality to seed the earth with broadbottomed, pot-bellied kids!”

Mabel gasped and staggered under the impact of the wave of choleric fury which swept over them.

Even Jeff was silenced. Mabel drew a deep breath and straightened.

“Your therapy is pretty strenuous, Jeff,” she said. “A couple of days ago I couldn’t have taken a blast
like that.”

Jeff’s concern washed over her, healing, soothing.

“I didn’t think about the effect of their reaction on you, Mabel,” he said contritely. “I was just testing to see just how big about it all they were capable of being when they made their selections. In their minds they had already summed us up and rejected us, you know.”

“I’m glad to know I can take it,” Mabel said.

“Yes,” Joe agreed silently. “So am I. Let’s turn this corner wide open, without testing first. Try to stay wide open. I’ll be there.”

They turned the corner—wide open. The visual scene and the psionic scene both lay in clear view.

A car, driven by a scholarly old gentleman, had just pulled past the pumps of the service station and over to the door of the garage at one side. The motor was missing, would the mechanic please look into it? The mechanic lifted the hood, and saw that one of the wires from the distributor cap had worked loose. Well of all the stupid old goats. Naturally that spark plug wouldn’t fire without any juice getting to it! He curbed the impulse to flare up in disgust at the helplessness of drivers in general. All the guy had to do was lift the hood and look!

But that was human beings for you. Ninety-five per cent of them wouldn’t know a piston ring from a fan belt. If it weren’t for the five per cent of guys like himself, guys who knew what made motors tick, the whole civilization would come to a stop. No matter how mechanized things got, it still boiled down to five per cent of the people carrying the other ninety-five per cent on their backs!

Interplayed with his thoughts was the great excitement in the old man’s mind. He was on his way up to the University with an unmistakable connecting link between the
Tu’un
and the Sung Dynasty in Chinese Art. He was filled with elation at this long sought discovery. He could hardly contain his impatience at the delay, but his visit would be a long one and last far into the night; a night of exhilarating discussion. And if that pesty motor got worse he might be left afoot. The mechanic was still bent over the frame of the car, fiddling with wires.

The old gentleman tasted the triumph of saying to the mechanic, “I have just discovered the connecting link between—” The awe which would fill the man’s face!

Then realization. The mechanic probably wouldn’t even recognize a Ming piece, much less a Tu’un!

Like the simple peasants of China, beasts of toil and burden, living only to sleep, to eat, to procreate their own misery.

It was only about five per cent of mankind which carried the lamp of knowledge and kept it glowing!

Only five per cent to carry the other ninety-five per cent on their backs. He unconsciously straightened his back, as if to shift the load, make it easier to bear.

From the window of his third-floor walk-up across the street, a middle-aged writer looked down on the scene below him. Gradually his eyes focused on the three students, the mechanic and the old man.

His thoughts left his space scout still fighting the controls of his ship to keep from being pulled into the sun, and, instead, analyzed the people below him in terms of his possible reading public. It would be a miracle if more than one of these belonged to the elite five per cent who read his stuff.

What a tragedy, what a horrible condemnation of the human race. Ninety-five per cent of the culture lagged far behind, as much as a quarter to a half century. Only five per cent were capable of speculating about a new idea, looking to the future, harbingers of progress. Five per cent who had to carry the rest of the culture on their backs, otherwise man would never progress at all!

Jeff could not resist the temptation. He shafted a thought into the writer’s mind.

“The trouble is,” the writer said aloud to himself in the way writers have, “ninety-five per cent of the people think in terms of single values. But what about multiple values?”

At first the words made no sense to him, also characteristic of writers, then he rushed over to his typewriter. He was triumphant at the breadth, the incredible vastness, of his inspiration. He tore the half finished page of space opera out of his machine. With nervous haste he threaded in a new page. He poised his fingers.

He did not write.

He picked up the pages of the half finished story from his desk. He did not even need to glance through them to know they were already out of date. His pseudo science analysis was no more than some tricky applications of thin single values. He tore the manuscript across and threw the pieces in the wastebasket.

He poised his fingers over the keyboard again. But no sentences formed into his mind to flow through his fingers. What would happen to his popularity with his audience if he implied that the beloved scientific method was a single value, only one way of interpreting reality? Were the disciples of science sufficiently scientific to question their own articles of faith? And what did he mean, even by these questions? He felt his inspiration slipping away from him in chaos and confusion.

He got
up and walked over to the window where he had first felt his inspiration. Of course it wasn’t superstition. But then, what about superstition? Had superstition ever been investigated in terms of multi valued logic? How could each man be so positive that his path, and only his, was the road to comprehension?

He gasped his exasperation and concentrated on the scene of reality. The elderly man was driving out of the garage. The mechanic was putting five dollars into the cash drawer. Odd, how he knew the denomination of that bill with such certainty! The three students had reached the corner of the block, and were turning it. Odd, that there seemed to be some connection between them and the inspiration he had just felt. Association of ideas, of course. They had been within his vision range when he had thought of the concept; therefore the concept was associated with them. Elementary psychology, nothing mysterious about it at all.

But then, wasn’t that explaining things in terms of single values and dismissing the thought as solved?

The inspiration flooded him again, and the writer was appalled. What if each of those people down there on the street represented the only worthwhile five per cent?

What if, to them, he, an acknowledged brilliant writer in idea speculation, were merely one of the worthless ninety-five per cent? He walked slowly over to his typewriter and sat down again. But he did not write anything—not yet.

“Instant acceptance of an idea is as self-defeating as instant rejection,” he mumbled, and wondered where the words came from. “The implications of multi-values cannot be mastered in five seconds.”

The thought consoled him a little, for the implication was that, in time, it might be mastered; that the destruction of single-value foundations only appeared to produce chaos because one didn’t know how to find order in the new relationships of things. That is, not yet.

The clamor which followed Jeff Carney’s rejuvenation mounted to a national frenzy. Everybody wanted Bossy. Business and industry wanted Bossy, for quite aside from her rejuvenation possibilities, Bossy was the universal substitute for undependable manpower, the sure cure for faulty management judgment. Every government agency had to have Bossy immediately. There was no other possible way of solving the intricate and massive complexities of their responsibilities.

Both the sincere and the power-grabbing investigative committees had to have Bossy for obvious reasons. Law enforcement agencies saw the ultimate lie detector which no one could baffle. There was no end to the claims upon Bossy, no restraint upon the special axes which Bossy could grind. There was no conception that Bossy transcended single-valued frameworks, fostered no narrow vision, no finely meshed prejudice screen of the only possible right.

The Secretaries of the Interior and Treasury nearly came to blows in the anteroom of the White House, where each was waiting to see the Chief Executive to demand exclusive jurisdiction over Bossy.

The incipient fray was halted only by the confusion of arrivals of the Secretaries of State and Defense to press similar demands.

“Quite obviously,” said State, flicking a speck of dust from his Homburg, “Bossy must be reserved for international diplomacy. There can’t possibly be—”

“Nonsense,” snorted Defense. “Bossy is obviously the ultimate weapon. It would be suicide for any but the Armed Forces to have control over her.”

“Bossy is a revenue problem,” stubbornly insisted Treasury. “Already two people have been made immortal, without payment of taxes. Why the cessation of inheritance taxes alone—”

“Bossy is a national resource,” shouted Interior.

Foreign governments, present and budding dictators, here and abroad, all wanted Bossy. Moscow pointed out, blandly, that she had as much right to Bossy, for peaceful pursuits of course, as she did to the atomic science which had been given to her so freely. The Mafia planned the greatest kidnap scheme of all time, the kidnapping of Bossy. What race track, what gambling casino could possibly play percentages against Bossy?

The post office demanded Bossy as the only possible solution to handling the avalanche of mail which was pouring into the Kennedy Enterprises—the offers, the special deals, the demands, the threats, the claims.

Steve Flynn’s masterpiece had received public opinion.

As the days passed the chaos of reaction began to coagulate into masses of definite opinion. As yet the opinion was undirected. The machinery of the opinion controllers had not yet taken up the load. The coalitions in Washington had not yet formulized cooperative policy, catch phrases had not yet been manufactured to supply magnetic islands around which convictions could form.

For the first time in more than a generation people were reacting independently, honestly, with opinions unslanted to directive semantic loads. The preponder-ance of mail, therefore, showed more trust in Kennedy than in any of the five percent groups who were trying to get Bossy. The letters pleaded with Kennedy not to sell out the people.

There was a strange undercurrent of pleading with him not to release Bossy even though they later demanded he should—as if, instinctively, they knew that when the machinery of opinion control got to working again they could not resist it. Like alcoholics, knowing that when the ready-made drink of easily adopted opinion was placed before them they could not resist it, they pleaded with Kennedy to keep sober and get them safely home.