They'd Rather Be Right (34 page)

“I suspected you wouldn’t,” Joe smiled.

“But what are you going to do Boss?” Flynn asked.

“There’s only one way to guard a secret so effectively that no one can misuse it to his own advantage and the detriment of others,” Kennedy mused slowly, “and that’s to give it away—make it open knowledge. Give it to everybody.”

“Scientists have known that for a long time,” Hoskins said. “That’s why we keep insisting on free trade of ideas.”

“But how can you do that with Bossy?” Billings asked. “Ten days to two weeks per person. You couldn’t begin to process more than a selected few ... and that takes us right back—”

Kennedy turned to Joe.

“Is there any reason why Bossy can’t be put on the production line, turned out en masse like vacuum cleaners, radios, automobiles?” he asked.

Mabel and Jeff and Joe looked at one another and smiled openly.

“That was the answer Bossy gave us weeks ago,” Joe said.

Kennedy’s mouth fell open.

“You see,” Joe went on, “when you’ve got a problem, all you have to do is ask Bossy.”

“You could have saved me a lot of sleepless nights,” Kennedy said reprovingly.

“We felt it better you came to the decision on your own,” Jeff said. “You control the factories. It was the problem of the dictator, you see. If the idea came to you before you were ready for it, and you didn’t approve of it, you might smash it. As you say, time for us has a different value. We could afford to wait.”

“Although we have been busy,” Mabel said with a teasing smile, “I’ve been working a regular factory shift. You see, Bossy has been turning out blueprints of herself, and of all the special tooling necessary to make her parts in mass quantity. Everything’s ready to hand to your engineers and production foremen right now.”

There is a time lapse necessary between deciding to put a machine on the production line and the act of shipping out the crated article. The vast proportion of the time cycle is taken up with the engineering.

So much assumption is confused with fact, so little is known of process, that each thing must be tested anew when tried in different combination or pattern.

All but one phase of the engineering work on Bossy was done. But there is still time consumed in the doing of a thing after man knows what it is he must do and how to do it. The vast resources of Kennedy’s far-flung enterprises were filled with trained and loyal personnel, but it still takes time to make a new tool and bolt it to the floor.

And time was pressing.

For a few days, Joe’s announcement that Bossy was dismantled held the Hardy group in a suspension of indecision. But this only allowed other groups to catch up in their own plans for taking control of Bossy.

Kennedy’s legal staff bogged down completely with writs, subpoenas, injunctions. A little man would sim-ply have been arrested and pushed around until he consented to do what was required of him. But Kennedy was not a little man.

In a
strange way, the
terrifying danger which had faced the country for several decades, acted to protect Kennedy. Gradually the position had changed from government by representative to government by representatives’ hired staffs. And these staffs had been hired on the basis of loyalty to given persons.

With such a prize at stake, it was an inevitable part of the pattern that there should be more strife between these factions than normal, and that much of their potential effectiveness was lost in counteracting one another’s moves.

Even so, at times, the attorneys of each faction found time to add another writ to the fast growing pile, demanding Bossy be delivered into their hands in perfect working order upon penalty of—the penalties varied according to the powers the factions had usurped for themselves to carry out their own brands of tensions.

Kennedy astonished his legal staff by telling them to answer each writ with a compliance promise. As per their demands, Bossy would be delivered into their hands on a given date. He coordinated that date with his production plans.

It was well known that Kennedy’s word was good. Each faction labeled the compliance as ultra secret. Each faction set about with frantic plans to lay the ground-work for its ascension to the pinnacle of power, to control the country, to control the world.

Some of the factions, such as the prohibition league still barely alive, had demanded Bossy more as a token gesture than anything else. They were vastly astonished to receive Kennedy’s promise that Bossy would be turned over to them on said given date. They accounted for it through belief that he was in secret sympathy with them. A man does not find it strange that someone else should share his prejudices and tensions, even a fanatic realizes there may be a few others who know right from wrong—his brand of it. These obscure little factions, too, kept their pending triumph secret; and basked in the anticipated power they would have to force everybody to believe and do the right thing—or else.

In this manner Kennedy bought the preciously needed production time with his promises. Even the private citizen cranks who wrote in demanding Bossy be given to them so that they could take their rightful place in controlling their fellow men were answered with the same promise.

For when Kennedy said that he intended to give the secret to everybody, he meant precisely that. He would not be content with merely publishing the plans and theories behind Bossy; which still would limit her use to the favored few who had the money and equipment to produce her. No, he intended that the actual machine, itself, be available to anyone who wanted her.

He realized what this would do to the economy of the world; but the changes which Bossy would bring about were only magnifications of the changes which had occurred when the steering wheel replaced the buggy whip. He greatly suspected that making Bossy available at cost to those who could buy her, and opening up vast clinics for those who could not, would make less dent in his vast financial holdings than the secondary changes which would come about because each man would now hold all the answers he needed to solve his own economic problems—the answers would be limited only by the man’s inability to ask the right questions, or by Bossy’s persistently irritating “Insufficient data.”

No, the legal department need not worry about the consequences of promising Bossy to each faction who demanded her. Each would receive her.

The one problem remaining, engineeringwise, was that there would be a great many Bossies indeed, and as fast as it could be managed they would be scattered over all the world. Bossy did not know all the facts of the universe. Bossy knew only what the science of today knows.

Man has not even scratched the surface of the facts surrounding his own fingernail, as yet. He has not yet even made a dent in the facts about the universe which remain to be discovered. Some of the Bossies would be receiving this new knowledge, others would not. And the total picture of the universe, as it unfolded, as the pieces were put together, must be made available to every man. Otherwise, Bossy would be self-de-feating.

There must be intercommunication between all the Bossies.

It was not difficult to found the principles on which this would operate. Bossy functioned already by a harmonic vibration needed to be broadcast on the same principle as the radio wave. No new principle was needed. Any cookbook engineer could do it—even those who believe what they read in the textbooks and consider pure assumption to be proved fact.

It was not difficult to design the sending and receiving apparatus, nor was extra time consumed since this small alteration was being made contiguous with the production set up time of the rest.

The production of countless copies of the brain floss itself was likewise no real problem, no more difficult than using a key-punched master card to duplicate others by the thousands or millions on the old-fash-ioned hole punch computer system.

There was no hitch anywhere along the line. Government interference had ceased, the raw stocks suppli-ers were long practiced in giving Kennedy Enterprises preferential treatment on any sudden orders, Kennedy’s own organization was long skilled in making quick changes and adaptations in his various functions.

Complete Bossies began to roll off the production line. They were crated and made ready for shipment long before the promised date. The contingency time for unexpected delays, based upon sound industrial engineering standards, had not been used.

And every retail outlet of Kennedy’s entire chain began to receive crates of a new piece of household equipment which would go on sale within a short time.

Steve Flynn received his orders to set up another worldwide television coverage with a shrug of his shoulders. This was old stuff now. He merely had to breathe the word that a new announcement was to be made concerning Bossy and he got instant cooperation.

But when he was told that after the announcement of Bossy’s availability to everyone had been made,

Joe would step in front of the cameras and give an explanation of what Bossy meant, he shook his head, blew a long breath through his lips.

“Oh, brother!” he muttered. Then to Kennedy, “Look, Mr. Kennedy, will you tell Joe, please, that these aren’t Brains he’s talking to—that these are just people who don’t know nothing from nothing, and don’t particularly want to! Will you tell him he can’t talk about evergreen trees or jigsaw puzzles or anything like that and expect to get across?”

“I understand he’s going to talk about water,” Kennedy answered with a chuckle.

“Oh, brother,” Steve groaned. “And half the peo-ple will wind up thinking that Bossy is just a hot-water heater or a new kind of bathtub! Well, at least, will you please ask him not to mention ... what was it he and Hoskins were talking about the other day ... multi-valued physics?”

He looked as if he were going to break down and weep.

He was apprehensive all the way through the preliminaries of the broadcast. A production was made of it, for the world had come to a stop and was listening. The world sat stunned at the announcement that everyone would have Bossy.

No one had ever believed that any except a special privileged few would benefit from her. They did not grasp it all at once. They sat in the stunned immobility of a poverty-stricken man who has been told, without warning, that he is a millionaire. Their minds, like his, could conceive of only the simplest poor uses for it, or wild extravagances.

They saw Kennedy’s face on the screen as he was introduced. They saw Billings again, who told them he intended to make another try at renewing his youth, that he had learned a great deal since his failure. They met Hoskins who confined his short talk to cybernetic principles understood only by a few like minds. They met Carney and Mabel again. Even Steve Flynn, usually confining himself to background operation, consented to say a few words about Bossy. He tried to keep his voice and talk out of the pitchman framework of pushing a new kitchen can opener which would also peel potatoes. He almost succeeded.

He did succeed in restoring a sense of the familiar to his listening and watching audience. They began to breathe again. There was enough of the commercial about his appearance and manner, enough of that frantic urgency—as if a sponsor were standing just out of sight with a long black whip—to make them realize, as had nothing else about the program, that Bossy was available to them at the nearest Kennedy Enterprise store, and at a price which they could probably afford.

Some of the jaws returned to a rhythmic chewing of gum, some realized their beer glasses needed refilling, the odor of burning food on the stove penetrated some nostrils. Enough normalcy was restored that they were able to perceive Joe as he stepped before the cameras, and their minds picked up at least some of the things he said.

“There have been many misconceptions about Bossy,” Joe began his talk. He hoped, contrary to Steve’s predictions, that he would get across, for the things he had to say were a summation of what Bossy meant to the world, and to each man.

“One of the most prevalent misconceptions has been that since Bossy can think faster and more accurately than a man, Man will cease to think, become an indolent slave of the machine and thus fail to reach his destiny.

“The adding machine can think faster than a clerk with a pencil and paper, but it has not destroyed business. The automobile can go places faster and easier than a man can walk there, but it has not stopped man from wanting to go. These things are simply tools which man uses.

“Bossy is just a tool. Bossy can answer your questions, but only if you ask them.

“There is another even wilder misconception. It has been said that Bossy is a soulless machine, and man, being guided by her, will become likewise no more than a soulless monster, losing his sense of faith, yearning, reaching.

“Bossy is a product of science. There is not now, there never has been any real issue between science and faith. Both strive for the same identical goal; both seek comprehension; both wish to benefit man that he live happier, healthier, more harmoniously with himself and with his neighbors. Man seeks to comprehend, to understand the forces which govern his life. The sometimes apparently different paths taken by science and faith are of no consequence in comparison with man’s yearning to know.