They'd Rather Be Right (15 page)

Carney was delighted, after his first shock, to find that Brains sometimes find themselves in the same boat as shortline outcasts.

Somehow the word had leaked out that the two professors had been found, and lost, in the San Francisco area. The search, which had been spread over the nation, now concentrated itself in the San Francisco area. And the area was ideal for the search. Surrounded on three sides by water, San Francisco has almost the status of an island and the traffic flows are concentrated ideally for thorough search.

The newspapers and communication channels which had been regretting a lack of world crises at the mo-ment, revived the entire issue with enthusiasm. All the lurid misconceptions were rehashed, improved upon; spun into the most sensational stories the fertile minds of reporters could conceive. The witch hunt was on in full force, and Carney kept himself busy collecting commentary. Although the danger was great, he was almost beside himself with pride that he was on the inside, that a word from him could blast the whole thing wide open. For the first time, he felt revenged upon society. It was within his power to withhold the very information society craved. And, at this point, that knowledge was sufficient satisfaction.

Half a century previously there would have been many champions rising to argue both sides of the question of Bossy; many to defend the right of these professors to push the frontiers of knowledge ahead. But forty years of effective opinion control had ingrained the habit of instant agreement with official opinion, regardless of how often that official position might change sides or contradict itself.

Still, one man did have the courage to call for a calm and rational consideration of the issues.

Howard Kennedy released his editorialized interview through one of the newspapers where he owned the controlling stock shares. He cited, calmly, the historical precedents where mass reaction had been violently antagonistic to other scientific discoveries; anesthesia, steam power, electrical power, Newton’s laws of motion, Galileo’s concept of the solar system, a long list which, upon analysis, was seen to contain almost every advance man had made in his long climb from savagery. He related all this to the question of Bossy, and left the question hanging as to whether this might prove to be another such instance of misguided opposition.

It was a daring thing to do, for it ran counter to popular opinion. Apparently he felt his millions, his position of power, his well popularized philanthropies, his liberal attitudes toward labor, would protect him.

Billings and Hoskins found in the article divergent rays of hope. Billings saw in it the possibility that man might once again capture the rational point of view. Hoskins, fretting under the conditions of the dark basement, the lack of competent assistants, the pressure of knowing he was hunted by government, saw a protector, a subsidizer, a return to the respectability of an ivory tower.

Joe, too, got a lift out of the article. The work on Bossy was almost finished. Billings had spent the necessary hours feeding the concepts of psychosomatics into Bossy’s storage unit. Bossy had found the concepts consistent with the carefully screened factual information which had been fed into her at Hoxworth. She had not thrown out psychosomatics as being a tissue of unsupported theory. Her acceptance was all the more impressive because she had refused most of the theoretical structures of orthodox psychology on the grounds that such structures had little or no relation to observable data.

Joe had no intention of keeping Bossy to himself once he had accomplished his aim. He, too, would need someone with courage and influence, such as Howard Kennedy. But not so naive as the two professors, he resolved to find out what went on in Kennedy’s mind before they responded to Kennedy’s obvious bid for their confidence. The man did not take the risk of public boycott simply to speak his piece. His motive was obviously to make contact. Beyond that, Joe could not go, not until he could get close to the man, see him, obtain some object which Kennedy had handled, some focalizing channel. It was one of Joe’s limitations on his ability that he could not use it in the way some of the totally untalented normals imagined the trait would work.

But of all the adjustments, that of Mabel was most important. And when Billings told him that there was nothing further to be done with the therapy mechanisms of Bossy until that already installed could be tested and adjusted, Joe knew it was time to talk with Mabel.

There literally wasn’t anyone else qualified. Hoskins was needed for his understanding of the mechanical principles. Billings must work in tandem with Bossy, man and machine coordinating to the utmost in the therapy while Bossy learned it. Aside from the fact that Joe was their only protection against the outer world, his psionic ability was too valuable to risk as a test case. Carney was openly cooperative, but Joe knew there was a hard core of hidden antagonism and suspicion. Further, Carney was quite satisfied with himself as he was, and no system of psychotherapy can make more than a temporary indentation against a basic unwillingness to change.

That left only Mabel. Mabel was obvious for an overt reason. She suffered painfully from a complex of rheumatism and arthritis, aggravated by fat. If Bossy was to prove effective at all, improvements in these would be most observable. At least these were the arguments Joe used to Billings and Hoskins. His plans went far deeper.

He went to see Mabel in her apartment on the floor above them.

She received him matter-of-factly, without question, without apology for some fancied untidiness of her apartment. Of the long list she might have been justified in having, Mabel retained only one small van-ity, and that a harmless one. Mabel had never been a respectable woman.

As he seated himself in her best chair, Joe smiled inwardly, and tenderly, at her little vanity. Even in this, she was intensely human, for she chose to be vain on a point where there was no justification for it.

Her mind was too simple and direct, her honesty was too innate, she lacked the hard-eyed viciousness which comes from forcing the psyche into deformities unnatural to it. No, even if she had tried, Mabel lacked the basic characteristics which would have qualified for her respectability.

Not that she lacked inner conflicts. Her complex of arthritis and her fat were sufficient evidence that she had not been free from these.

Even her considerable wealth was not a result of calculated avarice, but was the accidental result of an odd whimsy. In her younger days, some of the important men, finding in her qualities they could not find at home, seemed to receive some defiant pleasure out of freely giving her the things which their wives schemed and trapped and blustered to gain. In that small boy mischievousness of males, they built up a solid fortune for her in a mood of perverse gratitude.

Ordinarily it is only the blackmailers and shakedown artists of the police who grow rich from her profession, but as the influence of her clientele grew her numerous arrests ceased, and she no longer found it necessary to turn over all surplus monies as the price of being let alone.

Instantaneously, her life flashed through Joe’s mind as he settled back in his chair.

“We need your help, Mabel,” he said, without hedging on the purpose of his visit.

“In what way, son?” she asked, and her booming voice was quieter than usual.

He told her, briefly, the facts about Bossy, how they had come to build the machine, some of the things they expected from it. She made only one comment.

“It ain’t the first time the newspapers have got things all twisted up.”

He went on then to tell her how they hoped to make Bossy into a machine which would cure the ailments of man, such as her arthritis. Billings was a genuine medical doctor, and if she had paid any attention at all she would know he had a worldwide reputation.

Mabel nodded that she did know. She asked the obvious question.

“Why could a machine do things a doctor couldn’t?”

“Doctors are human,” Joe answered, “and, therefore, limited. The secret of any psychotherapy is that the doctor should be less twisted than the patient. This is seldom possible. True, he may be twisted in some other way, but if he simply substitutes one twist for another he has gained nothing. The greatest care was used, when Bossy was being educated, to feed in only absolutely proved and undeniable fact.

Bossy did her own interpreting. She rejected unfounded opinion, or prejudice built on false premises. She is more capable of unbiased therapy than any man could be.”

“I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about, Joe,” Mabel said frankly.

He developed for her the basics of psychosomatic therapy. To bring it into her own experience, he recalled how her stomach would be upset if she tried to eat when she was acutely worried.

“The cell,” he said, “is like the stomach. It refuses to function properly when such things as repressions, inhibitions, suppressions and the like affect it. Before long it gets twisted out of its healthy pattern into an unhealthy one. The idea of all the psychotherapies is to lift these suppressors so that the human can function again. Most of the psychologists work with some mysterious thing they call mind.

The psychosomatic men work directly with the body cells. Not only in the brain but all over the body, each cell seems to have a mind and memory of its own. Each one is capable of getting its own twists of inhibitions and repressions. The idea is to go clear down to the cellular level and take the load off of each cell so it can stretch and grow and function again.”

“Like being in a strait jacket and getting out,” Mabel commented. “I got me a general idea, son. I guess, being ignorant, that’s all I can hope for.”

“We don’t know how Bossy is going to work,” Joe told her frankly. “I don’t see how it can hurt you.

The worst that can happen is that you won’t get cured. And, of course, you won’t get cured if you hang on to the ideas which caused the trouble. That’s the toughest part, Mabel, to be willing to admit that you might not know what is right and what is wrong.”

She threw back her head and laughed her free, booming laughter. “Son,” she said heartily, “I never did know that.”

“You might be changed—a lot,” he warned her. “You might not want to go on living here as you do now. You might ... anything might happen. It’s a chance you would have to be willing to take. Nobody has ever had a look at reality except through smoked glasses. We haven’t got any idea of what it’s really like without them. You’d be the first.”

She looked down at her broad thighs, her old black skirt. She lifted her wrinkled hand with its enlarged knuckles.

“What good am I, like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know for sure, Mabel,” Joe said simply, “but I think you’ll be giving a lot to mankind.”

It was not to be expected that the psychosomatic therapy would go smoothly. Carney greeted the announcement that Mabel would undergo the test with flatfooted opposition. His suspicion and resentment came close to the surface and showed itself in alternat-ing sulks, in his forbidding Mabel to have anything to do with Bossy, and then in actual threats to do his plain civic duty and turn them all in to the Feds.

He seemed determined to demonstrate the old truism again: that the only enemy man has is man. The universe does not care whether man unlocks its secrets or leaves them closed. Water does not care whether man bathes in it or drowns in it; whether it waters his fields or washes them away. If man masters its laws and utilizes his knowledge, water becomes a force in his favor. But enemy or servant, water does not care.

Of all the forces, only man seems determined that man shall not master the universe.

Carney paid lip service only to the boon of health which Bossy might bring to Mabel and to all mankind.

He could react only that Mabel had deserted him, had gone over to these men from the other side of the tracks. It was a bitter realization that his long friendship with her counted for so little.

More than knowledge or enlightenment or understanding, man values his ascendancy over something or someone. The fate of mankind is of little consequence to him if he must lose his command in the process. Carney felt alone and deserted. It took a great deal of somatic comforting from Joe, and Mabel’s stern commands for him to mind his own business, to settle him down.

The second hitch came from Bossy.

There had been a considerable argument from Hoskins that inasmuch as the hunt for them had concentrated in San Francisco, and discovery was inevitable, their best course was to initiate contact with the government, turn themselves in and hope for the best. Or as an alternative, they should make contact with Howard Kennedy, whose interview had been so liberal, and let that industrialist negotiate for them. Joe had countered these arguments with the fact that the public was still bitterly fanatic on the subject of Bossy, and that government would not dare go against the will of the people and their blood thirst.

He pointed out, however, that if they could demonstrate, with an accomplished fact, Bossy was a master healer, then Kennedy would have something to work with to make the public change its mind about Bossy. Hoskins agreed, reluctantly.