They'd Rather Be Right (5 page)

He stopped short, for there flashed into his mind the possibility of one who might. Joe Carter, a student—a telepath.

The house where Joe lived was nearly a century old, and did not need the aid of the fog and the dusk to give it an air of grimy neglect. The weather-stained sign which proclaimed light-housekeeping rooms for students seemed almost as old, but at least it did not misrepresent them as being cheery or bright or comfortable.

Billings hesitated briefly at the foot of the steps leading up to its front door, and mentally pictured with dread the two long flights of wooden stairs he must climb to reach Joe’s room.

He could have summoned Joe to his office, of course, but tonight that would have been adding insult to injury. And, too, in his own room, the boy seemed to have a little less reserve than in the office or the classrooms.

He started the slow, careful climb up the steps, opened the front door which was never locked for it was obvious that no one here could have anything worth taking, walked across the short hall, and started up the first flight of stairs. He glanced farther down the hall, saw the landlady’s door close abruptly, and smiled. It was the same, every time he came to see Joe.

He had known Joe Carter for twelve years. First there had been the letter from Martin at Steiffel University, telling him about an eight-year-old telepath whose parents thought him insane. He, himself, had gone to the small college town and talked with the boy. He had arrived at a bad time. The story, as he got it from others, was that the boy had picked up a stray dog. The boy’s parents had turned the dog over to the pound, and it had been destroyed. Joe had become silent, uncommunicative, unresponsive to any of Billings’ attempts to draw him out.

Twelve years. From the sidelines he had watched Joe get through primary and secondary schools.

He had marveled at the continued, never-breaking concealment the boy practiced in covering his unique tal-ent. But concealment breeds distrust. The boy grew up friendless and alone.

Every year Billings had reviewed the grades which Joe had made. They were uniformly, monotonously, equivalent of C. He was determined to be neither sharp nor dull; determined that he would do nothing to make anyone notice him for any reason. As if his life, itself, depended upon remaining unnoticed.

Both his high school associates and Joe’s parents were astonished when Hoxworth University offered him a scholarship. It wasn’t much of a scholarship, true, for Joe’s parents had no influence and Joe was not an athlete. Since there would be neither prestige nor financial return to the University, it hadn’t been easy, but Billings had managed it, and without revealing the reasons for it.

He paused and caught his breath in the hallway at the top of the first flight of stairs, and then resumed his upward climb. They could talk all they pleased about how hale and hearty he was at seventy, but two flights of stairs

Twelve years. That would make Joe about twenty now. The last three years had been at Hoxworth.

And Joe had been as colorless in college as in high school.

Billings had tried, many times, to draw him out, make him flare into life. He had shown infinite patience; he had strived to radiate sympathy and understanding. Joe Carter had remained polite, friendly, appreciative—and closed. Billings had tried to show community of spirit, transcending the fifty years gap in their ages—and Joe had remained respectful, con-siderate, and aware of the honor of personal friendship from such a famous man. If Joe had known who wheedled a scholarship for him, he had never shown the knowledge.

Tonight Billings would try a different method. Tonight he would sink to the common level of the mean in spirit. He would demand acknowledgment and some repayment for his benefaction.

He hesitated in front of the wooden paneled door, almost withdrew back down the stairs in preference to portraying himself in such a petty light; and then before he could make up his mind to give it up, he knocked.

The door opened, almost immediately, as if Joe had been waiting for the knock. The boy’s face was withdrawn and expressionless, as usual. Yet Billings felt there was a greater wariness than usual.

“Come in, doctor,” Joe said. “I heard you coming up the stairs. I’ve just made some coffee.”

Two chairs were placed at the pitiful little table; two heavy china cups wreathed vapor. A battered coffeepot sat on a gas plate. The housekeeping was light, indeed.

The two of them sat down in chairs, straight hard chairs and picked up the mugs of coffee.

“I’m in trouble, Joe,” Billings began. “I need your help.” Somehow he felt that an immediate opening, without preliminary fencing, would be more appreci-ated. And on this basis, he proceeded into the story of the newest order he had just received that afternoon from Rogan. He made no effort, either, to draw Joe out, to get the boy to acknowledge his talent of telepathy. Billings took it for granted, and became aware as he progressed that Joe was making no effort to deny it.

That, at least, was hopeful. He switched suddenly to a frontal approach, although he knew that young men usually resented it when an older man, particularly a successful one, did it.

“Have you given any thought, Joe, to what you intend to do with your life? Any way you can turn your gift into constructive use?”

“A great deal, of course,” Joe answered without hesitation. “In that, at least, I’m no different from the average fellow. You want me to work with you on this synthetic brain, don’t you, doctor? You think I may have some understanding you lack? Is that it?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“It could destroy the human race, you know,” Joe said quietly.

Billings was brought up short. He felt a sudden chill, not entirely due to the bleak and heatless room in which they sat.

“You foresee that, Joe, definitely?” he asked. “Or are you merely speculating?”

“I’m an imperfect,” Joe answered quietly. “I often see seconds or minutes ahead. Occasionally I see days or weeks but not accurately. The future isn’t fixed. But I’m afraid of this thing. I’m afraid that if we make a machine which can think better than man, mankind wouldn’t survive it.”

“Do you think man is worth surviving, Joe? After the things he’s done?”

Joe fell silent, looking down at the table. Seconds became minutes. The cheap clock on the dresser ticked away a quarter of an hour. The coffee in the cups grew cold. Billings shivered in the damp cold of the unheated room, contrasted it with the animal warren comfort of the dormitories, the luxury of the frat houses. He became suddenly afraid of Joe’s answer. He had at least some conception of what it must be like to be alone, the only one of its kind, a man who could see in a world of totally blind without even a concept of sight. How much bitterness did Joe carry over from childhood?

“Do you believe that man has reached his evolutionary peak, doctor?” Joe asked at last, breaking the heavy silence.

“No-o,” Billings answered slowly.

“Couldn’t the whole psi area be something which is latent, just really beginning to develop as the photo-sensitive cells of primitive life in animals once did? I have the feeling,” he paused, and changed his phrasing. “I know that everyone experiences psi phenomena on a subconscious level. Occasionally a freak comes along”—he used the term without bitterness—“who has no barrier to shut it out of the conscious. I ... I think we’re trending toward the psi and not away from it.

“You think man should be given the chance to go on farther, then?” Billings asked.

“Yes,” Joe said.

“And you think that if he finds out what the true nature of thought is, at the level he uses it, it would destroy him?”

“It might.”

“Why?”

“He’s proud, vain, superficial, egotistical, superstitious,” Joe said without any emphasis. “This machine, to do what Washington wants, would have to use judgment, determine right from wrong, good from bad. Man has kept a monopoly on that—or thinks he has.”

“What do you mean—thinks he has?” Billings asked, and felt he was nearing some door which might open on a new vista.

“Suppose we say that white is good and black is bad,” Joe said quietly. “Any photoelectric cell then can tell good from bad. Suppose we say a high number is right and a low number is wrong. Any self-respect-ing cybernetic machine then can tell right from wrong.”

“But those are purely arbitrary values, Joe,” Billings objected. “Set up for a specific expediency.”

“You’re something of a historian, doctor,” Joe answered obliquely. “Aren’t all of them?”

Billings started to argue along the lines of inherent human nature, instinct for good and right, basic moral-ities, the things man believed set him apart from the other animals. He realized that he would be talking to a telepath; that he had better stick to the facts.

“At least man has arbitrarily set his own values, Joe,” he said. “The photoelectric cell or cybernetic machine can’t do that.” Yet he caught a glimpse of things beyond the opening door, and became suddenly silent.

“We must emphasize that fact, doctor,” Joe said earnestly. “Man must go on, for a while, thinking that; in spite of the contrary evidence which this servomechanism will reveal. That shouldn’t be too hard to maintain. Man generally believes what he prefers to believe. Most evidence can be twisted to filter through his screen mesh of prejudices and tensions, so that it confirms rather than confounds.

Billings felt a wave of apprehension. He almost wished that he had not come to Joe for help on this project. Yet he felt relief, too. Joe, by the plural pronoun, had indicated that he would work on the project. Relief, because he knew that he had no knowledge whereby the problem could be approached.

And he believed Joe did.

The illusion of a door opening remained before his vision. There were dark stirrings beyond.

The work did not progress.

It was not due to lack of organization, or lack of cooperation. The scientists had long ago adapted to the appointment of most anyone as head of a project, and they saw nothing unusual in a specialist in psychosomatics being assigned to make up a new servomechanism.

The lack of progress stemmed from the fact that their objective was not clearly defined. Through the days that followed, Billings was bothered, more than he cared to admit, by Joe’s warning that the semantics of their objective must be kept away from any concept of duplicating the work of the human brain. Yet that was what they were trying to do.

He was helped none, either, by the several incidents, in meetings, when one or the other of the scientists on
the
project tried to tell him that was what they were trying to do.

“If you want a servomechanism,” Gunther, the photoelectric man, said, “which will make the same decisions and take the same actions as a human plane pilot, then you must duplicate that pilot’s mental processes.”

“If we are trying to duplicate the processes of hu-man thought, why have no psychologists, other than yourself, been assigned to this project?” asked Hoskins, the cybernetic man.

These questions were not easy to parry. Both of these men were first-rate scientists, and in the figurative underground, among friends who could be trusted, they asked questions to which they expected answers. The line which Joe had insisted he adopt did not satisfy them.

“We must not permit ourselves to get confused with arguing the processes of human thought,” Billings had replied. “We will bog down in that area and get nowhere. This is simply a machine and must be approached from the mechanical.”

Yes, it was unsatisfactory, for it was precisely the same kind of thought control which had blanketed the country. You must solve the problem, but you are not permitted to explore this and this and this avenue in your search for the possible solution.

Joe, too, was a disappointment. Billings had succeeded in getting him appointed as project secretary. No one objected since the job required a great deal of paper work, carried little prestige, and the pay was not enticing. There would be other students assigned later to various phases of production.

Billings made a men-tal note to assign young Tyler to something which sounded particularly impressive.

The undercurrents of that cartoon could not go ignored. Joe’s appointment, therefore, seemed natural enough, and brought him into the thick of activity.

But Joe did no more than the recording. Billings found himself in the frustrating position of having engineered the situation so that Joe would be there for question on how they should proceed, but Joe gave only vague and evasive answers. The progress reports, turned over to Rogan for forwarding on to Washington, contained a great deal of wordage and little else. That would keep Washington quiet for a while, since their tendency was to measure the worth of a report by its poundage; but it was also dangerous in case anybody felt he was slipping out of the public eye, and began to cast about for some juicy publicity.

One of Joe’s typical answers brought typical results.

“We already know enough to build it,” Joe had said firmly. “We’ve got all the basic principles. We can duplicate the action of the human brain, at its present level of thinking, any time we want to. Only if we realize that’s what we’re doing, we won’t want to do it. So, on a mechanical level, we simply have to bring all the principles together and coordinate them.”