by Mark Clifton
They’d rather be right!
They tried to smash “Bossy” the super-computer. Joe Carter and his strange friends saved the machine—but that really wasn’t necessary. You can’t smash an idea—and the idea was bound to grow again anyway. But people can hate an idea…
They’d rather be right!
It was said long ago that the price of immortality is rebirth—and that is a price few have ever been willing to pay. Given the chance…
They’d rather be right!
They could have eternal youth—at a price. But the ultimate frustration lay in this: only the bums, the ner’do-wells, could bring themselves to pay that price! As for the rest…
They’d rather be right!
“Bossy” had dreams for sale. The dreams of the ages could be realized! If…you’d give up one half, and alter the other half beyond recognition.
Would you rather be right?
Copyright © 1956, 1981, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley based upon material copyright © 1954 by Street and Smith Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book in any form whatsoever without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review. For information, write: The Donning Company Publishers, 5659 Virginia Beach Boulevard, Norfolk, Virginia 23502
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Clifton, Mark.
They’d rather be right.
1. Riley, Frank Wilbert. II. Title.
PS3553.L46T5 1981 813',54 81-5384
ISBN 0-89865-165-4 (pbk.) AACR2
Printed in the United States of America
To the memory of Mark
CONTENTS
THEY’D RATHER BE RIGHT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
EXTRAS
CRAZY JOEY
HIDE! HIDE! WITCH!
THEY’D RATHER
BE RIGHT
CHAPTER I
Just ahead, on Third Street, the massive facade of San Francisco’s Southern Pacific depot loomed, half hidden in the swirling fog and January twilight. Joe Carter pulled his rented pickup truck to the now deserted curb, and squinted appraisingly into the gloom. The warning had come, the usual tingling up and down his spine, the drawing sensation at the nape of his neck.
He sent an expanding wave-field ahead of him, a telepathic inquiry, but there were too many people around the depot for him to sort out the specific source of danger without first knowledge of a focal point. The static of general anxiety, grief and gladness, which always seems to hang over a depot like a pall of smoke, prevented him from finding any menace directed toward himself.
And on the outside of the depot the scene was quite normal. The blurred yellow lights of a taxi pulled out of its reserved section and turned down Townsend Street toward the Embarcadero. The muffled rumble of traffic on the long overhead approach to the Bay Bridge was an audible accompaniment to the esper hum of half vocalized words and phrases picked up from the minds of the people all about the area.
He watched a police car cruise slowly by and disappear into the fog. He sampled the stream of consciousness of the two officers. Their casual glance has registered him in their minds: male truck driver, white, about twenty-two, no obvious disfigurements, not breaking any law at the moment. But there was no recognition.
He swept the street again with his physical eyes, and almost passed over the skid-row wino who had drifted a little far south of the usual haunts. The fellow had stopped in the chill shelter of a darkened store front, and was apparently drinking with desperate thirst from a wine bottle held in a paper sack. It was so usual, so completely in character, that Joe very nearly made the mistake of not penetrating. But even as he started to flick his eyes onward, his nape muscles contracted more sharply, heightening the awareness of danger.
Still doubting that the somatic price he must pay for sharing the wino’s hopelessness and dejection would be worth some bit of factual information drenched in it, Joe pierced.
He got a series of photographs, sharp and clear.
The Federal agent’s disguise was near perfection. Joe chuckled silently, with genuine amusement. In rinsing the wine in his mouth to give him a breath, just in case some other bum stumbled up to him, the agent had inadvertently swallowed a slug of the cheap stuff. With him, and as clearly, Joe felt the somatic effect of the wine in the man’s nose, mouth, throat and stomach.
But the agent’s disgust did not wash out the dominant picture in his mind. He had recently been briefed, and his upper stream of consciousness still carried the conceptual images.
Two more agents were inside the depot; one of them standing near the line of people waiting to get tickets validated; the other reading a newspaper over near the hallway which led to the rest rooms.
Within easy vision of both sat their quarry, Professors Billings and Hoskins. Billings had been recognized at the depot in St. Louis where he was changing trains in his flight across the country. Hoskins had not been discovered at all until he had joined Billings less than half an hour ago. There was elation in the agent’s mind over the meeting, for it might mean that the end of the long trail was near. Obviously, the two men were now waiting for someone else to join them.
And when someone joined them, it was possible, unsuspectingly, they might lead the agents directly to Bossy.
Up until now there had been absolutely no indication of where the synthetic brain had been hidden. There was disgust and contempt in the agent’s mind that during all the years that Hoxworth and other universities had been experimenting in the building of the cybernetic marvel, subsidized with government funds, Washington bureaucracy had not realized the significance of it. It had taken an uprising of the people, themselves, to drive home to Washington how man would react to the destruction of all his previous concepts on how the human mind worked and the values it assumed were absolute.
Someone had said then that this machine was more important than the atomic bomb had been forty years ago; that the implosion of its significance upon man’s psyche might do what the atomic bombs could not do; that man has a way of surviving physical destruction, but there was a large question of whether he could survive self-knowledge.
“You are so right,” Joe murmured, and lit a cigarette to heighten the impression that he had stopped to rest his shoulders and neck from arduous driving.
The agents’ orders were quite clear. Professors Hoskins and Billings were the central figures in developing the synthetic mind. The trail of these two men, sooner or later, would lead to Bossy. Until then, they were to keep the two professors under unsuspected surveillance; were not to concentrate enough agents to arouse suspicion; were to make an arrest only if the actions of the two men forced their hand.
Joe drew on his cigarette, and probed to a deeper level. He found what he wanted. The agent was tired, and he was chilled. He doubted that his stakeout position was necessary. The reports were that old Professor Billings, at least seventy-two, was as naive as a child; that he couldn�
�t elude the typical Junior G-Man, age six. And the agent’s stomach was beginning to feel queasy from the raw wine he had swallowed.
He was tired, he was chilled, he was queasy. Joe tied himself into the somatic discomfort, intensified it in himself, fed back the intensified dissatisfaction; picked it up again; oscillated it back and forth between them on feedback principle, stepped up each time—in the way he had watched mob reactions heighten far beyond the capacity of any isolated individual—and waited.
The man began to look down the street toward a small restaurant. He was growing ill. Perhaps the wine had poisoned him. There was the fleeting glimpse of wonder if he would be included on the roster of those killed in pursuit of duty. There was the rational denial of the urge of self-pity. There was the compromise to get a cup of coffee first, to see if that would break the chill, rest him, settle his stomach. But, undoubtedly, this was that extreme situation which would justify his leaving his post of duty.
By the time Joe had meshed the gears of his truck to pull away from the curb, the agent was already halfway down the block, hurrying to the restaurant, still clutching the neck of the wine bottle in the paper sack. In case he did die, it might be valuable evidence.
Without more care than an ordinary truck driver would show, Joe drove the pickup into one of the loading docks on the far side of the station. He willed away the last sympathetic waves of nausea from his own stomach, and climbed nimbly up on the ramp. He strolled, without appearing to be in any hurry, through the door marked with the sign of Railway Express.
The clerk looked him over, took in the greasy leather jacket, the oil-stained jeans, the crumpled cap with the cracked visor.
“Yeah?” the clerk challenged. “What do you want?”
“Pickup for Brown Appliance Company,” Joe answered easily. “Crate of television parts.” No flash of alertness, suspicion, was evident in the clerk’s mind. It was confirmation that no one knew of Bossy. He handed the clerk the shipping bill he had obtained when he forwarded the parts of Bossy from a town a hundred miles away from Hoxworth.
“No such package here,” the clerk said automatically. There was no real animosity in his voice or his mind. It was the simple desire to obstruct found in everyone, and often expressed where there is no fear of retaliation.
“Boss called the day crew,” Joe said dryly. “They said it was here. Suppose you get the lead out and find it.”
The clerk looked at him levelly and curled his lip in a slight sneer. If this punk’s boss had called and got the manager during the day, there might be a stink. He decided to cooperate. He found the crate in the back room, slipped the blade of the hand truck beneath its edge, grumbled at how heavy and bulky it was, and wheeled it out on the loading dock. To his own surprise, he found himself helping Joe load it carefully into the bed of the pickup.
Joe walked back into the office with the clerk.
“Boss wants me to get a ticket to L.A.,” Joe said. “Where do I do that?”
“In there,” the clerk said and jabbed a finger toward the door leading to the waiting room of the depot. “You want me to lead you by the hand?”
“No,” Joe answered. “Don’t like to get my hand dirty.”
He walked on through the door and down the corridor which led to the depot waiting room. He knew that the clerk was standing behind his counter with his jaw hanging down and his mouth open. The clerk’s shock of being bested at his own game gave Joe the somatic hook he needed to blur the image of himself in the clerk’s mind. In spite of the repartee, he would not be remembered. As any courtroom knows, emotional disturbance can call up wildly inaccurate descriptions. Already the clerk was remembering him as a hulking brute of a truck driver with coarse black hair, wide flaring ears and tobacco juice stains on his chin.
At the corridor entrance to the waiting room, Joe paused, and with both psionic and visual sight picked out the two professors. Their disguises were simple, and still intact. The seventy-two-year-old Billings had had the distinguishing mane of white hair cut short and dyed black. The elaborate gold pince-nez on the flowing black ribbon had been replaced with garden variety horn rims. His clothes were cheap and nondescript. But far more than such superficialities, Joe had counted on the change in the man’s bearing to keep his identity secret. Gone was the assurance of the world-famous figure, known to every child through picture, cartoon, newsreel, the renowned Dean of Psychosomatic Medicine at Hoxworth University. In its place was hurt, bewilderment, incredulity—a lost and tired old man. Even so, he had been recognized and followed here.
Professor Hoskins, at forty, with even less change in his appearance had not been recognized before joining Billings.
The two of them sat there now, according to plan, waiting for Joe to join them, to tell them what they must do next.
And with the wino agent’s mentations as a focal guide, Joe had no difficulty in picking out their two watchers. These two were also nondescript in appearance. They waited patiently, as might well-domesticated husbands waiting for wives, without either calling attention to themselves, or avoiding it.
Joe’s lips twitched in a smile, and he took advantage of their natural wish to relieve their boredom. The one with the newspaper signaled the other with his eyes that a conference was necessary. Aimlessly, they drifted together near the entrance to the depot. One followed the other out the door, and together they walked up the street toward a restaurant.
With no surprise at all, they joined their fellow agent in the wino disguise, and the three of them sat discussing their quarry, speculating on who was to contact the professors, and when the trail might lead to Bossy. The wino agent had recovered his feeling of well-being with astonishing rapidity, concluded he had just been momentarily chilled. He didn’t bother to mention why they had found him there, and it did not occur to them to ask.
For a full half hour, long after he had got the two professors and Bossy safely away from the depot, Joe kept them in the mental framework of considering their quiet discussion there at the restaurant counter a perfectly normal part of their duties.
Then, since Joe was not above a certain sense of humor, he allowed it to occur to each of them, simultaneously, that they had wandered away and left their quarry unobserved. They looked at one another, suddenly wild eyed with consternation, and sprang away from the counter as if it had burned them.
They ran pell-mell down the street to the depot. They searched the place from cellar to roof. Throwing aside all precautions, they questioned everyone. No one remembered having noticed the two men at all.
They drew together out near the loading docks and began to rationalize and justify their behavior after they had realized the futility of trying to fix the blame each on the others. They were well experienced in devising stories which would convince judge and jury, but their superior had come up through the ranks and would not be so gullible.
Their attempts to account for their decisions and actions grew marvelously ingenious, didactic, logical. Their story began to approach the infallibility of conclusions found in scientific textbooks.
The simple and factual explanation of what had happened was completely outside the potential of their real world framework. And had anyone suggested it, they would have considered him mad.
CHAPTER II
The Deluxe Hotel, in the heart of skid row, tried to live up to its name by running wooden partitions breast-high between the cubicles before they finished off to the ceiling with the usual chicken wire. It was both a sop to a higher standard of modesty, and slightly more discouraging to pilfering. They changed the sheets on cots between guests, as required by the Board of Health, with a little less than the customary reluctance; but there was no difference at all in the ever present smell of vermin repellant.
Jonathan Billings sat on the edge of his cot with his head in his hands, his elbows propped on bony knees—a tired old man shorn of dignity, sureness, confidence; completely at a loss in these strange surroundings.
He looked over
at his companion, Duane Hoskins, formerly Professor of Cybernetics at Hoxworth, who now sat in much the same position on his own cot, and reflected with astonishment that there was nothing in their outward appearance to distinguish them from other bums, winos and bos who lived in this section of San Francisco. Or, how did Joe express it: Men who were on the short line.
“Three days is a long wait,” Billings murmured softly, conscious that anything louder could be overheard. “I wish Joe would get things resolved.”
Hoskins looked up from his own reflections, his face a study in puzzlement and growing resolution.
“I’ve been thinking, Dr. Billings,” he said obliquely. It was characteristic of the two men, even in these surroundings, that they would maintain university protocol and formality. “I’ve been thinking that we are a pair of fools. What are we running from? Why are we—” He broke off the sentence, but his eyes swept the small cubicle which contained their two cots and a small stand, and indicated by his expression he meant the flop house itself, skid row, San Francisco.
“We are under Federal indictment, you know, doctor,” Billings reminded him austerely.
“All right!” Hoskins exploded, without realizing the loudness of his voice.
“Break it off, you two!” a voice grumbled thickly from beyond the partition. “Either talk loud enough so I can hear, or be quiet so I can sleep.”
Both men turned and looked at the partition resentfully, and then at one another warningly.
“All right,” Hoskins repeated, and kept his voice to little more than a whisper. “So we’re under indictment. But running and hiding like this makes it worse, not better. We didn’t do anything wrong. Our conscience is clear. The thing for us to do is face it, get it cleared up. I can’t understand why we bolted in a panic, like crazed animals in a burning stable.”
He paused, reflected, and added an emphasis significantly.
“There’s a great deal about this I do not understand.” He looked at Billings questioningly, almost in a challenge.