by Mark Clifton
Joe knew that Kennedy’s plans were not quite mature. It was time he took a hand.
“Pardon, sir,” he looked up from his notebook. “Uh…may I read back the last couple of sentences to check accuracy. It came so fast.”
The three men looked at him with exasperated patience of an executive with an inefficient secretary. But Hardy was not unwilling. It had sounded pretty good, and he wouldn’t mind hearing himself repeated. Kennedy suppressed a smile and nodded his permission.
“There it is, you old devil,” Joe read in the expressionless voice which is the trademark of the unimpressed secretary reading back. “Either you will have to throw in with those namby-pambies, or declare yourself one of our group who intend to get hold of Bossy for our own purposes.”
There was a stricken silence in the room. There was the immobility of mummies in a tomb.
“Isn’t that what you said, sir?” Joe asked in a faltering voice.
“I… I—” Hardy gasped and began to turn purple.
“He did not!” Oliver Mills rapped out the words as if they were cutting blows.
“What’s the matter with you, Joe?” Kennedy asked in a harsh voice; but Joe knew the anger was only simulated, that the old man was laughing heartily behind his poker face.
“I… I don’t know, sir,” Joe said, hesitantly. “Several of us have noticed it; those of us who have worked around Bossy a great deal. We keep hearing things, things people don’t actually say. That’s why I wanted to check. I wasn’t sure Mr. Hardy had said them, or was only thinking them. It’s…it’s very confusing!”
“Attaboy!” Jeff Carney’s thoughts, from over in Berkeley, approved. “Keep ’em off side.”
And they were off side. The implications were too plain. They could not be missed. This secretary could read their thoughts! The idea formed in their minds to escape the room, to get completely away and replan their strategy. They must act at once.
“Give ’em the other barrel, Joe,” Jeff urged delightedly from across the bay. He didn’t mind if the metaphors were mixed, Joe would know what he meant.
“We’re trying to fix it so it won’t happen again, sir,” Joe said apologetically. “Apparently there’s some kind of a broadcast power loss. So we have her completely dismantled, and—”
“Bossy is dismantled?” Hardy screamed the words hoarsely, as he sprang to his feet.
“Why, yes, sir,” Joe said innocently. “The machine is purely experimental you know, and—”
The slam of Kennedy’s door behind Hardy and Mills shut off the need for further words. They were gone in a panic. They would, indeed, have to reorganize their strategy.
Kennedy sat looking at Joe from under his bushy gray eyebrows.
“Does Bossy broadcast mind-reading ability, Joe?” he asked mildly.
“No,” Joe laughed. “It was pretty obvious what they were thinking.”
Kennedy nodded.
“And I don’t suppose she’s dismantled, either,” he stated.
“Not unless Hoskins has thought up something to tinker with,” Joe answered.
“I gather you didn’t approve of my making a deal with Hardy, then.”
“Had you planned on it?” Joe asked.
“You know I hadn’t,” Kennedy said slowly. “You know that, in the same way you know everything else in the minds of people around you. I’ve watched you and Mabel and Carney, Joe. I’ve questioned Billings and Hoskins. They pretended to know nothing, but they weren’t fooling me.”
“Are you sorry, sir?” Joe asked, and this time he used the term of address in sincere respect.
“No,” Kennedy answered instantly. “Maybe a little indignant at first, when I first realized your talent, over rights of privacy and such nonsense. But I’ve lived long enough to know no man stands on the pedestal he pretends to occupy, and I’m probably no worse than the run of the mill. No, I’m quite glad.
“A solution for Bossy has to be found, you know. This is just the first of the possible deals. I’ve known the problem from the first. I thought I was alone. Two misty-minded professors, and a stripling kid. I thought the whole burden of deciding what to do with Bossy was up to me.
“I’m glad it isn’t.”
CHAPTER XXVII
A solution had to be found.
Bossy was at least one loaded gun which could not be tossed into the nursery of playing children with the usual irresponsible attitude of science.
“There, children, is a new toy. I suppose I should tell you it is dangerous and you really ought not to point it at one another when you pull the trigger. Of course if you do it’s not my responsibility. I have all I can do in simply discovering the principles of how it works and in putting it together. Have fun, kiddies; and if you should kill one another with it, I will be the first to wring my hands and say it wasn’t meant for that purpose.”
Yet if the scientific product and principle is withheld, wouldn’t that be even worse? What differentiates the man from the child, the civilized from the savage, man from beast, except a knowledge of the interrelationships of the parts of the universe, and how they work in the cycles of cause and effect? Can the child ever grow up, mentally, if the principles discovered in the laboratory are withheld from him?
A solution for Bossy had to be found.
In essence, Bossy was the ultimate weapon, and raised the same old problem which all ultimate weapons raise.
“How far and how long can the trustees be trusted?”
Nor was this question being asked only by a few men of high intellect. The conversation overheard on the street by Joe and Jeff and Mabel was taking place everywhere. Solutions by the hundreds were pouring over the airwaves, published in every newspaper, offered in every crank letter. Each had some single-valued purpose which must be fulfilled. Each had some bogeyman which Bossy must be used to destroy.
Everyone recognized that only five per cent of all the people born ever amount to anything at all. Everyone humbly thanked his providential stars that through his own personal efforts and merit he had become one of the superior five per cent. Everyone looked with pity and contempt upon the ninety-five per cent who did not share his grace.
A solution had to be found.
The pressures of each group who had its own little solution began to mount. There had to be some relief of these pressures. The move made by Hardy as spokesman for the group, who believed that linear government was the only possible way of controlling man, was only the beginning.
The Margaret Kennedy Clinic took on the appearance of an armed camp. But these were Kennedy’s own guards, a recognizably futile safeguard against any really organized effort to get at Bossy, but a deterrent to disorganized attempts. Awaiting the revised strategy, the Pentagon had not yet supplemented its contingent, and the disgusted sergeant continued to change his sentry at regular intervals. The sentry challenged no one who went in and out of Bossy’s room and amused himself by pretending that he was an honor guard and presented arms for every person who passed down the corridor. The sentry who had let Carney into the room had embellished his story with the telling and you never knew who might be a five-star general disguised as a janitor with a mop and a pail.
At present the sentries were even more alert than usual. Everybody around the Bossy building knew that all the principals were in a meeting: Kennedy, Flynn, Billings, Hoskins, Carney, Mabel, Joe. The doors were closed, and Kennedy’s own guards let no one into the corridors leading to the room.
Inside the room the meeting was casual, more in the nature of a group of people who were merely visiting.
Steve Flynn, an almost infallible mirror of the public mind, expressed the mass bewilderment.
“What’s going to happen with Bossy?”
The question served to take the conversation away from the coffee and rolls which they had brought in with them.
“As a point of information, Joe,” Kennedy asked, “suppose I had made a deal with Hardy and his gang. Suppose now or at some time in the
future a would-be dictator did get hold of Bossy? He asks for the most effective strategy. He gets it. He asks for the most powerful weapons; he gets them. he asks for the most effective defense against other weapons; he gets it. He could conquer the world with ease.”
“He would still need followers,” Hoskins pointed out. “If people didn’t back him up—”
Flynn snorted in derision.
“A little bit of semantics twisting will get him followers by the millions. People will tie in with a fanatic if for no other reason than to break the monotony of their lives. That wouldn’t be a problem at all.”
“But he couldn’t be made immortal,” Billings objected. “As long as he held to a one-track idea, he couldn’t be relieved of his tensions and be renewed again. I would assume that the desire to conquer the world, or any part of it, would be in the nature of a fixation, a tension. As long as he clung to a one-track idea Bossy couldn’t renew him. He would know he’d die.”
“So what?” Flynn countered. “He’d have his fun while he was here.”
“Would he want it?” Kennedy asked slowly. “As against immortality, wouldn’t the satisfaction of pushing other people around for only a short while be pretty small potatoes?”
“If I know people—and that’s my trade,” Flynn answered, “he could convince himself that it would be all right to conquer the world first, and then he could repent his ways and have immortality, too. At least, that always has been the pattern.”
Jeff and Mabel were looking at Joe, their thoughts all identical.
“In the long run of history,” Joe said quietly, “it really wouldn’t matter. Man’s destiny would work out whether it were under a dictator, a democracy, or some form of government which we haven’t yet conceived.”
Kennedy and Flynn looked at him in amazement.
“I think the real problem here is in concept of the universe,” Jeff said. “And the meaning of science itself.”
Joe nodded.
“Bossy conceived the universe to be a totality,” he said. “Where all facts and processes and forces are interrelated to form a total concept. At this stage of man’s evolution, our scientists have been like little children facing a table piled high with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One piece is picked up and its holder says, ‘This is the important piece. I hold the one key to everything in my hands.’ Well, of course, he does. Because every piece is a key piece.”
Mabel put down her cup and took up the thread, unbroken.
“In most areas we haven’t even begun to try to fit the pieces together. Or where we do try, we find discrepancies. Like children, we are inclined to make one or two futile attempts and then throw the whole thing back on the table as a hopeless job. But all the pieces do fit to form a total picture. We haven’t any idea yet what that picture is. We haven’t even yet worked out an adequate method of approach.”
“We often think we have,” Jeff continued. “We form a theory and it seems to work until we run across a piece which proves it doesn’t. At least we’ve made some progress in going back over our previous work to see if a new theory, which will bring the new piece into line, would also have fitted into the past.”
“We’re still doing too much jamming and forcing the pieces together, though,” Joe picked up the thought. “We seem to have almost a mania for answering questions prematurely.”
“Life has been short,” Billings said with a note of nostalgia. “A man can be forgiven for trying to find an answer, a summation of all his efforts.”
“It plays hob with the total picture, though,” Joe answered. “We get some very strange linkages by forcing the pieces, to say nothing of the fact that such tactics will always defeat us.”
“I’m not sure I’m following that,” Kennedy said.
“The scientists who supplied Bossy with basic knowledge,” Joe explained, “were all familiar with the concept we’ve just outlined. They leaned over backwards to limit themselves to differentiate between demonstrable fact and assumptions drawn from such fact. Here’s an example:
“Virtually all books of astronomy state categorically that Mars has two moons. We’ve charted their courses, and toss away the fact as not being of any consequence that they do not follow the usual course of other bodies in the solar system. We’ve named them, given them their mass ratings. And we’ve dismissed them as a known fact.
“Actually all we can demonstrate is that our telescopes pick up some reflected light from what appears to be material bodies which appear to be satellites of Mars. And that was the information fed into Bossy—not that Mars has two natural moons, but that our telescopes pick up some reflected light.
“We know now that they could be artificial satellites, and if they were metallic then their reflected light could account for much smaller bodies than we have assumed. We didn’t think of this at the time we postulated the moons because artificial satellites were an impossibility, or so we thought.
“So here are two possible explanations where we had only one before. It is reasonable to ask what new developments in science next century will give us still further explanations?”
“Apply this everywhere in man’s knowledge. The vast majority of what he thinks is knowledge is pure assumption—the forcing and pounding of unlike pieces together to make them fit.”
“I don’t see what this has got to do with a dictator getting hold of Bossy,” Steve said. “It’s like the trees, it seems to mean something to you people, but I’m the common man, remember?”
“What I’m trying to say,” Joe answered, and took the cup of coffee Mabel poured for him, “is that Bossy deals only with proved fact, not assumptions. Her answers then are based on factual relationships. She fits the right pieces together. If a dictator had Bossy, he would ask her questions. She would answer the questions, and if he acted on the answers, he would, inadvertently, be fitting the pieces of the puzzle together for mankind.”
“If he acted on them,” Steve said cynically. “Suppose he didn’t like the answers Bossy gave him. Suppose he got mad and picked up a club and smashed Bossy because he didn’t like what she said. That happens, figuratively, all the time, you know. It’s pretty human to smash the guy or the thing which tries to tell us something we don’t want to hear.”
“Well, yes,” Joe sighed, “there’s that. Of course you’re overlooking the fact that Mabel or Carney could rebuild Bossy. Hoskins, Billings and I all working together could do it—but Mabel or Carney could do it alone. In a way they’re sort of a duplicate of Bossy; and Bossy, given the proper attachments, could rebuild herself.”
“But you three could be destroyed, just as Bossy could,” Kennedy argued.
“Man would eventually rediscover Bossy,” Mabel answered him. “The one thing we persistently overlook is faith in the future generations of man. We attack everything as if the final solution depended upon us, as if everything had to be settled because our moronic dependents couldn’t possibly cope with them. Suppose Bossy were destroyed, and us along with her? Time is long. There are millions of years ahead of man.”
“I can’t wait that long,” Kennedy said gravely, but with a wry twist of self-deprecation in his voice. “I’m still clinging to my old tension that I’ve got to protect man against his own self-destructiveness. I want to make sure there are some descendants—moronic or otherwise.
“You people, you’re different. Maybe you can look at things on the grand scale, what they call the cosmic point of view, but I… I can’t wait a million years for a solution.”
“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.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
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.