They'd Rather Be Right, or The Forever Machine

by Mark Clifton, Frank Riley

  He swung his feet to the floor and in the darkness groped for his robe and slippers. Someone was stealing down the corridor in this wing of the Margaret Kennedy Clinic, and was making a great effort not to be heard. It was the intense concentration on avoiding attention which had telepathed the warning to Joe.

  In the same instant that he focused his psionic sight, Joe perceived that the prowler was Doc Carney; that the old con man was intent on reaching Bossy.

  Bossy! But that would be impossible for the old man. Bossy was under padlock and government seal; with a soldier posted before each door of the operating amphitheater. The guard had been there since early morning, changed at two-hour intervals.

  The military had established its beachhead, the main forces had not yet moved up. The impounding of Bossy by a small contingent was a scouting mission. The strength of the opposing forces had not yet been determined.

  The Pentagon had not been worried about Kennedy's forces. These were already clamoring in Washington for an injunction to estop the seizure of Bossy, but this was to be expected. The main opposition, the one which had not yet declared itself, was public reaction. There was also fear of Bossy, herself. The machine had not been fully tested. It might have unknown striking powers. If it were as close to the human mind as was claimed, it might turn vindictive, revengeful.

  Through devious channels to baffle investigators and wear out the publicity value long before the truth came to light, the Pentagon sent out its task force to draw the enemy's fire, and waited.

  That was Joe's summation of the background, and now here was Carney tiptoeing down the corridor, a kit of burglar tools in one hand, intent on breaking in to Bossy. His motivation was clear to Joe, if not to himself.

  Ever since Mabel had gone into therapy, Carney had been a lost man. For the first time in his life he knew what it was to be completely alone. There was no companionship left for him back on skid row, and Mabel, his pal, his only tie to the old mores of his existence, had become something else entirely. There had never been love between them, contrary to gossip; there had never even been physical attraction. They were simply two old people who had led the same kind of life, drawn together out of mutual respect, and held together in a close orbit because there was no pull from any other direction.

  That was all changed now. His whole world was changed. Even his contempt, his disgust, his fear of Brains had changed. They, too, were just guys who made the best of things, tried to get along according to their own lights. This had been the evolution of his thinking since the time Joe had insisted he leave skid row and come to the Margaret Kennedy Clinic. He didn't understand why Joe had insisted upon it, he didn't have to be told that there was no need for him there, that he was simply in the place, not of it. He wasn't even in the way; he wasn't even that important.

  He was confused, he was lonely, he was no longer certain of anything. He, without knowing it, was ready for Bossy. And he was drawn to Bossy as though to a magnet. He was searching for Mabel, and the only way to find her was through Bossy. They talked about the immortality Bossy could give you, but that wasn't what he wanted. He simply wanted to know, to understand, to find comprehension because now he knew he had none.

  The one remaining spark of his old life was his resentment at the padlock on Bossy's door. The lock was a symbol of his whole life. He had always either been locked out or locked in. There had always been a lock between him and the thing he wanted. A lock had become a challenge. It was a challenge he could not resist. He had wavered in indecision before, knowing very well that even if he again found Mabel through Bossy it would not be the same as it had been before, but as soon as the padlock was placed there his mind was made up. The symbol had been inserted again between him and what he wanted. He rose to the challenge.

  His motives were quite clear to Joe; and Joe breathed a huge sigh of relief. He had wondered when Carney would come around to it.

  When the old man was safely past his door, Joe slipped out into the corridor behind him. He set up a protecting wave field which would prevent the old man from hearing him, or seeing him if he turned around.

  And he set up a wave field of illusion around old Carney himself.

  At the next turn of the corridor, Carney paused to case the situation ahead. It was nearly midnight, and the young soldier on guard, feeling that by now the lieutenant would be safely in bed and asleep, had pulled a chair up in front of this main entrance to the operating amphitheater. He had tilted his chair back against the door and was dozing there comfortably with his rifle across his knees, dreaming of the next twenty-four-hour pass and the little brunette he had met on a Hyde Street cable car.

  Alternative plans came into Carney's thoughts. He could rush the soldier, who seemed to be asleep, or he could make a noise and wake him, then stop to pass the time of night with the kid who was probably bored and lonesome and find an opportunity to clonk him on the head.

  Joe decided to take a further hand. Either scheme seemed unlikely for success. Into the young soldier's dream, half reverie and half real on the edge of sleep, Joe injected the image of a frowning officer. It was not just the lieutenant, not even a captain. This was big brass, real brass. GHQ stuff. There was a guilt feeling in the young man's mind anyway because he had settled back and was resting his eyes; it was not difficult to materialize the symbol of retribution.

  The soldier stirred uneasily and his movement decided Carney on the latter plan. He would just happen by and start talking. At the sound of a footstep, the symbol of retribution crystallized into reality. The soldier's eyes popped open in sheer horror. He pitched forward from his chair and somehow managed to get to attention without dropping his rifle.

  The snapping to attention, the look of horrified awe shocked Carney into immobility also. For a long moment, the two of them stood there, each immobile. The guard's worst fears were confirmed. He saw before him a general, a two-star general. He had been caught sleeping at his post by a two-star general! He opened his mouth twice before he could get words to come out.

  "S-sorry, s-sir,” he stammered. The effort, feeble as it was, revived the pattern of self-preservation. “I ... I was just resting my bad leg ... twisted it on the range yesterday ... sir—"

  Carney stared at the soldier in disbelief. The kid had gone nuts. They were all wacky.

  Joe gave the soldier his first faint gleam of hope. This general wasn't interested in him. He wasn't there to check up on the guard. He had important business. He had come by plane from Washington to make a personal inspection of this Bossy machine. But his visit was strictly hush-hush. Secret stuff. Classified! Restricted! Off limits! No enlisted men allowed. Officers only. The pattern was familiar, believable.

  "I want in there, right now, at once,” Carney heard his lips forming the words crisply, and wondered where they came from.

  "Yes, sir,” the soldier almost whispered. “Thank you, sir. But, sir, I don't have a key, sir. The lieutenant, sir—” He felt a little easier. If the general couldn't get in it was the lieutenant's fault. And he had used enough sirs to placate even a two-star general.

  Carney opened his kit of burglar tools and fished out a ring of skeleton keys. That ring was the pride and joy, the lifetime collection of one of the boys who was now donating some time to the State.

  "Try these,” he said, and tossed them to the guard.

  As key after key failed, the soldier grew more and more nervous until finally when one did work he was so relieved that he flung the door open, breaking the government seal, without a second thought.

  "Right in there, sir,” he said hurriedly. “I'll see that you're not disturbed, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, SIR ... I mean."

  Carney blinked at him owlishly. He didn't understand it, he didn't even understand himself, the way he'd acted. The kid soldier had apparently snapped his cap, but then what could you expect these days? He patted the boy on the shoulder.

  "Take it easy, son,” he said kindly. “You ain't no worse off than anybody el
se."

  Tears of gratitude welled up in the soldier's eyes. Now, for the first time, he understood this feeling of loyalty they were always telling him he'd better have, or else. Here was a real officer, a regular guy. The kind of an officer you could go through hell for-He blinked the tears away and saluted, not trusting himself to speak.

  Carney shook his bald head pityingly, and shuffled into the operating room.

  When the door had closed behind Carney, Joe turned and ran back down the corridor to Hoskins’ room. He shook the cyberneticist awake and dragged him, protesting, across the hall to the suite assigned to Billings. When both of them were sufficiently awake to understand him, he told them what had happened and briefly outlined his plan.

  Billings looked uncertain, but Hoskins delightedly smashed his fist into the palm of his other hand.

  "Good work, Joe,” he exclaimed. “It's worth a try, anyway. Come on, Jonathan."

  "Just walk right past the guard,” Joe cautioned. “Don't say a word."

  He hurried to his own room and phoned Steve Flynn. The phone rang a long time before he heard Steve growl an angry response.

  At first Steve didn't get it. Joe repeated the essential facts of his plan. Steve got it then. He whooped joyfully into the phone, anger and sleep forgotten.

  "Genius, kid! Pure, homogenized genius! You just keep control over there and watch Steve Flynn go into his super best!"

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  CHAPTER XXIII

  There was a time when scientists believed that when vapor in a cloud reached 32 degrees F the fog froze, as respectable water should, and formed into snowflakes-all nice and tidy and dependable. Field tests, in the contrary way of reality, did not confirm them. Sometimes the temperature was as much as 60 degrees F colder than freezing, and still the stubborn cloud refused to coagulate into snow. Then they found that a mere handful of dry ice could turn a whole roiling cloud into a sudden snowstorm.

  The mass psychology of the public mind was like that. Potential would build up, higher and higher, and still there would be no mass reaction. A straw would be tossed to see which way the wind blew, and would fall to earth unnoticed. Many a politician, many a pollster, assumed from this that there was no reaction potential.

  Then some insignificant little thing, some complete triviality, would seed the public mind, and a raging storm, over apparently nothing, would ensue. To those who had no conception of the forces of mass psychology, this made the public mind unpredictable.

  Steve Flynn did not know the scientific terms to account for his mastery of public emotion, but he knew something better. He knew how to feel the mass psychology potential, and when and how to seed it to make it crystallize. He could not have held his own in the bright patter of devastating epigrams which rolled so easily off the tongues of the lunatic intellectual fringe which had moved over from art and into science; but he could do where they could only talk about.

  He withheld breaking the news of Carney's therapy for hour after hour. The public mind had too high a potential of unbalance from Billings’ failure in Bossy to risk another such fiasco.

  Quietly, working completely behind the scenes, swearing each contact to secrecy, he set the stage for another world-wide television show. He even made the mistake, a part of his well calculated plan, of letting a notoriously unethical news commentator get word of what was happening just before that worthy went on the air.

  The commentator scooped the world with the rumor that Bossy was being tried again.

  It was the handful of dry ice in a high potential of mass psychology. The tornado, the typhoon, the cyclone of public reaction was sudden and complete. Under normal circumstances, when the military had found its beachhead squad outmaneuvered, a larger contingent would have been sent in to take over and stop all this nonsense.

  But, in view of the public clamor to be let in on what was happening, the mobs which gathered outside of newspaper offices and broadcasting studios all over the nation, the unaccountable mobs like those in an old-fashioned movie storming the palace gates, the Pentagon found it expedient to get all snarled up in orders and countermanded orders so that no action resulted.

  The Chief of Staff was suddenly out of the city on urgent business. He could not be reached for a decision. Back down through the echelons, rank by rank, went the responsibility for decision. Back across the continent to San Francisco it traveled. Back to Area Headquarters. Back to Post. Back to the lieutenant, who took the only possible course-and turned the whole thing over to his sergeant.

  "I know I can depend on you to take the appropriate action,” he said crisply.

  The sergeant nodded. He had been expecting it all the time. He would just keep changing the guard, the quite useless guard the way everybody and his dog kept running in and out of the room, until somebody, somewhere made a decision.

  The stage was set, and Bossy, bless her, was cooperating. To question after question, she answered instantly and simply:

  "Progress satisfactory."

  * * * *

  Assured by Joe, Billings and Hoskins, at noon Steve Flynn decided there was every chance the experiment on Carney would be a success. The scene in the amphitheater, set up again under the same conditions as the experiment on Billings, flashed on the television screens in millions of homes.

  Slowly, the amphitheater filled again with the renowned scientists of the world.

  By six o'clock the public began to get bored, restive. Carney's tired old body lay on the table under the glare of television lights, and its only movement was its rhythmic breathing, and occasional enigmatic twitch of the facial muscles, the tensing and relaxing of fingers and toes. There wasn't much to see. The entertainment value of watching an old man sleep is limited.

  One by one the TV chains returned to more remunerative programs where the public would feel at home in the old familiar cliche situations and gags that had passed for entertainment from time immemorial. Each chain promised to devote a half hour here and there, and anyone who really wished to hang upon Carney's every breath could do so by judiciously twirling his dial.

  Steve Flynn's staff did a magnificent job of interest buildup; bringing in all the old phony hackneyed situations guaranteed to make the public love Carney. His dead-end childhood around the wharves of the Embarcadero read like a chapter from Lincoln's life. Carney became a tow-headed little tot who studied by the light of street lamps, and lectured his playmates on the moral principles involved in stealing apples. His youthful years at juvenile delinquent institutions provided inspiration for a repetition of the sentimental prose of Dickens. The mature years developed into a search for comprehension, a misunderstood man buffeted by society, one of nature's noble martyrs.

  The public had its biggest cry since Camille. They stared at their TV screens with the fascination of the crowd who gathers at the scene of a murder and just looks.

  In the days that passed Steve's office brought the public up to date on Carney's later life. The friendship between old Mabel and old Carney became a great and noble thing, touched with humor and bathos, unenlivened by any hint of turgid passion. Mabel had simply rescued an old childhood friend and had given him back his self-respect-in view of the whitewashing job done it was not quite clear how he had lost it-by making him manager of her picturesque little pawnshop down on Third Street.

  Within an hour the pawnshop was completely cleaned out of all its merchandise by souvenir hunters who would pay any price for a slightly used jimmy or the hubcap of an out-of-date automobile.

  The world took skid row to her motherly bosom and the winos hovering in cold doorways became the bewildered recipients of much good advice and some help. The shortline became both proud and resentful of their new status. The professional do-gooders had been at it long enough to have at least a little understanding of why a man was on the shortline in the first place. These new uplifters made the men uncomfortable. But they endured it, in the passive way they had endured all the other outrageous demands of a
society with which they had never been able to cope.

  And they knew that within a week or two the good-will jag would pass, and be as faded and tired as a forgotten Christmas wreath on the tenth of January.

  In fact, the camellia of compassion was already starting to turn brown around the edges, showing that first sign of decay.

  "Why?” some of the more respectable members of society were beginning to ask. “Why is Bossy successful only with the most disreputable creatures that could be found? What kind of warped minds had rigged the machine so that it would give immortality only to the worst dregs of society?"

  Accustomed to rigging everything from slot machines to semantics in favor of some particular group, they could not conceive of a machine which had not been rigged and slanted deliberately.

  Deep beneath the roar of the crowd which was delighted by it all, the voices of the people who really mattered began to coalesce into an opinion which began to be heard around Washington.

  * * * *

  It was on the eighth day that some changes in Carney began to be evident. Step by step, and this time for the awed eyes of the world, Carney duplicated the pattern of renewal followed by Mabel.

  The plasma supply suddenly became a very important item.

  "More plasma,” Bossy's screen would announce.

  The TV commentator would murmur in his best bedside voice:

  "More plasma."

  Then, after the requisite two-second pause, the announcer would add:

  "This plasma transfusion is by courtesy of Midvale Memorial Hospital, Oakland, fully equipped and staffed for your every need. Luxurious service, modest prices. Pay-as-you-go-plan."

  The figure on the operating table straightened its tired old bones, flaked off the outer epidermis of faded skin, shed the lank wisps of dirty gray hair. The figure of a vibrant yoong man began to emerge, strong and lithe and beautiful.

  The tenth day passed. Now there was a renewed interest in watching the television screen. All the world knew that Mabel had emerged on the tenth day. But to repeated questions on when Doc Carney would emerge, Bossy simply answered: