They'd Rather Be Right (27 page)

But this—nothing!

A half hour later, at 9:30, Hoskins repeated his question. The answer was the same.

“No progress.”

At eleven o’clock Billings stirred and sat up. His face was drawn, his eyes were filled with grief of failure.

“Let’s try it from the beginning again,” he said slowly.

He lay back down.

“What is happening?” Flynn asked Hoskins. “I don’t know,” Hoskins answered.

There was a subdued gasp from the audience. A scientist was expected to know.

Flynn turned desperately toward his boss, Kennedy. His eyes fell on Joe.

“Mr. Carter,” he said suddenly, “can you tell us what is happening?”

 

For an instant, Joe was on the verge of refusing. Then he decided they would have to know sometime, it might as well be now.

He stood up, stepped past Kennedy’s knees. He faced the microphone, and the television eyes.

“All of the learned gentlemen in this room know, but for the benefit of those in the television audience who do not know, psychosomatic therapy is applied through a form of mild hypnosis, wherein the patient is conscious but rendered cooperative with the therapist. The therapist does not have complete command of the patient. If at any point the patient is commanded to let loose of a conviction which he believes more important than the cure, the therapist is defeated. There can be no progress.

“Apparently Dr. Billings is unable to give up some firm convictions which he believes to be right.”

He did not elaborate further. The doctors would know, they had had patients they could not help.

Each of them who had practiced psychotherapy of any kind would have had patients who preferred their own interpretation rather than adopt the doctor’s. As for the general public, they’d better be given the chance to think about this for a while.

He walked back to his seat.

Kennedy watched him with narrowed eyes. “That’s what you meant about me,” he mumbled as Joe sat down.

Joe sighed.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can’t you step up the juice a little?” Flynn was asking Hoskins. “If that’s all it is, just turn on more power and make him give up his convictions.”

Joe stood up again and spoke from his seat.

“That kind of therapy, the use of force to make a man give up his convictions, has been tried since the dawn of history. I think we should have learned by now that it won’t work.”

The audience shifted uneasily. This young man, whoever he was, was taking too much authority upon himself.

At that point Billings sat up again, and slowly began to disconnect the electrodes from his body. Four words were printed on Bossy’s communication screen which told the whole story.

“No progress is possible.”

Chapter XIX

Joe, Steve Flynn and Howard Kennedy sat in the industrialist’s office, and were silent. Kennedy sat with his back to the huge desk and stared out of the picture window which looked out over the city and the bay. Steve Flynn perused the papers with an almost masochistic zeal, searching out even minor comment from the back pages, as if, having had salt poured into his wounds, to have it all done at once.

Joe sat back in his chair, comfortable and resting, waiting until some plan of procedure would begin to jell in the other men’s minds.

He knew that the danger to man’s progress does not come from the scientist who constructs and verifies a structure of theory and methodology, but from that man’s followers. Whatever the university attended, whatever the degree obtained, the simple fact, as he had observed it in men’s minds, was that most men, even scientists, do not have the courage to follow the basic tenets of science; that even though they may call it science they actually stand upon a structure of faith.

And having had one structure taken out from under them, they seize upon another and guard it with a desperate frenzy, lest it, too, be threatened.

 

Speculative theory then becomes canonized law; suggested procedure becomes ritual; tentative statements become rote. And if their practice of it makes them successful, it becomes impossible for them to conceive of any other truth but their own. It works, therefore it is right. The originator, having had the flexible intelligence to vary from the old and create a new, might have been able to conceive of still yet another structure than his own; but his followers have the proof of their own infallibility always before their eyes.

Joe was aware of the obvious; that any theory is true within the framework where it applies; and any theory is false outside its own coordinate system. He knew, and now Bossy had proved his knowledge, that it is never the accuracy of the theory as an absolute, but rather the persistence of applying it and staying well within the boundaries of its framework which brings success.

So the growing organism of speculative consideration hardens into the ironclad coffin of orthodoxy.

And orthodoxy was having its day.

Bossy was something new. Bossy did not fit into their theory structure therefore Bossy was,
per se,
wrong. They would gladly go to their graves, firm and proud to the last expiring breath of how right they were.

“Listen to what Dr. Frederick Pomeroy says,”

Steve spoke up, and read aloud without waiting for a response.

“We should remember that Bossy was never intended to be more than an accident-prevention device on our faster military planes. The imputation of thera-peutic qualities is a travesty on our intelligence. When the truth of the Mabel Monohan case is finally uncovered—and it will be uncovered, never fear—we shall undoubtedly find that a shameful fraud has been perpe-trated on the public.’”

Flynn flicked the page with his fingertip.

“That just about sums up most of the comment,” he said. “Unless you’d like to hear what Dr. Eustace Fairfax, consulting psychologist for the San Francisco Police Department, has to say?”

Kennedy whirled his chair around. His eyes were bleak, but his lips were fighting a smile.

“That’s the one who saw Mabel at the jail, isn’t it?” he asked.

Steve turned several pages of the paper. The com-ments of Dr. Eustace Fairfax were buried down among the reactions of the lesser lights.

“‘There were those among the laity,’” Steve read, “‘who scorned professional opinion and counsel.

There were those in public life who preferred to pander to the emotions of the mob. There were those who chose to ridicule me when I testified that Mabel Monohan was a mentally unbalanced young woman who should be confined to an institution. Perhaps now they will remember their words, and in the future leave the problems of the mentally ill to those who are qualified to deal with them.’”

One could almost see the thin, fanatic face, the long nose quivering with indignation, the polished glasses sparkling with triumphant venom. Dr. Eustace Fairfax was indeed a cookbook psychiatrist, and by turning the tentative considerations of authority into esoteric articles of commandments he became authority.

 

The quotation sparked Joe’s impatience. He decided it was time now to let both men know where he was going.

“Of course none of them realize that the experiment was a complete success,” he said quietly.

Steve Flynn all but fell out of his chair. His mouth dropped open and his chin hung slack as he stared at Joe. Kennedy’s eyes sparkled with something approaching pride and approval.

“I’ve been wondering when you were going to take us into your confidence, Joe,” he said.

Steve’s jaw suddenly clamped shut and his eyes narrowed in sudden anger.

“I don’t get it!” he said harshly. “I don’t get any part of that. You mean you knew this was going to happen, that Bossy wasn’t going to work on Billings, and you let us go ahead and make fools of ourselves anyway?”

“The point,” Joe said mildly, “is that I didn’t know, not surely. I had to find out. I tried to warn you to tone down the publicity. I would have preferred the experiment in complete secrecy; that is, at first. Then later, I realized the wider the publicity for the failure, the better. It’s a good idea for mankind to know just what he’s up against.”

“Right now I’d settle for knowing what I’m up against,” Steve said disgustedly. Joe could feel the release of somatic tensions as the anger drained out of Flynn.

“Look,” he continued, “what Bossy can or can’t do is no skin off my nose. But you give me a job to do. You give me the job of making the public like Bossy. So I go ahead and build it up, make a big production out of it, big deal, my masterpiece. And now I find out you’re expecting just the opposite of what I expected.” He turned to Kennedy and asked, with a note of accusation in his voice. “Did you expect this too, Mr. Kennedy?”

“I wondered about it,” Kennedy answered him quietly. “In view of what Joe said to me the first time we met, I wondered.”

“It wasn’t a deliberate double cross, Steve,” Joe said, and washed away the traces of rebellion in Steve’s mind. “I didn’t know how it was going to come out. I hoped it would turn out the way it has, but I didn’t know it would.”

“I don’t get it,” Steve repeated, and this time there was hurt in his voice. “It helps that you didn’t deliberately cross me up, but—oh brother!”

“Do you know anything about trees, Steve?” Joe asked.

Flynn turned and looked at him sharply. These Brains! You never knew what tangent they were going to take next. How they ever managed to get anything done when they couldn’t stay on the subject more than two minutes was beyond him. Oh, brother!

“I don’t get that either,” he answered, and kept his opinion of this woolgathering to himself.

“In a forest of giant trees,” Joe said, “seedlings sicken and die. They need sunlight to grow; they can’t get it. It’s only around the fringes of the forest, as it spreads out, that they can get the right environment for growth. In the center the only growths that survive are the kind who can live in a filtered gloom. They survive under that certain condition, but they couldn’t survive a change; they couldn’t survive a condition which is normal environment elsewhere. They can’t even survive direct sunlight. You get that in a civilization of humans, too. The significant changes always come from the fringes; there’s no room for them to develop where the giant trees still stand.”

It was obvious that Steve still did not get it.

“It may sound like a paradox,” Joe explained, “but death, itself, is a survival factor. Environment is subject to change. The only life which can survive is the kind which can meet the challenge of the change. This means that every form of life must be constantly trying out new mutant patterns so that when the change comes there are mutations capable of meeting it.

“Did you ever notice, speaking as a class, that the castoff detritus of evergreen trees poisons the ground around them so that nothing but their own kind can grow? An idea, which becomes an evergreen tradition, does the same. But the castoff detritus of deciduous trees, which have the false death of winter, enriches the ground. A variant offspring has a chance to survive.”

Kennedy’s eyes closed, and he sat silently, hardly breathing.

“And I’ve always been bitter toward my son,” he said. “No wonder he couldn’t grow.”

“You’ll have to draw pictures for me,” Steve said in a puzzled voice. “The boss gets it, but I don’t.”

*

“The reason Mabel was able to respond to Bossy is quite simple,” Joe explained. “In spite of the kind of life she led, Mabel was at heart quite a believer in the truth of the artificial mores our civilization has set up. You find that far more frequently than is generally realized. Now she lived a life of sin and a life of crime. She should have been punished for it, according to her inner convictions, but instead she prospered. As she grew older, she grew more confused. Humanity says one thing and does another; sets up a whole system of ethics and then prospers through violating them. Mabel was honest, she could not reconcile what happens with what is taught. She wound up completely bewildered, at a loss to account for why man’s teachings and his behavior seem to have little or nothing in common.

“She wanted answers to all this. She really wanted answers, not just confirmations of what she already believed. Her prejudice screen had been knocked so full of holes that ideas could get through to her without first being deformed all out of reality to fit her preset conviction. Mabel was ready for therapy.”

“And Dr. Billings wasn’t,” Kennedy said.

“That’s right,” Joe agreed. “Dr. Billings had built a worldwide reputation on a structure which he believed to be right. Intellectually he is able to consider that other structures may be valid, but against deep seated convictions that his must be the right one because he has proved that it works, these are just mental exercises. In a showdown, he stopped playing word games and clung to his convictions. Only on a single-valued basis were they right. Mabel wanted to know; Billings already knew, or thought he did.”

“I don’t see what that has got to do with trees,” Steve said flatly.

“Man represents a mutation of life wherein the intellect will get its chance to prove survival worth. It hasn’t done that yet, you understand. All sorts of life forms flourish grandly for a while and then die out.

But universal time is a long time. Remember the giant reptiles flourished for forty million years. Man will have to better that record before he can truly say that intellect is superior to massive bulk and a thick hide.

“Against that forty million years, man has about seven thousand years of historical record. But man acts as if, and apparently really believes, he already has the answers, that there is nothing left for mankind to do for the next forty million years except to imitate the man of today.”