They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton Read Free Book Online

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.”
    That added