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

up to nothing when Billings tried it. Suggestions from various departments, working piece-meal, ranged all the way from pinhead size transistors, to city block long banks of cybernetic machines. Even though they had the knowledge, if they did, to build a separate machine to take care of each possible pattern which might arise in the piloting of a plane, it would create an accumulation large enough to fill the old Empire State building.
     
    In exasperation, Billings called Joe to account in his office. They were alone, and Billings minced no words about the way Joe was dragging his feet.
    “Why do you want to build this machine, doctor?” Joe asked abruptly. “You’re not afraid of the consequences if you fail?”
    Billings had not expected this attack from Joe. As the weeks had passed, he had felt a growing urgency to succeed, but he had not tried to put his feelings into words. To answer Joe, he tried now.
    “Every man, who thinks, wants there to be a meaning to his life,” he said carefully, for he sensed that this was the critical point. “I’ve spent my life trying to know, to understand. Everything I’ve ever learned seems to come together in this one thing. Say I’m looking for a monument, that there should be an apex, a crowning achievement. Every man would like there to be something remaining after him, which says, ‘This is the meaning of his life.’”
    Joe was silent, and looked at him steadily. Billings realized he had expressed only a part of it, perhaps the most insignificant part. He picked up a cigarette, lit it, and took another approach.
    “A civilization, too,” he said. “Each one of them has produced some one great achievement, one specialty. There’re not all the same and with the same goals. But each succeeding civilization seems to adopt what results it can use from past achievements. It syn-thesizes them into its own special achievement. Our specialty has been technological advance. Never mind that everything else is borrowed and doesn’t fit us—we have achieved that. But what we have achieved could be meaningless to some future civilization unless we give it meaning now. Here, again, this thing would sum up and embody in one object the total of our technology.
    “If man’s advance is toward a broader intellect, it seems we should sum up his intellect to this point—if we can, and in our own language, that of technology. It’s the only one we speak without an accent.”
    Still Joe sat in silence, and picked absently at a frayed thread in the drape which hung near his chair.
    Though he meant them to be constructive, Billings realized that to Joe such arguments were futile, hopeless, destructive. An old man may think with detachment about thousand-year periods of history, and view with little concern the infinitesimal part his own life plays out of all the trillions of people who may live. But a young man is impatient with such maundering. He wants the answers to his own life, the drive which will give purpose to his own acts. And the purpose was there, too, enough to satisfy even—a Joe.
    “No man watches happily,” Billings said, “while his civilization passes and sinks back into the Dark Ages. Every man has the tragic feeling that it need not happen; that if some eventual civilization is to endure, then why not his own? True, most civilizations had one spurt which made them shine for a while before they flickered out again. But some had several spurts. Some new thing entered the life of the people. They found the energy to meet the new challenge and solve its problem.”
    Joe’s head came up at this, and he stopped pulling at the string on the curtain.
    “According to you, Joe,” Billings said in final argument, “this thing may destroy man. It may also bump him up to the next step of evolution.”
    “You’d be willing to face personal danger for that, doctor?” Joe asked suddenly.
    The room grew very still. Billings did not answer lightly, for he suspected Joe saw