Free They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton Page B

is a practical limit to the elasticity of a material. There is also a limit to the elasticity of human reaction to a science it can not understand, and therefore fears.
    It became also apparent, in these weeks, that there was a serious leak of details on the progress of Bossy. No project as widespread as the work on Bossy could be kept entirely under security. Even where trained scientists possess only scraps and portions of the whole knowledge, misconceptions will occur. And multitudes of those working on some phase of Bossy were not yet trained scientists. They were students. Students, for all the grave respect they hold for the weight and importance of their knowledge, are notorious for misconceptions. There is a dividing line between effective scientist and student, but it has nothing to do with graduation exercises. Too many remain students, multiplying misconception upon misconception. An astonishing number of these, unable to make their way in the laboratory, turn to teaching for their living. The gap between science and superstition widens.
    Beyond a serious central leak, which was becoming apparent, there were widespread rumors and bits of information leaking out. Each, in itself, was perhaps a harmless thing—if properly weighed and stripped of its exaggerations and misinterpretations. But human beings, generally, are not noted for their ability to weigh judiciously, discount exaggerations, and allow for possible misunderstanding. People like sensationalism, and in the telling add their bit to it.
     
    Bossy, at first ignored as being the business of the scientists and having no relationship to bread and bed, suddenly became a topic of conversation everywhere. Everyone found he had an opinion.
    Ready-made opinions by the score poured through the news columns and over video. Bossy began to assume proportions of concern, dread, then outright fear.
    When you stop to think of it, some of the more articulate would say, the most inefficient, unpredictable, costly and exasperating machine used in industry is the human being. The only advantage it has over other machines, the only reason an industrialist uses it, is its wide flexibility of adaptation to numerous conditions, the ease of replacement if it doesn’t function properly.
    But now there was Bossy.
    It did not take long for the sensationalists to predict manless factories, manless shops and stores, manless utility and transportation services. Once the coals were breathed into flame, it did not take long for the fire to gather fuel and spread in white heat. And like a gaso-line poured into the flames was the wholesale student deferment.
    Some of this reaction trickled, much diffused, into the ivory towers. Billings tried to offset it. He made a personal appearance on a national hook-up, but he mistook fire for water and poured oil on the waves to quiet them.
    “There is nothing to fear,” he said. “The brain of Bossy is no more than a compound of synthetic pro-teins, colloids, enzymes, metallic salts, fatty acids—each molecule designed and shaped to do a specific task, picking up codified impulse charges to complete their structure, and then combining into a threadlike substance for storage and release.”
    If he had spoken in Hottentot, it would have been as comprehensible and less dangerous. For without conveying the slightest understanding, and even in his attempts to show this thing was not human, he heightened the dread.
    Bossy was truly a machine, a synthetic thing. Its inventor, the famous Billings, had said so, himself.
    Had it been alive, man might have understood it better, even though alien and inimical it would have shared with him the mystery of life and thought.
    As he droned on and on through his talk, as he described the lenses, the diaphragms, the metallic, glassite, plastic receptors, showing how they saw and felt and tasted and heard, he confirmed all the rumors. Bossy was capable of replacing man.
    And Bossy had no soul.
    Letters by the