THEY’D RATHER BE RIGHT (1958) [Part 2]

PART 2: “BOSSY”

Chapter 1

Just ahead, on Third Street, the massive facade of San Francisco’s Southern Pacific depot loomed, half hidden in the swirling fog and January twi­light. Joe Carter pulled his rented pickup truck to the now deserted curb, and squinted appraisingly into the gloom. The warning had come, the usual tingling up and down his spine, the drawing sensation at the nape of his neck.

He sent an expanding wave-field ahead of him, a telepathic inquiry, but there were too many people around the depot for him to sort out the specific source of danger without first knowledge of a focal point. The static of general anxiety, grief and gladness, which always seems to hang over a depot like a pall of smoke, prevented him from finding any menace directed to­ward himself.

And on the outside of the depot the scene was quite normal. The blurred yellow lights of a taxi pulled out of its reserved section and turned down Townsend Street toward the Embarcadero. The muffled rumble of traffic on the long overhead approach to the Bay Bridge was an audible accompaniment to the esper hum of half vocalized words and phrases picked up from the minds of the people all about the area.

He watched a police car cruise slowly by and disap­pear into the fog. He sampled the stream of conscious­ness of the two officers. Their casual glance has registered him in their minds: male truck driver, white, about twenty-two, no obvious disfigurements, not breaking any law at the moment. But there was no recognition.

He swept the street again with his physical eyes, and almost passed over the skid-row wino who had drifted a little far south of the usual haunts. The fellow had stopped in the chill shelter of a darkened store front, and was apparently drinking with desperate thirst from a wine bottle held in a paper sack. It was so usual, so completely in character, that Joe very nearly made the mistake of not penetrating. But even as he started to flick his eyes onward, his nape muscles con­tracted more sharply, heightening the awareness of danger.

Still doubting that the somatic price he must pay for sharing the wino’s hopelessness and dejection would be worth some bit of factual information drenched in it, Joe pierced.

He got a series of photographs, sharp and clear.

The Federal agent’s disguise was near perfection. Joe chuckled silently, with genuine amusement. In rinsing the wine in his mouth to give him a breath, just in case some other bum stumbled up to him, the agent had inadvertently swallowed a slug of the cheap stuff.

With him, and as clearly, Joe felt the somatic effect of the wine in the man’s nose, mouth, throat and stomach.

But the agent’s disgust did not wash out the domi­nant picture in his mind. He had recently been briefed, and his upper stream of consciousness still carried the conceptual images.

Two more agents were inside the depot; one of them standing near the line of people waiting to get tickets validated; the other reading a newspaper over near the hallway which led to the rest rooms.

Within easy vision of both sat their quarry, Profes­sors Billings and Hoskins. Billings had been recog­nized at the depot in St. Louis where he was changing trains in his flight across the country. Hoskins had not been discovered at all until he had joined Billings less than half an hour ago. There was elation in the agent’s mind over the meeting, for it might mean that the end of the long trail was near. Obviously, the two men were now waiting for someone else to join them.

And when someone joined them, it was possible, unsuspectingly, they might lead the agents directly to Bossy.

Up until now there had been absolutely no indication of where the synthetic brain had been hidden. There was disgust and contempt in the agent’s mind that during all the years that Hoxworth and other universi­ties had been experimenting in the building of the cybernetic marvel, subsidized with government funds, Washington bureaucracy had not realized the signifi­cance of it. It had taken an uprising of the people, themselves, to drive home to Washington how man would react to the destruction of all his previous concepts on how the human mind worked and the values it assumed were absolute.

Someone had said then that this machine was more important than the atomic bomb had been forty years ago; that the implosion of its significance upon man’s psyche might do what the atomic bombs could not do; that man has a way of surviving physical destruction, but there was a large question of whether he could survive self-knowledge.

“You are so right,” Joe murmured, and lit a ciga­rette to heighten the impression that he had stopped to rest his shoulders and neck from arduous driving.

The agents’ orders were quite clear. Professors Hos­kins and Billings were the central figures in developing the synthetic mind. The trail of these two men, sooner or later, would lead to Bossy. Until then, they were to keep the two professors under unsuspected surveil­lance; were not to concentrate enough agents to arouse suspicion; were to make an arrest only if the actions of the two men forced their hand.

Joe drew on his cigarette, and probed to a deeper level. He found what he wanted. The agent was tired, and he was chilled. He doubted that his stakeout posi­tion was necessary. The reports were that old Professor Billings, at least seventy-two, was as naive as a child; that he couldn’t elude the typical Junior G-Man, age six. And the agent’s stomach was beginning to feel queasy from the raw wine he had swallowed.

He was tired, he was chilled, he was queasy. Joe tied himself into the somatic discomfort, intensified it in himself, fed back the intensified dissatisfaction; picked it up again; oscillated it back and forth between them on feedback principle, stepped up each time—in the way he had watched mob reactions heighten far beyond the capacity of any isolated individual—and waited.

* * * *

The man began to look down the street toward a small restaurant. He was growing ill. Perhaps the wine had poisoned him. There was the fleeting glimpse of wonder if he would be included on the roster of those killed in pursuit of duty. There was the rational denial of the urge of self-pity. There was the compromise to get a cup of coffee first, to see if that would break the chill, rest him, settle his stomach. But, undoubtedly, this was that extreme situation which would justify his leaving his post of duty.

By the time Joe had meshed the gears of his truck to pull away from the curb, the agent was already halfway down the block, hurrying to the restaurant, still clutching the neck of the wine bottle in the paper sack. In case he did die, it might be valuable evidence.

Without more care than an ordinary truck driver would show, Joe drove the pickup into one of the loading docks on the far side of the station. He willed away the last sympathetic waves of nausea from his own stomach, and climbed nimbly up on the ramp. He strolled, without appearing to be in any hurry, through the door marked with the sign of Railway Express.

The clerk looked him over, took in the greasy leather jacket, the oil-stained jeans, the crumpled cap with the cracked visor.

“Yeah?” the clerk challenged. “What do you want?”

“Pickup for Brown Appliance Company,” Joe an­swered easily. “Crate of television parts.” No flash of alertness, suspicion, was evident in the clerk’s mind. It was confirmation that no one knew of Bossy. He handed the clerk the shipping bill he had obtained when he forwarded the parts of Bossy from a town a hundred miles away from Hoxworth.

“No such package here,” the clerk said automati­cally. There was no real animosity in his voice or his mind. It was the simple desire to obstruct found in everyone, and often expressed where there is no fear of retaliation.

“Boss called the day crew,” Joe said dryly. “They said it was here. Suppose you get the lead out and find it.

The clerk looked at him levelly and curled his lip in a slight sneer. If this punk’s boss had called and got the manager during the day, there might be a stink. He decided to cooperate. He found the crate in the back room, slipped the blade of the hand truck beneath its edge, grumbled at how heavy and bulky it was, and wheeled it out on the loading dock. To his own sur­prise, he found himself helping Joe load it carefully into the bed of the pickup.

Joe walked back into the office with the clerk. “Boss wants me to get a ticket to L.A.,” Joe said. “Where do I do that?”

“In there,” the clerk said and jabbed a finger toward the door leading to the waiting room of the depot. “You want me to lead you by the hand?”

“No,” Joe answered. “Don’t like to get my hand dirty.”

He walked on through the door and down the corri­dor which led to the depot waiting room. He knew that the clerk was standing behind his counter with his jaw hanging down and his mouth open. The clerk’s shock of being bested at his own game gave Joe the somatic hook he needed to blur the image of himself in the clerk’s mind. In spite of the repartee, he would not be remembered. As any courtroom knows, emotional disturbance can call up wildly inaccurate descriptions. Already the clerk was remembering him as a hulking brute of a truck driver with coarse black hair, wide flaring ears and tobacco juice stains on his chin.

At the corridor entrance to the waiting room, Joe paused, and with both psionic and visual sight picked out the two professors. Their disguises were simple, and still intact. The seventy-two-year-old Billings had had the distinguishing mane of white hair cut short and dyed black. The elaborate gold pince-nez on the flowing black ribbon had been replaced with garden variety horn rims. His clothes were cheap and nonde­script. But far more than such superficialities, Joe had counted on the change in the man’s bearing to keep his identity secret. Gone was the assurance of the world-famous figure, known to every child through picture, cartoon, newsreel, the renowned Dean of Psychoso­matic Medicine at Hoxworth University. In its place was hurt, bewilderment, incredulity—a lost and tired old man. Even so, he had been recognized and fol­lowed here.

Professor Hoskins, at forty, with even less change in his appearance had not been recognized before joining Billings.

The two of them sat there now, according to plan, waiting for Joe to join them, to tell them what they must do next.

And with the wino agent’s mentations as a focal guide, Joe had no difficulty in picking out their two watchers. These two were also nondescript in appear­ance. They waited patiently, as might well-domesti­cated husbands waiting for wives, without either calling attention to themselves, or avoiding it.

Joe’s lips twitched in a smile, and he took advantage of their natural wish to relieve their boredom. The one with the newspaper signaled the other with his eyes that a conference was necessary. Aimlessly, they drifted together near the entrance to the depot. One followed the other out the door, and together they walked up the street toward a restaurant.

With no surprise at all, they joined their fellow agent in the wino disguise, and the three of them sat dis­cussing their quarry, speculating on who was to contact the professors, and when the trail might lead to Bossy. The wino agent had recovered his feeling of well-being with astonishing rapidity, concluded he had just been momentarily chilled. He didn’t bother to mention why they had found him there, and it did not occur to them to ask.

* * * *

For a full half hour, long after he had got the two professors and Bossy safely away from the depot, Joe kept them in the mental framework of considering their quiet discussion there at the restaurant counter a perfectly normal part of their duties.

Then, since Joe was not above a certain sense of humor, he allowed it to occur to each of them, simulta­neously, that they had wandered away and left their quarry unobserved. They looked at one another, sud­denly wild eyed with consternation, and sprang away from the counter as if it had burned them.

They ran pell-mell down the street to the depot. They searched the place from cellar to roof. Throwing aside all precautions, they questioned everyone. No one remembered having noticed the two men at all.

They drew together out near the loading docks and began to rationalize and justify their behavior after they had realized the futility of trying to fix the blame each on the others. They were well experienced in devising stories which would convince judge and jury, but their superior had come up through the ranks and would not be so gullible.

Their attempts to account for their decisions and actions grew marvelously ingenious, didactic, logical. Their story began to approach the infallibility of con­clusions found in scientific textbooks.

The simple and factual explanation of what had hap­pened was completely outside the potential of their real world framework. And had anyone suggested it, they would have considered him mad.

Chapter II

The Deluxe Hotel, in the heart of skid row, tried to live up to its name by running wooden partitions breast-high between the cubicles before they finished off to the ceiling with the usual chicken wire. It was both a sop to a higher standard of modesty, and slightly more discouraging to pilfering. They changed the sheets on cots between guests, as required by the Board of Health, with a little less than the customary reluctance; but there was no difference at all in the ever present smell of vermin repellant.

Jonathan Billings sat on the edge of his cot with his head in his hands, his elbows propped on bony knees—a tired old man shorn of dignity, sureness, confidence; completely at a loss in these strange sur­roundings.

He looked over at his companion, Duane Hoskins, formerly Professor of Cybernetics at Hoxworth, who now sat in much the same position on his own cot, and reflected with astonishment that there was nothing in their outward appearance to distinguish them from other bums, winos and bos who lived in this section of San Francisco. Or, how did Joe express it: Men who were on the short line.

“Three days is a long wait,” Billings murmured softly, conscious that anything louder could be over­heard. “I wish Joe would get things resolved.”

Hoskins looked up from his own reflections, his face a study in puzzlement and growing resolution.

“I’ve been thinking, Dr. Billings,” he said obliquely. It was characteristic of the two men, even in these surroundings, that they would maintain univer­sity protocol and formality. “I’ve been thinking that we are a pair of fools. What are we running from? Why are we—” He broke off the sentence, but his eyes swept the small cubicle which contained their two cots and a small stand, and indicated by his expression he meant the flop house itself, skid row, San Francisco.

“We are under Federal indictment, you know, doc­tor,” Billings reminded him austerely.

“All right!” Hoskins exploded, without realizing the loudness of his voice.

“Break it off, you two!” a voice grumbled thickly from beyond the partition. “Either talk loud enough so I can hear, or be quiet so I can sleep.”

Both men turned and looked at the partition resent­fully, and then at one another warningly.

“All right,” Hoskins repeated, and kept his voice to little more than a whisper. “So we’re under indict­ment. But running and hiding like this makes it worse, not better. We didn’t do anything wrong. Our con­science is clear. The thing for us to do is face it, get it cleared up. I can’t understand why we bolted in a panic, like crazed animals in a burning stable.”

He paused, reflected, and added an emphasis sig­nificantly.

“There’s a great deal about this I do not under­stand.” He looked at Billings questioningly, almost in a challenge.

Billings looked back at him over his glasses. He was tempted now to tell Hoskins that Joe was a tele­path; that Joe knew what he was doing; that if he, himself, had paid sufficient attention to Joe in the past things might be different now. Back at the university he had had no difficulty in keeping Joe’s secret. There he had been in his own element, and ethical silence was natural. But now things had changed.

He lifted his hands from his knees and massaged the knuckles of one in the palm of the other. He opened his mouth, to speak, and closed it again. Even now, needing the cooperation and comprehension from Hos­kins as he did, he could not break confidence. He said nothing.

“Perhaps there’s something to the old wheeze about absent-minded professors, doctor,” Hoskins at­tempted a wan smile. “We do tend to get wrapped up in our own work, lose touch with what the layman calls reality. But these weeks of running, hiding—and now this. I ask myself why?”

He paused, searching for a comparison.

“It’s like an amateur play, where the actors are doing and saying completely unnatural things; where a bad director is shoving the cast into completely false situations. I’m one of those actors who suddenly real­izes just how false the whole position is, how impossi­ble it is to maintain it. Or—I’m that absent-minded professor who comes out of his woolgathering long enough to realize he isn’t lame at all. He just has one foot in the gutter.” He grinned wryly at the unexpected aptness of his metaphor.

“Conceivable, doctor,” Billings remonstrated in a whisper, and did not realize the incongruity of his concept forms in these surroundings, “your new ap­perception of reality may be as untenable as the one you wish to avoid.” Then a broken, almost sobbing, sigh escaped him, inadvertently. “There is nothing in the world so terrible as a mob of enraged human be­ings,” he murmured.

He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of man, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance.

“Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “to believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same supersti­tions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence—”

* * * *

An impatient creaking of cot springs in the next room broke him off, and kept Hoskins from answering. Both men became silent, and stared down at the cold linoleum on the floor. Simultaneously, and along par­allel lines, their thoughts went back over the events of the last year or two.

First there had been orders from Washington, trans­mitted, as usual, through the Resident Investigator. The orders were to construct a servomechanism, along the principles of the guided missile, which would pre­vent one plane from crashing into another, or crashing into a mountainside, to land it always safely, uncon­trolled throughout by human pilot or ground crew. A servomechanism, in short, which could foresee the outcome of any probability pattern when necessary.

Apparently the phrases had been tacked on, one after another, by the bright boys there in Washington, without any realization of what they were asking. There was some dim realization that this might be a psychological problem, so Billings had been desig­nated to head the project. The penalty, as usual, for failure was a public whipping by investigation, and imprisonment for contempt if he answered back.

And something strange had happened. It was as if the pressure of human originality, stultified for forty years through opinion control, had burst out of bounds.

Bossy, nicknamed from the machine’s faint resem­blance to the head of a cow, became more than an ordinary servomechanism.

The fever of original thinking spread beyond the departments of Hoxworth. The suppressed hunger to think was like an epidemic. Every academic institu­tion, even some industrial laboratories, caught the fire of enthusiasm, contributed to the work. It was as if the scientists were resolved Bossy would be empowered to think in areas where they were forbidden to go. It was as if they felt secure in their obvious defense.

“But this is only a machine,” they would say. “It cannot be held morally responsible for arriving at the only logical answers possible; even though such an­swers do not support your political bias. Logical ratio­nality is neither subversive nor nonsubversive. It is simply a statement of fact. You may destroy the ma­chine, but your verbal public whippings and pillories cannot incurably damage its psyche. It is only a ma­chine.”

Consciously, and subconsciously, Bossy was the answer of science to the stultification of opinion con­trol.

The news of what Bossy had become leaked out to the public. There was enough truth in the misinterpre­tations to disturb the public with profound unrest. Bossy could take over any job and do it better than a man. Bossy could replace even management and boards of directors. Bossy’s decisions would be accu­rate, her judgment unclouded by personal tensions.

Bossy could tell right from wrong!

It was perhaps misinterpretation of this last faculty which shook man off the narrow ledge of reason, and sent him plunging into the depths of blind, supersti­tious fear. Certainly it was the hook used by the rabble rousers, whose monopoly of moral interpretation might be challenged.

Opinion control had answered the gauntlet of sci­ence.

In the last minutes, before the frenzied mob had broken down the doors of the university, the three last remaining men, Billings, Hoskins and Joe Carter had escaped. Later, Billings learned that Joe and Hoskins, long anticipating this move, had crated and shipped Bossy out of the area.

They had fled in panic.

* * * *

They had continued to flee, sustained by some vague dream of a quiet sanctuary where they could continue work on Bossy uninterrupted. Typical of their kind, they had no concept of where this might be; or how this new sanctuary might nullify the pressures of mass reaction to their work; or how continued work, even daily living, might be financed. Their whole life had been in the ivory tower. It had never occurred either to Hoskins or Billings that there could be any other kind.

And now they were hiding out in a flop house on skid row. Even more incredible, to Hoskins, they were totally dependent for their next move on a youngster barely twenty-two years old.

“Incredible,” Hoskins said aloud, in disbelief.

“I wonder when Joe will be back?” Billings asked plaintively.

Hoskins looked at him, impatiently, and didn’t an­swer.

The two of them sat facing one another on the edges of their cots, and endured the waiting. Hoskins reached over and took another sandwich from the supply the hotel clerk had brought them at Joe’s orders. Billings wondered if he might safely make the trip down the hall to the community shower and bathe again. He smiled, ruefully, at his apparent compulsion to bathe again and again, a protest against his surroundings. He put the thought out of his mind. The fewer people who saw them, the safer they were.

Joe had told him that the word had gone out along skid row that nobody, and it meant nobody, was to talk to anybody, and it meant anybody, about Joe and those two buddies of his holed up in the Deluxe Hotel. It was a command, a group more. But there were still those with craving for a drink or a snifter of dope, always available for stoolies who might break the ta­boo.

* * * *

Billings’ self-analysis took him back to the conse­quences of opinion control, the same consequences which had occurred again and again throughout his­tory. There had been many times when man had been forced to adopt the only right opinion. Each time man’s forward thrust had slackened, vegetated, and died. Once, through the dark ages, the period had lasted almost a thousand years.

There was an odd peculiarity to the scientific mind. Block off an area where it may not go for speculative consideration, and immediately every line of research seems to lead into that area.

A small boy may sometimes survive for hours with no thought for the cookie jar, but forbid him to touch it and he can think of nothing else.

“Such a pity that it happened this time,” Billings said, and did not realize that he was speaking aloud. “The clue was there in front of us all the time, too. Had we realized Einstein’s coordinate systems were adaptable to all fields of science, not just physics, man would have gone even beyond his own dreams. Why, in the field of sociology alone—”

There was a loud, protesting creak of bedsprings through the thin wall. It was more than a man merely turning over in bed. There was the slither of hands being slid up the wooden partition. Fingers reached the top and slid through the chicken wire to grasp support. They tensed, showed strain, and there was the sliding noise of a heavier body being pulled up the wall.

The head of hair was first to show, matted and yellow gray. Eyes followed, rheumy and blinking. The shapeless red nose, and then the mouth. The mouth smiled in an expression which the face apparently thought was friendly. It was the placating, conciliatory smile of the long habitual alcoholic.

“Would you really attempt to apply physical quan­tum laws of space-time continua to sociology?” the mouth asked. The words were blurred; the flaccid lips had long since forgotten how to form crisp, incisive speech.

Billings and Hoskins had been watching the appari­tion arise, above the partition. Billings was first to recover himself. The question restored his position in the academic world.

“Unquestionably, it should be considered,” he an­swered.

The eyes closed. The whiter lids accentuated the grime on the face. They opened again.

“I wonder now,” the mouth asked, “why that pos­sibility had never occurred to me in my reflections? Perhaps I may blame it on the times we live in. Yes, certainly worth considering.”

The head began to disappear behind the partition again, then came up. The face had an eager expression this time.

“I would offer you gentlemen a nightcap—if I had one,” the mouth said hopefully.

“I’m afraid we don’t have any spirits either,” Bill­ings said regretfully.

The eyes regarded them, searching their expressions for truth. Apparently the face grew satisfied that they were not selfishly hoarding.

“Then you, also, are broke,” the mouth said with a twist of philosophic humor. “Distressing, isn’t it? But thank you, gentlemen, for a new idea. It amply repays me for this disturbance of my rest.”

The head sank quickly out of sight, and this time it did not reappear. In a few minutes there were gentle snores coming through the partition, an accompani­ment to the louder ones from down the hall.

“Imagine that,” Hoskins whispered finally. “Imag­ine finding a mind like that in a place like this.”

“My good Dr. Hoskins,” Billings whispered back with asperity, “we’re here, aren’t we?”

Chapter III

It was three o’clock in the morning when Joe checked them out of the Deluxe Hotel. He had paid for their room in advance, of course, and checking out meant no more than dropping their cubicle key at the desk. The night clerk picked it up without question, without comment, without speculation. He had seen everything in his time and had lost all curiosity about men on the short line. Guided by the grapevine com­mand, it was easy for him not to notice that this was an old geezer, a middle-aged bum, and a young punk.

The lobby was discreetly darker than the street out­side. At the door, before stepping out, Joe touched Hoskins on the elbow and spoke in a low voice.

“I’ll go first. You follow a quarter of a block be­hind. Hang onto one another, as if you’d had too much wine, but don’t overdo it.”

Hoskins started to speak and then nodded grimly. “What about police?” Billings asked softly. “Aren’t we in danger?”

Joe looked the two men over critically, and smiled.

“You look too seedy to be able to pay a fine, so the locals probably won’t bother you. The Federals have had a shake-up in the last couple of days. Seems some of their men were derelict in their duty. And they’re still working the better-class sections. It’s too early in the normal pattern for you to have come as far down as skid row, yet. Just follow along behind me.”

Out on Third Street, the wind off the harbor was chill and sharp. The fog was so heavy it was like fine rain. A few gray shadows of men wandered aimlessly up and down the sidewalk, looming up out of the fog a half block away and then disappearing again.

Joe hunched his shoulders and shuffled toward the corner of Howard Street. He waited there until he saw the two familiar figures lurching along behind. He steeled himself against the somatic effects of dejection and misery, and sampled the minds of those men still out on the street. Everything seemed to be normal. Some of the men were drunk; others, lacking the price of a flop house, were drugged with weariness and lack of sleep. A pair of cops were working the street two blocks up, routing such men out of doorways or alley corners where they were trying to sleep. But they were already beyond Joe’s destination.

He waited again at the entrance to an alley, until the professors were almost up to him. They were doing very well with their act, and when they followed him into the alley it might have been no more than the act of any normal human being seeking food from a gar­bage can, or hunting redeemable bottles thrown away by some more fortunate wino.

Joe stood in the darkness of the alley, waiting until they had come up to him. He made a quick survey of the minds in the vicinity and detected no evidence that any of them had been noticed. He took a key from his pocket and opened a door. He led them down some steps, cautioning them to feel their way carefully in the blackness. He took another key and opened another door at the bottom of the steps.

He led them into the even deeper blackness of a room, closed the door behind them, heard the click of the latch, and snapped on a light. After the darkness, the light dazzled all of them for a moment, and then they began to see. They were in a small and neatly furnished living room.

* * * *

In front of them there stood a slight little man who stared unwinkingly at Joe. Heightened by flared up eyebrows, the eyes might have been those of an owl.

“I see you made it, kid,” he said in a dry, brittle voice. He turned and called into another room, “Ma­ble, they’re here.”

The side door to the room opened, and a huge woman waddled in. Her hair had been dyed a flaring crimson, but showed a full two inches of gray at the roots. Her face appeared to be coated with varicolored enamels.

“Quick trip, son,” she said approvingly. “Coffee isn’t even ready yet.”

“Mabel . . . Doc Carney . . . meet my friends, Professor Billings and Professor Hoskins.” It never occurred to him to fumble for Mabel’s last name, or that Doc Carney might have any other. It never oc­curred to anybody. Their identities were complete and understood.

He watched both Hoskins and Billings bow slightly in the direction of Mabel. Here, in a more familiar kind of habitation, some of their dignity came back to them, and they wore it well.

“Sa-a-ay,” Mabel boomed at them in her hoarse voice, “you’re people.”

Joe was pleased to see a look of comprehension, orientation, come into Hoskins’ eyes. Perhaps that ivory tower had not been so sheltering, after all. Natu­rally he had never looked in to see, since that aspect of Hoskins was none of his concern. But Billings was completely bewildered. His expression seemed to say that naturally they were people.

“The word ‘people’,” Joe instructed in a dry, didac­tic manner, “used in this context at this ethnological stratum contains a specialized semantic content, signi­fying respect, approval, classifying you as superior in the humanities attitudes.”

Thus translated into simple English, Billings grasped the idea quickly. He took a step forward and held out his hand.

“You’re people, too,” he murmured. “That is not difficult to apprehend.”

“My-y,” she bridled in admiration, and shook his hand up and down heartily.

“You’re entirely right about that . . . er . . . profes­sor,” Doc Carney said with approval. “Mabel was a hundred-dollars-a-night girl in her day. She’s real class.”

“You don’t say,” Billings murmured, without any comprehension at all.

Mabel threw him a quick look, then flicked her glance suspiciously at Hoskins. Hoskins gave her a broad grin, and with a wink indicated that Billings was not wise to the life. Mabel took it then as it was meant, a compliment. Joe hurried quickly, before he burst into laughter, into the adjoining kitchenette where the coffee had begun to percolate. The somatics in the room were wonderful. He hadn’t needed to supplement with broadcasted reassurance at all.

“And did I understand that you were introduced as Doctor?” Billings turned toward Carney after they were all seated and asked. “What field, may I ask?”

Joe heard the question and came to the doorway with the percolator in his hand.

“Doc is an honorary title,” he told Billings. “He’s a carney.”

“I beg your pardon, Joe?” Billings asked.

“Doc Carney was a practicing psychologist” Joe explained. “A mentalist at traveling carnivals. He had an act. From the stage he told you things about your­self. I was his shill in the audience one summer while I was on vacation. That’s how I got to know him. We rolled ’em in the aisles.”

“Never saw anybody pick up the codes faster than Joe,” Carney commented. “Tried to get him to stick with me, we’d have made barrels of money.”

Mabel was in her element. It had been a long time since gentlemen had sat around in her parlor, talking in high-class voices. She sat in an elegant pose in her old red sweater, and surreptitiously glanced at a wall mirror to see if her bright orange face powder and flaming lipstick were wearing well. In a provocative gesture of old, she flicked her long jet earring back and forth at the side of her cheek with her finger, and tried to shrink her broad and shapeless thighs into something like seductiveness. With the forefinger of her other hand she scraped idly and futilely at a dirt spot on her old black skirt.

The room fell suddenly silent, and all of them wel­comed the steaming cups of coffee Joe carried in on a tray. All of them sipped slowly, appreciatively. Mabel alternately straightened her little finger and tucked it in again, unable to remember which was considered the more fashionable. It had been a long time since she was a hundred-dollars-a-night girl. A very long time.

“Now to business,” Joe said crisply, and set his cup down on an end table beside his chair.

* * * *

Hoskins and Billings were past any stage of as­tonishment. It seemed quite natural to them that Mabel was their landlady; that she owned half of the property on the short line; that she had documents, letters, in­scribed jewelry, and memories of former days which protected her against shake-down and blackmail.

“I could tell you plenty about these sanctimonious old geezers who tell the rest of the world how to be good,” she boomed. “But I leave them alone and they’re glad to leave me alone. It’s the same with my tenants. As long as you boys treat me fair, pay your bills, and don’t get me mixed up in your troubles, I leave you alone. I don’t know what you’re doing here. I don’t want to know. It’s none of my business. I don’t pry and snoop. I don’t have to. I’ve already seen everything.”

“She means it, too,” Joe said. “Mabel doesn’t pretend to be respectable, you know. So she doesn’t need to get her kicks out of peeking and spying and being scandalized and righteously indignant.”

Mabel turned and looked at him with shrewd eyes.

“What would you now about it, son?” she asked. “You’re not even dry behind the ears yet.”

Joe winked at her and pulled his mouth into an expression of self-mockery.

“Why, Mabel,” he said, teasing her, “you’ve heard about this terrible younger generation. I might even be able to tell you a few things.”

She threw back her head and roared with a hearty laughter. They went back to business.

Doc Carney was to be their outside contact man, buying all their supplies for them. Hoskins and Billings wouldn’t need to go outside at all. There was a big room, beyond the bedrooms to this apartment, which could be fitted into their workshop. Long ago power lines had been cut into the trunks under the street. It was never exactly mentioned, but it gradually became clear that the former tenants, who had paved the way for them, were counterfeiters.

It became apparent also, as Joe had planned, that Mabel and Carney assumed they were also counterfeit­ers. Obviously Billings was the engraver, no doubt some old renegade who had once worked for the Trea­sury. Hoskins must be the mechanic, the handy man, the chemist. Joe was the front for the outfit. And now that Mabel and Carney had seen them all, Joe was probably the brains of the outfit, too. These other two were putting on a good show at being college teachers, but it wasn’t all show. they really were out of this world, and didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.

When they began listing some of the things they needed, Carney’s suspicions were confirmed, although his eyes opened wide at the list of electronic and chemi­cal equipment they felt they might need. His expres­sion indicated he thought these boys were really going first-class.

“You can’t buy this stuff with queer money,” he said at one point coming right out into the open with his suspicions. “I can get all this stuff cheap. The boys heist it from warehouses, or highjack it, or lift it from labs and plants. Most of this stuff is hard to dispose of, so it’ll be cheap. They got no sense about what will move fast. Their fingers stick to everything. Still, you got to play fair with them. Pay them with queer, and you cut off your own nose.”

“The money will be good, Carney,” Joe reassured him. “This is a square deal all around.”

“That’s all I want to know,” Carney answered with relief. “How you pass the stuff and get good money for it to pay the boys is your business.”

“I haven’t said I was going to pass any queer,” Joe reminded him.

“That’s right, son,” Mabel interrupted. “Never tell anything.”

“But just how will we get the money?” Hoskins asked. “It will take a great deal. And we’re not work­ing on subsidy now.”

“It won’t take as much as you think,” Joe said. “We’re almost through. Just a few additions and con­versions to be made now. I’ve been playing the races for it. I’ve got a system.”

* * * *

Carney looked at him with admiration. The kid thought of everything. That would answer any ques­tions about where the money came from. It was an old blind, but a good one. He threw back his head and laughed.

Mabel thought Joe was kidding them, and laughed along with Carney. Anybody knows that systems are for the lambs who want to be fleeced. Hoskins consid­ered that Joe had rebuked him for discussing it in front of strangers. He laughed to cover his faux pas.

“I am not certain that one can be assured of winning on such wagers,” Billings said doubtfully, seriously.

They all laughed then.

“Don’t worry about it,” Joe said. “Any of you. That’s my job.”

“Just keep your nose clean, son,” Mabel boomed.

Everyone sat and admired everyone else. Everyone was quite certain he understood everyone else. And Joe knew none of them understood anything at all.

For he had not yet told Billings and Hoskins what he intended to do with Bossy. Their realization had not yet come that he had been using them this last year; using the facilities of Hoxworth; the facilities of all the institutions who had helped on Project Bossy; using the subsidies from Washington. He had been using them selfishly, with determination, with practical ap­plication of psychology to serve his own purpose.

He had no sense of guilt about this. It was certainly normal and well-established practice for individuals to divert tax monies to their own advancement. It was one of the many survivals of savage custom working in modern society. The tribesmen paid their tithes to the chieftains, the elders, the witchdoctors—as al­ways.

And, without even attempting to rationalize it into the end justifying the means, it was an obvious bargain for both sides. For the human race there was now a thinking machine, one which could use discrimination and judgment, and act. When the troglodytes got over their superstitious fear of flame, they would find fire quite useful.

And for him, it was deliverance.

For him the long loneliness would be ended. He was already quite clear on how the psychosomatic therapy knowledge of Billings could be incorporated in the machine, how the machine could interact with a human being to get down to the bedrock of every fixation, inhibition, repression of a person. How these would be supplanted with orderly rationalization.

From the machine, in due course, a man or a woman would emerge—a real man or woman; not the twisted warped, pitiful deformity which passes as human.

And, if his reasoning were correct—another tele­path .

Chapter IV

For a week, almost day and night, Duane Hoskins worked on the reassembly of Bossy. Now that the parts were in his hands again, and he had a place to work undisturbed, he pushed conflict with his circumstances into the background and gave all of his thought to the task of bringing Bossy back to her origi­nal state of function. He assured himself that when his job was done, then he would attempt to get a more realistic approach to his relationships with government and other people.

The reassembly took all of his thought. He started out on the task as if it were no more than a routine nuisance which he must endure, since he had been all over this ground in the first assembly. But as the sub­assemblies began to accumulate into their proper rela­tionships again, he grew more and more excited.

Guided as he was by a rigid intellectual honesty, that one faculty which makes the scientist differ from any other calling, he found himself freely acknowledg­ing that Bossy was not his creation. Bossy was not even a true product of cybernetics—at least not as that science had been conceived before the start of this project.

Somewhere, somehow, they had surmounted the thin and narrow conceptions of their predecessors. Only now, with the accomplished fact before him, did he realize just how thin and self-restricting those concepts had been.

More important, and more incomprehensible, they had surmounted the sterility of opinion control. Al­though, in the narrow sense, his field was far from the dangerous social sciences; early in his career Hoskins had realized that no field of science is remote from the affairs of men, that there is a sociological implication inherent even in the simple act of screwing a nut on a bolt.

Of course he had never expressed this in a class­room. Outwardly he had held to the prevalent opinion that the physical scientist has no responsibility to man for what he achieves. As with all other instructors, he knew that in each class there were bound to be at least two or three students who, in preparation for careers to come, had set themselves up as the supra analysts of what was the only right opinion. These were diligent in reporting to pressure groups, or directly to Resident Investigators.

The consequence was that even the brightest of stu­dents were becoming no more than cookbook engi­neers. This had always been regrettably true of ninety-five per cent of engineering students. But before opin­ion control there had been at least five per cent whose minds were fertile enough to conceive a variant idea.

Now, for almost half a century, there had been nothing new. There was an apparent progress, of course. The cookbook engineers were still able to mix up new batches from old ingredients. There was still enough gadgetry invention to confound any criticism. But there was no exploration of new areas, hunting for new frontiers.

In his own field of cybernetics, he had studied the mid-century experiments with ultra high-speed com­puters, the automatic chess players, the visible speech mechanisms, and the like. He had discovered how close the followers of Baggage and Vannevar Bush had come to their dream of the second industrial revo­lution. But here, in the closing decade of the century, cybernetics was still playing mechanical games with the same concepts.

Only Bossy was different.

As he continued with the reassembly, Hoskins grew deeply troubled. At times he felt as if he were on the verge of some vast concept not quite grasped; as if he caught hazy glimpses of an outline of a totally un­known continent where, always before, all science had assumed there were only empty seas. He cursed the sterility, the rote memorization which passed for learn­ing. He bitterly accused his own mind of being like a wasted muscle, long unused, now incapable of a task which should be accomplished with ease.

Not that he was failing in the reassembly. Complex as it was, he remembered each step in perfect order. And, laid out before him as it was, he knew the theory and purpose of each part. What he failed to grasp was how it had been conceived in the first place.

He recalled well, in the early days of the project, the consternation, the blank incomprehension between one department of science and another. The legendary Tower of Babel was a miracle of understanding by comparison. As is to be expected when men are deeply disturbed by a sense of inadequacy, each branch of science had withdrawn into itself, become more and more esoteric, more ritualistic. As the inadequate man looks for and seizes upon differences so as to establish his superiority, so each science had moved farther from the common purpose of science—which is to know. And that was the way this project had begun, in spirit and in practice, back there at Hoxworth.

Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, men under­stood one another; problems were solved; old jealous­ies forgotten; prejudices discarded. Everywhere in the university the departments were caught up in the spirit usually known only to a few men—the desire to go beyond apparent differences, to understand what is really meant, to regard with pitying impatience those who would still value personal ascendancy over com­prehension.

And, most astonishing of all, everyone took it for granted. No one seemed to have realized what had happened or much less why. He, himself, had not realized it until now; when the act of reassembling Bossy forced him into a minute review of each stage of the work. Only in its totality did it reveal its logical impossibility.

* * * *

He tried to question Billings during the afternoon when they were working together installing the random synaptic selectors which would respond to sensory code patterns.

“Dr. Billings,” he said carefully “while it is apparent that no individual part of Bossy was unknown to science, even fifty years ago, the blending of the parts, and, above all our concept of what happens in the process of thought, is new. How did we manage it? You were the head of the project. You ought to know.”

He saw the same hesitancy, the same film of con­cealment that usually came over Billings’ candid blue eyes when this topic had been discussed before back at Hoxworth.

“Probably no more than fortuitous circumstance,” Billings answered evasively.

“I don’t believe that, and neither do you,” Hoskins stated bluntly. He pointed to the hydrogen ion concen­trators, to the wave-field harmonics receptors. “These are accident?” he questioned with disbelief amounting to derision. “It was accident that the Department of Music was able to give us the clue to search activators in pattern selection? That the department of Synthetic Textiles was able to show us how to polymerize and catalyze strings of molecules into the material which became Bossy’s concept storage unit?”

In nervous tension, he paced up and down the room, and puffed at his cigarette as if in agony.

“That Bossy is able to take apart patterns,” he con­tinued in the same incredulous voice, “and fill in the missing pieces from probability selection through her proprioceptors? That we were able to recognize this as the treasured and mysterious process of reasoning?”

He stopped his pacing and pounded softly and slowly on the edge of the work bench with the heel of his hand.

“Above all,” and now his voice was almost queru­lous, “it was sheer accident that we were able to understand one another, go beyond semantic differences to the real core of meaning—when, as you know, our usual pattern was a gleeful destruction of the other fellow’s attempts at comprehension? Dr. Billings, I am neither a child nor a fool. I cannot accept the theory of fortuitous circumstance!”

“We did it,” Billings answered shortly, and won­dered why Joe had permitted this question to arise in Hoskins’ mind at this time. Joe should have told him, should have cued him on what to do. This was conflict, and Bossy was not yet completely assembled. “We did it,” he repeated futilely. “Isn’t that the only important thing?”

Hoskins glared around the room, at the bare pine­wood floor, the stained cement walls of the basement room, the harsh overhead lights, the door to their bed­rooms which was the only source of fresh air.

“What am I?” he asked hoarsely. “No more than a handy man? Is that why I’ve placed myself in jeopardy, taken all these risks; just to hold a job as subordinate mechanic—without pay? Are we working as a team, doctor? Do we have one another’s confidence; or don’t we?”

“I don’t know how to answer you, Duane,” Billings said slowly, and Hoskins noticed that his first name had been used in their conversations for the first time. “I don’t know why you’ve been permitted to think of these things.”

“Permitted to think of them!” Hoskins exploded. Billings fluttered his hands in the air, as if to ward off violence.

“You will have to ask Joe,” he said weakly.

Chapter V

The three men sat in the small living room of their basement quarters, having a late sandwich before going to bed. The somatics in the room were tense.

Hoskins pored over the schematic of the multiple feedback system, alternately fretting over whether Car­ney would be able to find the right tube for the torque amplifier, which had been cracked in transit, and stew­ing over the indignity of having been referred to Joe for the answers he felt he must have.

Billings mused over the problem, given to him by Joe days before, on how automatic psychosomatic therapy mechanisms could be installed in Bossy, what the most effective electrode contact with human sub­jects might be, and how reverie reviews could be taken down to cellular level, as Joe had insisted they must.

Joe worked at the small desk, extending the proba­bilities of his system to the end of the Tanforan meet, to tailor his bets to the amount of money they would need until the next racing season. The system was imperfect in that jockeys sometimes changed their minds in the heat of the race, extended their horse when they were not supposed to, won when they were not supposed to win. Reserves had to be set aside to cover a streak of these. Still, it was the safest method of getting enough money without calling attention to himself.

The scene was much the same as it had been back at Hoxworth, when he was secretary on Project Bossy; but the circumstances, both overt and somatic, were different.

He was aware that Hoskins was facing a crisis, one which had been maturing for the past two weeks, that if he let it go on, Bossy, herself, might be threatened. He could have avoided it, of course, just as he had avoided it all those months at Hoxworth. Delicately, he could have implanted the right impulses in Hoskins, so that revealment would come as no shock. But he had a sound reason for doing otherwise. Hoskins had a first-rate brain, and Joe had come to realize that blind acceptance of his extrasensory perceptions would give him no clue as to how the same gifts might be installed in Bossy. It was necessary that Hoskins fight it out on a cerebration level.

Further, he felt the same loyalty toward Hoskins that he felt toward Billings. And he wanted Hoskins to have the full benefit which Bossy could eventually give. That meant Hoskins had to grow up, willingly, of his own volition.

At that moment Hoskins reached over to the stand beside his chair and picked up another of the sand­wiches. He glanced at Joe obliquely, his curiosity almost overcoming his resentment. Joe chose this moment to look up from his own work.

“Every man surrounds his mind with a framework of screen mesh.” Joe said conversationally, “com­posed of his prejudgments, preconceptions of what is acceptable to him. Everything he receives must filter through it.”

Hoskins glared at him impatiently, as if a precocious child, age five, had tried to be profound about man and woman in marriage. He flared in sudden anger, and his mind formed the sentence, “What would a young punk like you know about it?” but he was too courteous to say the words.

“So it seems to you,” he spoke flatly.

“So it is, doctor,” Joe said, without deferment. “The first strands of the screen are strung very early. ‘Don’t do this! That’s bad! Now that’s mother’s good little boy! That’s nasty, shame on you! You’re too little to do that alone! That’s over your head, wait until you’re older! Always tell mother when the children are bad to you!’ On and on with things like that.”

“So?” Hoskins questioned with a shrug.

“So a pattern of standards is formed. Everything is judged in relation to that pattern. The stream of commands, admonishments, casual remarks are but­tressed, ingrained, and enforced with emotional im­pact, sometimes with physical shock treatment administered with the flat of the hand where it will do the most good.”

“Then education comes along,” Hoskins debated with a smile, “and tears your screen to pieces.”

“In theory only,” Joe said. “But not in practice.

Even then everything received is modified by the screen. Oh maybe there’s a hole punched here and there, and rewoven with new strands. But new strands are woven, that’s the point. The filtering goes on just the same. Even if a new idea pushes against the screen with such force that it must be considered, it is usually so distorted by the time it has been ‘rationalized through the screen’ that it means just what the receiver wants it to mean.”

“The prime purpose of education, Joe,” Hoskins instructed, “is to insure an open mind, the ability to consider an idea on its own merits, to accept reality without distortion.

* * * *

“You’ve been wondering, lately, how Bossy came into being,” Joe said abruptly.

Hoskins looked at him curiously, and then over at Billings accusingly. Billings had had no right to dis­cuss their conversation with this immature boy.

“I’m a telepath,” Joe said simply.

“Nuts!” Hoskins exploded disgustedly.

Joe threw back his head and laughed freely.

“You see what I mean, doctor?” he chuckled.

“I see I’ve got enough problems on my hands al­ready, without having you spring a lot of wild-hair notions on me.” Hoskins snapped. Then pityingly, “Joe, I’ve always thought you were a diligent and fair student. I never suspected you harbored ideas about that superstitious guff. Joe! That’s for the credulous, the wild-eyed! It’s . . . it’s beneath the notice of ratio­nal men.”

“Dr. Rhine didn’t think so,” Joe answered.

“That’s different. That was scientific research under laboratory conditions. However, it is significant that Dr. Rhine never found, nor claimed to have found, a true telepath.”

“Neither have I,” Joe said quietly. He kept his voice normal, not revealing the dark loneliness of life­long solitary confinement, such as might be known by a human who was never once permitted to communi­cate with one of his own kind.

“At best,” Hoskins continued forcefully, “all he found was some phenomena which exceeded the laws of probabilities. That might mean some trace elements, true. But it could also mean that our notions of the laws of probabilities could stand revision.”

“And your screen mesh prefers the latter,” Joe laughed.

Billings looked over his glasses, and cleared his throat.

“I have known about Joe,” he said hesitantly, “since he was eight years old. Dr. Martin of Steiffel University wrote me. That’s why I brought Joe to Hoxworth. There was sufficient evidence, Duane. I could not deny it. And . . . I, too . . . tried.”

“You’ve been the victim of some elaborate hoax, Dr. Billings,” Hoskins said harshly.

Joe looked at Hoskins, undismayed.

“Professor,” he asked, “what was it Algazzali wrote about the ‘fourth stage of intellectual develop­ment’?”

Instantly, like a man reciting a bit of poetry learned in high school, Hoskins quoted:

... When another eye is opened by which man perceives things hidden in others . . . perceives all that will be . . . perceives things that escape the percep­tions of reason—”

“You didn’t know you remembered that, did you, professor?”

Hoskins shrugged.

“It means nothing,” he said. “Neither the drivel nor the fact that I remembered it. A young college student absorbs a lot of such guff before he gets down to serious work. You’ve run across it somewhere, Joe. It was a safe assumption that I would have, also.”

“But how clearly you recalled it!” Billings teased. “And after all these years, too.”

“That, too, means nothing. We’ve shown in Bossy how a concept may lay idle, never be called into use, until the right harmonics stimulate a pattern where it is required.”

Joe reached over, took a piece of paper and pencil, scribbled a note, folded it, and handed it to Billings. At that moment Hoskins started up from his chair.

“Excuse me.” he murmured in a stricken voice and headed for the bath.

In a few moments he came back into the room. His eyes were watery, his cheeks pale, his nostrils drawn.

“Don’t eat any more of those sandwiches,” he said. “The meat must be tainted. At least in that one I got.”

At Joe’s motion, Billings handed the note to Hos­kins. Curiously, Hoskins opened the note and read it.

“Professor Hoskins will need to vomit in less than one minute,” the note said.

Hoskins crumpled the note and threw it in the waste­basket in disgust.

“That’s telepathy?” he asked derisively. “Probably saw me turning green around the gills. Jumped to conclusions again.”

“Even before you felt any discomfort, professor?” Joe laughed. “And how many of these conclusions do I have to jump to before the evidence will penetrate your screen.”

“A great many more,” Hoskins snapped. “I—”

There was a sudden urgent rap on the door.

“Another demonstration, professor,” Joe said dryly, as he got up to open it. “That’ll be Carney. He’ll have Mabel with him. He’s very disturbed. Inci­dentally, he has your torque amplifier tube. And, gen­tlemen, he has found out who we are. This is a showdown, so let me handle it.”

* * * *

When he opened the door, Carney and Mabel stepped through, and Carney shut the door quickly, as if he were being pursued. The old reprobate’s eyes were flashing anger. Mabel’s usually generous friend­liness was replaced by a mask of curiosity, wariness. Although Carney had much to say, he seemed at a loss how to begin now that he was here.

“I got the tube,” he opened accusingly, obliquely. “This stuff is real hot. The Feds and local boys have passed the word along to watch for anybody buying it. They’re paying big stoolie dough, too. You guys are hot, too hot!”

He turned to Joe, his voice a compound of anger and disappointment.

“You tricked me,” he burst out with what was really bothering him. “I didn’t know you guys was Brains. I didn’t know you was them three from that eastern college the whole country is looking for.”

Billings and Hoskins looked at him curiously, and then at Joe who stood easily beside the closed door and said nothing.

Carney turned to Mabel.

“I swear, Mabel,” he said apologetically, “I didn’t know these guys was Brains when I asked you to rent them this place. I just thought they were in a counterfeiting racket or something.” Then he added bitterly, “But I guess I ought to have known. The way Joe picked up the code when he worked with me in the act. I just thought maybe he was psychic or some­thing. I didn’t know he was a Brain.”

Joe glanced at Hoskins with a suppressed smile.

“See what I mean about prejudice screens, doctor?” he asked. “Now it would be all right with Carney if I were merely psychic. But to have a trained mind—that’s something to arouse antagonism.”

“But you’re not our kind of people at all,” Carney argued, his anger arising again. “You don’t belong with us. And you tricked me.”

Help came from an unexpected source, and without any effort from Joe.

“Who are we, Carney,” Mabel asked slowly, “to point the finger at anybody?”

“But these guys are the ones who invented that machine which is gonna blow up the world, Mabel,” Carney shouted. “They’re the ones that thought out that thing which is gonna make slaves of all the peo­ple when it takes over the world and runs it. They built Bossy!” He cast a fearful look toward the back room.

“I’ll bet it’s that Bossy thing they’ve got in that back room, not a counterfeit press at all! These guys want to wipe humans off the face of the earth, and we’re helping them!”

Both Hoskins and Billings started to protest the string of clichés picked up from yellow journalism, but Joe silenced them with a warning look. Let the boil-over run its course. You couldn’t get into a man’s mind with reason while it was inflamed with anger; the prejudice screen was at its very strongest then. It was the old clash of ignorance without learning and ignorance with it.

Only Mabel seemed able to surmount the conflict.

“I’ve always said,” she commented, “that a person does what he has to do. Maybe Joe and the professors can’t help being what they are—any more than you and I could help being what we were.”

Joe watched her intently. He knew now that she could qualify for his intended use of Bossy, as he had suspected she might. He had been wise in choosing skid row. Only here, among these broken by accusa­tion, could be found those unwilling to accuse. Only here, among the victims of a too narrow sense of right could be found those who were not fatuously confident of their special endowments for defining it. The same conclusion had been reached once before, two thou­sand years ago.

“It’s not for us to say, Carney,” Mabel added firmly.

She stood there, a shapeless hulk in her old red sweater and black skirt. Her swollen feet were planted far apart. The red joints of her rheumatic fingers opened and closed painfully. The mask make-up on her face, meant to conceal the age and pain lines, could not conceal her quality. Mabel was—people.

Chapter VI

For almost a week Joe avoided everyone as much as possible, allowing the change of status to settle itself into acceptable relationships. He knew that Billings and Hoskins were having many long conversa­tions about his psionic ability, that Hoskins was gradu­ally rationalizing the idea that Billings had not been hoaxed after all.

“I mean,” Billings said at one point in their conver­sations, “we must be willing to go beyond the present frontiers of physics to understand Joe’s psionic traits. We must get a notch above the concept that for a thing to be scientific it must have visible wheels.”

“The frontiers of physics—.” The phrase appealed to Hoskins, helped him to view this dark trait with something nearer acceptance.

“I have no doubt,” Billings pressed his advantage, “that the answer lies in some order of energetics not yet explored. We do have to go beyond the mere par­roting of the words of Einstein’s coordinate systems and think in terms of genuine practical application.”

“I’m not sure I see how that can be done here,” Hoskins objected.

“The eye is no more than a cellular mechanism activated by the wave field of energy we call light,” Billings reasoned. “The encephalograph reveals the brain generates its own wave field of energy. Some obscure area of Joe’s brain has taken a mutant leap and is activated by that wave field, so that he can perceive thought directly, as the eye perceives light. Such an area might be present in every brain, but rudimentary in the way of light sensitive cells in primi­tive life.”

It was not the complete theory which Joe held, but it served to orient Hoskins to the idea that Joe was no more than an eugenic mutant. It brought the idea out of the areas of metaphysics into the realms of physics.

But even with such rationalization, the emotional implications of living in the presence of a telepath were too much for Hoskins to accept immediately. Man, even the most brilliant of men, is not all intellect. No man is without skeletons in his closet, those little quirks, those dark little actions and mean motives, shameful little things which he does not even reveal to his doctor, his confessor, his psychoanalyst.

Hoskins resolutely faced such things in himself, and as resolutely turned away from them. His mind refused the idea that Joe could see them clearly.

“How could you continue to respect me if you knew these things about me?”

He had not yet arrived at the knowledge that Joe would have seen thousands of carbon copies of such traits in others, would have grown up with them, accepting them from the first as being no more than normal to any human being. That in the balance scale of a man’s life, achievement was even more splendid because it did gain ascendancy over the furtive quirks; that man was even nobler in that, at the same time, he was so reprehensible.

Hoskins would arrive there, but it would take time.

Carney progressed in his own adjustments much more easily. His resentment changed to admiration, partly helped by Joe’s unsuspected somatic assurances, partly through the example set by Mabel. The tender­loin stratum has an almost universal contempt for the organized hypocrisy of society. Unable to accept it, become a part of it, they are broken by it. They seldom become enough detached to see it is this very pretense of man to be better than he is which drives him to convert his pretense to reality.

Carney was delighted, after his first shock, to find that Brains sometimes find themselves in the same boat as shortline outcasts.

Somehow the word had leaked out that the two professors had been found, and lost, in the San Fran­cisco area. The search, which had been spread over the nation, now concentrated itself in the San Francisco area. And the area was ideal for the search. Surrounded on three sides by water, San Francisco has almost the status of an island and the traffic flows are concentrated ideally for thorough search.

The newspapers and communication channels which had been regretting a lack of world crises at the mo­ment, revived the entire issue with enthusiasm. All the lurid misconceptions were rehashed, improved upon; spun into the most sensational stories the fertile minds of reporters could conceive. The witch hunt was on in full force, and Carney kept himself busy collecting commentary. Although the danger was great, he was almost beside himself with pride that he was on the inside, that a word from him could blast the whole thing wide open. For the first time, he felt revenged upon society. It was within his power to withhold the very information society craved. And, at this point, that knowledge was sufficient satisfaction.

Half a century previously there would have been many champions rising to argue both sides of the ques­tion of Bossy; many to defend the right of these profes­sors to push the frontiers of knowledge ahead. But forty years of effective opinion control had ingrained the habit of instant agreement with official opinion, regardless of how often that official position might change sides or contradict itself.

Still, one man did have the courage to call for a calm and rational consideration of the issues.

* * * *

Howard Kennedy released his editorialized inter­view through one of the newspapers where he owned the controlling stock shares. He cited, calmly, the his­torical precedents where mass reaction had been vio­lently antagonistic to other scientific discoveries; anesthesia, steam power, electrical power, Newton’s laws of motion, Galileo’s concept of the solar system, a long list which, upon analysis, was seen to contain almost every advance man had made in his long climb from savagery. He related all this to the question of Bossy, and left the question hanging as to whether this might prove to be another such instance of misguided opposition.

It was a daring thing to do, for it ran counter to popular opinion. Apparently he felt his millions, his position of power, his well popularized philanthropies, his liberal attitudes toward labor, would protect him.

Billings and Hoskins found in the article divergent rays of hope. Billings saw in it the possibility that man might once again capture the rational point of view. Hoskins, fretting under the conditions of the dark base­ment, the lack of competent assistants, the pressure of knowing he was hunted by government, saw a protec­tor, a subsidizer, a return to the respectability of an ivory tower.

Joe, too, got a lift out of the article. The work on Bossy was almost finished. Billings had spent the necessary hours feeding the concepts of psychosomat­ics into Bossy’s storage unit. Bossy had found the concepts consistent with the carefully screened factual information which had been fed into her at Hoxworth. She had not thrown out psychosomatics as being a tissue of unsupported theory. Her acceptance was all the more impressive because she had refused most of the theoretical structures of orthodox psychology on the grounds that such structures had little or no relation to observable data.

Joe had no intention of keeping Bossy to himself once he had accomplished his aim. He, too, would need someone with courage and influence, such as Howard Kennedy. But not so naive as the two profes­sors, he resolved to find out what went on in Kennedy’s mind before they responded to Kennedy’s obvious bid for their confidence. The man did not take the risk of public boycott simply to speak his piece. His motive was obviously to make contact. Beyond that, Joe could not go, not until he could get close to the man, see him, obtain some object which Kennedy had handled, some focalizing channel. It was one of Joe’s limita­tions on his ability that he could not use it in the way some of the totally untalented normals imagined the trait would work.

But of all the adjustments, that of Mabel was most important. And when Billings told him that there was nothing further to be done with the therapy mecha­nisms of Bossy until that already installed could be tested and adjusted, Joe knew it was time to talk with Mabel.

There literally wasn’t anyone else qualified. Hoskins was needed for his understanding of the mechanical principles. Billings must work in tandem with Bossy, man and machine coordinating to the utmost in the therapy while Bossy learned it. Aside from the fact that Joe was their only protection against the outer world, his psionic ability was too valuable to risk as a test case. Carney was openly cooperative, but Joe knew there was a hard core of hidden antagonism and suspicion. Further, Carney was quite satisfied with himself as he was, and no system of psychotherapy can make more than a temporary indentation against a basic unwillingness to change.

That left only Mabel. Mabel was obvious for an overt reason. She suffered painfully from a complex of rheumatism and arthritis, aggravated by fat. If Bossy was to prove effective at all, improvements in these would be most observable. At least these were the arguments Joe used to Billings and Hoskins. His plans went far deeper.

He went to see Mabel in her apartment on the floor above them.

She received him matter-of-factly, without ques­tion, without apology for some fancied untidiness of her apartment. Of the long list she might have been justified in having, Mabel retained only one small van­ity, and that a harmless one. Mabel had never been a respectable woman.

As he seated himself in her best chair, Joe smiled inwardly, and tenderly, at her little vanity. Even in this, she was intensely human, for she chose to be vain on a point where there was no justification for it. Her mind was too simple and direct, her honesty was too innate, she lacked the hard-eyed viciousness which comes from forcing the psyche into deformities unnat­ural to it. No, even if she had tried, Mabel lacked the basic characteristics which would have qualified for her respectability.

Not that she lacked inner conflicts. Her complex of arthritis and her fat were sufficient evidence that she had not been free from these.

Even her considerable wealth was not a result of calculated avarice, but was the accidental result of an odd whimsy. In her younger days, some of the im­portant men, finding in her qualities they could not find at home, seemed to receive some defiant pleasure out of freely giving her the things which their wives schemed and trapped and blustered to gain. In that small boy mischievousness of males, they built up a solid fortune for her in a mood of perverse gratitude.

Ordinarily it is only the blackmailers and shakedown artists of the police who grow rich from her profession, but as the influence of her clientele grew her numerous arrests ceased, and she no longer found it necessary to turn over all surplus monies as the price of being let alone.

* * * *

Instantaneously, her life flashed through Joe’s mind as he settled back in his chair.

“We need your help, Mabel,” he said, without hedging on the purpose of his visit.

“In what way, son?” she asked, and her booming voice was quieter than usual.

He told her, briefly, the facts about Bossy, how they had come to build the machine, some of the things they expected from it. She made only one comment.

“It ain’t the first time the newspapers have got things all twisted up.”

He went on then to tell her how they hoped to make Bossy into a machine which would cure the ailments of man, such as her arthritis. Billings was a genuine medical doctor, and if she had paid any attention at all she would know he had a world-wide reputation.

Mabel nodded that she did know. She asked the obvious question.

“Why could a machine do things a doctor couldn’t?”

“Doctors are human,” Joe answered, “and, there­fore, limited. The secret of any psychotherapy is that the doctor should be less twisted than the patient. This is seldom possible. True, he may be twisted in some other way, but if he simply substitutes one twist for another he has gained nothing. The greatest care was used, when Bossy was being educated, to feed in only absolutely proved and undeniable fact. Bossy did her own interpreting. She rejected unfounded opinion, or prejudice built on false premises. She is more capable of unbiased therapy than any man could be.”

“I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about, Joe,” Mabel said frankly.

He developed for her the basics of psychosomatic therapy. To bring it into her own experience, he re­called how her stomach would be upset if she tried to eat when she was acutely worried.

“The cell,” he said, “is like the stomach. It refuses to function properly when such things as repressions, inhibitions, suppressions and the like affect it. Before long it gets twisted out of its healthy pattern into an unhealthy one. The idea of all the psychotherapies is to lift these suppressors so that the human can function again. Most of the psychologists work with some mys­terious thing they call mind. The psychosomatic men work directly with the body cells. Not only in the brain but all over the body, each cell seems to have a mind and memory of its own. Each one is capable of getting its own twists of inhibitions and repressions. The idea is to go clear down to the cellular level and take the load off of each cell so it can stretch and grow and function again.”

“Like being in a strait jacket and getting out,” Mabel commented. “I got me a general idea, son. I guess, being ignorant, that’s all I can hope for.”

“We don’t know how Bossy is going to work,” Joe told her frankly. “I don’t see how it can hurt you. The worst that can happen is that you won’t get cured. And, of course, you won’t get cured if you hang on to the ideas which caused the trouble. That’s the toughest part, Mabel, to be willing to admit that you might not know what is right and what is wrong.”

She threw back her head and laughed her free, booming laughter. “Son,” she said heartily, “I never did know that.”

“You might be changed—a lot,” he warned her. “You might not want to go on living here as you do now. You might . . . anything might happen. It’s a chance you would have to be willing to take. Nobody has ever had a look at reality except through smoked glasses. We haven’t got any idea of what it’s really like without them. You’d be the first.”

She looked down at her broad thighs, her old black skirt. She lifted her wrinkled hand with its enlarged knuckles.

“What good am I, like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know for sure, Mabel,” Joe said simply, “but I think you’ll be giving a lot to mankind.”

Chapter VII

It was not to be expected that the psychosomatic therapy would go smoothly. Carney greeted the announcement that Mabel would undergo the test with flatfooted opposition. His suspicion and resentment came close to the surface and showed itself in alternat­ing sulks, in his forbidding Mabel to have anything to do with Bossy, and then in actual threats to do his plain civic duty and turn them all in to the Feds.

He seemed determined to demonstrate the old truism again: that the only enemy man has is man. The uni­verse does not care whether man unlocks its secrets or leaves them closed. Water does not care whether man bathes in it or drowns in it; whether it waters his fields or washes them away. If man masters its laws and utilizes his knowledge, water becomes a force in his favor. But enemy or servant, water does not care.

Of all the forces, only man seems determined that man shall not master the universe.

Carney paid lip service only to the boon of health which Bossy might bring to Mabel and to all mankind.

He could react only that Mabel had deserted him, had gone over to these men from the other side of the tracks. It was a bitter realization that his long friend­ship with her counted for so little.

More than knowledge or enlightenment or under­standing, man values his ascendancy over something or someone. The fate of mankind is of little conse­quence to him if he must lose his command in the process. Carney felt alone and deserted. It took a great deal of somatic comforting from Joe, and Mabel’s stern commands for him to mind his own business, to settle him down.

The second hitch came from Bossy.

There had been a considerable argument from Hos­kins that inasmuch as the hunt for them had concen­trated in San Francisco, and discovery was inevitable, their best course was to initiate contact with the gov­ernment, turn themselves in and hope for the best. Or as an alternative, they should make contact with Howard Kennedy, whose interview had been so lib­eral, and let that industrialist negotiate for them. Joe had countered these arguments with the fact that the public was still bitterly fanatic on the subject of Bossy, and that government would not dare go against the will of the people and their blood thirst.

He pointed out, however, that if they could demon­strate, with an accomplished fact, Bossy was a master healer, then Kennedy would have something to work with to make the public change its mind about Bossy. Hoskins agreed, reluctantly.

Almost day and night for the past week, Billings had fed his lifetime of knowledge into Bossy on every facet of psychosomatic therapy. And his knowledge represented the accumulated knowledge of the world. It was, therefore, a bitter disappointment that their first question to Bossy for an estimate of time required for the therapy on Mabel should cause an instant flashback of an unwanted answer.

“Insufficient data.”

It was the old familiar phrase which, even back at Hoxworth, they sometimes viewed with impatience. A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts.

Here, under the pressure of time, knowing they might be discovered any day, Bossy’s bland reply, flashed on her screen, made them sick at heart. Yet, without even a survey of the problem, what else could they expect?

The problem had not been Mabel, herself. She had been more than cooperative. In view of the situation, Billings had decided to make the therapy continuous, and Mabel had willingly arranged her affairs with her attorney for a ten-day absence. As willingly, she had fitted herself into the network of electrodes and lay on the couch with complete confidence. Her last words, before Billings began to induce the hypnosis, were to Carney who had watched the preparations with hostile eyes.

“Don’t be an old fool,” she said, “give me a chance to get well again.”

For the first four hours Billings, in tandem with Bossy, played her memories back and forth, trying to uncover the central tensions which were the source of her troubles. At the end of the fourth hour, while she was in a rambling, repetitious incident of her child­hood, Billings again put the question to Bossy for a time estimate.

“Insufficient data,” Bossy flashed back again. “What data do you need?” Hoskins snapped at Bossy irritably.

“A complete survey of every cell memory to deter­mine the quantum of repressors.” Bossy flashed.

Joe, who had been hovering in the background, stepped forward.

“Based on techniques now in use,” he asked, “how long would that take?”

“Insufficient data,” Bossy’s screen said.

“What do you need to get the data?”

“Cessation of interference,” Bossy said. “By ver­bal methods now used, a survey would take years, or never be accomplished. The past failure of psychoso­matic therapy is not in theory but in technique. A human mind is too slow, reactions are too gross. The best the human can accomplish is a few obvious snarls.”

“If left alone, how would you accomplish it?” Bill­ings asked curiously.

“It is simple,” Bossy said, “for me to use the principles of the electroencephalogram. I would run all combinations of my entire storage unit against the patient. Any disturbance to the alpha rhythms would indicate the source of a tension in the patient—on the order of the lie-detector principle. All such tensions could be released by replacing fallacy with understand­ing.”

“How long would that take?” Hoskins asked.

“Insufficient data,” Bossy answered.

“It makes sense, though,” Billings said. “We’ve always known that time was our greatest enemy; that even in months we could only uncover a few of the most obvious. Bossy can operate on a thousands per second review of her storage units.”

“What would be the effect of the tension release?” Joe asked Bossy.

“When the repressors are removed from the cells,” Bossy answered, “they can again function normally, restoring themselves.”

“Which would mean that health is restored, obvi­ously,” Billings said.

“Any objections to Bossy taking over, gentlemen?”

“You’re the doctor,” Hoskins said.

* * * *

And it was not until a week later, a week of constant watching, intravenous feeding, physical body care, while Mabel lay on the couch in an apparent coma, that they saw any change.

It was on the morning of the seventh day, after Hoskins had spent his vigil through the night sitting beside Mabel, that they saw how startling a change had occurred. It was as if accumulated releases were, all at once, showing their affect.

The puffiness was disappearing from her cheeks, the deep pouches under her eyes were less swollen, the roll of fat around her neck had shrunk. Slowly, like a face emerging from a sculptor’s shapeless blob of clay, there was another Mabel—a younger Mabel.

It was more than a skin health and tautness, than the relaxation of rest, than the disappearance of wrinkles; than the reduction of swelling in the joints.

The three men stood looking down at her recumbent form on the couch. They stared at her with wide, incredulous eyes. Mabel was growing young again!

The faint hum of Bossy, working at top level speed, buzzed in their ears.

Chapter VIII

It was not a miracle. The regeneration and rejuvenation of Mabel was no more than the end result of completely applied psychosomatic therapy. Yet it was a result which a human therapist, unassisted by Bossy, could never attain. However he may strive for detachment from bias, no man can grow to maturity without at least something of a framework of prejudice; and the thera­pist, in removing the warping deformations of one matrix, unconsciously supplies another.

Further, thousands of hours of verbal therapy were reduced to seconds by Bossy. Never before had anyone known what a complete therapy could produce. And they did not know now. Dr. Billings, Professor Hos­kins, Joe Carter, the three men stood looking down at Mabel who lay on the couch, the center of a network of conduits connecting her to Bossy, and marveled.

They did not understand the obvious reformation of Mabel’s body. But they were witnessing it.

It was characteristic of Billings that even in the moments of astonishment he remembered to check the gross aids of therapy. To his surprise, the last drops of the synthetic plasma, fed from the suspended tank to Mabel’s veins, were running out of the container. He had put on a fresh bottle the night before, and at her low threshold of activity, it should have lasted for two more days.

Almost instantly, as the last drops ran down the transparent tube, Mabel’s lips began to move.

“Hungry,” she muttered. “Hungry, hungry, hun­gry, HUNGRY!”

Bossy’s screen was flashing on and off in emergency signals.

“Cells cannot regenerate without food,” the ma­chine said, over and over. The statement of fact seemed, to the men, to carry a connotation of contemp­tuous impatience, as if these human beings should be expected to know at least that much.

Quickly Billings ran across the room, grabbed up one of the few remaining bottles of plasma, broke the seal on his way back, and replaced the empty bottle with the full one. As the liquid began to flow down the tube, Mabel’s mutterings ceased, and she lay still and quiet again. Almost visibly, Joe, Dr. Billings and Professor Hoskins could see the changes in her appear­ance taking place, and wondered what mental changes could account for them.

Joe tried to follow, but the thought-patterns were so rapid and so varied it was like trying to pick up and follow one spoke in the blur of a speeding wheel.

“Hunger creates tensions to act as cell repressants, hindering therapy,” Bossy volunteered a flash on her screen, as if to reproach them and warn them not to let it happen again. In the pattern of human beings generally, they had given her a job to do, and then followed a procedure to hamstring her and prevent her from doing it. As with human beings generally, they did not intend to thwart her, they merely let their lack of comprehension do it for them.

Perceptibly the level in the bottle was lowering. At this rate the supply, expected to last for another two days, would be gone in two hours. And they had only one more bottle in reserve.

Synthetic fortified plasma cannot be cooked up in the ordinary apartment kitchen, and none of them were sufficient biochemists to attempt it. The only alterna­tive to halting the therapy, and none of them would consider that, was to obtain more plasma quickly, within the four hours their total supply would last. And even that time was a rough estimate, the consumption of the supply might be progressively accelerated.

They called Carney into their living room.

He had been hanging around the outskirts of the experiment for a week, since it had started; not admit­ted to the workroom, nor asking to be admitted since Mabel, herself, had told him to stay out. His sulks and belligerence had disappeared, replaced by anxiety. His anxiety was mitigated by confidence. He realized that inasmuch as Mabel had made the decision and had stuck to it, she could not be in better hands.

But their reports to him did create some doubts. They were all identical, and to him they were vague and unsatisfactory.

“Mabel is resting naturally and progressing nor­mally.”

He had not had much real experience with hospitals.

His concepts of what probably went on was drawn from motion picture script writers’ efforts to knock themselves out with drama piled upon drama, one near-fatal crisis after another, ever trying with the same old tricks to excite a public long since immune to further emotional response. Yet, without it, something seemed lacking to Carney.

His reaction, when Joe told him that more plasma must be obtained at once, was one more nearly relief than alarm. This was more like it. As with the script writers, it did not occur to him that crisis piled upon crisis is usually a sign of inefficiency and bungling. It did not occur to him to ask the very normal question of why this need for further plasma had not been fore­seen, or what change had occurred in Mabel to make their estimates fall short.

Actually, he was flooded with a sense of satisfac­tion. He would be of some use after all, Mabel’s life depended upon him. He, Carney, was as important to her as these Brains.

He was cooperative. That is, he wanted to be.

“But I don’t know where I could buy that stuff on short notice,” he blurted. “I had plenty of warning on the last and put out the word I could use it. In a few days the word came back that it was ready. You got to be careful on things like that. It’s different from tools and electrical stuff.”

Billings, standing beside Joe, was visibly shaken.

“We simply have to get more,” he insisted. “Our present supply will last less than four hours. Mabel can’t be cured without it. It’s dangerous to try.”

Carney blanched. His fingers shook as he tried to light a cigarette.

“If I had more time,” he muttered, “but four hours, and in broad daylight.”

Joe glanced at his wristwatch.

“It’s nine o’clock now. That means we must be back by noon, to give us margin. Where’s the nearest big hospital?”

“There’s an emergency just a couple of blocks over,” Carney said.

“An emergency hospital wouldn’t have enough,” Joe said. “I want a place that would have a big sup­ply.”

“I don’t know,” Carney said hesitantly. “There’s Memorial, I guess. Down off Protrero.”

“I want a doctor’s whites,” Joe said crisply. “Where can I get them?”

“I can do that,” Carney said with relief. “It’ll take me five minutes.” He turned and almost ran out of the room.

He was back in less than five minutes. The uniform was complete, even to a little black bag.

“The boys’ fingers do stick to everything, don’t they?” Joe smiled.

Carney grinned.

* * * *

They were almost over to the interurban depot, where taxis were plentiful, before Carney asked any questions.

“What’re you gonna do, Joe?” he asked between puffs of breath as they walked rapidly down the street.

“Steal it,” Joe said tersely. “There are times when the ethics of esperance must be secondary.”

Carney nodded, sagely, without any comprehension of the phrase.

“In broad daylight!” he gulped. He sighed and squared his thin shoulders. “But I’ll try anything for Mabel,” he added, slipping easily into the improbable valence of a movie plot.

When the cab pulled up in the broad circular drive­way in front of the hospital, Joe paid the fare and gave the driver a tip.

“If you’ll wait,” Joe said, “we’ll be going back in about ten minutes.” His words were casual, but he beamed a sense of high drama into the driver’s mind.

“I’ll wait,” the cabbie promised, as if he were taking an oath.

Joe took the steps, two at a time, with Carney pant­ing behind him.

In the lobby, Joe smiled at the young nurse behind the information window, and beamed a strong field of reassurance at her.

“Where can I find the head nurse, please?” His eyes told her that, after having seen her, he was in no way interested in the old battle-axe of a head nurse.

The girl returned his smile, while she automatically evaluated him for age, possible marital status, financial prospects. She was already confident of his susceptibil­ity. It was the normal and expected thought process. Joe tied himself into it, and pushed it farther by gently projecting the image of a young intern backed by wealthy parents.

The nurse’s eyes sparkled, and she inhaled to give Joe a better appraisal of the merchandise.

“Do you mean our Day Supervisor?” she twinkled. “Shall I get her on the phone?” Her tones, and her thought-patterns, pleaded with him not to be in such a hurry to part company.

To the image of the wealthy young intern, unmar­ried, Joe fed the picture of a shining blue convertible, upholstered in red leather, and followed that with a picture of bowing head waiters in a dining room with soft lights.

“She’s so busy this time of day,” the nurse said doubtfully. “If I could help you—?”

“Well, I’m really heading for the Blood Bank,” Joe said easily. “I’m borrowing a supply for St. Luke’s—” The picture crystallized into a long evening of dancing at the Venetian Room at the Fairmont, so much less touristy than the Top of the Mark.

“Oh, that,” the now utterly vivacious young woman trilled. “I’ll be happy to show you the way, Dr.—?”

“Dr. Carter . . . soon, anyway . . . I hope,” said Joe, with a wink.

The nurse turned to the non-uniformed girl at the typewriter behind her.

“I’ll be right back, darling,” she cooed. “If anyone asks where I am—”

“I know,” the girl said with a bored tone. “You’re powdering your nose.” These nurses with their airs!

None of them paid any attention at all to Carney. Obviously, in the hierarchy of the hospital caste, a system which puts India’s to shame, he was an Un­touchable, lower, probably, than even an Orderly. As Joe and the nurse walked down the corridor, her heels clicking smartly, Joe knew that Carney, following be­hind, was staring at his back with an awe bordering on reverence.

During the course of the short trip to the second floor, rear, Joe dutifully went through the protocol of finding out the young nurse’s name, hours on and off duty, the telephone number at the adjoining nurse’s residence.

When they reached the Blood Storage Room, the nurse spoke crisply, and fraternally, to the intern in charge.

“This is Dr. Carter, from St. Luke’s—”

The intern, obviously not backed by wealthy parents or a blue convertible, regarded Joe enviously.

“I wish I could make St. Luke’s,” he said. “How long have you got?”

“Two more months,” replied Joe, with a sidelong glance at the nurse. “Sometime come over and get acquainted. Glad to introduce you around.”

“Well, thanks! I’d sure like to!” The intern offered his hand. “Harry Vedder,” he said, “Cal—”

“Harvard Medical,” murmured Joe. The intern blinked with respect, and thawed even more. His guess had been right. This was one of those wealthy boys; probably been money in the family so long that he didn’t even think about it; all this equality was the real thing, not an affectation. A real guy! The nurse was all but ready to take off and fly.

“A couple dozen bottles will be enough,” Joe said, bringing their thoughts back down to his errand.

“Surgery ran short. Called your administrator. Guess you got the release. We’re returning it in the morning.”

His words were innocuous enough, but his face showed them what he thought of a hospital administra­tion who could let surgery run short of a vital supply. The nurse and intern picked up the expression, and suppressed smiles. As with any subordinate under a hard taskmaster, they were delighted to see their bosses slip.

“No, the order didn’t come through,” the intern said.

Joe grinned knowingly. Everybody, all along the line, was slipping.

“Maybe you’d better call the front office and get confirmation,” he said easily. He heard a subdued gasp behind him from Carney.

“Not me,” the intern said instantly. “Maybe over at St. Luke’s—but here at Memorial we don’t remind our heads that they’ve slipped. Just take along what you need, and I’ll check it out when the order does come through.”

They all grinned then, the nurse turning hers into a charming, provocative smile.

In another two minutes, Carney was staggering down the corridor under the load of heavy cartons. To the astonishment of the intern and the nurse, Joe, himself, hoisted the last remaining box on his own shoulder. The astonishment gave way to satisfaction. This was a real guy, indeed, thoughtful enough not to make the old man take two trips, secure enough in his position that he didn’t have to make a show of it.

With his free hand, Joe again shook hands with the intern. The nurse twinkled along beside him down the corridor, as if he were her special property. She es­corted him to the front door, to save him the trouble of being stopped and questioned should any official notice the two men carrying out cartons of plasma.

“Don’t forget,” she whispered as she held open the heavy door for him.

Joe laughed, a laugh which promised a great deal.

The taxi driver came halfway up the steps and re­lieved Carney of part of the load. By the time he had driven ten blocks he had convinced himself this was a very important mission; and by the time he helped them unload their boxes in front of the emergency hospital, he was certain he had been an important part of high drama. When they refused his help in carrying the cartons into the emergency hospital, he knew be­yond all doubt that secrecy on his part was of highest importance. He drove away, his long dormant scout’s honor keeping him from even looking back through his rear-view mirror.

“Kid,” Carney puffed, as they let themselves in through the door to their own basement quarters, “if you can stay out of jail, you’ll con a million.” He was filled with admiration, almost ready to forgive Joe for being a Brain.

Joe stopped the old man in their living room, unwill­ing to let him go on into the workroom, to see what was happening to Mabel.

“This will be enough to last us a couple of days, anyway,” Joe said. “But you’d better send out the word for more plasma through your usual channels.”

“Sure takes a lot,” Carney answered curiously.

“Always does,” Joe shrugged, as if it had all been perfectly normal. “Think you can get more?”

“Sure,” Carney answered easily, “now that I’ve got time.”

Carney went away satisfied, comfortable in his mind for the first time in more than week. He had something to do, he was important again.

* * * *

Inside the workroom, Billings and Hoskins were still standing near Mabel, watching her. Somehow, probably in an absent-minded daze, Hoskins had brewed their morning coffee, and, equally absently, they were drinking it.

A quick probe of Billings’ stream of rationalizing satisfied Joe that the first astonishment had lessened and was being replaced by a new evaluation of the tenets of psychosomatic therapy. Billings was trying to talk this out to Hoskins, to verbalize his thoughts into coherency.

“This is all quite understandable,” he was saying slowly, carefully, “if we draw an analogy between the cell and a bullet shot from a gun. At first there is a given momentum of like force, strong enough to rise in an ordered projectory. The cells renew themselves with healthy vigor. Like the amoeba, barring accident, they are immortal—that is, they have the potential of immortality through continued self renewal.”

“But air resistance, or the resistance of heavier materials, and the pull of gravity gradually overcomes the bullet, drags on its momentum, so that the bullet reaches a balance, then gradually sinks to earth, in­ert,” Hoskins said.

“Exactly,” Billings agreed, “as do the cells. They renew and multiply through the growth of the child to its maturity. But gradually the accumulation of mis­takes, repressions, frustrations, disappointments, ten­sions of all kinds, overcome the momentum of the initial life force. The cells cannot keep up their renewal production as against all these depressants. They slow down, more and more, until finally some organ—or complex of organs—is too weakened to function. We call it disease, old age, death.”

“Would gravity, itself, have any effect, doctor?” Joe asked, as he stepped up to them and poured himself some coffee. “It seems to me that the constant pull of gravity against the cells would tend to slow them down, just as it does the bullet. If cells have a form of memory, as you contend, then the memory of weari­ness would be passed from the old cell to the new one, and be added to in the experience of the new cell. The accrued memories of weariness, alone, might be sufficient to account for old age.”

Billings looked up at him.

“It could be,” he agreed.

“Let’s ask Bossy,” Hoskins said, instantly.

He flipped open the communications key, and Bill­ings put the question.

“Is gravity a factor in cell renewal?” he asked.

“Yes,” the machine answered instantly. “The most basic. All living cells, whatever the organism, accu­mulate such memory of weight as to destroy their potential for renewal.”

“Did you eliminate such cellular memory in the patient?” Joe asked.

“Naturally,” Bossy answered. “My instructions, regarding therapy, were to find all tensions of any nature and remove them.”

Billings and Hoskins settled back in their chairs.

“And the result is that the organism is allowed to continue on at the rate of its peak,” Billings said.

“Let’s face it, doctor,” Hoskins said harshly. “The result, in effect at least, is—immortality!”

“Well now,” Billings said hesitantly. “New repressions, new weariness memories, new suppressants can accumulate—”

“And again be wiped out by treatment,” Hoskins said, pounding his fist into the palm of the other hand. “Immortality—it brings up some powerful ethical questions, doctor.”

“More than you know,” Joe answered with a smile. “You’ve both overlooked one thing. Mabel was will­ing. Who else would be?”

“Anybody! Everybody!” Hoskins said at once. “Everybody wants to be immortal.”

“Duh . . . I wanna be immortal!” Joe parodied a famous comic, who parodies a vast portion of man­kind. “You haven’t yet considered the price, Professor Hoskins.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Joe,” Billings asked curiously.

“The patient must be willing to be relieved of all tensions,” Joe said.

“Yes,” Billings agreed.

“A firm belief in anything acts as a tension, in that it disallows the opposite of that belief. The admission ticket to immortality is the willingness to divorce one­self from all frameworks of preconception and preju­dice.”

“Would that be so difficult?” Hoskins asked, with a challenge in his voice.

“I think so,” Joe said quietly. “I think, gentlemen, you will find that they’d rather be right—and die.”

Chapter IX

For two more days the three men watched the progress of Mabel. They hardly slept at all, and ate only in snatched mouthfuls. The fascination was beyond anything they had ever experienced.

It was like watching the minute hand of a small watch. No, it was more like the unfolding of some fabulous blossom. Staring intently, the eye could not quite catch any change from microsecond to microsec­ond. Yet if one looked away and looked back again, the development was apparent. And over the two-day period, the change was incredible.

There had been some alarm about her hair. It had come out in matted gray masses on the pad which supported her head; and for a while they feared she would be completely bald. Then a fine mist of hair began to show, and now her head was covered in a helmet of gold mahogany ringlets. Her face, smoothed to clean and classic form, took on the simplicity of a child, the serenity of a sage.

During the early stages of therapy, Hoskins had attempted to keep her body covered with a sheet. Typi­cal of man, he reasoned that this was a concession to Joe’s youth and inexperience. Actually, he was obey­ing the compulsions of his own tensions. Billings had finally, and rather irritably, reminded him that theirs should be a clinical attitude. Joe, concealing his amusement, reminded him that when one, from earliest childhood, could see directly into the thought streams of others, clothes lost their utility as a modesty mecha­nism for individuals.

Hoskins, a little angry at himself for feeling foolish, dispensed with the sheet; and had resolutely main­tained a clinical attitude.

Mabel lay in a position faintly suggestive of the fetal curl; or like a dancer of perfect body relaxed and fallen asleep on a casual couch. She breathed slowly and deeply, and only now and then showed a flicker of expression on her face as Bossy touched some deeply buried memory of pain, some formula of prejudice which had no basis in fact, and erased them.

It was still impossible for Joe to get through to her mind. For the first time in his life, he found himself blanked out of another’s thoughts, emotions, motives. For the first time, he got a taste of what it must be like to have a normal mind.

He had always pitied others because they were psio­nically blind; now he marveled at them. How had man managed to live with man at all, unable to see one another truly? No wonder they fumbled awkwardly in their dealings, and made incredible mistakes of misun­derstanding!

The human race was like a universe of material bodies, each with its own eccentric orbit, blindly crashing into one another, caroming off, senselessly changing direction as a consequence of random con­tact. The miracle was that even rudiments of order, on a few occasions of history, had somehow been achieved.

For the first time, he gained a little respect for cane tapping.

He had likened them to blind people, feeling their way along, tapping their canes ahead of them in total darkness. Their science was a tabulation of how many cane taps it took to get from here to there. Their lore was the measurement of exteriors. He had understood, abstractly, why it was they so often substituted mea­surement for meaning. But it had taken this inability to get through to Mabel to give him a real appreciation of their problem.

Suddenly Joe felt the need to get out and walk. The two days had left him feeling cramped and stifled. He was restless with his inability to get through to Mabel, his inability to find out if Bossy, in clearing away all the debris of prejudice screens, had opened a window through which she might see—psionically.

His question to Billings on whether there was any­thing he could do received a negative answer. His question to Bossy on whether any complications were anticipated drew an equal negative. Hoskins murmured that he, himself, was going to catch some sleep and would relieve Billings who watched at Mabel’s side. Joe gladly escaped the confines of the room.

* * * *

Outside, on the street, the dark and fog enveloped him as he headed away from Third and Howard toward Mark Street. It was a night for walking. And it was a city which calls to stranger and old resident alike for exploration. Years may pass but one never becomes quite accustomed to the magic mystery of San Fran­cisco at night.

And Joe was at that period of growth when a young man walks down the streets of a strange city in the darkness, looking at the absorbing activities of all the little people about him from a mile-high vantage. Es­caped, at last, from encircling arms, from the protec­tions of childhood, a youth grows tall, taller than the buildings, broader than the city, swifter than the wind in his face.

He is filled with an all encompassing love for man­kind, with pity and compassion. Out of his sudden enormous strength he would do great things of purpose and import. He knows his debt for all the things civili­zation has given him, and he feels an overwhelming obligation to repay that debt. He must strive to lift man from his despair and purposelessness into realms of great achievement, enlightenment. Nothing less would be good enough for mankind.

And for Joe the purpose of Bossy was to give, at last, psionic sight to man. How else could man take the evolutionary step necessary to lift him from the blind circling rut which, time after time through ensu­ing civilizations, returned man to his starting point?

He had been sure that his own psionic ability could be put to such use. Along with a few others, he felt his obligation to use his total capacity for helping man­kind.

He crossed Market Street, conscious of being con­fined by the traffic cop’s angry whistle to their painted white lines, seeing in that the symbolism of cane tap­ping, and began to climb the hills of Powell Street.

He had held the theory that since psionic rudiments were more apparent in lower animals and in children than in human adults, if all the debris of false training could be cleared away the esperance might develop. He did not know. He had never been able to discuss it with anyone—feel it with anyone, share comprehen­sive speculation.

For communication implies shared comprehension. It was not only that they lacked vocabulary—they did not even know they lacked it. To a race of totally deaf would the musical instrument and the complex art of music develop? Even if they gained an abstract com­prehension that there could be communication through tone modulation, what ridiculous developments would derive from their attempts to realize it! Logical and rational to them, perhaps, but ridiculous to one who could hear music.

Strangely enough, they had the beginning tools. Ein­stein had given them the coordinate system, where truth was relative to its own framework but need not apply outside. But instead of being able to use that tool intimately and familiarly in daily life, they relegated it to some theoretical abstraction of light speed and universe size. Instead of seeing meaning, they saw only measurement.

Their mathematics contained many valued calculi of symbolic logic, and, incredibly, they did not see how it could possibly apply to an understanding of one another, but rationalized it out of existence, useful only to some totally alien form of thought.

They were like two-dimensional creatures who had achieved the mathematical symbolism of height, but who, by the very nature of their limitations, could see no way it might apply to their own world reality, and, therefore, denied it except as a plaything of abstrac­tion.

To one whose horizon was bounded by what he could touch with his outstretched cane, where was the vocabulary to give the picture of tumbling mountains piled back and back of one another, farther and farther away, blue and bluer to deep purple in the distance? If there were no organ to respond to light of any nature, how could one build up the concepts of modulation in color? Was it possible to communicate a symphony to a science which could only measure vibrations per second?

Yet, in Bossy, the cane tapping proved valuable. He could not have built Bossy himself. He did not have the training. He might have accomplished other things through his psionic sight, but he could not have communicated them, and they would, therefore, have been valueless.

To deal with the blind, Bossy had to be of the essence of the blind. To move a two-dimensional crea­ture into a third dimension, there must be at least a two-dimensional entry. It is insufficient to scorn or rant at a two-dimensional creature because he cannot understand the concept of “pinnacle.” If his entire world—and all he values—is two-dimensional, what would be the value of a pinnacle to him, even if he could conceive it?

In a nonpsi world he may speculate on the abstrac­tion of the psi, but would he be willing to throw aside his cane tapping to gain it? Wouldn’t he regard all talk about it from the two-dimensional point of view, his scorn for the nonsense of height being his greatest handicap in reaching it?

Bossy contained the two-dimensional entry. Bossy contained the most enticing of all baits—immortality!

Was the exit three-dimensional? He did not know.

What would a mind be like, governed solely by rational relationships of facts, free from all the debris of precedent, undeformed by pain, punishment, grief, repression

Suddenly Joe stopped in his tracks, appalled! What a terrible oversight!

Man does not live by logic. He does not live ac­cording to the patterns of fact applied to fact. He does not live according to rationality, not even according to reason.

He turned and started running swiftly down the hill. Frantically, he sent his probe ahead of him into the basement room, but he could sense nothing of its con­tents. Billings had fallen asleep in his chair, and in his mind there was only the residue of random impression that everything was all right. Naturally, or he wouldn’t have fallen asleep!

What a terrible oversight! Bossy had been filled only with proved fact. Any conclusions drawn were carefully labeled as suspect, to be considered only as possibilities. All prejudice, assumption, fallacy had been carefully screened out by checking and double checking of the finest minds in the country over the past two years of her building back at Hoxworth.

And everything had been fitted into the framework of material for a machine’s thinking. In submitting Mabel to the machine, they had overlooked the fact that a machine’s approach might not necessarily be the wisest for a human. A previous sentence flashed on Bossy’s screen returned to Joe’s memory.

“My instruction, regarding therapy, were to find all tensions of any nature, and remove them.”

That was what Bossy had done.

Joe groaned aloud at their stupidity in giving such an order. He was passing St. Francis Hotel now, and had to slow his speed to keep from attracting attention. There were taxis, of course, but a taxi pulling into skid row at this time of night would surely attract too much attention. One does not take taxis to get to a two-bit flophouse.

And it was only a few more blocks. As usual, the slum and the palace were closely adjacent, the one seeming to require the other.

Again and again he sent his thoughts ahead, trying to wake the sleeping Billings through the urgency of his thought. But the old man’s weariness and two days of sleeplessness defeated him. He tried again to contact Mabel’s mind and found it no more responsive than Bossy.

That was it, of course! Mabel’s mind, at this stage, was reacting in the valence of a machine.

At Mission and New Montgomery, he turned south toward skid row. Ahead of him there was the stir of unusual activity. Although it was near two in the morning, there was a crowd of people gathered in a spot of light which streamed out from the open doors of a saloon. A squad car was parked nearby, but the two policemen standing beside it made no move to interfere in the excitement. This, in itself, was strange, for only the toughest were assigned to the skid row beats, and they did enjoy using their clubs whether called for or not.

Cautiously, Joe stepped into the shadow of an alley­way, and sent an exploratory wave field ahead. At first there seemed to be little pattern in the jumble of impressions and stirred emotions. Then bit by bit, principally from the thoughts of a pair of young sailors, supplemented by the knowledge of the officers, Joe put the elements of the story together.

The wagon had just carted off a woman to the City Jail. That, in itself, would have caused no more than passing interest on the shortline. But the woman had been very young. She had been beautiful. Even allowing for normal exaggeration in the sailors’ minds, she was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.

And she had been stark naked.

She had come strolling off Howard Street. The sail­ors had just been coming out of the door, and the streaming light had caught her like a spotlight on a dark stage. They had been too stunned even to whistle. A cruising squad car, coming by at that moment, had almost crashed into a fire hydrant before it skidded to an astonished stop.

One of the officers had thrown his own coat about her while they stood waiting for the wagon. She hadn’t spoken a word. She just stood there, looking from face to face, and smiling her strange, sweet smile.

The wagon appeared shortly, and whisked her away. It was all routine. Yet the two officers did not climb back into their car. They stood there, watching the crowd, apparently waiting for it to disperse or grow unruly. But their expressions were far away. It was not the nudeness, as such, which remained in their minds. It was as if they, too, were still stunned at having seen, all at once, too much beauty.

Even as Joe ran down the alley toward their base­ment quarters, he knew, with near certainty, it had been Mabel.

At the foot of the stairwell, leading down from the street level, the outer door was open and swinging. He snapped its lock behind him, and ran through their living quarters into the workroom. Mabel’s couch was empty. Billings still sat in his chair beside the bed, his head slumped forward in sound sleep.

Bossy was lighted, but silent. Her screen showed two words.

“Problem solved.”

Chapter X

Dr. Eustace Fairfax, Consulting Psychiatrist to the San Francisco Police Department, gazed down his thin nose and transfixed the lieutenant with a glare, heightened by polished glasses, in which anger and incredulity were fiercely blended.

“Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that I have been called at this fantastic hour of the night to examine a . . . a . . . a routine case for the psycho ward?”

“But this isn’t a routine case,” the harried lieuten­ant insisted. His own disbelief made him weak in his protestations.

“Bah!” Dr. Fairfax tossed the police blotter across the desk. “I have never seen a more routine report: ‘... Nude young woman arrested, corner of Howard and New Montgomery—’ And you wake me up at three o’clock in the morning! The commissioner will hear of this!”

“Wait, sir,” pleaded the lieutenant. “You don’t understand—” It was an unfortunate choice of words, for one does not tell a consulting psychiatrist that he does not understand.

Dr. Fairfax, who had turned away and was starting out the door, whirled around.

“And what is it I am incapable of understanding?” he asked, his words as brittle as flake ice.

“This young woman isn’t really young,” the lieu­tenant began hesitantly. Then, overcoming his own doubts, he rushed on. “You see, according to the fingerprint records, this woman, Mabel Monohan, is actually sixty-eight years old!”

“Then why in heaven’s name do you book her as a young woman?” the psychiatrist asked in extreme exasperation.

“Well, the fact is . . . the Booking Officer thought . . . we all swear she wasn’t a day over twenty-one!”

“Then you’ve made a mistake, that’s all.”

“No sir, we didn’t make a mistake. The fingerprints checked in every particular, not just one print but all of them. We wired the prints to the FBI in Washington. They check there, too.”

“Then the mistake was made when the prints were taken before.”

The lieutenant began to get a little heated now. The efficiency of his department was being questioned.

“Mabel Monohan,” he said firmly, “has been in and out of this jail for the last fifty years. She has been printed countless times. We called in some of the old-timers. They swear this girl looks like the Mabel they knew forty years ago, ah . . . from seeing her in jail, of course.”

“That does it! I’ll call the commissioner the first thing in the morning. You may need the professional services of a psychiatrist around here, but not to exam­ine the prisoners!”

Dr. Fairfax’s ordinarily nasal voice had risen to a high whine under the stress of extreme anger. He was often angry at people because they contrarily refused to fit in nicely with his theories. And, of course, it was the people who were wrong. The theories had been advanced by the most Eminent Authorities, and proved by carefully selected case histories. His one satisfac­tion in life was that so many of the laws he had advo­cated to make people conform to these theories had been passed—despite strong opposition.

Apparently more laws were needed. He jammed his hat on his head and stalked toward the door. The lieutenant hurried around the desk and caught him by the arm. And was shaken off.

“Please, doctor,” the lieutenant begged, despera­tion bringing sudden firmness to his voice. “I think it is necessary you examine this woman tonight. I couldn’t reach the commissioner, he’s been on a three-day . . . he’s unavailable, but when he learns the facts I’m sure he’ll agree.”

Apparently it broke through the psychiatrist’s indig­nation.

“All right,” he agreed, as if he were following rule three and humoring a psychotic patient. “Inasmuch as I’m here, I might as well examine her. But it’s a clear case of fraud, or incompetence. I don’t need to see the prisoner to determine that!”

He began to get a certain glow of anticipation. Ap­parently the girl was cleverly pulling some new stunt, and it would be his pleasure to expose her. Laymen simply didn’t understand these things; but it was always possible to rationalize symbolisms until one found them fitting into theory. He grew almost pleasant in satisfaction at being a master of intricate reasoning which none but a trained psychiatrist could grasp.

He followed the lieutenant back to the desk. He pursed his lips and hm-m-m’d many times, implying that all of this was no mystery to him. He studied the photographs taken forty to fifty years ago, clucked over the poor photography, triumphantly pointed out the differences among the photographs, asked how they could be used to compare with the girl when they were not even identical among themselves, expressed his doubts of the whole science of fingerprinting, and thoroughly enjoyed setting the whole stage to prove his theory of fraud. Faithfully he followed the pattern of the scientist determined to interpret the facts to suit the theory.

“Bring her in, lieutenant,” he said, when he was quite satisfied that he had encompassed everything in the thick dossier of Mabel Monohan. He settled him­self into the lieutenant’s swivel chair.

“In here, doctor?” the lieutenant wavered. “Wouldn’t you prefer to use the office of the regular psychiatrist, where they’ve got all the hocus-pocus—” He stopped, aghast at his slip.

“I shall not need the usual equipment for testing, which you term . . . ah . . . hocus-pocus,” Dr. Fair­fax said with asperity, and chalked it up in his memory for delayed retaliation. “This is a simple case of fraud, and I can handle it right here. Bring her in, and then you leave her alone with me. I am sure she will soon recognize my ability to see through her little game.”

* * * *

His first sight of Mabel confirmed his belief in fraud. There was simply no art of make-up which could turn an old woman into a young girl, whatever the female gender may wish to believe. This girl had no make-up on at all. And the bright glare of the overhead light showed that she was barely twenty-one. The rough prisoner clothes she wore did not fully conceal her youthful form.

Dr. Fairfax dismissed the lieutenant and the matron with a curt nod.

“Sit down,” he said coldly to Mabel, and nodded toward a chair. He smiled with faint scorn as he watched her touch the chair on its arm and back, and then seat herself.

“I am sure you know what a chair is,” he said coldly.

She looked at him with a little puzzlement in her fathomless blue eyes.

“Chair:” she said, “Noun. English language. Movable seat with four legs and back, for one person, used by humans.”

“So that’s the way it is to be,” he say cryptically. “What is your name?”

“Mabel,” she answered.

“Address?”

She gave the address of her apartment off Howard Street. It checked with the dossier.

“How many times have you been arrested, Mabel?”

“Thirty-two,” she answered instantly.

He blinked. This was a little out of pattern. She could easily get detailed information about the life of the old woman from other sources, but even the old woman would not remember so precisely how many times she had been arrested; not when there had been so many over such a long period of time.

“How do you know that?” he shot the question at her abruptly, expecting to see the first signs of confu­sion when she realized she had gone too far; that she shouldn’t have known it so accurately or instantly.

“It is a fact,” she said, without any confusion what­ever.

Well, whatever her little game, she was a cool one. This might prove interesting.

“And I suppose you know all the facts,” he said, emphasizing his sarcasm.

“About myself, yes,” she answered. “But I know only facts which have a relationship to me. I do not know all facts. Bossy says all facts are not yet known.”

He blinked again. Somehow the name Bossy seemed familiar, but he could not place it. He seldom read the news, or followed any of the activities of run-of-the-mill people. Since they contrarily refused to fit theory, it was less bothersome simply to ignore them. Then the concept of Bossy clarified.

Of course! It was a childish name for a cow! He marveled at his acumen, and stored it away. It would come in handy to trip her; revealed a farm background, which she couldn’t suspect him of knowing. Oh these silly people who thought they could fool a psychiatrist!

He would get her to talking. She would make further slips, and then when he pointed them out to her, she would realize she was no match for him. The confes­sion would be easy.

“What is this all about, Mabel?” he asked with deceptive gentleness.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I have assumed it was a dream. Bossy says the dream state in humans is likely to be no more than a random excitation of synaptic patterns creating an irrational sequence of visualiza­tion. All this is certainly irrational.”

He felt slightly uneasy, and not only because it violated the subconscious symbolism theories of Freud, which only a psychologist could interpret—at fifty dollars a séance. This sort of thing must be scotched immediately.

“And a cow told you all that?” he asked bitingly.

“It must be a dream,” she responded. “Or the alternative is that you are insane. Your question is completely irrational. Cows do not speak a language intelligible to humans.”

He grasped desperately at rule five: Never allow the patient to guess you are not completely master of the situation. He decided to use technique B: Switching the frontal attack.

“Why did you appear on the street without any clothes?”

“My therapy was completed. I wished to evaluate my environment. I did not realize it was cold enough for my body to need additional protection beyond that furnished by my skin.”

He gulped, and stared at her intently. She was mad. Stark raving mad.

“Are you sixty-eight years old?” he asked scorn­fully.

“I have no age now,” she answered simply. “Answer my question,” he commanded sternly.

“I did.”

“Your answer has no meaning. You are either sixty-eight or you are not.”

“That is Aristotelian logic,” she said reflectively. “Bossy says humans can never understand themselves through Aristo—”

“Bossy says! Bossy says!” He all but screamed the words at her in exasperation. “Look here, young woman—”

“... telian logic,” she continued. “Reasoning along that line is comparable to Zeno’s proof that mo­tion does not exist. This is a most interesting dream in that your thought-processes are consistent with those currently in vogue in the cult of psychiatry. By any chance, do you imagine yourself to be a psychiatrist? Bossy says—”

Dr. Fairfax thrust himself to his feet, and almost ran to the door.

“Take her away,” he told the waiting matron harshly. “Lock her up alone for the night. I will have to see her again when she is less disturbed. And she’s dangerous. She’s very dangerous!”

The old matron looked at him with veiled contempt. For thirty years she’d been handling her girls. She knew a sweet, innocent, young thing when she saw it. They were saying this was old Mabel. Well, they were all nuts—including the psychiatrist.

“It’s all right, dearie,” she said soothingly, and put her arm around Mabel’s waist to lead her away. Dangerous, indeed! “It’s all right, baby. You can de­pend on old Clarkie.”

“I know,” Mabel said. “You always were a good scout. Twenty-two years ago, the last time I was here, you got my attorney for me. There was a reform ticket in office, and they were holding me incommunicado.”

The matron drew back from her, turned pale, tot­tered, and clung to the wall.

“Nobody ever knew it was me,” she gasped. “I’d of lost my job. Nobody knew except Mabel, herself. And Mabel wouldn’t have told nobody—not nobody!”

“I told you she was disturbed, dangerously dis­turbed!” the psychiatrist snapped. “Now take her away!”

Tentatively at first, then comfortingly, the matron took Mabel’s arm and guided her down the hall.

“But you can’t be Mabel,” the matron was saying. “You just can’t be. Even then, Mabel was getting old and fat. Tell me,” she said desperately, “tell old Clarkie, dearie. How did you do it—Mabel?”

The lieutenant came back into the hall from another office, and saw the psychiatrist leaning against the door jamb.

“What do you think, Dr. Fairfax?” he asked brightly.

The doctor straightened himself, drew himself up, and looked down his nose professionally.

“A clear case of . . . a clear case of—” He was unable to find, in the pat little repertoire of psychotic patterns, a name which precisely fitted this kind. He would have to rationalize it out through symbolisms until it neatly fitted something or another before he expressed his diagnosis. He must be sure to use the established and orthodox patterns of symbolism ma­nipulation so that other qualified psychiatrists would confirm him—if it came to that.

“A layman wouldn’t understand,” he finished, loft­ily.

Chapter XI

The long corridor leading to the courtroom was packed with jostling, noisy people, mostly women. This was not a trial. It was only a hear­ing for the purpose of setting Mabel’s bail. But old Clarkie had talked again, and this time to reporters.

The papers hadn’t had much time to work on it before the deadline of morning editions, but they’d done their best. And the results were quite satisfactory. Most of the articles about this old woman, who had turned into a young girl, were written with tongue-in-cheek, for, as frequently occurs with reason, the editors did not believe the stories turned in by their reporters.

But the public believed. The public wants miracles. The public demands miracles; and if one source ceases to provide them, they will turn to another source which seems to accomplish the spectacular. Even while they resented and opposed the scientific attitude, they lapped up the miracles which this attitude accom­plished with glee.

The Fountain of Youth, long denied consciously, was still the great secret dream. They believed it be­cause they wanted to believe it. They wanted to see this young and beautiful girl who, up until her disap­pearance ten days ago, had been a fat old woman. That hers had been an unsavory reputation somehow added to the credibility.

“If an old thing like that can do it, then I, much more worthy, can also do it,” was the tenor of the refrain in every woman’s mind.

Joe Carter slowly edged his way along one wall toward the high double doors of the courtroom. He gasped as a stout woman dug her elbow into his stom­ach, and then forgot about the elbow when a spiked heel ground down on his foot.

The jam grew tighter as he neared the door, and further progress seemed impossible. A perspiring bai­liff stood against the door, and stared unhappily at the surging crowd.

“No more room inside, ladies,” he kept insisting. “You might as well turn around and go home.”

Groans, catcalls and derisive laughter answered his words. This was a mere male, and they knew and exercised their power to give him a bad time.

“I can’t go home like this,” one woman yelled. “My old man wants me to look like eighteen again tonight!”

“Eighteen!” another woman shrieked. “I’ll settle for thirty-five!”

“Let us see her!” another yelled. “It won’t cost you anything to just let us see her.”

“It ain’t fair,” screamed another.

In desperation, Joe singled out one of the loudest of he women and fed the idea into her mind that the hearing had been postponed until two o’clock.

“Why you—” the woman suddenly yelled at the bailiff. “You know that hearing’s been put off, and you just let us stand here!”

“Put off?” someone else shrilled. “They’ve put off the hearing?”

“Of course they have!” the first woman yelled again. “The politicians want to hog everything for themselves. Come on, let’s go to the mayor’s office. Let’s see about them holding out on us taxpayers!”

The hallways began to clear as the word spread. The tightly packed knot of people around the bailiff began to loosen, untangle itself. Joe squeezed through the first break and stepped up to the bewildered bailiff.

“Good work,” Joe whispered his congratulations. “It could have been a riot if you hadn’t acted just in time. I’ll not forget to mention it!”

The bailiff, without realizing quite why, opened the door just wide enough for Joe to slip inside. Several of the women saw it, but the massive doors closed off their rising clamor.

* * * *

The courtroom was relatively quiet. A bitter legal wrangle was going on in front of the bench; but Joe ignored it for the moment while he searched for Mabel. He missed her as he swept the fenced-off arena in front of the judge’s box the first time. Then he spotted her at the counsel table where she was almost hidden by a massive gray-haired man who stood behind her chair and was holding up his hand to catch the judge’s eye.

“Your honor,” he intoned, as the judge looked his way, “to my colleague’s objections I would like to add the further objection of complete irrelevancy. Ap­pearing unclad on the public street is a simple misde­meanor. Our client has been charged with nothing else. The city attorney has failed to cite a single statute which would deny our client right of bail. Indeed, it has been a deplorable miscarriage of justice that she was detained overnight!”

The city attorney dabbed at his flushed face with a wadded handkerchief. It was true she had been charged with nothing else. A bad oversight, considering all the things they had to choose from, and somebody would pay for it. But then, nobody had expected the most important legal firm in San Francisco to appear sud­denly in Mabel’s behalf.

“The distinguished defense counsel misrepresents the obvious meaning of my words,” he protested un­easily. “I would not deny the defendant bail. I ask only, in the public interest, that she be detained in the psychiatric ward pending further investigation. I respectfully request the Court to appoint two indepen­dent psychiatrists, acceptable to the defense counsel as well as to my office, to determine the fitness of the crimin . . . prisoner.”

The judge looked appraisingly from one speaker to the other, then lowered his eyes and scribbled small doodles on the pad of yellow paper in front of him.

Joe knew he was thinking of forthcoming judicial elections. Usually it paid off to play along with the machine because the general public didn’t know one judge from another and marked the handiest spot on the ballot. But this case was different. How he acted could really help or hurt his chances in the election.

In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law; but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose. He’d better play it cautiously. He looked again toward the city attorney.

“Have you any grounds for questioning this young . . . this woman’s sanity?”

“There was prima-facie evidence that she was com­pletely unclad when arrested on a public thorough­fare—”

“Incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial,” snapped defense counsel instantly. “Nudity is not prima-facie evidence of insanity. If this case should go to trial, we will prove beyond all doubt that our client was merely sleepwalking.”

“That I would like to see,” the city attorney mum­bled under his breath. Then aloud, he persisted, “In the second place, a Consulting Psychiatrist has already conducted a preliminary examination of the defendant. We would like to call him to the stand at this time.”

The judge nodded. He must be fair to both sides, allow no criticism to come his way from a higher court.

“You may proceed.”

While the psychiatrist was being sworn, and estab­lishing his credentials, Joe tried to reach out and make psionic contact with Mabel. He failed in a most baf­fling way. He seemed to touch the periphery of her mind and then to lose himself in the characteristic pattern of a dream. Did she think she was still dream­ing? Her detachment, her lack of interest, her negative somatic reaction to the whole procedure baffled him. For the true dream state was anything but lacking in somatics. In the conscious state the human mind is seldom capable of reaching the heights of true horror often found in a dream. He came back to the witness who had been speaking.

“You say you tried to examine the defendant,” prompted the city attorney. “You used the word ‘tried’ advisedly?”

“Certainly,” snapped the psychiatrist. It was un­thinkable that he should use any word without self-advisement. “I say ‘tried,’ because the patient was too disturbed to be cooperative.”

“Would you say she exhibited the characteristics of a rational person?”

“I would not!”

“Did you question her about her age?”

“I did. She said she had no age.”

“Did you ask her why she appeared on the street nude?”

“I did. She answered that she did not know it was cold.” His expression showed plainly that a belief that clothes were necessary simply to keep out the cold was all the evidence they needed to establish her insanity.

Apparently the city attorney thought so, too. He nodded significantly toward the judge and relinquished his place at the stand. The defense counsel approached the psychiatrist in the manner of an experienced big-game hunter who is called upon to shoot a rabbit. He put one foot on the step in front of the witness stand, carefully drew up his trouser cuff, and leaned toward the psychiatrist in a conversational manner.

“Do you believe that the defendant has somehow been able to recover her lost youth?”

The psychiatrist flushed angrily. He wondered if it would be possible to suggest a law which would not permit defense counsels to question the judgment of a psychiatrist.

“No, I do not believe it,” he snapped.

“Do you then discount the evidence of the finger­prints? The photographs? The testimony of numerous people who identify her?”

“I am convinced all of this is a hoax!”

“And is, therefore, something which no rational person could believe?”

“Such a claim to rejuvenation is beyond the credi­bility of a rational man.”

“Then if the city attorney and the Court were to place some credence in the defendant’s regeneration, you would hold they are not rational men?”

A titter swept the courtroom. Several women clapped loudly. The psychiatrist felt called upon to defend his profession.

“I have not been called upon to examine the city attorney and the Court—”

The implication was not lost upon the judge that this witness assumed the possibility that everyone was insane except himself. The defense counsel preferred to leave it there before the impression could be cor­rected.

“One more question, then,” he said hurriedly. “Do you believe a woman’s reluctance to tell her age is a sign of insanity?”

The courtroom roared with applause and laughter. The psychiatrist’s cheek twitched under the indignity of a layman’s doubt, but he said nothing. The judge, sensing at last the way the public would respond, per­mitted himself a small, judicial smile. Joe attuned himself to the judge’s relief, mellowed and broadened his mood, fused a warm and noble valence into the judge’s concept of himself.

... The wisdom of a Solomon . . . utterly fair and incorruptible . . . stalwart and courageous defender of human rights against the oppression of a growing po­lice state . . . kind and compassionate

His head came up as if he were posing for a photo­graph.

The defense counsel turned impressively toward the bench.

“Your honor, I trust the Court, in its vast wisdom, agrees with us that this defendant should not be sub­jected to further indignities. She has clearly undergone a harrowing experience. She needs a period of rest. In good time, medical science will be able to develop the facts about her case, which could be of great benefit to humanity. All of us should cooperate to that larger cause. In the glorious pages of history, we must not be found wanting!”

The judge was regretful that he had barred news photographers from the courtroom. Really, this mo­ment should be caught and recorded for the pages of history.

“Meanwhile,” continued the defense counsel, “I withdraw our request that the defendant be released on bail.”

The judge, the city attorney, the psychiatrist looked at him in surprise. The courtroom held its breath.

“Instead I do petition the court to dismiss the misde­meanor charge against her entirely!”

The courtroom exploded from silence into thunder­ous applause. Joe did not need to intensify it with broadcasted waves of mass psychology feedback. The counsel knew his rabble-rousing, well.

The judge tapped his gavel and crinkled the charac­ter lines around his eyes with kind and mild reproof. He held up his hand for silence, and the crowd leaned forward in anticipation. He dismissed the charges. He arose in statuesque dignity and retired to his chambers amid the roar of approval.

With a courtly gesture, the defense attorney took Mabel by the arm and hurried her out of the room, refusing to pose outside for the newspaper and televi­sion cameraman. But reporters did stop them, momen­tarily, on the front steps. They answered one, and only one, of the barrage of questions.

“Who does your firm actually represent in this case?”

The lawyer smiled a bland, courteous smile.

“Why, the defendant, of course,” he answered.

But behind the smile was the name Joe had been seeking—the name of Howard Kennedy, the multimil­lionaire industrialist who had given the newspaper that surprising interview in defense of Bossy.