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

concern, and from the apertures there began to spew a thread, all but invisible, not more than a few molecules in breadth and thickness, with each molecule tailored to pick up and store its own burden of electrical impulse.
    Bossy began to take shape, and, oddly enough, the box took on a faint resemblance to a cow.
    Perhaps this was mainly due to the two eyestalks which sprouted out from near its upper surface, like horns topped with dragonfly eye lenses. None of this poor human vision for their Bossy. The diaphragm for picking up sound on the front of the box was vaguely like the blaze on an animal’s face, the apertures for air entrance where scent and taste could be sampled where like nostrils.
    It was as if there was an unconscious determination to see that the thing remained Bossy.
    A stream of specialized molecules poured past each sense receptor, picked up the electronic vibration, combined to make a thread, in the way that a motion-picture film picks up light and sound, so that when played back they coincide, and stored itself at the bottom of the case.
    They had not yet arrived at any point where a new basic principle needed to be found. Although, at this point, they had no more than a superior sense-re-cording machine. The thread could be played back, but that was all. And no one worried about it.
    It was music, another unlikely department, who gave the clue to the next step. A note struck on one key of the piano will, through the principle of harmonics, vibrate the strings at octaves above so that they also give off sound. Shouldn’t there be a vibronic code signal inherent in each sense stream, so that like things will activate harmonically with other like things? Wasn’t that how recognition took place through harmonically awakened association with like experience in the past?
    It was.
    Outwardly, Bossy ceased to take shape. To codify every sound, every shape, every vibration translated into touch and feel and scent and taste, every degree of light and color density was a monumental task—in terms of detail work, although its organization was not difficult. To translate these into electrical code impulses was difficult. But here again, no new principle was needed. Here again, man had merely the task defining the world in terms of symbol—and symbol in terms of code impulse.
    Nor was it too difficult to again tailor the molecules to carry electrical current, which, theoretically, would keep these code impulses vibrating in harmonics with those passing the sense receptor apertures.
    And still it was no more than an impulse storage bank. Only in theory was a new impulse activating its counterpart in old impulses. They had no way of testing it in practice. And felt supremely confident that a way would be found.
    No one who has not directed a large scale activity, coordinated the work of thousands of people and syn-thesized their results could fully comprehend the mass of work which fell upon Billings and his immediate staff. Many times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle, that the scope of activity had got out of hand. Yet inquiries and suggestions came from everywhere, and many of them were pertinent and valuable.
    It was as if the whole academic life of the nation had been swept up in the same urgency which had compelled him; as if men had something to think about which, for the moment, was unimpeded with restrictions and investigations.
    Yet, in spite of the weight of administrative detail, he had the feeling that he had full grasp of everything that was happening, and with a clarity of mind he had never experienced before he was able to see the relation of concepts one to the other.
    Perhaps it was this clarity which made him call a halt to the coding as it was developing, scrap much of what had been done, and start over. For it should have been obvious all along that identical things receiving identical codes was not enough. This had been the stumbling block of all cybernetic machines in the