“Of course not, but it could be. Not only that, but look at how we attack a research problem. We put an army into it. We hope that enough mediocrity will add up to talent. Me too, by God. I cancel coffee breaks because my people don’t know how to use them. So I’m banking on the mass mediocrity too.”
“What do you think the Russians are doing?”
“They pretend to use the mass approach, but I bet they work in little competitive teams, the way invention used to work in America in the early days. I tell you, they’re making fools out of us.”
“Well, thank you for showing me around, sir. I don’t feel I earned any fee.”
“You see what we’ve come to, and I don’t know how to stop it.” He hadn’t even heard me. He waved an arm around to take in the whole building, toilets and all. “One of these days,” he said, “I’ll set it on fire and run by the light of it.” I certainly wasn’t earning any fee. “Perhaps I’ve lost the quality of courage,” Hurlbet said. “But I’ve got responsibilities, too, you know.” I thought of Mother and the sports car. I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to get going, sir,” I said.
Hurlbet grabbed my hand and shook it a long while. “Think about it. What can I do? I’ll try anything!” I nodded and went out.
I went down the hall till I got blocked by a cleaning wagon. It was parked in the middle. A janitor took out a mop and went along the corners. A sign on the wagon said “Maintenance Engineering,” and there was the Maintenance Engineer himself with the mop.
In 1954, the late honored Albert Einstein astonished more laymen than fellow-scientists when he said that if he were about to choose a career, “I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or peddler... .”
Norbert Wiener had written, earlier: “. .. The degradation of the position of the scientist as an independent worker and thinker to that of a morally irresponsible stooge in a science-factory has proceeded even more rapidly and devastatingly than I had expected. . . .”
And earlier still, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the explosion of the first atom bomb at Alamagordo, and could think of nothing but the line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death—the shatterer of worlds.”
The quotations are all from Lewis S. Feuer’s The Scientific Intellectual (Basic Books, 1963), and his conclusions seem inescapable. The Laugh-O-Rama of Big Business Research is no happenstance; the decline of creative scientific thought is a natural consequence of the compromise—and compromising—of scientists.
Science: A broad inquiry, by means of numerous subsidiary disciplines, into the true nature of the universe. Its chief exponents liken it to humanity in general, whose perpetuation requires the intermittent observation of its own errors.
Scientism: The promotion of goods, services, values or decisions in the name of scientific method. Hence science as practiced. One who practices science is called a scientist. The practice allows for a large variety of human inclinations. Scientists are variously idealistic, ambitious, ordinary, academic, practical, foolish, careless, trustworthy, decent, and indecent; some are comic, some tragic, some vulgar, and some are in the grand tradition.
(The Doomsday Dictionary)
HOT PLANET
Hal Clement
The wind which had nearly turned the Albireo’s landing into a disaster instead of a mathematical exercise was still playing tunes about the fins and landing legs as Scholssberg made his way down to Deck Five.
The noise didn’t bother him particularly, though the endless seismic tremors made him dislike, the ladders. But just now he was able to ignore both. He was curious—though not hopeful.
“Is there anything at all obvious on the last sets of tapes, Joe?”
Mardikian, the geophysicist, shrugged. “Just what you’d expect . . . on a planet which has at least one quake in each fifty-mile-square area every five minutes.
You know yourself we had, a nice seismic program set up, but when we touched down we found we couldn’t carry it out. We’ve done our best with the natural tremors—incidentally stealing most of the record tapes the other projects would have used. We have a lot of nice information for the computers back home; but it will take all of them to make any sense out of it.”
Schlossberg nodded; the words had not been necessary. His astronomical program had been one of those sabotaged by the transfer of tapes to the seismic survey.
“I just hoped,” he said. “We each have an idea why Mercury developed an atmosphere during the last few decades, but I guess the high school kids on Earth will know whether it’s right before we do. I’m resigned to living in a chess-type universe—few and simple rules, but infinite combinations of them. But it would be nice to know an answer sometime.”
“So it would. As a matter of fact, Kneed to know a couple right now. From you, How close to finished are the other programs—or what’s left of them?”
“I’m all set,” replied Schlossberg. “I have a couple of instruments still monitoring the sun just in case, but everything in the revised program is on tape.”
“Good. Tom, any use asking you?”
The biologist grimaced. “I’ve been shown two hundred and sixteen different samples of rock and dust. I have examined in detail twelve crystal „growths which looked vaguely like vegetation. Nothing was alive or contained living things by any standards I could conscientiously set.’
Mardikian’s gesture might have meant sympathy. “Camille?”
“I may as well stop now as any time. I’ll never be through. Tape didn’t make much difference to me, but I wish I knew what weight of specimens I could take home.”
“Eileen?” Mardikian’s glance at the stratigrapher took the place of the actual question.
“Cam speaks for me, except that I could have used any more tape you could have spared. What I have is gone.”
“All right, that leaves me, the tape-thief. The last spools are in the seismographs now, and will start running out in seventeen hours. The tractors will start out on their last rounds in sixteen, and should be back in roughly a week. Will, does that give you enough to figure the weights we rockhounds can have on the return trip?”
The Albireo’s captain nodded. “Close enough. There really hasn’t been much question since it became evident we’d find nothing for the mass tanks here. I’ll have a really precise check in an hour, but I can tell right now that you have about one and a half metric tons to split up among the three of you.
“Ideal departure time is three hundred ten hours away, as you all know. We can stay here until then, or go into a parking-and-survey orbit at almost any time before then. You have all the survey you need, I should think, from the other time. But suit yourselves.”
“I’d just as soon be space-sick as seasick,” remarked Camille Burkett. “I still hate to think that the entire planet is as shivery as the spot we picked.”
Willard Rawson smiled. “You researchers told me where to land after ten days in orbit mapping this rock-ball. I set you just where you asked. If you’d found even five tons of juice we could use in the reaction tanks I could still take you to another one—if you could agree which one. I hate to say ‘Don’t blame me,’ but I can’t think of anything else that fits.”
“So we sit until the last of the tractors is back with the precious seismo tapes, playing battleship while our back teeth are being shaken out by earthquakes—excuse the word. What a thrill! Glorious adventure!” Zaino, the communications specialist who had been out of a job almost constantly since the landing, spoke sourly. The captain was the only one who saw fit, to answer.