Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HIDE! HIDE! WITCH! 29 and exasperating machine used in in- dustry is the human being. The only advantage it has over other machines, the only reason an industrialist uses it, is its wide flexibility of adaptation to numerous conditions, the ease of replacement if it doesn’t function properly. But now there was Bossy. It did not take long for the sensa- tionalists to predict manless factories, manless shops and stores, manless utility and transportation services. Once the coals were breathed into flame, it did not take long for the fire to gather fuel and spread in white heat. And like a gasoline poured into the flames was the wholesale student deferment. . Some of this reaction trickled, much diffused, into the ivory towers. Biilings tried to offset it. He made a personal appearance on a national hook-up, but he mistook fire for water and poured oil on the waves to quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,’’ he said. **The brain of Bossy is no more than a compound of synthetic proteins, col- loids, enzymes, metallic salts, fatty acids—each molecule designed and shaped to do a specific task, picking up codified impulse charges to com- plete their structure, and then com- bining into a threadlike substance for storage and release.” If he had spoken in Hottentot, it would have been as comprehensible and less dangerous. For without con- veying the slightest understanding, and even in his attempts to show this thing was not human, he heightened the dread. Bossy was truly a machine, a syn- thetic thing. Its inventor, the famous Billings, had said so, himself. Had it been alive, man might have under- stood it better, even though alien and inimical it would have shared with him the mystery of life and thought. As he droned on and on through his talk, as he described the lenses, the diaphragms, the metallic, glassite, plastic receptors, showing how they saw and felt and tasted and heard, he confirmed all the rumors. Bossy was capable of replacing a man. And Bossy had no soul. Letters by the thousands, the hun- dreds of thousands, poured into Congress. Congress, far more receptive to the will of the people than is gener- ally realized, tried to act. But it was the Administrative Department who had cut the orders for work on Bossy. The Administrative Department un- fortunately chose this issue as a battle arena to show Congress it could no longer be shoved around so easily. The resultant conflict, the raw tem- pers which flared into print and over national hookups, served merely to heighten the tension throughout the country. There was something to it! The quiet and doubtful words of the mollifiers, the advocates of let’s wait and see, the admonishers of you're not hurt yet, their voices were lost in the angry outpourings of revolt against this manufacture of a soulless machine to replace man, this deferment of favored young men, these irrespon- sible scientists—science itself. In damning the very idea of science, it never occurred to most that they were using the products of science to get their message into every corner of the land, into every mind. The first overt move came from a small band of men who chose to have a parade of protest. It was national news. They fed upon the publicity. The parade regrouped and formed into a march—a march across two states toward Hoxworth University. connicloooks.c@ im