They'd Rather Be Right Read Online Free PDF Page A

trotting awkwardly on the bias as some dogs do.
    He did not need to sniff for tracks. He knew.
    Jonathan Billings, Dean of Psychosomatic Research at Hoxworth University, heard the knock on his study door, and looked up from his work at his desk. But before he could call out an invitation to enter, the door opened.
    That would be Mr. Rogan, Resident Investigator. Anyone else would have waited.
    Billings watched him without expression as he came through the door—a little man, a negative quantity, who wore heavy silver-rimmed glasses in the hope they would give character to a characterless face. The brief case he carried, too, was heavily decorated with silver, proclaiming its unusual importance. He needed these trappings, and more. He was the kind of man one forgot to introduce, and his whole bearing suggested his determination to command the attention he never quite received.
    There was a portentous frown on his gray face, and without any preliminaries of greeting he bustled over and laid a new issue of the college paper on Billings’
    desk. Billings looked down at the open page, and a cartoon of himself looked slyly back.
    That was the trouble of having an old, old face with a thousand wrinkles. Even seventy years had been unkind in putting so many wrinkles there. In a cartoon, and he was often the subject of them throughout the country, those wrinkles could be slanted to make him appear fine and noble, or sly and scheming. It would depend upon which faction of the public the cartoonist wanted to please.
    This time, in the cartoon, he was sly; and had his finger held up toward his lips in a cautioning, secretive gesture. There was a caption in bold print beneath the cartoon.
    “You were quite wrong, Albert, about the nature of the universe!”
    Billings looked up from the cartoon with a slight smile and met the accusing expression in Rogan’s washed blue eyes.
    “This is highly irregular, doctor,” Rogan said firmly, before Billings could comment. “I trust you have not been questioning indisputable facts! I trust you have not been planting disturbing doubts in the minds of our future citizens! I trust you know Congress approved those facts for school textbooks long ago! It would be most subversive, not to mention a waste of time and tax money, to question them now!”
    Billings felt a flare of sudden irritation, an emotion he considered quite unworthy of the circumstances.
    He should be accustomed to this sort of thing by now. For the past thirty years there had been a Resident Investigator, some worse and some not any worse than Rogan; monitoring what the teachers said, the lines of thought they pursued. He remembered a long succes-sion of them who had come through his door; some of them resentful that he was world famous and must be handled with especial care; others seeing in it a golden opportunity for personal publicity if they could catch him in some subversive remark.
    Out of the montage of accusations and sly traps written in their collective expressions, one face stood out clearly from all the rest. What was the remark the man had made? Oh, yes, he remembered it now.
    “I am completely impartial, Dr. Billings,” the man had said. “I merely see to it that you teachers say nothing which might threaten our freedom of speech!”
    The memory of that incredible twist of semantics, so characteristic of the early days, cleared the irritation from his mind, and he looked back into Rogan’s face with equal firmness. His answering tones were just far enough away from Rogan’s speech that he could not be accused of Contempt For An Investigator.
    “I trust you know, Mr. Rogan, that my subject is psychosomatics. I trust you are aware that I have no knowledge of approved astronomy courses, and would not feel qualified to comment upon it.”
    Rogan slapped the cartoon on the desk with the back of his fingers imperatively. He had studied the old films assiduously in an attempt to impart authority into his own attitudes