The Non-Statistical Man

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  The Non-Statistical Man

  by

  Raymond F. Jones

  BELMONT BOOKS • NEW YORK CITY

  THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN

  A BELMONT BOOK-May 1964

  Second printing May 1968

  published by arrangement with

  Raymond F. Jones and Scott

  Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  Published by Belmont Productions, Inc.

  1116 First Ave., New York, N. Y. 10021

  © 1964 by Raymond F. Jones

  Acknowledgments!

  "The Non-Statistlcal Man," © 1956, Columbia Publications, Inc.

  "The Moon Is Death," © 1953, Columbia Publications, Inc.

  "Intermission Time," © 1953, Columbia Publications, lnc.

  "The Gardener," © 1957, Columbia Publications, Inc.

  Covers Printed in U.S.A. Body Text Printed in Canada.

  Contents

  THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN.

  THE MOON IS DEATH

  THE GARDENER

  INTERMISSION TIME

  THE NON-STATISTICAL MAN.

  1

  Charles Bascomb was a man who loved figures—the genuine, Arabic kind, that is. Not that he didn’t adequately appreciate the, other kind, too. Mrs. Bascomb was quite good in that department, but Charles had come to take her somewhat for. granted after fourteen years of married life—plus three young Bascombs who had taught him what a great obligation can be implied by so small a number.

  Bascomb considered himself a realist, and pointed to his passion for figures to prove it. If an opinion were given —whether on the price of hamburger in Denver, or the difference between the climate of his home town of Land-bridge, and that of Los Angeles, California—he demanded figures and odds.

  Yet, in his world of endlessly marching columns of black numerals, there was escape, too. It was clean and cold and precise here. The scatterbrained effusions and emotionalism of Sarah Bascomb were lacking. Charles Bascomb loved his wife, but she was scatterbrained. And the utterly irrational demands of the small Bascombs could not penetrate.

  All irrationality was swept aside, and here, and here alone, could be had a clear view of the real world. It would have been difficult for Bascomb to say, if the question had been put to him, which was the real world and which was fairyland. Mrs. Bascomb and the kids were real enough— in their place—but they couldn’t possibly fit in the realm of precise figures, which was the real world.

  Fortunately, no one ever asked Mr. Bascomb about this, and it was never pushed into his awareness beyond an occasional fuzzy, gnawing feeling that there should be more congruity between these two areas than there was.

  It was generally quite deliciously satisfying to him to know that he could tell, for example—with almost perfect accuracy—how many of the citizens he passed on the street on the way to the station each night, and how many of these would not be alive by the end of the year. He could tell almost precisely how many would be alive in another five years, provided he had their present ages, of course. He could tell how many would die of diabetes, and heart trouble, and cancer.

  There was a satisfaction in knowing these things. There was a satisfaction in his work of assembling such information and producing the proper deductions. (He was Chief Statistical Analyst of the New England Mutual Cooperative Insurance Company.) There was a sense of power in it.

  But Bascomb believed he was a humble man. The power was in the figures, in the statistical methods which constituted the temple wherein he but served as priest.

  At the age of thirty-seven he believed he would serve his god of figures for the remainder of his life. And, certainly, on that morning of April tenth, when one of the Junior Statisticians came to his office, he considered himself safe and secure in the groove he would run in until he himself became a statistic in the Company’s books.

  Bascomb looked up and smiled pleasantly as Hadley approached his desk—there was no reason for being otherwise.

  “Good morning, Hadley,” he said. “You look as if the week-end treated you well. Mrs. Hadley get over her cold all right?”

  “She’s fine, Mr. Bascomb.” Hadley was a youngster, still in his first year of marriage. He shared Bascomb’s passion for figures—Arabic—and hoped to rise high in the firm.

  Hadley spread out some long sheets of paper and bent over the desk. “We ran across something interesting last week that I thought I’d like to show you. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “What is it?” said Bascomb.

  “District reports of claims in Division 3 show some curious anomalies. In the town of Topworth, we had eighteen claims registered on all types of policies and—”

  “That is not an unusual number for a town of that size.”

  “No—but here’s the catch. Those policies had been taken out less than six weeks ago, with only two exceptions. Now, here in Burraston we have nine claims—all on policies less than six weeks old, with no exceptions. And in Victorburg—”

  “Let me see that!”

  Bascomb drew the sheets toward him and adjusted the heavy, shellframed glasses that seemed to grip the sides of his head rather than rest on his ears.

  “In Victorburg—twenty seven claims on policies only four weeks old.” He ripped the glasses away from., his face and looked up. “How large is Victorburg, Hadley?” “Only thirty-two thousand, Mr. Bascomb.” He waited, knowing he’d said enough for the moment.

  Bascomb bit the tip' of. the earpiece on his glasses and looked down again. He rustled the wide sheets of paper. “This is one of the strangest things I have seen since I’ve been in the insurance business,” he said. “We know that in statistics we sometimes encounter long runs of an anomolous nature, but three cities like this—”

  “There are seven altogether,” said Hadley. “I went back and checked over some of our more recent records in the same district. The other four are less pronounced—six to eight each—but they are there.”

  “Very strange, to say the least,” said Mr. Bascomb mildly now. “I think I’d like very much to follow up the details and see if any explanation can be found—beyond merely assigning it as an unusual run.”

  “I have all the claim papers on my desk.”

  “Get me the initial applications also. Was there any consistency shown in the salesmen who wrote the policies?”

  “No. About a dozen different salesmen are involved. The only pertinent factor I’ve found is that in these last three towns we have new agencies, which have put on a big campaign backed by our national advertising. But that doesn’t explain, of course, why they should have written policies on which claims w
ere to be made so quickly.”

  “No, of course not; get me all the papers available.” Bascomb spent the rest of the morning computing the normal claims expectancy for each of the towns involved. He figured the probabilities of encountering such runs as had come up; he examined in detail the applications of all the policyholders.

  On the death claims there was the usual medical certification showing the applicants to be in acceptable health at time of policy writing. Two had died of polio; one in a car accident; four of coronary trouble—that should have been caught! There were two cancer cases—they should have been found, too. Some of the trouble was evidently in the medical department; he’d see that some overhauling was done there.

  But blaming the examiners would not dispose of the whole problem, by any means; the accident and liability claims could not be dismissed so easily. There was only one factor of any significance which he was able to discover. Better than ninety percent of the applications had come in through voluntary response to the company’s advertising. They hadn’t been sold by the usual foot-in-the-door salesman Bascomb so thoroughly disapproved of.

  That would be worth noting to the sales department!

  But, on the other hand, had their advertising suddenly become so much better? He called the advertising manager and asked for copies of whatever displays had been available in the seven towns during the period the policies were sold.

  He was interrupted then by some current items that killed the better part of the afternoon. When he finally got around to the advertisements, it was almost time to quit. It would be too rough if he missed the five-seventeen— there would be time enough to get back to this problem tomorrow.

  Yet, that would not do, either; there was something too persistently nagging about this, too many “queer” aspects to let the matter alone even overnight. He broke a long standing rule between him and Sarah Bascomb, and stuffed the entire mass of papers into his briefcase to take home.

  Sarah Bascomb was well aware that she didn’t live in the same world with her husband, and that made it rather nice, she thought. It would have been exceedingly boring if they both Talked of nothing but expectancy tables and statistical probabilities, or the PTA and young Chuck’s music lessons.

  As it was, she thought they got along fine. She listened with honest attentiveness to Charles’ discussions of the ratio of cancer to coronary deaths, and the increase of both over pneumonia and other infectious diseases during the past thirty years. It was so boring as to be absolutely incredible; but she was thankful that there were men like Charles in the world to take care of these particular things—which had to be taken care of, but which no ordinary person would think of concerning himself with.

  She was proud of Charles’ ability to deal with such obscure and unpleasant material, and she listened to it because she was in love with him. It didn’t occur to her that it was in any way disloyal to feel it was all very stuffy.

  In turn, Charles took an active interest in household affairs—and left all the answers up to her, which was the way she liked it. It would have been intolerable if he’d been one of those men who insist on planning the dinner menu, or picking kids’ dentist, or seeing Mr. Salers down the street when Chuck and the Salers kid had an after-school knock-down, drag-out argument.

  Sarah was quite willing and able to take care of these items alone. At thirty-five she was a competent, contented, still good-looking suburban housewife without a cloud on the domestic horizon.

  But on this particular April tenth she had been a trifle uneasy all day. There was the feeling that momentous things were about to happen to disturb the complacency of Charles’ life and hers. She often had such feelings and Charles told her they were ridiculous; but over the years, Sarah had sort of kept track of them. She’d discovered that these feelings always meant something, one way or another—especially when they were this strong.

  So she was not surprised to see the brief case in Charles’ hand as she watched him from the kitchen window, coming through the breezeway to the house.

  She turned, as if she hadn’t seen him, and attended to the noisy sputtering frying of his favorite—liver with onions. She squealed with simulated surprise and pleasure as his arms came about her waist, and he kissed her on the back of the neck.

  Then she pretended to notice the bulging briefcase for the first time. “Big business tonight? I thought maybe we could go out to a show at the Centre—?”

  Bascomb smiled, shrugged a little, and tossed the briefcase carelessly to a chair across the room. “Nothing very important; just a little problem that came up today—but it can wait. We’ll see the show if you want to. What’s on?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Nothing in particular; it’s not that important. I want you to spend the evening on your problem. That is important. And I want you to tell me all about it.”

  They settled the problem, as Sarah knew they would, by staying home. And after dinner, she sat very quietly and attentively while Charles tried to explain why it was upsetting to come across such a run of events as had turned up. Try as she would, however, Sarah could not quite grasp the significance of it, or the reason for astonishment.

  “You say it might be expected to happen once in a few hundred centuries,” she insisted, “so I should think you’d be glad the time is now, when you are able to witness it.”

  Bascomb smiled with tolerance; there was no use trying to make her understand. “It’s just that a fellow doesn’t expect to be around for the event,” he said. “We talk about it, and use it in our figuring; but we just don’t expect to see it.”

  “That’s what makes it all the more exciting!” Sarah’s eyes were alight in a way she hoped would make Charles think she understood what he was talking about.

  Then her expression grew more somber. “And I think it’s something terribly important, too,” she said. “I feel that it’s something which could mean a great deal to our future, Charles. I know it. Tell me as soon as you find out what it really means.”

  Bascomb muttered a growl of exasperation in the bottom of his throat. This was the kind of thing that came close to driving him to distraction—Sarah’s “feelings” that something-or-other was going to happen, or was especially meaningful.

  It gave him the shudders when she started talking that way—because the most damnable part was that she was often right. He had started keeping check on it, out of pure self-defense, a long time ago. Her batting average gave him a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “There’s nothing significant for us in this crazy thing,” he said irritably. “It’s just a bunch of policies that came up for claim all at once—when our statistical methods gave us no reason to expect it. That’s absolutely all; it’s ridiculous, darling, to try to read anything more in it.”

  “You’ll tell me, won’t you?” Sarah Bascomb said.

  Charles accomplished nothing toward a solution of the problem that night. At the end of four hours work, it seemed just as inexplicable as it had when Hadley first mentioned it.

  He slept badly, his line of disturbed thought alternating between the problem itself and Sarah’s irrational interpretation of its significance. In the morning he arose and told himself that it was idiotic to allow a small, routine problem of this kind to get so out of hand.

  Only it wasn’t small, and it wasn’t routine by any means.

  As he sipped his coffee across the breakfast table from Sarah, and with the three youngsters beginning to stir noisily overhead, he said cautiously, “I’ve been thinking that it might almost be worthwhile to have a personal interview with these policyholders, and see if anything can be deduced from firsthand contact with them. Of course, it’s silly to hope for anything definite, but I think maybe I’ll do it.”

  He held his coffee cup poised while he waited for her answer. And now he was the idiot, he thought—as if her opinion could be of any possible significance!

  Nevertheless, Bascomb waited, head cocked to catch the slightest inflection o
f her voice.

  “I think that’s the most sensible thing you’ve done about the whole problem,” she said. “After all, who could tell you more about why they bought the policies when they did—and how they came to make claims—than the people themselves?”

  That cinched it, and Charles Bascomb fumed at himself for asking the question of Sarah. After all, he’d intended doing just this, anyway, hadn’t he? What difference did her uninformed opinion make to him? But then, her comment was a good one; who, indeed, could tell more about the purchase of these policies than the people who’d done the buying?

  He called the office and told his assistant, Jarvis, what he was doing and gave him instructions for carrying on.

  2

  Of the seven towns, Victorburg was closest to Land-bridge, so Charles Bascomb started for there, feeling unfamiliar in heading the car onto the open highway instead of driving to the station. He congratulated himself that these cases had turned up close to the Home Office, instead of halfway across the United States; at the same time, Bascomb told himself once more he was a complete idiot for giving the whole thing this much attention.

  He reached Victorburg by ten o’clock, and drove at once to the first address on his list. It was a quiet, treeshaded street that added to the peacefulness of the April morning. He pulled up in front of a neat, white frame house.

  Mrs. Davidson; she was the claimant on one of the death cases—Mr. Davidson had died of coronary trouble just three weeks ago. Bascomb wondered if he shouldn’t have gone first to one of the lesser claimants. But it was too late, now. A woman working in the garden at the side of the house had seen him; she was looking up. He got out of the car with his briefcase in his hand.

  He tipped his hat as he came up. “Mrs. Davidson? I’m a representative of the New England Mutual Cooperative.”