The Non-Statistical Man Read online

  Mr. Dunlap and Dr. Webber were curious, aware that events were taking place below their level of comprehension.

  Jimmy went to the boys’ room to wash and comb his hair. Then he was back on the stage, where the others had gathered, whispering in quiet urgency.

  Beyond the curtains the roar of the assembling students almost filled him with the old panic. But he remembered the words of Mr. Barton, and it subsided. He parted the curtains and peered through a narrow slit. In a way, he could feel sorry for them now. He knew where they were going. They would be politicians and jet pilots and engineers.

  But none would share his great wonder about how the universe was put together, or his great power to find out. He’d have to make it plain to them, all that he found out. It was still their world as well as his. They had a right to know about it.

  Mr. Mooremeister gave a choppy wave of his hand to Mr. Barton, and the heavy new curtain slid open with a hissing of the runners. The Principal marched with a pompous gait to the front center of the stage. Jimmy followed, his head up and eyes bright. The others came behind him.

  Everyone remained standing while the band played the school song and the Star Spangled Banner, and Jimmy saw out of the comer of his eye that the rest of the stage had filled. Mr. Lawson was there. He was the physics teacher who sold insurance on the side. Jimmy didn’t know what he was going to do on the program. And then Jimmy’s heart did a triple beat. Brick had come in and was taking his place at the rear of the stage.

  He had forgotten that Brick was scheduled to talk. Brick was representing the student body in paying tribute to Jimmy. What a tribute that would be! Brick hated him for a coward now. He had to get to Brick and tell him things had changed, that nothing was the way it had been a short time ago. But there was no chance. Mr. Mooremeister was rising and beginning his speech. “Friends, students, teachers, and parents . . .”

  There were quite a few parents in the audience. They were smiling and nodding with pleased expressions in the back rows. Jimmy recognized Mrs. Parks, his Sunday School teacher. Almost all the neighbors on the block had come.

  “.. . you know the story of Jimmy Correll,” Mr. Mooremeister’s solemn voice went on. “I don’t have to retell it, though it’s a story that’s worth retelling. I want to say again how proud we are, the city of Murrayton, the schools, Lincoln and Westwood, where Jimmy has attended. I want to say how proud I am to have known and understood something of the genius we are privileged to have in our midst. The genius of Jimmy Correll.”

  Jimmy felt he could forgive Mr. Mooremeister for saying these things he didn’t mean, though he wished just a little bit that Mr. Mooremeister did really mean them.

  But it didn’t really matter any more. The Principal was just a grown-up Tom Marlow, and Jimmy didn’t have to hate any of them now.

  He only had to tell them. He’d have to tell them and make them understand what the miracle of the stars was like. He’d have to touch their hearts and their minds with the incredible glory of the atom, and show them the wonder of space and night and the infinities of time.

  Brick was rising now, He came slowly the long way around the rows of chairs and his eyes were steady on Jimmy’s face as he came. Be paused in front of Jimmy and took his hand.

  Jimmy swallowed hard and half rose in his chair. “Brick . . .”

  He turned and faced the students. “There’s not much anyone like me can say about a guy like Jimmy. The main thing I want to say is that Jimmy has been my friend, and I am very proud of this. I hope I have been a friend to Jimmy. Most of you know what Jimmy has done for me. I wasn’t blessed with an over-supply of brains, and he’s tried to make up the difference during football season. It’s been a wonderful experience for me. I’d like to think of Jimmy as my own kid brother. I like to think of him as one of the closest friends I’ve got.”

  There seemed to be an enormous filling and swelling in his chest. He blinked to keep the picture of the audience clear in his eyes. He didn’t see any of the hate now that he had so long believed was there. Maybe it never had been there at all, as Brick had tried to tell him.

  This is the way it would always be, though, he thought. He would never find many who would put their arms around him and slap him on the back and laugh at his jokes. They would do this kind of thing. They would put him up before them and give him honors and speeches. It was the only kind of thing they knew how to do for one like him.

  He looked down at the individual faces. They were sober and sincere in agreement with the things Brick was saying. They meant the honors they offered. And then Jimmy turned sharply to the man beside him. Mr. Mooremeister had reached out and patted the back of his hand. The Principal’s eyes were on Brick and he was nodding and smiling happily at the boy’s awkward speech.

  Then Jimmy felt a burst of overwhelming realization Mr. Mooremeister really meant it, too!

  “Jimmy lives in a world you and I don’t see,” said Brick. “He lives in a world of stars and atoms and forces that keep the worlds in place. He dreams of these things while the rest of us—well, I guess while the rest of us dream about the coming Saturday night date or whether we’ll be able to get that new aluminum head for the rod.

  “It’s hard to be a friend to a guy like that. He’s always so far ahead of you. I think almost all of you know how hard it is to be a friend to Jimmy . .

  No, it isn’t, Brick, he said fiercely under his breath. It isn’t ever going to be hard to be a friend to Jimmy again. He knew now that there were many things Mr. Barton hadn’t told him, many reasons why he had to remain in this place before he joined the others of his kind. He was learning for the first time that it had been as difficult for the Tom Marlows and the Mr. Mooremeisters as it had been for him.

  “I’ll show you, Brick. I’ll show all of you, he murmured to himself. I’ll be your friend. Honest I will.

  INTERMISSION TIME

  1

  The party was like a wake; the talk was quiet, the faces of the guests waxy. Some of them regretted coming, John Carwell thought. Some of his best friends. He didn’t blame them; there’s nothing appropriate to say to a man at his own funeral.

  Doris had insisted on t^e party, and she was struggling mightily to produce an air of celebration. The trouble was that in her it was real.

  She sat at the piano, her fingers playing a twinkling song of springtime. Guests were seated about, or standing in small knots, their attention on her playing. But it might as well have been a funeral march for all the delight reflected in their faces.

  John moved silently through the wide doors to the balcony overlooking the garden. In the darkness he almost collided with another figure standing by the railing. He grunted apologetically. “Sorry, George. Didn’t see you standing there.”

  The figure of George McCune, concert agent for John and Doris Carwell, moved like a bulbous shadow. “I’m out here weeping,” he said. “That music—it turns me over inside when I think I’m not going to hear it any more.”

  He placed a broad fat hand on John’s shoulder. “I’ve said everything; I’ve given you all my arguments. So now I give you my congratulations.

  “It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing, you and your sister. A wonderful thing—and the biggest damn’ piece of foolishness I have ever heard of in a life that has been long, and composed of much more than ordinary foolishness. What can I gay to show you how crazy—how utterly damn’ crazy—”

  He spread his hands in resignation and clamped them to his side. “Have you tried to show her, John?”

  John’s arm went fondly across the agent’s low broad shoulders. “There’s no use making any more talk,” he said quietly. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow Doris and John are but guinea-pigs.”

  George puffed violently and pushed himself free of John’s hand. He looked towards the horizon, across the city of life and ruin. “Planet 7,” he muttered. “Human Developments! It’s wonderful that they should take morons and pigs, and make human beings and geniuses out
of them; but what in Heaven’s name has that to do with John and Doris Carwell?

  “You and your sister have genius now, at your fingertips. With your music you make people happy. Is there any greater genius than this?

  “Ah, but we’ve been through this before. Tell me that you have changed your mind and made Doris understand. Just say the one word that will make an old man happy.”

  “We leave at noon, tomorrow,” said John.

  The notes from the piano were like a thousand tiny bells in the air beside them. The two men listened, and dreamed of a fresh spring world uncharred and overflowing with life.

  “Doris made the decision,” said John. “Ever since our folks died when we were kids, she’s been the one to come up with the answer—for both of us. She’s older. Things have always worked out the way she said; maybe this will, too.

  “I wouldn’t go, of course, if it weren’t for her; but I'd be far less than half the Carwell piano team if I stayed. You couldn’t book me three times a year, alone.”

  “Listen, boy!” George almost bounced with sudden inspiration. “You could have them standing in the aisles. I know. I’ve watched you—you’ve got a fire that Doris can never show. Her playing is brilliant—and cold; she’s never let you show the things that are inside you.

  “Tell her you’ve decided to go it alone; tell her you’re going to live your life and play your music the way you want to. Then she’ll back down, call this Human Developments thing off, and let you lead the concerts the way you always should have.”

  “You know Doris better than that. She wouldn’t back down for the Devil himself, and I’m no Devil!”

  “What are you?” George whispered with a sudden bitterness that shocked them both. Then, “Forget it,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, John; let’s go inside.”

  “No—I’ll stay out here. It’s Doris’ show, anyway.”

  “Always Doris’ show!” exploded George. “But this performance I will not accept. I will persuade her myself. Tomorrow you will play in the auditorium; I will announce it on the radio that you have come to your senses!”

  He marched away—squat, resolute, ridiculous, lovable. Marched as if he had not already a hundred times explained to Doris the folly of leaving a career on Earth for the fantastic experiments being run on Venus.

  John leaned on the iron railing, staring over the city at the evening star. In a moment he heard the music stop, and the babble of voices. He closed his ears to the debate that fumed again; he was sick of it. They were going, he and Doris. He didn’t understand why; maybe Doris did.

  Out there on Planet 7, in the Alpha system, they were trying to make a new man because the old man had failed. Homo sapiens had burned up a world.

  In the hundred years since, only a quarter of the Earth had become habitable, and its population was less than thirty millions. A sober, stunned, and bewildered humanity rebuilding amid the ruins.

  They had accomplished much in that century. There were cities again; there was space-flight; then overdrive and the stars; and the mutants had been wiped out. There was a single coordinated government that united the efforts of all races and tongues.

  It was the ruins that did it, John thought. No matter how drunk or how elated and forgetful man became, he could never get away from the ruins. A thousand years of rebuilding would not cover them all.

  But Doris said this was not enough; she said that, in time, men would forget even what the ruins stood for and blast them anew in fresh wars of their own.

  Maybe Doris was right. She had always been right, John thought.

  He thought of George again. What are you? George had asked. John wished he had some kind of answer to that question. He had seen it before—in the eyes of those who watched him and Doris together.

  He couldn’t understand exactly why the question should be asked. It didn’t seem unnatural that he should find his answers to living in the stronger and more brilliant mind of his sister. He felt sometimes as if some blast of energy had shattered all but a minimum of his own thinking circuits, leaving him as dependent as a robot.

  He knew the moment when that happened, too—the clay he learned their parents were dead and there was no one in the world but him and Doris. He could remember I lie moment like a great curtain drawing across the portion of his mind where life and initiative and enthusiasm were charted.

  He was eight then; Doris was sixteen. It hadn’t done to her what it did to him. She’d had strength enough for both of them, and it had been hers that he’d drawn upon ever since.

  So—going to Planet 7—

  He had no real hope or feelings in the matter. He felt blank to all the torrent of argument that swirled about him. That belonged to the portion of his mind that had been walled off so long ago. Doris said it was right; his own mind could hold no other opinion.

  And he could not answer George’s question, because he did not know how else he could be.

  The babble of sound within the room was suddenly split by an angry voice. John looked in at the tall, darkhaired figure of Mel Gordon by the piano.

  “Shut up, all of you,” Mel said. “Doris knows what she’s doing. Most of the rest of us haven’t got the guts to think about it, let alone carry it through. Shut up and leave her alone!”

  He whirled and strode from the room to the darkness of the balcony. All of them understood the explosion. Mel Gordon didn’t want Doris to go, either.

  Mel saw John watching from the balcony shadows. “I’m sorry I blew my stack,” he said.

  “We’d all feel a little better if we did the same,” said John. “Did you get a report on your re-application?”

  “They turned me down again. Mel Gordon—not even good enough for a guinea-pig. Who knows what will happen when they get through tinkering and tampering, and trying to make homo superior out of you and Doris? Me, they’d have a chance with; but Doris is already what they are trying to find.”

  “Have you asked her to stay?”

  “I haven’t the right to ask that; no one has. How many of the rest of us know what we want to do with our lives?”

  He looked back into the room as the noise of the stirring guests indicated their departure. “I guess I busted up your party. Sorry, John.”

  “You didn’t bust it up; they didn’t like coming to this funeral anyway. They understand how you feel.”

  “Yeah! Good old Mel—carry the torch high. John, when you get up there, tell her I tried to come, will you? Tell her I tried.”

  After the guests were gone, they faced each other in the faintly embarrassing vacuum that surrounded them always when they were alone together. Doris sat again at the piano. Her fingers moved in the melody of a Brahms lullaby, so softly that it could scarcely be heard.

  She was the most, beautiful thing that had ever lived, John thought. At thirty she had something of the wisdom of a mother, and of the passion of first love. But she knew neither love nor motherhood, nor would she; she lived on some far, cold plane where human destiny was determined by sheer brilliance of reason, and emotion was unknown. He didn’t understand such a place; he didn’t understand such a mind.

  He only knew that Doris was not often wrong.

  He was aware that she had stopped playing and was looking at him. There was wistful yearning in her eyes that startled him by its unfamiliarity. “You do think it’s right that we should go, don’t you, John?” she said.

  “Sure—it’s all settled; you haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

  “No! It’s just that sometimes I wish you could understand how I feel—just a little.”

  2

  There were almost a hundred volunteers waiting behind the gates of the spaceport, each the nucleus of a cluster of friends and relatives saying last goodbyes. Some of the groups were quiet, waiting for the inevitable; others were stormy pools filled with last minute tears and clinging.

  The sky above the port was cloud-specked and shining, as if Earth herself were putting
on a last and final appeal to the emigres to think again of what they were abandoning. John watched the little whirlwinds on the field and wondered if the dust of Planet 7 had the hot, dry smell of old forgotten lanes in summertime; if you could imagine faces and horses and ships of the sea in her clouds.

  He stood near the center of their group. Even the buzz of human voices was a kind of music, he thought. But he wouldn’t hear these voices—not ever again.

  He edged away from Mel’s silent pleading; the bustling, explosive fury of George’s last minute demands that Doris come to her senses; the mumbled congratulations of the two score fellow musicians; the whine of several hundred fans and musical followers.

  It was not hard to escape. Attention was on Doris, incredibly beautiful and untouched by the fact that she was leaving Earth today and would never see it again. John felt that none of the talk was addressed to him,

  He watched the star-ship slowly moving to its launching-base, towed by chugging tractors that strained like insects against its mass. He tried to look over the heads of the crowd to see others who would be his own companions on the journey.

  And then he caught a startling movement of color threading between the islands of humanity.

  It was a girl in a flame-red dress. At the gate she stood on tiptoe, clutching the iron bars like an eager child. He strolled to the gate and stood beside her. “If you’re looking for anyone in the crowd, I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time of it, now,” he said.

  “Oh, no.” She glanced up quickly. “I’m going to get on the ship. Are you going, too?” Her waves of dark hair trembled and the almost-black pupils of her eyes glistened with light.

  Whatever the scientists on Planet 7 considered worth passing on to the future, John hoped they would preserve that light. He had never seen its like before, he thought “Yes, I’m going,” he said.

  They watched the big ship. It was motionless now and mechanics scurried ant-like at its base. Hatches opened ponderously.