The Non-Statistical Man Read online

  Magruder had rightly said the only test of his theories and work was the pragmatic one. And until a person had seen actual results, he would be convinced the whole thing was the product of an active insanity.

  There had to be a more indirect method.

  At once, Bascomb thought of his friend, Hap Johnson, feature writer of the Courier; Hap would understand a thing like this. He would take the obvious view, at first, that Bascomb was drunk; but his innate curiosity wouldn’t let him stop there. Hap was a solid citizen and a respected newspaperman; but he had just enough yen to be the kind of news hero pictured in the movies to be hooked by something like this. Yes, Hap was the man to see, Bascomb decided as he got up from the park bench.

  He found his man slapping a typewriter in a small cubicle located just off the Courier city room. The room was full of smoke, the typewriter was very old, and Hap’s hat clung to the back of his head at a sharp angle. These were the affectations he allowed himself in deference to the movie idols he realized that no workaday reporter could ever hope to emulate. Otherwise, he was an excellent newsman.

  He looked up as Bascomb walked in. “Charley! Don’t do a thing like that! The roof braces of this firetrap can’t take such a shock. Don’t tell me now—you’ve lost your job; your wife has left you; you owe the company ten thousand dollars you’ve embezzled—”

  Bascomb sat down, pushing Hap back into the chair from which he’d risen. “It’s worse,” he said. “I want you to do me a favor—and give me some advice.”

  “The advice is easy,” said Hap; “I don’t know about the other part.”

  Sketchily, then—without going into Magruder’s complex social theories—Bascomb described the professor as a half-baked quack who could really do some of the things he claimed.

  “Call it hypnosis, suggestion, or whatever you want to.” he said, “Magruder exerts some kind of controlling influence over the people who takes his courses. Personally, I think it works through the pills he gives out. Whatever it is, the man is dangerous; he’s radical, subversive, and he is somehow able to lead his followers to accomplish what he wants them to do.

  “Right now, he seems to be attacking the insurance companies with an eye to bankrupting them. You’ll say I’m crazy, but I’m genuinely afraid of what he might be able to do if he was able to expand and make a concentrated attack. You can imagine what the results would be if he actually succeeded—financial chaos. He seems to think he can do the same kind of trick with the advertising business and other institutions. He’s got to be stopped.”

  Hap Johnson pushed his hat a notch further back on his head and regarded Bascomb thoughtfully. “You’re not a drinking man,” he said, “and I’ve never detected signs of insanity before. So it’s possible there’s something in what you say. “But—” he leaned closer in a gesture of secret confidence—“isn’t it reasonable to suppose you might have been mistaken about the people you interviewed? Overwork, worry about the guy who’s gigging for your job—”

  “I’m sure, Hap,” said Bascomb. “I’ve gone over it a hundred times; I’ve plugged every hole.”

  Hap drew back. “It’s not the kind of thing you could go to the police with—yet they ought to know about it. Here’s what we can do: you say Magruder is no M. D., so we ought to be able to get him investigated for prescribing those pills of his—practising medicine without a license.”

  “I don’t know whether that would stop him or not—”

  “It might not stop him, but it would get him some darned unfavorable publicity, if it’s handled right. We could play it from there. I’ll get a ticket to his lecture; you can introduce me, and we’ll see what kind of story he gives me.”

  Bascomb neglected to tell Sarah anything about his visits with Dr. Magruder and Hap Johnson; but he caught her eyeing him as if she knew all about it, anyway. It gave him the old, familiar, uneasy sensation. He knew she couldn’t possibly have learned what he’d done, but she had feelings abou;l things; he wished he dared ask precisely what those feelings were.

  On the evening of the next lecture she volunteered the information. Bascomb had just told her about arranging for Hap to go with them.

  “That’s what I’ve been feeling!” Sarah exclaimed. “It’s been as if tonight were a turning point of some kind. I can’t tell whether it’s going to be good or bad for us—but it depends on something that’s going to happen to Dr. Magruder. And Hap Johnson is responsible! He doesn’t want to come to find out what Dr. Magruder teaches; he just wants gossip for that cheap tabloid he works for, and he doesn’t care who he hurts in getting it.”

  “I thought you liked Hap.”

  “I used to—until he did this to Magruder!”

  “He hasn’t done anything yet,” Bascomb reminded her; “so far there’s nothing but your own slightly overworking imagination.”

  Sarah ignored his remark. “Let’s not go tonight, Charles. Don’t take Hap down there; he’ll kill Magruder with what he’ll print.”

  Bascomb felt the perspiration starting under his collar. “Don’t be ridiculous, darling; you’re imagining things. I’ve asked Hap along, and he’d think I was crazy if I tried to back out now. Nothing’s going to happen; you’ll see.”

  The evening seemed to go smoothly enough in spite of Bascomb’s mixed anxieties. He let his attention be held only mildly by Magruder’s double-talk, and afterwards, when he went up to introduce Hap Johnson the Professor smiled knowingly. Magruder’s face clouded a trifle, however, as he took the reporter’s hand, and Bascomb saw a new tension come at the same moment into his wife’s expression.

  Then it was past and Magruder was shaking Hap Johnson’s hand cordially, inviting him back, making an offering of a generous sample of his pills and the circulars describing his exercises.

  “This will make me a superman, huh?” Hap asked dubiously as he accepted the articles and examined them.

  “Guaranteed!” Dr. Magruder slapped him on the shoulder and laughed jovially. “It never fails when instructions are followed faithfully. Of course,” he added soberly, “I realize you are not sufficiently interested to go along with me to that extent; but I trust that if you write up our little course of lectures here, you will keep in mind that we actually offer nothing at all. Anything that occurs as a result of coming here is due strictly to the student’s own efforts.”

  “If that were true,” said the reporter with sudden iciness in his eyes, “it would not be necessary for you to hold lectures at all, would it? The buck isn’t passed as easily as all that!”

  On the way home, Bascomb tried to console his wife; he reminded her repeatedly that nothing had happened to verify her fears. Sarah remained unresponsive, apparently accepting as fact that Magruder’s doom was sealed. She felt it, she said.

  Bascomb drove carefully, acutely aware of the sense of exhaustion that filled him. It was futile to close his eyes any longer to the fact that Sarah’s feelings corresponded exactly with Magruder’s description of a moderately wellworking intuition.

  In the early years of their marriage, he’d laughed at her and shrugged off her hunches and lucky guesses; then he’d begun to keep tab—

  There was no question about her knowing Hap’s purpose in coming to the meeting. Bascomb wondered how much she was aware of his own position. She had nothing, but her intuitive knowledge shown bleakly in her eyes, he thought miserably.

  He hadn’t quite known, at first, just why he felt it necessary to keep from telling her about his visit with Magruder and Hap. Now he saw the full impossibility of it. Suppose Magruder were right—well, partly right, anyway? Suppose intuition did turn out to be a natural, useful human function that was active in some people and could be developed in others? How could he tell Sarah that Magruder was an evil man—that the faculty she cherished so greatly had to be suppressed with all possible force?

  She wouldn’t understand that a sizeable number of intuitive people could literally destroy the civilization and institutions that modem man was dependent
upon.

  Her intuition was too precious a possession for Sarah to ever believe anything evil could be in it, Bascomb thought; she’d turn against him before believing that.-This thing had a potential that could destroy his very home if he failed to handle it right!

  In his attempts to appease her he was more than usually cooperative that night ift doing the routine Magruder prescribed, and in taking the pills. They were brown and orange now.

  Sarah’s face did not relax its expression of foreboding.

  It occurred to Bascomb, as soon as he reached the office the next morning, that applications might now be coming in from the people named by Magruder in their interview. He was right; six of them were in the morning mail.

  He had no actual right to enter the applications department and take a look at the papers before they had even begun to be processed. It was no great offense, of course— it wouldn’t have been to a man other than the kind Dave Tremayne happened to be. Tremayne was head of the processing department. Another man’s casual courtesy was his grudging favor.

  Bascomb was well aware of this as he stood with the papers in his hand, scanning them while Tremayne looked on belligerently.

  “These will have to be rejected,” Bascomb said as mildly as possible. And for a long time afterward he wondered why he actually said it; there would be no great harm to the company in paying off claims of an additional half dozen short-term policy holders. But that thought was utterly foreign to his mind now. He could see no coursp but the one he was following.

  “I thought that was for us to decide,” Dave Tremayne snapped; “since when did the Statistical Department take over those duties?”

  “I—I happen to know a little about these cases,” Bascomb said hesitantly. “Friend of mind is acquainted with the town pretty well. He knows these people and is certain there is something that isn’t on the level. This big fire policy for example. Bhuener’s Hardware. It’s a firetrap; I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a claim on it before the month is out—”

  Tremayne advanced and took the papers from Bas-comb’s hand. “You can let us worry about that,” he said unpleasantly; “any time I need help from the figures department I’ll let you know.”

  He should have known it was worse than useless, Bas-comb told himself. He looked at Tremayne and turned away; then he stopped and faced the department head again. “It wouldn’t look at all good,” he said, “if you got another half dozen claims within a month of granting the policies. Your short-termers are beginning to stick out on the charts.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Tremayne demanded. But his belligerence had subsided now.

  “I’m advising you to turn down those applications,” Bascomb said. He walked away to his own department.

  It wasn’t a logical thing to do, he thought, as he reached his own desk once again. It could cause a lot of trouble either way it fell—whether the prediction turned out right or wrong. And Dave Tremayne was just the kind to milk it for all the trouble it was worth.

  He was rather hopeful of hearing something from Johnson regarding the reporter’s impressions and plans concerning the campaign agannst Magruder. But he heard nothing at all that day, nor the next. A sense of loneliness assailed him. He wanted somebody to talk to about this thing, but there was nobody at all to give him companionship under this burden. Sarah continued moody and cool and convinced of the approach of disaster.

  6

  Hap Johnson called on the succeeding day, and he had news. “This bird is more clever than you’ve given him credit for!” he said. “It’s no wonder the previous chemical analyses showed a harmless filler supporting a few vitamins in his pills.”

  “What do you mean?” said Bascomb.

  “I had five different outfits run tests on these pills before I found the answer. They all gave the same story you already had. Then I asked Joe Archer, who runs toxic checks for the police department, to look at them. He got it in a minute, just by looking at the other guys’ results.

  “They were right. The pills are about as potent as dried carrots—individually; but put them together in the combinations and succession Magruder prescribes and you’ve got something!”

  “What?” asked Bascomb.

  “Joe couldn’t give me the answer to that, but he said it was obvious these chemicals would combine in the body, and with the body chemicals, to form some items only slightly less potent than dynamite.”

  “We really ought t0 have a case against Magruder then,” said Bascomb. Peculiarly, he thought, there was no sense of elation or triumph at all, now that defeat of his enemy was in sight.

  “That’s the devil of it,” said Hap; “I’m not so sure we have. That’s where Magruder has been so clever. The things he has actually been prescribing are inconsequential. I’m not so sure we could pin him down on the basis of the fact that his pills recombine inside the human system to form new and more potent drugs. He could argue he’d never prescribed or administered those; and, technically, he’d be right.”

  “But it would ruin him even if the courts had to agree with that argument; and that’s all I’m interested in,” Bascomb replied. “Can’t your friend, Archer, give us enough basis for a complaint to the District Attorney.”

  “He said it ought to be made known, at any rate. It would help if we could get some witnesses who could swear they’d been injured by the pills. Why don’t you talk to Joe yourself, and see if you can round up any such witnesses? You know who’s been taking in these lectures; in the meantime I’ll put a gentle word in the paper to start the ball rolling.”

  Charles Bascomb agreed and hung up. From what he’d seen, however, he doubted that it would be possible to get any of Magruder’s followers to complain against him. They were a devout bunch—all those he’d seen, anyway.

  A doubting weariness came over him again as he sat there staring at the black shape of the telephone. How in Heaven’s name had this all begun? How had he become so involved in a senseless, unbelievable tangle like this?

  Why was he the only one, out of the hundreds who’d contacted Magruder, who understood the threat of Magruder’s work? It was as if the Professor had singled him out, as his greatest potential enemy, to show him exactly what he could do. And Bascomb remembered that Magruder had said this was just what he had done—in order to recruit Bascomb’s aid. But surely Magruder hadn’t actually believed he’d accept the validity and desirability of the Professor’s work!

  That was the dilemma presented by the whole thing. To recognize it as a threat, Magruder’s claim had to be accepted as valid. A hundred times a day, Bascomb had to ask himself again if he accepted this. And because of what he had seen, his answer was still a forced, unwilling yes.

  And if so incredible a work was valid, could it not function for good instead of harm? This also gnawed unceasingly in Bascomb’s mind. But Magruder’s own words had answered this. He was out to change the face of society in a destructive manner.

  It wasn’t just that he was selfishly thinking of the insurance business, Bascomb reminded himself; Magruder seemed bent on attacking the whole bright world of statistical science, and all the institutions founded upon it.

  And this Bascomb could not countenance; his own private world had no other foundation. In statistics a man could know what to expect of the world. Destroy this, put existence on an individual incident basis, and what was left? A nebulous faith in unconfirmed beliefs about how things ought to turn out—

  Then he thought again of Sarah and felt lost.

  His world had already been shaken too vigorously.

  He didn’t go to Joe Archer; there seemed to be no point in it yet. He continued with the pills and the exercises, and went to another lecture. There, he looked for possible witnesses against Magruder, and knew that the quest was futile, even before it started. These people never turned on their messiahs; even if one failed them, there was always the next season, and the next—

  That was the day the first of Hap’s articles appeared in
the paper. He indicated he was going to do a series analyzing the weird cults and health panaceas and mental improvement fads that proved sucker traps for the sick, neurotic part of the populace which was in need of genuine help.

  It began mildly enough, as Johnson had promised; but Bascomb was more than ordinarily amazed at the man’s genius, because he could see where Hap was going. He began, not by antagonizing those who were following such phoney panaceas, but by sympathizing thoroughly with their search for assistance—which was so difficult to find in a brutal civilization that cared only in token measures for the sick or improvident individual.

  He promised to follow up with stories of the frauds who preyed upon such people. It was a terrific build-up for the time when he was ready to let go at Magruder. Reading it, Bascomb felt the matter had already passed from his hands. Magruder was, at the mercy of Hap Johnson—and the newspaper-reading public.

  Bascomb felt later that he should have been prepared for the event that occurred the following day. (He was eventually to do a great deal of Monday morning quarterbacking over this period of his life.) But when he went to the office, he was still prepossessed of the thought that power to act in the Magruder matter had passed from him.

  He was called almost as soon as he arrived to the office of Famham Sprock, Second Vice-president of New England. Sprock was a small, mealy old man who had been by-passed sometime ago for the top post in the Company. He had been relegated to office administration, even though it was known that all who felt his judgement would suffer for his failure.

  Sprock looked at Bascomb through seemingly-dull eyes as the statistician entered the room.

  “You sent for me?” Bascomb said, trying to make it as little like a question as possible.

  “I’ve had a most unbelievable complaint about you,” said Sprock. “It seems too incredible to even act upon it, to believe that one of our Family would act in such a manner. Yet I am forced to believe that the accusation is well founded.

  “I am told that you have assumed to step over the line of your authority in this office, and presume to dictate to your fellow officers in the conduct of their affairs. You have demanded that Mr. Tremayne refuse to act favorably on certain applications, so it is said. Is this true, Mr. Bascomb?”