The Non-Statistical Man Page 6

  “Yes.” Bascomb nodded his head. And suddenly he felt himself shaking all over; this weazened old fool could actually destroy him if Sprock took it into his silly head. He could deny Charles Bascomb the world of facts and figures and clean, cold statistical reality. Why hadn’t he minded his own business?

  “Why, Mr. Bascomb?” said Sprock.

  Bascomb took a deep breath and wearily recited the occurrence of the anomalies from beginning to end, leaving out all reference to Magruder, of course.

  “All you have said is a matter of serious concern, and one we should well pay attention to,” said Sprock. “But it has nothing to do with your presumption in the matter of advising Mr. Tremayne.”

  “I have said that the policy applications I referred to are of the same class as those previously mentioned; they will also be followed by quick claims.”

  Sprock rose and came around the side of his desk. “Mr. Bascomb, that is a thing you could not possibly know!”

  Suddenly an old, latent fury seemed to spring alive inside Bascomb’s mind. What was this shriveled idiot trying to tell him? He knew—he knew beyond all question of doubt that what he said was true. It didn’t matter that Magruder had predicted it. Magruder had nothing to do with this positive, insistent knowledge that burned in his mind.

  He knew, in and of himself, that those policies would turn out as he said. And Sprock telling him he couldn’t possibly know—

  As suddenly as it had arisen, the rage died, and Bascomb found himself smiling at the little man and sensing a strange pity for him.

  “I have discovered something new,” said Bascomb quietly. “It—it is a recent statistical development on which I have been working for some time. It is a formula that enables me to predict when we are due for a run of policies such as this. They occur every once in a while, you know; my formula tells me that this is ready to occur again.”

  “I don’t believe it!” snapped Sprock; “such a thing is impossible. Why if it were true, it would—it would change the entire aspect of our business. I warn you, Bascomb— and this is the last and only time I will do so—I want no repetition of this kind of occurrence. I will not tolerate it in my organization. A repetition means a complete and permanent severance of your relations with this Company. Do I make myself clear, Bascomb?”

  “Yes,” said Bascomb. He turned to the door as Sprock dismissed him. But he turned, with his hand on the knob. “I would suggest, however,” he said, “that you get a list of those applications from Mr. Tremayne. Within thirty days there will be claims on every one of them!”

  Back at his desk, Charles Bascomb felt a tremendous sense of release, quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before—an elation at having stood up to Sprock. He had a momentary feeling of not being afraid of Sprock any more—or of New England—or of any other force that might be able,to shake him from his niche.

  It died in a renewed consternation over what he’d said. Why on Earth had he indented the lie he told Sprock, the lie about a mathematical invention that would predict unfavorable runs? Well, there had to be something to cover his previous statement about knowing positively there would be claims on these particular policies.

  And then the full force of what he’d said hit him. He’d said he knew. And it was true. He wasn’t just taking Magruder’s word for it, he knew. As if trapped in a comer by a persistent enemy, he tried to evade this sudden fact, to turn his back upon it and refuse to admit all its appalling implications.

  But escape was impossible. He sat there, feeling stunned, then slowly embraced the unwanted knowledge.

  This was it.

  This was intuition.

  It was the way Sarah felt, he supposed—only she felt it on almost any connection. No wonder she thought him a blockhead when he couldn’t understand how she could be so sure of a wholly illogical assumption!

  It was the way the policyholders felt, too, the ones he’d interviewed. And they had been right.

  It was impossible to take up the thread of his work as he had planned it before receiving Sprock’s call. He got up and went over to the unabridged dictionary open on its stand in the comer by the window. He turned the pages to intuition.

  "Perceived by the mind immediately, or without the intervention of any process of thought,” he read. In very recent times he would have made an extremely bad pun on that definition.

  "Quick perception of truth, without conscious attention or reasoning—truth obtained by internal apprehension, without the aid of perception or the reasoning powers.”

  That last one was closest to it, he thought, but even so, it was extremely deceptive—written by a man who hadn’t the faintest concept of intuition. For there could be no obtaining of truth without perception; of that, Bascomb was quite sure. There had to be contact. He didn’t know how he could explain his contact with the matter of the six policies which he knew would shortly have claims on them, but somehow there was contact.

  He closed the book. The definitions had been written by a statistician, not an intuitionist, he thought wryly; and that was no help at all.

  He took his hat and walked out of the office, leaving word with Miss Pilgrim, his secretary, that he’d be back after lunch.

  He had no definite goal in mind. He wanted merely to get away, to try to get some self-evaluation of the thing that had happened. He half expected the experience to dim as he got out into the clear spring air and faced the reality of the city with all its movement and noise and color. But there was no change at all.

  He stopped at a street comer, waiting for the green light. He drew himself up to full height and sniffed deeply of the air, which was only moderately loaded with carbon monoxide at this time of morning. Why had he let a thing like this shake him so? People had hunches all the time; it was quite an ordinary thing, after all, when you stopped to think about it. He had no reason to feel apologetic, because he’d finally had one for the first time in his life.

  But it wasn’t any good. He knew he’d have lived out his full fourscore and ten without ever experiencing a genuine hunch, if it hadn’t been for Magruder. All his life he’d laughed at hunches, and at the people who depended upon them for important decisions in their lives. Now, with one of his own, he felt like an unlucky prospector who’d sour-graped himself into believing there was no ore—only to come upon the biggest strike of all.

  He stopped again in the middle of the block, and stepped back against the store fronts, a sudden new burden upon him. His face paled.

  It was his habit to watch the crowds on the streets. Sometimes he counted a hundred of those going past in the opposite direction and estimated with a shallow regret that twenty five of them would feel the death-grip of cancer. As many more would give way to failing hearts.

  There would be diabetes, infections, and accidents in decreasing proportions.

  This always made him a little sad. Now, for the first time, he recognized how much he’d exulted in this private knowledge, and how superior he’d regarded himself because of it. It had been a power over his fellows—as if he, personally, were responsible for their fate.

  With horror, he recognized something new. The passers-by were no longer an amorphous, faceless stream; they had become a procession of individuals.

  That woman in the red coat standing by the baby carriage—

  As if in a nightmare, he found himself moving across the sidewalk toward her. “That tumor—” he said in a mild, hesitant voice; “it’s so small now, it could probably be removed before metastasis—”

  She stared at him in a moment of fright, then reassured herself by a glance at the passers-by. “I don’t know you,” she said with cold contempt, not at all alarmed.

  Bascomb realized in dim horror what he had done. He touched his hatbrim and glanced nervously about. “I beg your pardon,” he said, backing away. “You will see your doctor, though, won’t you—?”

  His withdrawal gave her added courage. “I oughta call a cop! In broad daylight, too. And a woman with
a six-months old baby—can ya beat that?”

  His heart was pounding heavily as Bascomb turned in full retreat. He rounded the comer and stopped in front of a cigar store window, watching the reflections in the glass to make sure he wasn’t followed by an angry, insulting policeman.

  When he was able to breathe easier, he faced the pedestrians again with the new awareness he possessed of his fellow men. Intuitively, he could correct the crude, statistical knowledge he’d been content with up to now. How ridiculous it was to be content merely with how many when it was possible to know which ones.

  He glanced up sharply to the man standing next to him. The stranger was looking absently at a box of high-priced cigars, but his face was drawn into a warp of indecision.

  “It won’t work,” Bascomb said quietly. It was almost impossible for him to keep from speaking. “The deal is rigged,” he said, “and they’re waiting for you to walk into the trap.”

  The man’s face paled and then grew scarlet with rage. “What do you know about it?” he demanded. “Who are you?” He advanced threateningly and Bascomb was sure he’d have laid hands on him if the sidewalk hadn’t been crowded.

  “I’m a friend,” said Bascomb in haste, backing again from this new encounter. “Take my word for it and don’t sign the contract.”

  Then he darted away with a speed that shocked his system. The stranger attempted a short pursuit, but gave it up as ridiculous in the heavy pedestrian traffic. His mind was made up, however; though he would not have admitted it, the fantastic warning had tipped the decision for him.

  Bascomb slowed as he found the steps of the Public Library, but he went up, two steps at a time. In the reading room, he settled by the window, keeping an eye open for signs of pursuit.

  He had done a foolish thing. He would not pull that kind of stunt again. At least he’d try not to—the sudden impact of this sure, certain knowing was difficult to resist.

  7

  For almost two hours Charles Bascomb sat there, apparently just staring through the window. But his mind was burning with the fury of the effort to evaluate the change within himself. He saw all his past life as a dark, empty grayness—a feeble reliance on somebody else, who relied on somebody else— If a man was wrong in statistical Society he could always fall back on his group, his school, “that’s what they taught me”, his insurance company, “everybody knows that”, his firm—the bigger the cushion, the better.

  It seemed impossible that that life was only as far away as this very morning, when he’d left the house, and that vision had come within these few hours.

  It wasn’t that sudden, of course. Magruder’s pills and exercises had been working on him for days, now. Perhaps it took something like the encounter with Sprock to jar his intuitive faculty into action. At any rate, he would never be the same again. His life could never be the same.

  The most immediate thing he had to take care of was calling off Hap Johnson’s newspaper campaign against the Professor. After that, there would be time enough to determine what his relationship with Magruder would be.

  But he already had an inkling of what would be necessary. '

  He found Hap in the Courier office looking unchanged from the time of his last visit. The reporter looked up, pleased as he saw Bascomb’s face. “Pretty good story to start off with, don’t you think?” he said. “The switchboard has taken seventy or eighty calls on it already. Most of them giving us kudos.

  “It was a good story,” Bascomb said, taking a seat by the worn desk. “It will have to stop, however.”

  “What—?”

  Bascomb nodded. “I have found out something I didn’t know before. Magruder is no fake; his stuff works.”

  “You said that before. The idea was to keep it from working.”

  “On me, I mean. I’ve found out how to use it in a different way than Magruder intended; it can be used constructively, not the way Magruder is doing.”

  Hap frowned in suspicion and puzzlement. “I don’t get this,” he said. “You mean you want to have things all love and kisses between you and Magruder now, and promote his phoney self-development course instead of fight it?” Bascomb shook his head. “I haven’t quite figured out what ought to be done about Magruder. He’s a crackpot— there seems no getting around that fact. Probably a senile condition; he’s retired from the university you know. I suspect the full story is something like this: He stumbled on some bio-chemical concoction that would enormously improve a man’s mental abilities—actually induce a genuine intuitive ability. He probably tried to sell his associates and superiors on it and was laughed at for his trouble. That would naturally sour him on all efforts to promote it honestly and professionally, so he became embittered and turned to his self-development business to promote it under cover.

  “But with a difference. Where his initial impulse was no doubt to use his discovery for the benefit of mankind, he’s now determined to destroy everything he can as a revenge for the rebuff by his colleagues.”

  “Which is a good enough reason why we should continue to blast him,” said Hap.

  Bascomb shook his head. “No; in doing that, we would be running the risk of destroying the discovery itself. We can’t take the chance; it’s too valuable. The first thing necessary is to preserve Magruder himself until we can obtain control of his discovery and make sure it will be used properly. Then we can take steps to see that Magruder is prevented from taking out his bitterness against society; it’s absolutely necessary to withdraw our attack on Magruder now.”

  Hap’s look of suspicion deepened. “I don’t see it. You are only theorizing about Magruder’s background; and all I can see is that his system has been pretty effective— in taking you over onto his sidel What makes you think that this intuitive thing is all to the good if it’s used right— and that you can handle it better than Magruder?”

  Bascomb told him about the morning’s incidents with Sprock and the strangers on the street. He tried to describe his new outlook on the world.

  “O.K. Tell me something about me,” said Hap in quick challenge.

  “Why, yes—” Bascomb said hesitantly. “You—”

  He stopped.

  “Go on,” said Hap. “Should I take a bus or a taxi home tonight? Will it be safe enough to come to work tomorrow?”

  Bascomb tried to speak. Nothing came. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said at last. “I haven’t got it fully, and in a way I can control all the time. It’s just at certain times, and certain circumstances; you’ve got to understand that, Hap.”

  “All I can see is that Magruder’s got you over on his side. For my book, he’s a dangerous charlatan who needs to be stamped out; and that goes double in view of what he’s done to you. I don’t know how he engineered such a switch, but you aren’t the same man I knew a few days ago.”

  Bascomb tried again, from the beginning. But there was nothing he could say to convince Hap Johnson of his changed point of view—or rather, of the harmlessness of it.

  The reporter stood up as Bascomb approached the door to leave. “I’m going to fight Magruder, because I think he’s a menace to decent, ordinary-thinking people,” he said.

  “And if you go over to his side, Charley, I’m going to fight you, too.”

  There was no hint of friendship in his eyes.

  “I see,” said Bascomb slowly. “Well, thanks, anyway, Hap; maybe we’ll get together on this thing before it’s over.”

  He tried to assess Hap Johnson’s intense hostility as he went out to the street again. The more he thought about it, the more incredible it seemed. Hap hadn’t even been that hostile toward Magruder originally; he’d more or less gone along routinely, seeing Magruder as a crank to be suppressed. Now Bascomb felt that the reporter had become his own personal enemy because of the attempt to call off the campaign. He shook his head and gave up the problem for the present.

  His inability to put on a demonstration for Hap troubled him, but he felt his explanation had been right.
He had something that was growing within him; it couldn’t be forced or pushed. It had to come at its own rate, and he was willing to give it time. But he couldn’t afford to be backed into a comer like that again until it was fully matured.

  Finally, he wanted desperately to talk to somebody who could understand him. He thought momentarily of Magruder himself, but that was out. He felt that he and the Professor were going to be very bitter enemies over exploitation of intuitive processes, and only one of them could survive that straggle.

  There was no one—except Sarah.

  He glanced at the clock on the comer. She’d be startled to see him coming home in the middle of the day; and old Sprock would run a fever if he ever found out—perhaps even fire him. Somehow, that was becoming less and less important as the day went on.

  Sarah greeted him with a smile, opening the door before he was halfway up the walk. “I thought you’d be on the earlier train,” she said.

  Bascomb stopped, then smiled back at her; he should have known.

  They sat in the living room, and he told her about the events of the morning. He told of the interview with Sprock, and the sudden burst of intuitive knowledge that overwhelmed him. He told of the encounters with the strangers on the street, just as he’d told it to Hap Johnson. And he described the reaction of the reporter.

  Sarah listened responsively, as if it were all something she’d heard before and had expected to hear again; but when he was through Bascomb realized that he hadn’t come home merely for the purpose of telling her these things. He arose and stood by their modem picture window overlooking the landscaped back yard. There was still a great deal to say and he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

  “It must be that a statistician is essentially a coward,” he said finally. “I’ve spent my life running—fleeing as hard as I could from contact with individual factors. I don’t know why; maybe it was because I felt helpless in the presence of an individual—whether it was a figure or a human being.