The Non-Statistical Man Page 7

  “But in dealing with groups, and predicting their behavior—there was power in that!” He turned to Sarah, facing her motionless figure across the room. “Can you understand that, darling? Can you understand what it meant to be able to comprehend a mass of individuals when I was completely frightened by the randomness of a single one?”

  “Yes—I can understand it,” Sarah said softly.

  “Now, it’s gone,” Bascomb went on in a low voice. “The terror of an individual is gone—and so is the sense of power over any group whose action I can predict. It’s more than my professional career that’s involved; it’s the basic postulates of my whole life. I can quit hiding behind my ridiculous little rows of black figures, my summations, my media, my extremes. I can quit being the absurd fool I have been all my life!”

  Sarah shook her head. “If you had been a fool, you would never have been able to see what you have been doing. You have merely gained sight which you never had before—and you mustn’t forget that you still live in a world of the blind.”

  “How close am I?” Bascomb said. “You’re so far ahead of me—can you tell me how close I am to getting full use of my intuitive capacity so that I can depend on it?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I can’t even see the end of the road for myself; sometimes I think there may not be any. It may be like a skill that can grow and increase as long as you live. And I’m not so far ahead of you, either; not really. I never had very much; I was just willing to trust and use what I had. It works that way. The more you use it, the more reliable it becomes.”

  He crossed the room and sat down beside her again. He told her his feeling about Magruder and his theoretical explanation for the Professor’s behavior. “Magruder’s found something with the potency of atomic energy—and he’s using it to light a bonfire. It has to be taken out of his hands and put to proper use. That’s my concern now—but I feel the need of more development for myself before trying to take it away from him.”

  “I think you’re right in wanting to exploit his discovery, but I’m not sure Magruder’s activities are entirely in error. After all, he brought it to your attention through these methods.”

  “Yes, but a direct approach would have been a whole lot more effective; and any good results are only incidental. His basic purpose is destructive. He told me so, himself.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Bascomb shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you could help me there. I try to think ahead on it, but I get nothing but fog and fuzz. I can’t seem to grasp any plan of action for myself. I don’t get that intuitive feel about anything except that I must protect Magruder from Hap Johnson right now, in order to save his discovery.

  “Later, there can be lectures, courses, a school maybe —not the kind of thing Magruder has been doing, but a straightforward presentation showing what his actual discovery is and what it can do. That’s the approach we’ll make, I think.”

  “But there’ll be effects that will startle and shock people—”

  “We’ll prepare them; we’ll lay it on the line and let them know exactly what to expect—not sneak up on them without any warning the way Magruder is doing.”

  “What about such things as your insurance business? It will be bankrupt in time.”

  “That’s the obvious conclusion, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the right one—for the simple reason that insurance company people can also have the same advantage.”

  “It would be a stalemate then,” said Sarah. “People would apply for policies only when they needed them, and the insurance companies would turn them down on the basis of knowing claims would soon be made.”

  “It would turn into a kind of savings and loan institution,” Bascomb answered. “People could plan far enough ahead for coming emergencies. Insurance companies could cover them by accepting savings, and malting loans for amounts beyond them—such loans being repayable in some manner. It’s the only way it would ever work.”

  “But so many other things, too. There’ll be the public schools, the courts and juries.” She gave a small gasp. “There’s Zad Clementi Charles—”

  Bascomb’s mind shifted to thoughts of the alleged kid-nap-murderer, whose trial had been headline news in their town for weeks. “Clementi—?” he said. Then the sad, sure intuitive awareness made itself felt in his mind. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s Clementi; he didn’t do it, but they’ll take a vote on it and decide to hang him for it. Twelve good men and true—in the statistical world you can multiply ignorance by a constant and get truth.”

  Sarah had straightened, her eyes staring through the window to the garden beyond. “We could help,” she said in a whisper, “if we knew the right answer—”

  Bascomb shook his head. “I can’t get it; there’s only the fog and fuzz. Have you got it?”

  Sarah shook her head bitterly. “No—I don’t know how to reach it yet. I wonder if it will be like this always—so many things you know exist, just beyond your fingertips?”

  8

  In a kind of fierce desperation, they returned to Magruder’s manuals during the following evenings. They swallowed the green and orange and yellow and brown pills with conscious intensity, as if this would increase the potency of the chemicals.

  They attended Magruder’s lectures and drank up every precious word he spoke. Bascomb tried to shear through the overburden of wordage and digest the meat; Sarah refused to worry about this, taking it all at face value.

  The children had been aware of some kind of strange, extracurricular activity on the part of their parents for some time. Now the sense of intensity grew somewhat frightening to them; but Charles Bascomb was not ready to admit them to an understanding of what was being attempted. He didn’t know how he could make them understand fully enough to keep from resenting it. And then at other times, he wondered if they might already understand too well.

  His own development progressed at a rate that was pleasing to Bascomb in spite of his impatience. After the first violent shock of becoming aware of intuitive powers, he restrained himself on the streets and on the train and wherever he had casual meeting with hordes of his fellow men. He steeled himself to, walk by men who were dying and to sit near those who were headed for inevitable disaster—disaster and death that might be turned aside by even a small degree of insight.

  The revolution in his own life he began to see in appalling proportions. He’d known that changes would be necessary; but the early estimates were revised upward in a continually widening spiral. He began to know periods of genuine fear as he saw the gap widening between the future and the past—but he would not have turned back, even if it were possible.

  He had not changed his initial estimate of Magruder’s person and methods, or the necessity of restricting his activities, but preservation of the discovery was the all important concern right now; and anything that would lead to this end was fair enough.

  He called at Magruder’s hotel two weeks after the discovery of his own rising intuitive powers.

  Magruder, by that time, had been brought under indictment for practising medicine without license—as a result of Hap Johnson’s articles and a complaint based on Joe Archer’s analysis of the colored pills. Skillfully, Hap had built up a powerful attack against all quacks and charlatans in the health and mental development field; and without leaving his paper open in any way for libel, he had directed public attention and sentiment towards Magruder and his course of lectures.

  The Professor opened the door after Bascomb’s first knock. “I was waiting for you.”

  And suddenly the enormity of his incredible oversight hit Bascomb between the eyes. How could he combat or deceive in any way a man who had the intuitive ability that Magruder must have? It was an impossibility!

  How could he have overlooked this simple fact? And yet he had overlooked it completely.

  “Are you feeling ill?” Magruder asked solicitously. “Can I get you anything?”

  Bascomb shook hi
s head. “I’m all right; just need to sit down. Over here by the window will be all right.”

  Magruder nodded and escorted him to the chair, then took one for himself. “It’s good to see you again. I’ve been aware of you at the lectures, but you always get away so quickly I don’t have a chance to even say hello.” “I’ve been reading about your trouble,” said Bascomb a little thickly.

  “That! It’s nothing; it occurs all the time. All I have to do is make a delaying action until I finish the lectures. Then I’ll pay my fine and be on my way.”

  “Do you think you’ll get by with a fine?”

  Magruder frowned, his wrinkled face contorting like an old apple. “These newspaper articles have a rather unusual skill, coupled with an extraordinary amount of venom. I confess they do worry me, somewhat; you didn’t know what you were starting.”

  Bascomb remained quite still. Was there anything Magruder didn’t know?

  He had admitted worry over the outcome of the indictment, however—as if that were still hidden from him. Bascomb wondered how it could be, what limits there were to intuition, anyway.

  Bascomb said carefully, “I’ve changed my mind since our last meeting.”

  “I know,” Magruder answered almost impatiently. Bascomb swallowed hard. The only possible direction was straight ahead, regardless of what Magruder “knew”.

  “Then you must also know that my own intuition has begun to function,” he said. “I didn’t understand what you were talking about before; now I do. I want to go along with you.”

  “I know that, too,” Magruder repeated, nodding. “I’ll be delighted to have you, of course. There is only one additional item we need mention: the price.”

  “You said nothing about price.”

  “When we talked before, you weren’t interested enough as a member of a statistical society. Your present job; it’s going to cost you everything that has value to you to warrant my quoting it. But now you need to know that your career as a statistician—”

  “I expected that.”

  “Your name; your position in the community; your home—everything, in fact, except your family. You have good fortune, indeed, in your wife.”

  Bascomb paled. “I don’t understand,” he murmured,. “You can’t; not now. Understanding will come later. The important thing is that you are ready to begin. You value sufficiently the power of intuition to be willing to pay the price of everything Statistical Society offers. There is no doubt about that, is there?”

  Bascomb looked across at the enigmatic Professor in staring silence. Nothing in his whole life had prepared him for so fantastic a conversation as this one. What did Magruder mean? How much did he actually know? If he could be so positive about some things, and yet have doubt about others, it was obvious he did not have hundred percent intuition. And one of the things he seemed not to know was Bascomb’s own private intentions in this matter. If that were true—and Bascomb felt almost certain of it—then this talk of a fantastic “price” was just that—fantastic.

  He had to gamble on it. He nodded his head slowly and said, “There is no doubt about it. I am ready to begin.” “Excellent!” exclaimed Magruder. He got to his feet energetically. “There are a good many things I have to show you. This indictment business is going to interfere considerably, and you can be a great help to me within a short time—”

  Hours later, Bascomb had a substantial lead in the direction he wanted to go. Magruder gave no sign of doubting Bascomb’s good faith, or sensing his real purpose.

  He explained the source of his medication—a small private capsule company—and gave Bascomb authority to place orders with a letter of introduction that would validate those orders. He admitted the false front of gobbledygook pseudo-scientific terms in his lectures.

  “That’s the way it has to be done,” he said confidentially. “The public would never swallow the actual facts. They’d rather have corporeal vibrations and ethereal streams, than try to understand that men made a mistake in the dawn of history which we now have to correct.”

  “But what kind of teaching is that?” Bascomb demanded in spite of himself. “How can they ever learn what intuition really is by such methods?”

  Magruder glanced sidewise at him. “How does a baby learn to see, or to smell, or to feel? Intuition’s like that. First order functions can’t be taught. They are blueprinted in the germ plasm from ages past, and the psyche reads the plans in the dark schoolroom of the womb. There, it learns how to make its own heart beat, and when it comes into the world, how its eyes are to function—and its lungs, stomach, and intuition. No—you don’t teach those things.”

  “But what do you do, then? Something happens—something happened to teach me how to use intuition.”

  “Did it? I think not. You learned how yourself—after I assisted in removing some of the obstacles imposed by a Statistical Society. The exercises free the imagery mechanisms of your mind, teach your body that it need not abhor certain inherent functions. The pills react biochemically to inhibit the fear component attached to these functions. A wholly artificial fear, you understand, which has been laboriously attached by Society.

  “That is all that is possible to do. Teaching is a greatly over-rated activity. It is obviously nothing more than extracting an agreement—sometimes to good ends, sometimes to bad. But it’s always applied to second order effects, the use of a function—not the function itself.

  “Self-learned items such as breathing, heart circulation, intuition, artistic creation, and ten thousand others can be suppressed by forces which may be stronger than the urge to live and grow. If the suppression has not already caused the death of the body—or the soul—it may be possible to remove the suppression, but still the organism must do its own learning in the first order field of living, growing, creating.

  “In our activity we do nothing but remove the suppressors.”

  Bascomb made no comment. He cringed slightly before the Professor’s reflection on the many years spent in achieving his place as a scholarly statistician; but it was heavy going following the physiological and psychological theories into which Magruder now plunged. Bascomb tried to stay with it, taking copious notes to refresh his memory and to check against standard texts later.

  When the interview was finally over, Bascomb felt he was well on his way. Reaching the street after leaving Magruder’s suite, only one puzzle remained to plague his mind insistently.

  The price.

  Magruder saw disaster ahead for him; but nothing could be clearer than Bascomb’s own intuitive knowledge that he was on the right track—and Sarah verified it wholeheartedly. '

  Could two people, with functioning intuitive powers, get opposing answers to the same problem?

  The answer was obviously no—provided there was any validity to intuitive knowledge at all. That left two possibilities: Magruder’s intuitive power was less than Bascomb’s own; or Magruder had no knowledge whatever of Bascomb’s real intentions—and this made the difference in their view of the future.

  Bascomb contented himself with this latter answer; he wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, but there was no other in sight. And he knew he was right in what he was doing. There was no question of it, no sliver of doubt.

  He had decided that Hap Johnson’s articles could be useful, after all, in keeping Magruder too occupied to pay too close attention to Bascomb’s failure to follow instructions—if only it didn’t turn heavily against the discovery itself.

  Bascomb was thinking this the next morning when he opened the paper and Magruder’s picture slapped him in the eye. The Professor had been arrested during the previous afternoon. He had not put up bail—which was set at an unreasonably high fifteen thousand dollars. He was securely in jail.

  The news was disconcerting. Bascomb hadn’t wanted anything like this to befall the Professor; yet it put him safely out of the way, and left a free hand to inaugurate a sane program. It would be all to the good as long as it restrained the professor’s d
estructive activities—without destroying his discovery. It seemed to Bascomb a good indicator that he, not the Professor, was right. He had an intuitive feeling that this was so; it meant he had to get started—and quickly.

  There was the question of Bascomb’s job with New England. At first, he had considered leaving it forthwith—but that was mere crude logic that led to such a conclusion. Intuitively, now, he recognized the necessity of remaining.

  First of all, he needed the money it provided. But in addition, the company represented an institution he had come to love; he didn’t intend to see it scuttled. The obvious course was to take a hand in the inevitable transition. Men like Sprock would need a great deal of help during that difficult time.

  As soon as he reached the office that morning, Bas-comb requested Hadley to make a check on the batch of policies he’d warned Tremayne and Sprock about. There was no waiting; Hadley had the information already at hand, having started a one man project to discover anomalies.

  “Five of those you mentioned have made claims,” he said, and was pleased at Bascomb’s resulting smile. But on second thought his pleasure turned to wonder. How could Bascomb have known what ones to ask for?

  “Get me the papers,” said Bascomb; “I want to add them to my study.”

  He checked them over. It would have been nice if the remaining one had come in, but this was good enough. One death claims; two accidents, and two liabilities. He took the sheaf of papers and walked down the hall to Sprock’s office.

  The vice-president glanced up belligerently as the secretary ushered Bascomb in. “I was about to call you,” he said. He ruffled a handful of papers in front of him and lowered bushy eyebrows. “It’s time we did some more talking.”