The Non-Statistical Man Page 9

  These were coming from the direction of the bathroom, where Bascomb found Sarah busy with soap and water and bandages. His oldest boy’s eye was tightly closed. Cuts and bruises decorated the rest of his face and his upper torso.

  Bascomb wanted to make it light, but he saw Sarah’s face and changed his intended tone. “What was it all about?” he asked evenly.

  Mark glanced up, hesitant; he turned to his mother. “It’s all right,” she said grimly.

  “Down at school—said Mark. “All the kids—I told them they couldn’t say things like that and tried to make ’em shut up. But I couldn’t lick the whole school.”

  “What were they saying?” Bascomb asked.

  “That you are a Communist. They went around singing it kind of: Bascomb’s dad’s a Red man; that sort of thing. Then Art Slescher wrote on the boards in all the classes before I got there: Name a dirty Commie. I got him after school.”

  Bascomb looked at Sarah, his face blanched. They didn’t speak.

  Later, when the children were in bed, they tried to talk about it. “We can’t go on bucking something like that forever,” Sarah said.

  “It won’t be forever,” Bascomb snapped, more irritably than he intended; “I mean, it will die down after while. You knovy how these newspaper stories go. They pin a guy to the cross with scandal, and in a week even his next door neighbors have forgotten about it.”

  “Not this.” Sarah shook her head. “It hasn’t even got a good start it’s going to build bigger and bigger. Mark’s experience isn’t the only one.”

  “What else?”

  “I overheard talk at the store while I was shopping today. Two women on the other side of grocery island. They thought I’d gone away. One mentioned your name. Said her daughter had a friend who’d heard you were caught molesting some high school girls one night that it was no wonder you were defending a man like dementi.”

  Bascomb buried his face in his hands and groaned with helpless despair and rage “Such a little thing to begin with—! How in Heaven’s name did it lead up to this? I hope they hang Magruder!” He looked up. “It’s going to be hell to live with while it lasts, but time will make a difference.”

  “Not in this.” Sarah shook her head again; “it will only grow worse.”

  “Then what are we to do! We’ve got our home here. It’s our community as much as those gossiping old biddies’ —those mentally twisted kids—”

  “It’s going to force us out, Charles; we can’t live here any longer. The sooner we prepare to leave, the better we’ll be. Put the house up for sale tomorrow!”

  Only then, for the first time in many days, did Bascomb remember Magruder’s strange words, and it hit him like a blow in the stomach. “It’s going to cost you everything—your present job, your whole career—your good name—your position in the community; your home—"

  Magruder had said that; and every word of it was coming true.

  But there was time and a way to save things yet. “We’re not moving out before a thing of that kind,” he said; “there’re ways of licking it.”

  “At the price of our own destruction!”

  “It’s always been expensive to fight against insane prejudice, but the world would be a hell of a place to live in if a few of us didn’t try.

  “Tell Mark to not get involved in any more fistfights; tell him that when the others accuse me of being a Communist, he’s to agree. He’s to tell them I’ve got a pipeline straight to Moscow. Khrushchev himself appointed me, and I’m planning to wipe out the President and his Cabinet next month.

  “Tell the neighborhood biddies the same thing. Walk up and ask their advice on what to do with a husband you catch every week or two with sixteen-year old girls right in your own house. That’ll shut them up after a while.

  “And then—we’re staying; we’re staying right here and we’ll find out who did the murder Clementi is accused of. We’ll ram it down their throats until it chokes every one of the lying, sadistic gossipers!”

  “We have nothing but an intuitive sense about dementi—sod you’ve rejected that. So possibly the jury- was right, after all.”

  Bascomb remained staring straight ahead of him to the figured pattern on the opposite wall; it seemed as if he hadn’t heard her. Then, slowly his lips parted. “No,” he said. “I’ve rejected everything Magruder induced me to believe about intuition, but dementi’s innocence doesn’t depend on that. Our feelings about him were merely random chance, let us say, but logic convinces me we were right in that one thing. I’ve gone back and read the accounts of the trail. The evidence is ridiculous; they haven’t given him a chance. And I think it’s because there’s someone who’s being protected.”

  10

  It was a noble and virtuous gesture. Bascomb felt Sarah would commend him and agree to stick valiantly by him. Instead, she got up and paused in the center of the room. She gave him a single backward, almost-contemptuous look. “You are being an idiotic fool!” she said. “A pebble can’t stop a fifty ton boulder rolling down a hill.” She strode off in the direction of the bedroom.

  A week later, Charles Bascomb was convinced she was right. Mark was in the hospital to get an arm set after it had been broken when the mob piled on him at school. Sarah had been read out of the two ladies clubs she belonged to; and the minister of their Church had informed her he had made different arrangements in the baby-sitting round robin which had been worked out during services. Sarah wouldn’t need to bother with it any more.

  Bascomb had found his car painted a screaming red-including all the glass—when he got off the train at the end of the week to drive home. The same night their front windows were broken with slingshots; and when they got up, they found a crude hammer and sickle painted on the front door.

  In the city he’d not been able to get a single Job Interview during the entire time.

  Bascomb visited the local suburban real estate office in the early morning. By afternoon he had a sale at a thousand dollar loss, which the agent assured him was the best he could do in the light of the jinxed condition of the property.

  Once agreeing to defeat, it was impossible for Bascomb to get out too soon. He didn’t know where they were going, but as soon as all arrangements for storage and forwarding of their personal goods had been made he turned the car west. Slivers of red paint still showed next to the rubber gasket of the windshield; but the new paint job on the car symbolized the only thing he was taking with them, hope.

  He didn’t know where they were going. He was still stunned by the events of past days. The uncontrolled viciousness and brutality of the attacks against his family were unexplainable. Even the police had expressed apathy toward his complaints. A city had turned against him.

  And for what? he asked himself continually, over and over again. There was no rational explanation. His single statement of defense for Clementi had set it off. But that must be only the trigger. Where was the main explosive force of the catastrophe! He didn’t know. All he was sure of was that his townsmen seemed to have suddenly gone insane.

  They crossed New York in easy stages, and stopped late that night at a Pennsylvania tourist lodge. Mark’s arm was giving him pain. Neither Chuck, nor Darcie, the youngest, lying across his lap asleep, was enjoying the ride. They were running from a terror that wouldn’t show its proper face.

  It was there that they heard the newscast as they turned on the small radio in the lodge.

  “Police are looking for a once-respected insurance executive now fleeing with his family from the consequences of an incredible wave of criminal attacks. Charles Bascomb—dark green Buick—six girls all under age—license number—"

  “Come on!” said Bascomb. “It must have been on earlier; I noticed the clerk watching closely while I wrote down our license number—”

  They turned out of the drive, even as the clerk came out of the office to witness their unexplained departure. Sarah saw him turn and run inside. “He’s phoning the police,” she said.

>   There was no hysteria, or even despair, Bascomb recalled later as he turned the car onto the highway and kept it moving. A kind of calm seemed to have settled over them all. The children were quiet, and Sarah sat as if she had confidence that Bascomb knew exactly what he was doing.

  As if he actually did, he slowed at a dark intersection and turned off on a secondary highway. “We’ll have to keep off the main road,” he said. “This one ought to take us where we’re going.”

  No one asked where that was; at the moment Bascomb didn’t think to inquire in his own mind just what he meant by his words. He just kept driving. About midnight he pulled up at a small country crossroads community. A single lighted sign: Hotel shown in the whole village.

  “We’ll be all right here,” Bascomb said with assurance; “we’ll try to get some rest and get out early in the morning.

  They went south and west, avoiding the main highways rounding the Michigan shore line. No one viewed them with any more suspicion than any ordinary family of tourists; no siren-screaming cars rocketed along side them. Just once did they catch a repeat of the news broadcast mentioning the police pursuit.

  When Bascomb abruptly turned the car to a northerly course, he had a momentary impulse to stop and check the road map and ask himself why the devil he was heading this way. But he didn’t stop; he merely slowed for an instant—then stepped on the gas and settled a little more comfortably behind the wheel. He’d known it all along, of course.

  Where else would they be going but to Myersville—the town that burned television sets in the square?

  They arrived very late. The headlights of the car showed a neat village of white, green-trimmed houses. There appeared to be only a single hotel, and they drew up before it, after driving the length of the town and returning. As they walked into the small lobby a man got to his feet from a nearby leather chair and advanced with outstretched hand. He was smiling broadly.

  “I’ve been waiting all evening for you,” Professor Mugruder said.

  Sarah Bascomb walked toward him with an answering smile and accepted his hand. But Charles stopped short and stared at the little wizened man who was at the root of all his troubles.

  He’d felt there was safety in their flight west. When Bascomb turned north, he knew he’d been subconsciously aware from the beginning that they’d end up in Myersville.

  But by no twist of backward calculation could he admit that seeing Magruder was anything but an unexpected shock. Magruder was the last person in the world he wanted to meet.

  “How did you get here?” he demanded.

  “Flew,” said Magruder easily. “The judge threw out the charges in the preliminary hearing, and let me go the day you left. I tried to get in touch with you, but you were a little too early for me. I knew I’d find you here.”

  “And just how did you know that?” Bascomb said belligerently.

  Magruder smiled again. “How did you know Myersville was the place to come to?”

  He refused to say another word about the subject of their past relationship. While he accompanied them to the dining room, and to a meal that seemed to have been waiting for them, he told about the town, its peacefulness and opportunity for full living, which he was sure they would enjoy. He spoke of other, incidental, things, but the word intuition was not mentioned that night.

  He led them directly to their rooms afterward.

  “We have to register,” Bascomb explained.

  “That has been taken care of,” said Magruder. “After all, we run the place.”

  Bascomb knew by then it would be useless to ask the identity of “we.”

  The children had never seen the Professor, of course, and had heard his name only when it slipped in their presence. But they struck up an immediate friendship. At the breakfast table the following morning the Professor proved an unexpected adeptness with sleight-of-hand tricks, riddles, and stories that kept the children enthralled.

  Bascomb, however, was more absorbed in an inspection of his fellow diners; he was used to seeing occasionally an individual he mentally classified as a “character”— but never in such numbers as this. The hotel seemed to be full of them.

  Magruder was watching him, he discovered after a time. The children and Sarah had turned to their meal, and the Professor said, “That’s Shifty you’re watching across the room. He’s a great man in a pool room. While pool isn’t as popular as it once was, he handles dirty pictures, too. That gives him a good following in the highschool crowd, where he specializes in pushing our stuff. The kids think they’ve been on.'a genuine reefer jag when they get through.”

  “I’d like to know what the devil you’re talking about,” said Bascomb testily.

  “Marty, over there, works the racing crowd. He gives them a system that really sends them flipping—but they pick the ponies right too. They wouldn’t let go of Marty for all the uranium in Utah.

  “Then the fellow next to him is Doc Simmons; he’s a chiropractor. Has a nice little practice among neurotic females of the upper bracket in Chicago. Across the table is Doc Bywater—we have a lot of Docs here—who is behind the ads you see in the little magazines sometimes. You know: cure piles in ten days or your money back. Or: prostate sufferers, get relief overnight. That sort of thing. He gives them a dilly of a routine, and, of course, it works one hundred per cent of the time. He’s got a warehouse full of testimonials.”

  “It makes absolutely no sense at all!” Bascomb exclaimed.

  “All right, then, I’ll tell you.” Magruder had been eating as he talked; now he arose, finished with breakfast while Bascomb hadn’t touched a thing. Bascomb got up with him, however, and went out to the broad porch of the hotel and sat down facing the small unbusy main street of the town.

  “Peaceful place, isn’t it?” said Magruder. He pointed to a dark spot on the gravel of the town square a block away “That’s where they burned the television sets; it must have been quite a show.

  “But you wanted to know what this was all about, didn’t you? That shouldn’t be very hard, actually, because you already know—”

  “I don’t know a thing!” Bascomb cried. “Who are the “we’ you referred to last night? Who are the people you pointed out in the dining room—what’s the meaning of their nonsensical activities?”

  “The first thing you need to comprehend,” said Magruder slowly and carefully now, “is that intuition does not provide you with a superman intellect in the logical, statistical world you have lived in all your life.

  “Intuition is an entirely different breed of cat, a nonlogical means of arriving at conclusions about the world. Remember that the world and its problems remain the same. Sometimes the answers are the same, too; most of them are considerably better. But the change of method sometimes tends to make the whole picture—the world of your personal inter-relations—all of these often look so different that you think you’ve suddenly dropped down on another world.

  “Non-logical has come to be synonymous with irrational or crazy;—a piece of sheer propaganda put out by a system struggling tooth and nail, so to speak, to prevent recognition of another and better system. When shifting from one to the other you may be inclined to discount some of the features of the new.”

  Bascomb snorted in disgust. “If you’re trying to tell me I had any sense of intuition at work you can save your breath. The one time I depended on it in full confidence, it nearly destroyed me. It wiped out everything I’ve built up so far—home, job, community relationship. I’m even wanted by the police, I hear. Heaven only knows how that will turn out!”

  “No—I think Charles Bascomb knows that it will turn out all right. The hysteria will pass; the charges will be dropped and forgotten. There will be no continued pursuit and harrassment from that quarter.

  “I’m quite sure you know also that your intuition did not fail you. It was working accurately to bring you with optimum speed to the new circumstances which will give you maximum satisfaction in life.”

  “You’r
e crazy! I took your pseudo-scientific nonsense, hook, line, and sinker, and determined Iwould base a new life on it. My wife agreed with me. Everything went wrong; you evidently know what happened.”

  “And you recall, also, that I predicted this would be the course of events? It had to be. You were following a strongly-working intuitive faculty, and it was leading you along an optimum path.

  “There’s one trait of intuition that makes it a little hard for a statistically bred and educated man to stomach. Intuition is completely ruthless. If reaching a certain goal involves a pathway through beartraps and hellfire, intuition makes no allowances for logical objections to these obstacles. It takes you through; that’s what happened in your case.”

  “I hope you’re not trying to tell me it was intuitionally desirable that I be. run out of town with my reputation destroyed!”

  Magruder nodded. “That’s exactly the case,” he said. “You had accepted your intuitive faculty as a prime motivator at the moment you recognized it actually existed. Not everyone does that, you understand, but you did—hook, line, and sinker, as you say.

  “It was therefore very easy for it to assume a very high functioning level, and replace a considerable mass of logical reasoning. But even so, it was still comparatively embryonic in development—with the result that you were somewhat in the position of a man trying to ride two horses wanting to go in opposite directions.

  “You permitted intuition to operate, but you tried to evaluate its results logically.”

  “An intuitionist has no desire for status in the community, I suppose! No need for a sound, stable reputation and solid family life!”

  Magruder grimaced impatiently. “I suppose it’s difficult to shuck off the lifelong habit of trying to generalize from a single specific incident. You’ll learn, however—

  “Your case has nothing to do with what intuitionists in general desire or do not desire. For you, your intuition determined an optimum course of action with the precision of Natural Law. For you, not for anybody else. For you.”