The Non-Statistical Man (6 page)

“Yes,” Magruder nodded soberly. “I would say that faith is a large component of intuition.”

“There is only one thing you have left out: the mechanism by which these weird exercises of body and mind, and the little colored pills are supposed to restore one’s intuition.”

“That, too,” said Magruder, “is something which can only be tested pragmatically. You understand, of course, that these methods do not restore anything.
You
have never learned to use intuition in any degree; your wife is considerably more proficient. Yet, comparatively speaking, you are both readers who move your lips. You have to learn to do it by scanning—and the only proof that this is better is in learning it.

“So, if you continue, you will learn how to use your intuitive powers. The little pills contain a shading of vitamins to satisfy those curious enough to analyze them. The active ingredient is the other material which is necessary to subdue the automatic reaction of fear in dropping statistical thinking. This fear is very real and dominating; it says that use of intuition is a defiance of the billions of a man’s fellows who have lived since the beginning of the
race. It says they will crush him for daring to step out on his own and be an Individual who does not consult and bow to their wishes.

“Without a proper biochemical compensation of this fear, it would be all but impossible for a man to ever command his intuitive powers. So do not attempt it without use of the pills; it would tear you to pieces.”

“And one final question,” said Bascomb. “If I were to believe all this, and become one of your men who ‘know what it’s like to be on both sides of the statistical fence,’ what use would you make of me?”

“I would ask you to assist in the spread of these methods, particularly among your own professional group, which is among the strongest fortresses that intuition has to attack. Such attack can best be done by someone from the inside.”

“I see.” Bascomb rose suddenly and took up his hat. “It has been most entertaining, Professor; many thanks for your time.”

“Not at all.” Magruder smiled and accompanied him to the door. “I will expect you at the next lecture.”

“It is doubtful I will be there,” said Bascomb. “Quite doubtful.”

Bascomb had it in mind to return to the office as he left Magruder’s hotel room, but once out on the street he knew this was impossible. His brain churned with the impossible mixture of fantasy and faintly-credible truth which Magruder had dispensed.

He turned down the street in the direction away from his up-town office and moved slowly, dimly aware of his surroundings, murmuring apologies to his fellow pedestrians with whom he collided at intervals. Finally, he stopped and found an empty bench in Moller’s Park; he sat down, the pigeons clustering expectantly about his feet.

He had nothing to feed them, but their random motion and the sharp whine of their wings served to bring him in closer touch with the present moment.

A decision had to be made and made quickly. There was no use quibbling mentally over what Magruder could or could not do. The critical fact was that he could do
something.
Charles Bascomb had no doubt of this; he sim
ply could not deny the run of policy claims. How much of all that nonsense about intuition was true Bascomb didn’t know; for the moment he didn’t care. Magruder was far more than a harmless quack; he was a crank—and a dangerous one at that. If his mysterious doings were extended any further, he could actually undermine the foundations of the nation’s insurance business.

He could.

And how much more beyond that, Bascomb didn’t know; there would be tffne enough to find out when Magruder was safely stopped.

He considered going to the police with his story, but almost at once the futility of this was obvious. What desk sergeant, detective, or even police chief would listen to such a tale without being tempted to throw
him
behind bars for drunkenness?

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 in
tuitive 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—”