The Non-Statistical Man (3 page)

“We just figured it was time we ought to have some insurance.”

“It’s hard to say—I guess we were just impressed to buy when we did."

“I don’t know. I felt it was the thing we needed as soon as l heard your company was opening an office here.”

Bascomb closed the book shakily, and resumed driving —slowly. It was tempting to jump to conclusions in a thing like this, but that was absolutely the
thing
you couldn’t do. There was really no basis for assigning a positive correlation between die short policy claims and the intuitive purchasing by the holders. That was the kind of thing on which a man could trip himself up badly; and
he
certainly wasn’t going to fall into the trap on this thing, Bascomb told himself. It was an interesting coincidence, but pure coincidence nonetheless—a sound, statistically understandable causation would be forthcoming in due time.

With that comforting thought, Bascomb completed the remainder of the trip and reached home.

Sarah was waiting anxiously, her supper schedule upset by the uncertainty of his time of arrival. She demanded at once: “Tell me all about it, Charles.”

He’d thought he’d brush over it lightly in the telling. Somehow he didn’t feel like describing the exhausting details of the interviews with his wife. But within a couple of hours after supper she had it all—through proper questioning, which was one of the skills in which she excelled.

Even down to Dr. Magruder.

“You mean you went away without even asking who he was?” Sarah demanded.

“It wasn’t important,” said Bascomb, irritated now by the cross-examination. “Besides, she’d already slammed the door in my face.”

“You should have found out about him,” said Sarah thoughtfully looking across his left shoulder. “I
feel
there’s something important about him. Magruder— I’ve heard that name somewhere. Dr. Magruder—”

She went for the paper on the other side of the living
is
room and came back, opening it in front of them. “There!” she said. “I thought I remembered.”

Bascomb stared at the four inch, two column advertise* ment indicated by his wife’s Firehouse Red fingernail.

“Are you a living vegetable—or are you living?”
it asked.
“If you are dissatisfied with life, let Dr. J. Coleman Magruder show you. the way to better health, vitality, and happiness. Half-alive is no better than dead. Hear Dr. Magruder Wednesday night at 8 p.m
.—”

“I guess
that
takes care of the importance of Dr. Magruder,” said Mr. Bascomb with a slight feeling of triumph.

Sarah Bascomb looked thoughtfully at the advertisement for a long time, then slowly closed the paper. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “I’ll bet that if you go back to every one of those people you talked to today, you’ll find they have taken Dr. Magruder’s course.”

“Nonsense!” Bascomb cried, more sharply than he intended. “That’s ridiculous! What grounds have you got for suggesting such a coincidence?”

“It’s no coincidence, darling; I’m just sure that’s the way it is. What Mrs. Harpersvirg said proves it—”

“It proves no such thing! Just because one flippety female said Magruder—what the devil
did
she say? I’ve forgotten now, but it doesn’t prove all these people fell for this quack’s line!”

“Ask them,” said Sarah.

He left Dr. Sherridan until last. After all the rest had confirmed Sarah’s hypothesis, Bascomb fought against the final prospect. It was absurd in the extreme even to suppose that Dr. Sherridan had attended quack Magruder’s lectures.

But he had to know.

Dr. Sherridan smiled amiably and waved his hand in disparagement of any significance attaching to his enrollment with Dr. Magruder. “It was mostly for laughs,” he said; “you know how those things go. You work hard all day without much relief from the constant pressure, and something comes up that tickles your funnybone. You go through with it just for kicks, and find you get a whale of a lift out of it; that’s the way it was with this Magruder thing.”

“He’s a complete phoney, of course, a quack?”

“Oh, naturally, but I went along with it all. I even took his pills after I had them analyzed and found out
they were genuine vitamins with a harmless filler. Pretty low on vitamins, of course.”

“He
has
pills?”

“Yes. Several colors for different days of the week.”

“How did you come to—ah, enroll with Magruder in the first place?”

“I found my patients talking about him all the time. He came through here giving his lectures and enrolled most of the females over twenty-five—he’s got a good line, and a nice bedside manner—and one half the neurotic males. Big crowd. So I went down to the first one of his second series to see what went on. That’s how I got in; it was rather amusing, all told.”

“I see. Well, I was just curious. Wife’s become interested, and I wondered if it might be something the police ought to know about. Thanks for your time.”

“Not at all. You might try signing up yourself, if you feel in need of a laugh.”

Before he went back to Landbridge, Bascomb made a check. He didn’t want to have Sarah suggesting it first. And he was right; Dr. Magruder had also been to Topworth and Burraston, and all of the four other cities showing insurance claims anomalies.

He confessed this additional information as soon as he got in the house that evening, in order to forestall Sarah. He should have known better than to try.

“Oh, I could have told you last night that I felt Magruder had been to all those towns; but I knew you’d say it was silly. Anyway, I’m glad you found out. I made reservations for both of us for his full course, starting tonight. We’ll have to hurry, if we’re to get through dinner and everything before we leave.”

He tried to assess his feelings as he stood before the mirror later in their bedroom, trying to adjust his tie. Only two days ago, Hadley had shown him an innocent problem concerning claims anomalies. Tonight, as a direct result, he was signed up for a quack health and development course. A kind of fogginess seemed to develop in his mind when Bascomb tried to trace the intervening steps of this cause and effect relationship. It made no sense whatever.

He wasn’t quite sure why he didn’t put his foot down— even now—and declare the whole thing ridiculous, as it actually was, and refuse to go. It felt almost as if he’d been drawn into a swiftly-moving current from which he didn’t
have the stamina to withdraw. But that was ridiculous, too; there was nothing about the whole affair that wasn’t.

Except the cold, unavoidable fact that people by the dozen had bought New England policies and made claims a month or two later.

Charles Bascomb had a sense of cold foreboding as he looked at himself in the mirror now.

The doctor had rented the most plush assembly room in the town’s best hotel, and it was filled to the limits of the gray velvet drapes upon its walls. They wouldn’t have had a seat at all if Sarah hadn’t insisted they hurry.

Charles Bascomb glanced about as he sat down, assessing the crowd who had turned out to hear Magruder. They were easily typed: Ninety percent of them were heavily loaded with psychosomatic ills that had already blossomed into heart trouble, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes in two thirds of them. This year they were here to listen to Magruder. Last year it had been Hongi, or something like that, from India; the year before, the sour cream and road tar molasses man; next year somebody else. Always the same crowd, minus the ones who died in between, augmented by the gullible newcomers—

Bascomb felt sorry for them; he wished he could have taken them to his office and shown them his statistics. There was the record of what would happen to this group —and all the Magruders, Hongis, and sour cream men in creation couldn’t change it.

Why was
he
here—when he had claims anomalies to analyze!

A solid round of applause indicated that the performance was about to begin. Somebody had stepped to the platform and was holding a hand up for attention. Bascomb thought this was Magruder, at first—but it turned out to be only the proprietor of the local health food store, who was sponsoring the course and was about to introduce his star.

He took quite a while, but Magruder finally came onstage. This was a shock. Bascomb had been expecting a barrel-chested, big-biceped character of the kind usually photographed in high society surroundings, with his arms carelessly about the waists of a couple of movie star devotees.

Instead, Dr. Magruder was a rather wizened, pinched-up little man of better than fifty. He peered myopically at his audience through broad lenses and began speaking in scratchy tones that grated on the ears.

Bascomb sat up at attention. This was decidedly different from the show he’d expected. Something was definitely not right about Magruder; he just wasn’t the type of character to be putting on a show of this kind. Bascomb decided to listen.

He would have been better off if he hadn’t, he decided at the end of an hour. With the aid of an incredible pseudo-biochemistry, and large charts that bore no resemblance to any structure in the human body, Dr. Magruder gave out the usual line. He spoke of “corporeal vibrations”, the “ethereal stream”, the “prescience aura”, and a dozen other coined phrases of nonsense. He spoke of the
correlating affinities,
which his little colored pills were guaranteed to organize within the body, and of the “Cosmic mono-regression” which his set of seventy-five special mental and physical exercises was sure to nullify.

It was sheer gibberish, and the audience ate it up.

Including Sarah.

She beamed happily as she received their copies of the first six of the fabulous exercises and a week’s rainbow assortment of pills.

“You aren’t going to
take
those things, I hope!” Bascomb whispered.

“Of course I am; and so are you. Don’t you think it’s wonderful that the Doctor has discovered all these things about human beings, that people have been trying to find out for so long?”

“Look, darling—”

“Don’t you just
feel
the power in what Dr. Magruder says? Don’t you just
know
he’s right?”

Bascomb gave up and carried the exercise books and boxes of colored pills to the car, as they broke away from the crowd leaving the assembly room.

Following Sarah’s admonition, he took a red and a green pill before going to bed.

These claims anomalies did not constitute the first items of interest which young Hadley had brought to Bascomb’s attention. Because he hoped to rise high and fast in the
firm, Hadley had made an exhaustive study of his associates and superiors. It would have surprised Bascomb to know how full the file was which Hadley kept securely hidden at home, and which described the Bascomb eccentricities and foibles as Hadley saw them.

So in accord with the policy he’d adopted toward Bascomb, Hadley approached the following morning about ten o’clock—when,'the morning rush of mail was out of the way—with a news clipping in his hand. “Something curious here,” he said; “I wondered if you might have seen it in the paper this morning.”

He laid it on the desk and Bascomb frowned at it wordlessly. His cold reception of it gave Hadley a start of fear that he might have misjudged Bascomb’s interest in the anomalous, after all.

“At least we can’t blame Magruder for that, anyway,” Bascomb growled unpleasantly.

“Who, sir?” said Brooks politely.

“Magruder. Oh, hell—I’d forgotten you didn’t know anything about
him.
Forget it. Thanks for the clipping.”

He turned away to his work, but Hadley stood hesitantly by the desk still. “Did you—were you able to make anything out of the claims anomalies I mentioned the other day?”

“No, nothing!” Bascomb snapped irritably. Hadley fled.

Bascomb forgot the clipping until he turned back to that side of the desk again fifteen minutes later; his eyes caught it and he read it through once more.

There was a four inch item about a small town in Minnesota that had finally determined what to do about the TV menace to its children and its culture. On a bright spring Saturday afternoon the citizens had carried their sets down to the town square. There, amid picnic surroundings of fried chicken and peach cobbler, they’d had contests of sorts for various ages—the contests consisting of hurling rocks through twenty-one inch picture tubes from various distances.

Then they’d piled all the sets together and set fire to them. It was reported that there had subsequently been a run on the local library, and that discussion forums and chamber music groups had sprung up all over town.

Bascomb grinned wryly to himself. That was taking the bull—literally!—by the horns and tossing it. He hoped it indicated a trend.

But his statistician’s mind veered back to the essential element in the story, the one which had prompted Hadley to cut it out: the anomaly. When umpteen hundreds of thousands of other communities throughout the land darkened their living rooms at sunset to bask in the hypnotic glow of buncombe until bedtime, why had the single town of Myersville reared up on its hind legs and demonstrated independence of national mores?

Bascomb didn’t know, and he was quite sure he would never find out. His hands too full of Dr. Magruder even to think of tracking down such a remote incident as that in Myersville. But, he repeated fervently to himself, he hoped it was indicative of a trend.

He had reached a standstill in his attempts to analyze the insurance claim anomalies scientifically, according to the principles of statistics; he had to have more data. And while it seemed ridiculous to wait upon Dr. Magruder for that, yet Bascomb had just about decided there was nothing else to do. He knew there could be no connection, but there seemed nowhere else to look for data.

He knocked off a little early for lunch. He had an appointment with an old college friend, Mark Sloane, who had suggested for weeks that they get together when he was in town. He phoned during the morning to announce this was the day.