The Non-Statistical Man (12 page)

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?”

“Intuition is an entirely different breed of cat, a
non
logical 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’re crazy! I took your pseudo-scientific nonsense, hook, line, and sinker, and determined I
would
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. In
tuition 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.”

“Is there any purpose in it that can be understood by my Simple logical mind, then?” Bascomb asked bitterly.

“Of course. It is simply that you had to be
driven
out of your niche in a statistical society, or you would not have gone. That represents an almost unbelievable reflex activity of the intuition which
cannot
be understood in logical terms. It saw, so to speak, that you were desirous of utilizing intuition; but it also saw that you would never renounce sufificiendy the statistical way of life you had built up so solidly. It saw, therefore, the necessity of destroying the impediment in order to permit you to realize your basic intuitive choice of an intuitive life. So it set up the chain of circumstances—it led
you
to set them up— to destroy your position in statistical society, and thereby free you for the fuller life you had already chosen but could not otherwise obtain.

“You’ll get used to that kind of operation after while; I’ll admit it shakes you pretty hard die first few times it goes into operation!”

“It’s absolutely—”

Bascomb didn’t finish with the word “insane”, which was on the tip of his tongue. He suddenly sat very still, staring across the quiet Main Street of Myersville. In the vault of his mind, a page seemed to have turned, and a previous opacity was flooded with a brilliance of light. He felt a trembling within the fibers of his being, that was at once both a joy and an apprehension.

Every word of Magruder’s last statements was true!

He saw it now—and understood how he could not possibly have seen it before. But something within him was aware—the mysterious, fearful thing men called intuition—

He would
not
have left his niche. He would have done such nonsensical things as promoting the course he attempted; he would have spoken of his find to his friends and associates.

And he would have backed down whenever their ridicule endangered his association with them. He would have valued his place in the community; his security or reputation—everything—above a full exploitation of intuition. He would have remained with New England; he would have remained a Statistical Man.

Something in him saw how it would be. And now he witnessed clearly on the lighted page of his mind the process of that seeing, the intricate course of its illogical flow.

The process that had made
him
once and for all a NonStatistical Man.

It would be there again, he knew, doing its work out of sight of his living, reasoning awareness. He’d never doubt or mistrust it again. This was the very quality of faith he’d once suggested to Magruder!

“I wouldn’t have left without being driven,” he said slowly, his eyes still staring at the buildings on the other side of the street. “I’ll never lose faith in my intuition again.”

Magruder smiled a bit wistfully. “You’ll need it; but
you’ll doubt the truth of your statement when intuition leads you through far hotter hells than anything you’ve seen up to now. And it will. Never doubt
that!

“But, eventually, you will have a solid faith that can’t be shaken by anything you encounter. You’ll know by then that intuitive awareness excells crude logic in any basic crisis.”

“It seems wrong,” said Bascomb dubiously, “the way we’ve been talking and thinking about it. Like something outside myself, driving, directing and telling me what to do without any volition of my own. It gives me an uncomfortable feeling to think of it that way.”

“It should, because that’s not the way to think of it. Intuition is not some mysterious little green man in your skull, giving instructions and keeping back data from you.

“Intuition is
you
—a function of you, just as imagination, logic, or any other functions are. Like the subconscious, it does withhold data from the logic department at times; but that doesn’t signify a separate entity by any means.

“The exact nature of intuition is, of course, still a mystery to us. We’ve only discovered how to restore it and use it to a degree. And like any other faculty, its operation can be improved and developed. What the top levels may be, we don’t know; none of us has reached there, yet.