The Non-Statistical Man (13 page)

“You’ll find there are some things intuition is not. Basically, it is a means of knowing things as they
do
exist, without particular recourse to the other senses, and relationships as they
are
and can be, without recourse to involved logic. Apart from this, it isn’t a means of time travel to know everything that’s going to occur in the future down to the end of your life. It
does
involve a considerable amount of prescience of the immediate future; but this fades exponentially as time increases the quantity of interlocking variables. It’s one of our most valuable properties, however, and one which we’re expanding rapidly.

“Basically, intuition seems to function on the premise of direct contact with the universe. We have to postulate a condition of no distance, and simultaneous contact with all portions of the universe at once, or at least at will. It’s very complex, but we think we’re on the right track.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Bascomb. “One thing
I’d like to be able to understand, however, is the viciousness of the attacks on me back home. There was nothing normal about that; nothing I did could possibly explain it. The police ignored my requests for help, and vandals attacked my family at will. All because I defended an innocent man they wanted to kill!”

“No.” Magruder shook his head. “Surely you don’t believe the attack was result of your defense of dementi?” “What else?”

“That’s one thing you
must
know, or one of the basic purposes of your coming has been lost. Look in your own mind and see if another reason is not apparent now.” Bascomb considered, and the illumination he’d experienced before seemed to bum slowly into brilliance again like a ripening sunburst. “Yes,” he said, “I understand, dementi had nothing to do with it.
They
thought dementi was the reason; but actually they fought me because of what I’d tried to teach about intuition.”

“That was it,” said Magruder. “The fury of a statistical society breaking out at the appearance of its more desirable rival. You can’t forget, surely, that men have always burned witches, and the few who found wisdom in their words. Prophets have always paid for their gift with their lives, in one way or another. Logic almost won; witches and prophets are few these days.

“You’ll learn even more fully how dependence on Society inhibits a man’s intuitive ability. You
have
learned that Society will fight Intuition, tooth and nail; it was absolutely necessary that you learn that lesson well.” “Why?” exclaimed Bascomb. “Wasn’t the knowledge available intuitively, without going through this unpleasant experience?”

“Don’t make the mistake of assuming intuition replaces experience,” Magruder said. “If that were true, we could become ascetics and spend our lives atop a high pole contemplating our belly buttons. Intuition serves to guide experience, not replace it. Intuitive knowledge that your neighbors would react as they did would not, of itself, have served to tear you from your statistical environment —without the actual experience of being subject to their reaction. It would have remained an academic matter, a further deterrent to your breaking away.

“Similarly, you might ask, if people can detect their own need of insurance in advance, can they not change
that need entirely? Can’t they avoid accidents headed their way? Sometimes they can—if it is appropriate to their total optimum world-experience for them to do so. Other times they can only prepare to meet the experience in an optimum manner.”

“But all your lecture students aren’t going through what I did!”

“No—you’re different because of what you are to become in this field. The others learn how to use it in their private lives, but they don’t talk about it; their intuition teaches them how to keep out of such jams. Yours led you to it, because of the lesson you had to learn—because you had to know, first-hand, how your neighbors and friends could turn on you with cold, vicious savagery because of this thing.

“You had to see Society mobilizing all the witch burning techniques accumulated over the ages, and realize these still exist; that science has not made them unnecessary, but is sometimes only a milder form of the same thing. You had to know that Society recognizes your possession as a death warrant for itself, that it will fight to the death for its own survival.

“You had to know how truly Man has become poor, little rich boy, sitting in the midst of his wealth of Christmas gadgetry which has become abundant beyond his capacity to use it; and that inside, a slowly crumbling psyche is leaving
him
a hollow, eyeless shell which will collapse upon the heap of shining gadgetry when his last internal fires are dead.

“But I say logic
almost
won; the battle isn’t quite over. Logic hasn’t wholly dispelled the society of witches and prophets and sorcerers and soothsayers. Their company has been considerably augmented since our discovery of processes to restore intuitive faculties in spite of the social pressures against them.

“I started five years ago while still at the University. I recruited slowly and carefully, and all of my original people are still with me. We moved about the country later, working at random, developing our methods, improving our means of contact and sheer existence in a statistical society. You have encountered reports on some of our work, we are only beginning.

“Six months ago, we decided on the experiment of taking over a whole community. We chose Myersville be
cause it already had a good stable foundation; you know our results. It’s to be our headquarters for some time to come.

“The general public here is not in on the secret of what, precisely, has happened to them, you understand. They are simply aware that they have decided to change their way of life; that they became fed up with the old one and voluntarily decided to improve. It shocks them now when they go away for a visit. But
we
didn’t do this. They did— after having experienced release of some of their intuitive faculties, which led them to cease their slavish dependence on Society.

“That’s about the whole story to date. We’re trying to recruit stronger men as time goes on. Our survey of your abilities showed you to be one of the strongest.”

“How could you know that?” Bascomb demanded abruptly. “I was buried, literally buried—in the statistical mass I called living. Why, Sarah’s intuitive bullseyes scared the daylights out of me!”

“We knew that—and we knew why. Your inherent endowment of intuitive faculties is so high that you had to make a choice very early in life: bury them completely, or risk the terror of complete ostracism by the Society which would regard you as an enemy to its own existence.

“There’s nothing shameful about that decision; it’s the one the whole race made in the dawn of its life. It was particularly fortunate that you married a woman like Sarah, who already had some understanding and belief in her own intuitive powers. She will be a great help to us, also.”

“You seem very sure we will go along with you!”

“Do you suppose we would have gone to the trouble we did, if we lacked positive, intuitive knowledge of that fact!” Magruder asked in astonishment.

Bascomb smiled in understanding. There was no argument to offer; he knew the Professor was quite correct. He knew it in the most positive way a man can ever gain any knowledge.

He
felt
it was the way things ought to be.

You don’t
know what age means until you’ve seen the Moon at close range. It’s not like the friendly face of an old man who’s lived a good, full life; it’s the white skeleton of a desert traveler, lost and picked clean by the buzzards. Ten thousand years ago.

They sent two of them down the first trip. McAulilfe and Joe Siddons. McAulilfe was a geologist, and Joe was an electromagnetic field man. Joe supposed that sort of combination was as likely to find the trouble on the Moon as any other, but he would have preferred someone nearer his own line. There was nothing for Mac and him to talk about. Just the trip itself, and neither of them wanted to talk much about that.

It should have been at least a five-man party, Joe told himself. He knew the kind of hassle that could spring up on these two-man patrols, and he didn’t relish the idea of any argument with Mac. The geologist was a big, broadshouldered man who looked more like a stevedore than a pebble chaser.

Joe was big enough to take care of himself in most comers he was liable to back into, but he didn’t want to stir up a hassle with anybody just now. He wanted to find out why nobody had ever come back from the Moon. He wanted to know what had happened to his closest friend, Dr. Radon Harcourt, who had been with Expedition Five.

Mac was handling the controls of the small rocket jumper. His eyes stayed on the glaring sector of the Moon’s disc that lit up the forward port. Joe felt of his straps, and glanced to starboard where the hovering space station provided a jump-off point for this Moon investigation.

He consulted the chart on the panel and pointed ahead of them. “A little to starboard, Mac. That’s the Caucasus Mountains over there. Base Five is somewhere along the foot of them at the edge of Mare Imbrium.”

Mac glanced at the chart for himself and corrected their fall. Above him, the television screen showed the row of officers watching from inside the space station itself, watching every move made by the two men in the rocket. Listening to every word they said.

Buzzards,
Joe thought.

He shook the animosity out of his mind. This was a
poor way to begin. Nobody could be blamed for Harcourt’s death; not yet, anyway. And nobody had forced him and Mac to come on this trip. They had volunteered to try for a Moon landing.

Men had been trying for twenty years or more. The first rockets naturally aimed for the Moon; they didn’t come back. The flash equipment, the mass of radio components —nothing had ever come out of the Moon to show that the expeditions had landed with the men alive.

There had been eight expeditions altogether before they finally gave up. By that time the atomics were ready, and Mars was as close to a man with a reactor pile as the Moon was to one with a rocket. Man had actually landed and returned from Mars without ever having walked upon the face of the Moon—as far as anyone knew.

The Moon was a jinx, they began to say. Men refused to sign for any new attempts on Earth’s own satellite, while they grasped eagerly for a chance at Mars again, or Venus.

But another Moon trip was finally organized. Expedition Five they called it, because it was the fifth under current operation or consideration. In it were three of the largest atomic ships, and almost two hundred men. Including Radon Harcourt.

None of them were ever seen again.

They had landed; that much was known. There had been messages telling of routine exploration, describing the cold, dead surface of the satellite. But within hours, almost, there came news of some kind of disaster. There were frantic, garbled reports of a division among members of the expedition. And then silence.

It was decided that something had to be done. This was a challenge that could be ignored no longer. The Moon had to be opened to exploration and its mystery solved. For this purpose, a space station, of the type built in an orbit around earth, was erected and towed into place in a Lunar orbit. A thousand specialists were poised to d&-mand an answer concerning the fate of the vanished men.

There were no precedents. Two-man crews in small jumper-rockets were arbitrarily decided upon to open a line of attack. Where hundreds had failed, perhaps two could find a simple answer as to why. McAuliffe and Siddons were the first to go, selected by lot from among the volunteers available.

They were eight miles up now, skimming the barren
plain of Mare Imbrium. Joe put his eye to the telescope, searching for evidence of Base Five.

“Got it,” he said suddenly. “Three ships in a triangle with the huts in the center. That’s it.” -

“All right, turnover,” said Mac. His fingers punched down.

Joe steeled himself against the sidewise tug and roll of the rockets as they turned the ship, halting its forward motion in an upward arc, then lowering it slowly on the tail jets. Mac steered carefully to bring them close to the deserted base. The jets blasted a cloud of pumice dust higher than the ship, and the rocket settled into the shallow crater.

Mac switched off the igniters. “End of the line, and nobody’s ever made the return trip. Why do you suppose we were damn fools enough to get into such a predicament as this?”

“There’s no predicament, yet,” said Joe. “As of now we could push the buttons and go right on back to the station.”

Mac looked carefully out the port at the dismal, aged Moonscape visible now as the dust cloud settled. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to do just that,” he said. “Just to break the luck of this damned place!”

Their first task was to set up the television transmitters which would keep the base area under surveillance of the officers aboard the space station. They would explore the area in full view of the men aboard the station. When they entered one of the huts, or the abandoned space ships, they were to be out of sight no more than twenty minutes. Their absence for a longer period would be the signal for the launching of a second rocket-jumper, whose occupants would go directly to the spot where Mac and Joe were last seen. And if this did not serve to locate the difficulty, other tricks were in reserve.

In their weighted suits they climbed down the fin ladder and scrambled up the side of the shallow depression blasted by the rockets. Straight ahead were the crags of the Caucasus Mountains, a sunlit bone heap.

At a distance of a hundred feet from the rocket, they turned. Joe spoke. “Joe Siddons reporting to Commander Ormsby. We have rigged the television cameras and are proceeding toward Base Five. Are we in view? Is the alignment satisfactory?”

“Very good,” said Ormsby. “Proceed according to plan.”

The men turned and slogged forward, dust foaming about their feet. Joe could imagine how it was up there on the station—the men crowding the television screens, the relief rocket standing by for emergency—