The End of the World Page 2

  “Nobody was on the bench with me. I had my hands in my lap. Those characters in the mixed-up clothes were standing nearby, but I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t thinking much except that my feet hurt and I wanted to get home—and how unbearably hot and sultry the weather was. Then—” her eyes became distant—“suddenly I knew what I had to do and it was very urgent that I do it. So I stood up and I—and I—” Her voice became shrill.

  “Take it easy!” he said sharply. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Huh? Why, Mr. Breen! I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “Of course not. Then what happened after you undressed?”

  “Why, you put your raincoat around me and you know the rest.” She faced him. “Say Potiphar, what were you doing with a raincoat? It hasn’t rained in weeks. This is the driest, hottest rainy season in years.”

  “In sixty-eight years, to be exact.”

  “Sixty—”

  “I carry a raincoat anyhow. Just a notion of mine, but I feel that when it does rain, it’s going to rain awfully hard.” He added, “Forty days and forty nights, maybe.”

  She decided that he was being humorous and laughed.

  He went on, “Can you remember how you got the idea of undressing?”

  She swirled her glass and thought. “I simply don’t know.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I expected.”

  “I don’t understand—unless you think I’m crazy. Do you?”

  “No. I think you had to do it and could not help it and don’t know why and can’t know why.”

  “But you know.” She said it accusingly.

  “Maybe. At least I have some figures. Ever take any interest in statistics, Meade?”

  She shook her head. “Figures confuse me. Never mind statistics—I want to know why I did what I did!”

  He looked at her very soberly. “I think we’re lemmings, Meade.”

  She looked puzzled, then horrified. “You mean those little furry mouselike creatures? The ones that—”

  “Yes. The ones that periodically make a death migration, until millions, hundreds of millions of them drown themselves in the sea. Ask a lemming why he does it. If you could get him to slow up his rush toward death, even money says he would rationalize his answer as well as any college graduate. But he does it because he has to—and so do we.”

  “That’s a horrid idea, Potiphar.”

  “Maybe. Come here, Meade. I’ll show you figures that confuse me, too.” He went to his desk and opened a drawer, took out a packet of cards. “Here’s one. Two weeks ago, a man sues an entire state legislature for alienation of his wife’s affection—and the judge lets the suit be tried. Or this one—a patent application for a device to lay the globe over on its side and warm up the arctic regions. Patent denied, but the inventor took in over three hundred thousand dollars in down payments on North Pole real estate before the postal authorities stepped in. Now he’s fighting the case and it looks as if he might win. And here—prominent bishop proposes applied courses in the so-called facts of life in high schools.”

  He put the card away hastily. “Here’s a dilly—a bill introduced in the Alabama lower house to repeal the laws of atomic energy. Not the present statutes, but the natural laws concerning nuclear physics: the wording makes that plain.” He shrugged. “How silly can you get?”

  “They’re crazy.”

  “No, Meade. One like that might be crazy; a lot of them becomes a lemming death march. No, don’t object—I’ve plotted them on a curve. The last time we had anything like this was the so-called Era of Wonderful Nonsense. But this one is much worse.” He delved into a lower drawer, hauled out a graph. “The amplitude is more than twice as great and we haven’t reached peak. What the peak will be, I don’t dare guess—three separate rhythms, reinforcing.”

  She peered at the curves. “You mean that the lad with the arctic real estate deal is somewhere on this line?”

  “He adds to it. And back here on the last crest are the flagpole sitters and the goldfish swallowers and the Ponzi hoax and the marathon dancers and the man who pushed a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose. You’re on the new crest—or you will be when I add you in.”

  She made a face. “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I. But it’s as clear as a bank statement. This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, ‘Wubba, wubba, wubba.’”

  She shivered. “Do you suppose I could have another drink? Then I’ll go.”

  “I have a better idea. I owe you a dinner for answering questions. Pick a place and we’ll have a cocktail before.”

  She chewed her lip. “You don’t owe me anything. And I don’t feel up to facing a restaurant crowd. I might—I might—”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” he said sharply. “It doesn’t hit twice.”

  “You’re sure? Anyhow, I don’t want to face a crowd.” She glanced at his kitchen door. “Have you anything to eat in there? I can cook.”

  “Um, breakfast things. And there’s a pound of ground top round in the freezer compartment and some rolls. I sometimes make hamburgers when I don’t want to go out.”

  She headed for the kitchen. “Drunk or sober, fully dressed or—or naked, I can cook. You’ll see.”

  He did see. Open-faced sandwiches with the meat married to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by scraped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his refrigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized. They ate it on the tiny balcony, sopping it down with cold beer.

  He sighed and wiped his mouth. “Yes, Meade, you can cook.”

  “Some day I’ll arrive with proper materials and pay you back. Then I’ll prove it.”

  “You’ve already proved it. Nevertheless, I accept. But I tell you three times—which makes it true, of course—that you owe me nothing.”

  “No? If you hadn’t been a Boy Scout, I’d be in jail.”

  Breen shook his head. “The police have orders to keep it quiet at all costs—to keep it from growing. You saw that. And, my dear, you weren’t a person to me at the time. I didn’t even see your face.”

  “You saw plenty else!”

  “Truthfully, I didn’t look. You were just a—a statistic.”

  She toyed with her knife and said puzzled, “I’m not sure, but I think I’ve just been insulted. In all the twenty-five years that I’ve fought men off, more or less successfully, I’ve been called a lot of names—but a ‘statistic?’ Why, I ought to take your slide rule and beat you to death with it.”

  “My dear young lady—”

  “I’m not a lady, that’s for sure. But I’m not a statistic, either.”

  “My dear Meade, then. I wanted to tell you, before you did anything hasty, that in college I wrestled varsity middleweight.”

  She grinned and dimpled. “That’s more the talk a girl likes to hear. I was beginning to be afraid you had been assembled in an adding machine factory. Potty, you’re really a dear.”

  “If that is a diminutive of my given name, I like it. But if it refers to my waist line, I definitely resent it.”

  She reached across and patted his stomach. “I like your waist line; lean and hungry men are difficult. If I were cooking for you regularly, I’d really pad it.”

  “Is that a proposal?”

  “Let it lie, let it lie. Potty, do you really think the whole country is losing its buttons?”

  He sobered at once. “It’s worse than that.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come inside. I’ll show you.”

  They gathered up dishes and dumped them in the sink, Breen talking all the while.

  “As a kid, I was fascinated by numbers. Numbers are pretty things and they combine in such interesting configurations. I took my degree in math, of course, and got a job as a junior actuary with Midwestern Mutual—the insurance outfit. That was fun. No way on Earth to tell when a particular man is going to die, but
an absolute certainty that so many men of a certain age group would die before a certain date. The curves were so lovely—and they always worked out. Always. You didn’t have to know why; you could predict with dead certainty and never know why. The equations worked; the curves were right.

  “I was interested in astronomy, too; it was the one science where individual figures worked out neatly, completely, and accurately, down to the last decimal point that the instruments were good for. Compared with astronomy, the other sciences were mere carpentry and kitchen chemistry.

  “I found there were nooks and crannies in astronomy where individual numbers won’t do, where you have to go over to statistics, and I became even more interested. I joined the Variable Star Association and I might have gone into astronomy professionally, instead of what I’m in now—business consultation—if I hadn’t gotten interested in something else.”

  “‘Business consultation?’” repeated Meade. “Income tax work?”

  “Oh, no. That’s too elementary. I’m the numbers boy for a firm of industrial engineers. I can tell a rancher exactly how many of his Hereford bull calves will be sterile. Or I can tell a motion picture producer how much rain insurance to carry on location. Or maybe how big a company in a particular line must be to carry its own risk in industrial accidents. And I’m right. I’m always right.”

  “Wait a minute. Seems to me a big company would have to have insurance.”

  “Contrariwise. A really big corporation begins to resemble a statistical universe.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. I got interested in something else—cycles. Cycles are everything, Meade. And everywhere. The tides. The seasons. Wars. Love. Everybody knows that in the spring the young man’s fancy lightly turns to what the girls never stopped thinking about, but did you know that it runs in an eighteen-year-plus cycle as well? And that a girl born at the wrong swing of the curve doesn’t stand nearly as good a chance as her older or younger sister?”

  “Is that why I’m still a doddering old maid?”

  “You’re twenty-five?” He pondered. “Maybe, but your chances are improving again; the curve is swinging up. Anyhow, remember you are just one statistic; the curve applies to the group. Some girls get married every year.”

  “Don’t call me a statistic,” she repeated firmly.

  “Sorry. And marriages match up with acreage planted to wheat, with wheat cresting ahead. You could almost say that planting wheat makes people get married.”

  “Sounds silly.”

  “It is silly. The whole notion of cause-and-effect is probably superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house building right after a peak in marriages.”

  “Now that makes sense.”

  “Does it? How many newlyweds do you know who can afford to build a house? You might as well blame it on wheat acreage. We don’t know why; it just is.”

  “Sun spots, maybe?”

  “You can correlate Sun spots with stock prices, or Columbia River salmon, or woman’s skirts. And you are just as much justified in blaming short skirts for Sun spots as you are in blaming Sun spots for salmon. We don’t know. But the curves go on just the same.”

  “But there has to be some reason behind it.”

  “Does there? That’s mere assumption. A fact has no ‘why.’ There it stands, self-demonstrating. Why did you take your clothes off today?”

  She frowned. “That’s not fair.”

  “Maybe not. But I want to show you why I’m worried.”

  He went into the bedroom, came out with a large roll of tracing paper.

  “We’ll spread it on the floor. Here they are, all of them. The 54-year cycle—see the Civil War there? See how it matches in? The eighteen and one-third-year cycle, the 9-plus cycle, the 41-month shorty, the three rhythms of Sun spots—everything, all combined in one grand chart. Mississippi River floods, fur catches in Canada, stock market prices, marriages, epidemics, freight-car loadings, bank clearings, locust plagues, divorces, tree growth, wars, rainfall, Earth magnetism, building construction, patents applied for, murders—you name it; I’ve got it there.”

  She stared at the bewildering array of wavy lines. “But, Potty, what does it mean?”

  “It means that these things all happen, in regular rhythm, whether we like it or not. It means that when skirts are due to go up, all the stylists in Paris can’t make ’em go down. It means that when prices are going down, all the controls and supports and government planning can’t make ’em go up.” He pointed to a curve. “Take a look at the grocery ads. Then turn to the financial page and read how the Big Brains try to double-talk their way out of it. It means that when an epidemic is due, it happens, despite all the public health efforts. It means we’re lemmings.”

  She pulled her lip. “I don’t like it. ‘I am the master of my fate,’ and so forth. I’ve got free will, Potty. I know I have—I can feel it.”

  “I imagine every little neutron in an atom bomb feels the same way. He can go spung! or he can sit still, just as he pleases. But statistical mechanics work out all the same and the bomb goes off—which is what I’m leading up to. See anything odd there. Meade?”

  She studied the chart, trying not to let the curving lines confuse her.

  “They sort of bunch up over at the right end.”

  “You’re dern tootin’ they do! See that dotted vertical line? That’s right now—and things are bad enough. But take a look at that solid vertical; that’s about six months from now—and that’s when we get it. Look at the cycles—the long ones, the short ones, all of them. Every single last one of them reaches either a trough or a crest exactly on—or almost on—that line.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “What do you think? Three of the big ones troughed back in 1929 and the depression almost ruined us… even with the big 54-year cycle supporting things. Now we’ve got the big one troughing—and the few crests are not things that help. I mean to say, tent caterpillars and influenza don’t do us any good. Meade, if statistics mean anything, this tired old planet hasn’t seen a trend like this since Eve went into the apple business. I’m scared.”

  She searched his face. “Potty, you’re not simply having fun with me? You know I can’t check up on you.”

  “I wish to heaven I were. No, Meade, I can’t fool about numbers; I wouldn’t know how. This is it. 1952—The Year of the Jackpot.”

  Meade was very silent as he drove her home. When they approached West Los Angeles, she said, “Potty?”

  “Yes, Meade?”

  “What do we do about it?”

  “What do you do about a hurricane? You pull in your ears. What can you do about an atom bomb? You try to outguess it, not be there when it goes off. What else can you do?”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a few moments, then added, “Potty, will you tell me which way to jump?”

  “Huh? Oh, sure! If I can figure it out.”

  He took her to her door, turned to go.

  She said, “Potty!”

  He faced her. “Yes, Meade?”

  She grabbed his head, shook it—then kissed him fiercely on the mouth. “There, is that just a statistic?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “It had better not be,” she said dangerously. “Potty, I think I’m going to have to change your curve.”

  II

  RUSSIANS REJECT UN NOTE

  MISSOURI FLOOD DAMAGE EXCEEDS 1951 RECORD

  MISSISSIPPI MESSIAH DEFIES COURT

  NUDIST CONVENTION STORMS BAILEY’S BEACH

  BRITISH-IRAN TALKS STILL DEAD-LOCKED

  FASTER-THAN-LIGHT WEAPON PROMISED

  TYPHOON DOUBLING BACK ON MANILA

  MARRIAGE SOLEMNIZED ON FLOOR OF HUDSON

  New York, 13 July—In a specially constructed diving suit built for two, Merydith Smithe, cafe society headline girl, and Prince Augie Schleswieg of New York and the Riviera were united today by Bishop Dalton in a service televised with the aid of the Navy’s ultra-new—

  As the
Year of the Jackpot progressed, Breen took melancholy pleasure in adding to the data which proved that the curve was sagging as predicted. The undeclared World War continued its bloody, blundering way at half a dozen spots around a tortured globe. Breen did not chart it; the headlines were there for anyone to read. He concentrated on the odd facts in the other pages of the papers, facts which, taken singly, meant nothing, but taken together showed a disastrous trend.

  He listed stock market prices, rainfall, wheat futures, but the “silly season” items were what fascinated him. To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When, for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood? What were the gradations between National Cancer Week and National Athlete’s Foot Week? On what day had the American people finally taken leave of horse sense?

  Take transvestism. Male-and-female dress customs were arbitrary, but they had seemed to be deeply rooted in the culture. When did the breakdown start? With Marlene Dietrich’s tailored suits? By the late nineteen-forties, there was no “male” article of clothing that a woman could not wear in public—but when had men started to slip over the line? Should he count the psychological cripples who had made the word “drag” a by-word in Greenwich Village and Hollywood long before this outbreak? Or were they “wild shots” not belonging on the curve? Did it start with some unknown normal man attending a masquerade and there discovering that skirts actually were more comfortable and practical than trousers? Or had it started with the resurgence of Scottish nationalism reflected in the wearing of kilts by many Scottish-Americans?

  Ask a lemming to state his motives! The outcome was in front of him, a news story. Transvestism by draft dodgers had at last resulted in a mass arrest in Chicago which was to have ended in a giant joint trial—only to have the deputy prosecutor show up in a pinafore and defy the judge to submit to an examination to determine the judge’s true sex. The judge suffered a stroke and died and the trial was postponed—postponed forever, in Breen’s opinion; he doubted that this particular blue law would ever again be enforced.