The Year of the Jackpot Page 3

  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.

  Or the laws about indecent exposure, for that matter. The attempt to limit the Gypsy Rose syndrome by ignoring it had taken the starch out of enforcement. Now here was a report about the All Souls Community Church of Springfield; the pastor had reinstituted ceremonial nudity. Probably the first time this thousand years, Breen thought, aside from some screwball cults in Los Angeles. The reverend gentleman claimed that the ceremony was identical with the “dance of the high priestess” in the ancient temple of Karnak.

  Could be, but Breen had private information that the “priestess” had been working the burlesque and nightclub circuit before her present engagement. In any case, the holy leader was packing them in and had not been arrested.

  Two weeks later a hundred and nine churches in thirty-three states offered equivalent attractions. Breen entered them on his curves.

  This queasy oddity seemed to him to have no relation to the startling rise in the dissid
ent evangelical cults throughout the country. These churches were sincere, earnest and poor—but growing, ever since the War. Now they were multiplying like yeast.

  It seemed a statistical cinch that the United States was about to become godstruck again. He correlated it with Transcendentalism and the trek of the Latter Day Saints. Hmm, yes, it fitted. And the curve was pushing toward a crest.

  Billions in war bonds were now falling due; wartime marriages were reflected in the swollen peak of the Los Angeles school population. The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual. The Metropolitan Water District commissioners tried to stop it. It fell between the stools of the police powers of fifty “sovereign” cities. The taps remained open, trickling away the life blood of the desert paradise.

  The four regular party conventions—Dixiecrats, Regular Republicans, the Regular Regular Republicans, and the Democrats—attracted scant attention, because the Know-Nothings had not yet met. The fact that the “American Rally,” as the Know-Nothings preferred to be called, claimed not to be a party but an educational society did not detract from their strength. But what was their strength? Their beginnings had been so obscure that Breen had had to go back and dig into the December 1951 files, yet he had been approached twice this very week to join them, right inside his own office—once by his boss, once by the janitor.

  He hadn’t been able to chart the Know-Nothings. They gave him chills in his spine. He kept column-inches on them, found that their publicity was shrinking while their numbers were obviously zooming.

  Krakatoa blew up on July 18th. It provided the first important transPacific TV-cast. Its effect on sunsets, on solar constant, on mean temperature, and on rainfall would not be felt until later in the year.

  The San Andreas fault, its stresses unrelieved since the Long Beach disaster of 1933, continued to build up imbalance—an unhealed wound running the full length of the West Coast.

  Pelee and Etna erupted. Mauna Loa was still quiet.

  Flying Saucers seemed to be landing daily in every state. Nobody had exhibited one on the ground—or had the Department of Defense sat on them? Breen was unsatisfied with the off-the-record reports he had been able to get; the alcoholic content of some of them had been high. But the sea serpent on Ventura Beach was real; he had seen it. The troglodyte in Tennessee he was not in a position to verify.