Kate Wilhelm by The Downstairs Room (epub)

Author:The Downstairs Room (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes there is no explanation. I tell you this because—I want to tell you this. Perhaps I had become bored with statistics. I don’t remember if that preceded the story. Possibly it did. Perhaps I merely got tired of seeing a whole economy, an entire civilization, geared to a thing that doesn’t even exist: an average man.

The Plausible Improbable

JAMES Jeffrey Wentworth Moore knew when he was going to die. Also he suspected how. James Jeffrey Wentworth Moore, at sixty-two, also knew he was a living refutation of all the arguments, hypotheses, and proofs of determinism. In time his very presence would have sufficed to scrub every theory of causality. Proponents of the school of probability, moreover, had reason to shudder as his name became known to them, for he was both the exception to and undeniable proof of the rule of the statistical norm. Things happened to James Jeffrey Wentworth Moore that were uncaused, things that ranged far beyond the chance of probability, and yet, strangely, gave it credence.

His very birth, he was wont to think, had been an improbable feat. At fifty-two, Mrs. Moore had long since denied herself the questionable pleasure of counting days when her weeks on the calendar failed to divide her years into a pattern of twenty-eight-day cycles. Thus it was that she suddenly became aware of the child within only after he had been there and growing some four months. Time running its due course brought about the necessary development of the foetus and he became James Jeff…But enough of that.

In the first five years of his life James had every conceivable childhood disease; some of them he repeated once or twice; some of the things he had a modern virologist would be hard put to give a name to. The casual reader will shrug and mutter, so do a lot of brats. But consider: James was the only child of an aged couple who oversheltered him, clasping the sickly child to their bosoms until they must have been as filters through which all bacteria and viruses necessarily had to pass. From what source then the measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc., but improbable or no, they did pass. Dr. Spock could have researched this one child and, using this data alone, produced a tome double the volume of the one extant, which would have been enough reference book for any mother to diagnose everything that resulted in fever and bed, for every subsequent infant born.

From his sixth birthday to the date of this telling, James never had another illness. It was as if a statistical table with the figures of so many hours of bedridden illness had been consulted and in the shortest possible time had been complied with. Suppose one did a week’s sleeping at one time, fifty-six hours, and then remained awake the remaining one hundred twelve hours. So it was with the hours, days, weeks, years that a normal person is confined to bed. James was normal; he merely got all his in early, you might say.

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