For your copyreader is a worrier. He worries because each day he handles the fresh and bleeding incidents that shape the course of human destiny, and there probably is no one who knows more surely nor feels more keenly the knife-edge balance between survival and disaster.
Charley Porter worried more than most. He worried about a lot of things that didn’t seem to call for worry.
There was the matter, for instance, of those “impossible” stories happening in sequence. The other men on the copydesk took notice of them after two or three had occurred, and talked about them—among themselves, naturally, for no proper copyreader ever talks to anyone but another copyreader. But they passed them off with only casual mention.
Charley worried about the incidents, secretly, of course, since he could see that none of his fellow copyreaders felt them worthy of really serious worry. After he had done a lot of worrying, he began to see some similarity among them, and that was when he really got down on the floor and wrestled with himself.
First there had been the airliner downed out in Utah. Bad weather held up the hunt for it, but finally air searchers spotted the wreckage strewn over half a mountain peak. Airline officials said there was no hope that any had survived. But when the rescuers were halfway to the wreckage, they met the survivors walking out; every single soul had lived through the crash.
Then there was the matter of Midnight, the 64 to 1 shot, winning the Derby.
And, after that, the case of the little girl who didn’t have a chance of getting well. They held a party for her weeks ahead of time so she could have a final birthday. Her picture was published coast to coast and the stories about her made you want to cry and thousands of people sent her gifts and postcards. Then, suddenly, she got well. Not from any new wonder drug or from any new medical technique. She just got well, some time in the night.
A few days later the wires carried the story about old Pal, the coon dog down in Kentucky who got trapped inside a cave. Men dug for days and yelled encouragement. The old dog whined back at them, but finally he didn’t whine any more and the digging was getting mighty hard. So the men heaped boulders into the hole they’d dug and built a cairn. They said pious, angry, hopeless words, then went back to their cabins and their plowing.
The next day old Pal came home. He was a walking rack of bones, but he still could wag his tail. The way he went through a bowl of milk made a man feel good just to see him do it. Everyone agreed that old Pal must finally have found a way to get out by himself.
Except that an old dog buried in a cave for days, getting weaker all the time from lack of food and water, doesn’t find a way to get out by himself.
And little dying girls don’t get well, just like that, in the middle of the night.
And 64 to 1 shots don’t win the Derby.
And planes don’t shatter themselves among the Utah peaks with no one getting hurt at all.
A miracle, sure. Two miracles, even. But not four in a row and within a few weeks of one another.
It took Charley quite a while to establish some line of similarity. When he did, it was a fairly thin line. But thick enough at least, to justify more worry.
The line of similarity was this: All the stories were “running” or developing stories.
There had been a stretch of two days during which the world waited for the facts of the plane crash. It had been known for days before the race that Midnight would run and that he didn’t have a chance. The story of the doomed little girl had been a matter of public interest for weeks. The old coon dog had been in the cave a week or more before the men gave up and went back to their homes.
In each of the stories, the result was not known until some time after the situation itself was known. Until the final fact was actually determined, there existed an infinite number of probabilities, some more probable than others, but with each probability’s having at least a fighting chance. When you flip a dime into the air, there always exists the infinitesimal probability, from the moment you flip it until it finally lands heads or tails, that it will land on edge and stay there. Until the fact that it is heads or tails is established, the probability of its landing on edge continues to remain.
And that was exactly what had happened, Charley told himself: the doubt had been flipped four times, and four times running it had stood on edge.
There was one minor dissimilarity, of course … the plane crash. It didn’t quite fit.
Each event had been a spin of the dime, and while that dime was still in the air, and the public held its breath, a little girl had gotten well, somehow, and a dog had escaped from a cave, somehow, and a 64 to 1 shot had developed whatever short-lived properties of physique and temperament are necessary to make long shots win.
But the plane crash—there had been no thought of it until after the fact. By the time the crash came into the public eye, the dime was down, and what had happened on that mountain peak had already happened, and all the hopes and prayers offered for the safety of the passengers were, actually, retroactive in the face of the enormous probability that all had perished.
Please, let the dog escape. Tonight.
Let the little girl get well. Soon.
Let my long shot come in. Next week.
Let the passengers be alive. Since yesterday.
Somehow the plane crash worried Charley most of all.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, and with no logic whatsoever, the Iranian situation cleared up, just when it began to look as if it might be another Korea.
A few days later Britain announced proudly that it had weathered its monetary storm, that all was well with the sterling bloc, and London would need no further loans.
It took a while for Charley to tie these two stories up with the plane-girl-Derby-hound-dog sequence. But then he saw that they belonged and that was when he remembered something else that might—well, not tie in, exactly—but might have something to do with this extraordinary run of impossibilities.
After work, he went down to the Associated Press office and had an office boy haul out the files, stapled books of carboned flimsies—white flimsies for the A wire, blue flimsies for the B wire, yellow for the sports wire and pink for the market wire. He knew what he was looking for hadn’t come over either the market or the sports wire, so he passed them up and went through the A and B wire sheets story by story.
He couldn’t remember the exact date the story had come over, but he knew it had been since Memorial Day, so he started with the day after Memorial Day and worked forward.
He remembered the incident clearly. Jensen, the slot man, had picked it up and read it through. Then he had laughed and put it on the spike.
One of the others asked: “What was funny, Jens?”
So Jensen took the story off the spike and threw it over to him. It had gone the rounds of the desk, with each man reading it, and finally it had got back to the spike again.
And that had been the last of it. For the story was too wacky for any newsman to give a second glance. It had all the earmarks of the phony.
Charley didn’t find what he was looking for the first day, although he worked well into the evening—so he went back the next afternoon, and found it.
It was out of a little resort town up in Wisconsin, and it told about an invalid named Cooper Jackson who had been bedridden since he was two or three years old. The story said that Cooper’s old man claimed that Cooper could foresee things, that he would think of something or imagine something during the evening and the next day it would happen. Things like Linc Abrams’ driving his car into the culvert at Trout Run and coming out all right himself, but with the car all smashed to flinders, and like the Reverend Amos Tucker’s getting a letter from a brother he hadn’t heard from in more than twenty years.