"You know something?" he finally said.
"What?"
"It might be worth a try."
He swiveled about then and leaned forward to re-coordinate, but she was there first. As he pressed the buttons and the S-7 swung around, she kissed him. Below her dark glasses her cheeks were moist.
II
the suicide bothered him more than it should have, and Mrs. Lambert had called the day before to cancel her appointment. So Render decided to spend the morning being pensive. Accordingly, he entered the office wearing a cigar and a frown.
"Did you see ... ?" asked Mrs. Hedges.
"Yes." He pitched his coat onto the table that stood in the far corner of the room. He crossed to the window, stared down. "Yes," he repeated, "I was driving by with my windows clear. They were still cleaning up when I passed."
"Did you know him?"
"I don't even know the name yet. How could I?"
"Priss Tully just called me—she's a receptionist for that engineering outfit up on the eighty-sixth. She says it was James Irizarry, an ad designer who had offices down the hall from them. That's a long way to fall. He must have been unconscious when he hit, huh? He bounced off the building. If you open the window and lean out you can see-off to the left there-where . .."
"Never mind, Bennie. Your friend have any idea why he did it?"
"Not really. His secretary came running up the hall, screaming. Seems she went in his office to see him about some drawings, just as he was getting up over the sill. There was a note on his board. 'I've had everything I wanted.' it said. 'Why wait around?' Sort of funny, huh? I don't mean funny...
"Yeah... Know anything about his personal affairs?"
"Married. Coupla kids. Good professional rep. Lots of
business. Sober as anybody. He could afford an office in this building."
"Good Lord!" Render turned. "Have you got a case file there or something?"
"You know," she shrugged her thick shoulders, "I've got friends all over this hive. We always talk when things go slow. Prissy's my sister-in-law anyhow—"
"You mean that if I dived through this window right now, my current biography would make the rounds in the next five minutes?"
"Probably"—she twisted her bright lips into a smile—"give or take a couple. But don't do it today, huh? You know, it would be kind of anticlimactic, and it wouldn't get the same coverage as a solus.
"Anyhow," she continued, "you're a mind-mixer. You wouldn't do it."
"You're betting against statistics," he observed. "The medical profession, along with attorneys, manages about three times as many as most other work areas."
"Hey!" She looked worried. "Go "way from my window!
"I'd have to go to work for Dr. Hanson then," she added, "and he's a slob."
He moved to her desk.
"I never know when to take you seriously," she decided.
"I appreciate your concern"—he nodded—"indeed I do. As a matter of fact, I have never been statistic-prone—I should have repercussed out of the neuropy game four years ago."
"You'd be a headline, though," she mused. "All those reporters asking me about you... Hey, why do they do it, huh?"
"Who?"
"Anybody."
"How should I know, Bennie? I'm only a humble psyche-stirrer. If I could pinpoint a general underlying cause— and then maybe figure a way to anticipate the thing—why, it might even be better than my jumping, for newscopy. But
I can't do it, because there is no single, simple reason—I don't think."
"Oh."
"About thirty-five years ago it was the ninth leading cause of death in the United States. Now it's number six for north and South America. I think it's seventh in Europe."
"And nobody will ever really know why Irizarry jumped?"
Render swung a chair backwards and seated himself. He knocked an ash into her petite and gleaming tray. She emptied it into the waste-chute, hastily, and coughed a significant cough.
"Oh, one can always speculate," he said, "and one in my profession will. The first thing to consider would be the personality traits which might predispose a man to periods of depression. People who keep their emotions under rigid control, people who are conscientious and rather compulsively concerned with small matters..." He knocked another fleck of ash into her tray and watched as she reached out to dump, then quickly drew her hand back again. He grinned an evil grin. "In short," he finished, "some of the characteristics of people in professions which require individual, rather than group performance—medicine, law, the arts."
She regarded him speculatively.
"Don't worry though—" he chuckled—"I'm pleased as hell with life."
"You're kind of down in the mouth this morning."
"Pete called me. He broke his ankle yesterday in gym class. They ought to supervise those things more closely. I'm thinking of changing his school."
"Again?"
"Maybe. I'll see. The headmaster is going to call me this afternoon. I don't like to keep shuffling him, but I do want him to finish school in one piece."
"A kid can't grow up without an accident or two. It's— statistics."
"Statistics aren't the same thing as destiny, Bennie. Everybody makes his own."
"Statistics or destiny?"
"Both, I guess."
"I think that if something's going to happen, it's going to happen."
"I don't. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be in the racket I'm in."
"The world's a machine—you know—cause, effect. Statistics do imply the prob—"
"The human mind is not a machine, and I do not know cause and effect. Nobody does."
"You have a degree in chemistry, as I recall. You're a scientist, Doc."
"So I'm a Trotskyite deviationist"—he smiled, stretching— "and you were once a ballet teacher." He got to his feet and picked up his coat.
"By the way, Miss Deville called, left a message. She said: 'How about St. Moritz?' "
"Too ritzy," he decided aloud. "It's going to be Davos." Because the suicide bothered him more than it should have, Render closed the door of his office and turned off the windows and turned on the phonograph. He put on the desk light only.
How has the quality of human life been changed, he wrote, since the beginnings of the industrial revolution?
He picked up the paper and reread the sentence. It was the topic he had been asked to discuss that coming Saturday. As was typical in such cases he did not know what to say because he had too much to say, and only an hour to say it in.
He got up and began to pace the office, now filled with Beethoven's Eighth Symphony.
"The power to hurt," he said, snapping on a lapel microphone and activating his recorder, "has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement." His imaginary audience grew quiet. He smiled. "Man's potential for working simple mayhem has been multiplied by mass-production; his capacity for injuring the psyche through personal con-
tacts has expanded in an exact ratio to improved communication facilities. But these are all matters of common knowledge, and are not the things I wish to consider tonight. Rather, I should like to discuss what I choose to call autopsy-chomimesis—the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually represent radical dispersions of psychic energy. They are peculiar to our times..."
He paused to dispose of his cigar and formulate his next words.