Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

His silence sapped the melodramatic force from my little parting speech.

“Goodbye,” I said, feeling silly, and hung up with a crash.

Now winter closed upon the city. Some years no snow comes until January or even February; but we had a white Thanksgiving, and in the early weeks of December there was blizzard after blizzard, until it seemed that all life in New York would be crushed in the grip of a new ice age. The city has sophisticated snow-removal equipment, heating cables buried in the streets, sanitation trucks with melt-tanks, an armada of scoops and catchments and scrapers and skimmers, but no gadgetry could cope with a season that dropped ten centimeters of snow on Wednesday, a dozen more on Friday, fifteen on Monday, half a meter on Saturday. Occasionally we had a thaw between storms, allowing the top of the accumulated pack to soften and slush to drip into the gutters, but then came the cold again, the killing cold, and what had melted turned quickly to knife-edged ice. All activities halted in the frozen city. A weird silence prevailed. I stayed indoors; so did anyone else who had no powerful reason for going out. The year 1999, the whole twentieth century, seemed to be taking leave in frigid stealth.

In this bleak time I had virtually no contact with anyone except Bob Lombroso. The financier phoned five or six days after my dismissal to express his regrets. “But why,” he wanted to know, “did you ever decide to tell Mardikian the real story?”

“I felt I had no choice. He and Quinn had stopped taking me seriously.”

“And they’d take you more seriously if you claimed to be able to see the future?”

“I gambled. I lost.”

“For a man who’s always had such a superb sixth sense of intuition, Lew, you handled that situation in a strikingly dumb way.”

“I know. I know. I suppose I thought Mardikian had a more resilient imagination. Maybe I overestimated Quinn, too.”

“Haig didn’t get where he is today by having a resilient imagination,” Lombroso said. “As for the mayor, he’s playing for big stakes and he doesn’t feel like taking any unnecessary risks.”

“I’m a necessary risk, Bob. I can help him.”

“If you have any notion of persuading him to take you back, forget it. Quinn’s terrified of you.”

“Terrified?”

“Well, maybe that’s too strong a word. But you make him profoundly uncomfortable. He half suspects that you might actually be able to do the things you claim. I think that’s what scares him.”

“That he may have fired an authentic seer?”

“No, that authentic seers exist at all. He said — and this is absolutely confidential, Lew, it’ll do me harm if he finds out you’ve heard this — he said that the idea that people might really be capable of seeing the future oppresses him like a hand around his throat. That it makes him feel paranoid, that it limits his options, that it makes the horizon close in around him. Those are his phrases. He hates the entire concept of determinism; he believes he’s a man who’s always been the shaper of his own destinies, and he feels a kind of existential terror when faced with somebody who maintains that the future is a fixed record, a book that can be opened and read. Because that turns him into a sort of puppet following a preordained pattern. It takes a lot to push Paul Quinn into paranoia, but I think you’ve succeeded. And what bothers him particularly is that he hired you, he made you a member of his inner team, he kept you close by him for four years, without realizing what a threat you were to him.”

“I’ve never been a threat to him, Bob.”

“He sees it differently.”

“He’s wrong. For one thing, the future hasn’t been an open book to me all the years I’ve been with him. I worked by means of stochastic processes until quite recently, until I got entangled with Carvajal. You know that.”

“But Quinn doesn’t.”

“What of it? It’s absurd for him to feel threatened by me. Look, my feelings about Quinn have always been a mingling of awe and admiration and respect and, well, love. Love. Even now. I still think he’s a great human being and a great political leader, and I want to see him become President, and though I wish he hadn’t panicked over me I don’t resent it at all. I can see how from his viewpoint it might have seemed necessary to get rid of me. But I still want to do all I can for him.”

“He won’t take you back, Lew.”

“Okay. I accept that. But I can still work for him without his knowing it.”

“How?”

“Through you,” I said. “I can pass suggestions along to you and you can convey them to Quinn as though you’ve thought of them yourself.”

“If I come to him with the sort of things you’ve been bringing him,” Lombroso said, “he’ll get rid of me as fast as he got rid of you. Maybe faster.”

“They won’t be the same sort, Bob. For one thing, I know now what’s too risky to tell him. For another, I don’t have my source any more. I’ve broken with Carvajal. You know, he never warned me I was going to get fired? Sudakis’ future he tells me about, but not my own. I think he wanted me to get fired. Carvajal’s been nothing but grief to me, and I’m not going back for more of the same. But I still have my own intuitive processes to offer, my stochastic knack. I can analyze trends and generalize strategies, and I can relay my insights to you, can’t I? Can’t I? We’ll fix it so Quinn and Mardikian never find out that you and I are in contact. You can’t just let me go to waste, Bob. Not while there’s still a job to do for Quinn. Well?”

“We can try,” said Lombroso warily. “I suppose we can give it a try, yes. All right. I’ll be your mouthpiece, Lew. Provided you allow me the option of deciding what I want to pass along to Quinn and what I don’t. It’s my neck on the block now, remember, not yours.”

“Sure,” I told him.

If I couldn’t serve Quinn myself, I could do it by proxy. For the first time since my dismissal I felt alive and hopeful. It didn’t even snow that night.

But the proxy arrangement didn’t work out. We tried, and we failed. I diligently sat down with the newspapers and caught up with current developments — one week out of touch and I had lost track of half a dozen emerging patterns — and then I made the perilous frosty journey across town to the Lew Nichols Associates office, still a going concern though ticking but feebly, and ran off some projections on my machinery. I transmitted the results to Bob Lombroso by courier, not wanting to chance the telephone. What I gave him was no big deal, a couple of piffling suggestions about city labor policy. During the next few days I generated a few more equally tame ideas. Then Lombroso called and said, “You might as well stop. Mardikian shot us down.”

“What happened?”

“I’ve been feeding your stuff in, you know, a bit at a time. Then last night I had dinner with Haig and when we reached the dessert he suddenly asked me if you and I were keeping in touch.”

“And you told him the truth?”

“I tried not to tell him anything,” Lombroso said. “I was cagey, but I guess not cagey enough. Haig’s pretty sharp, you know. He saw right through me. He said, You’re getting this stuff from Lew, aren’t you? And I shrugged and he laughed and said, I know you are. It’s got his touch all over it. I didn’t admit anything. Haig just assumed — and his assumptions were correct. Very amiably he told me to cut it out, that I’d be jeopardizing my own position with Quinn if the mayor started to suspect what was going on.”

“Then Quinn doesn’t know yet?”

“Apparently not. And Mardikian isn’t planning to tip him off. But I can’t take any chances. If Quinn gets wise to me, I’m through. He goes into absolute paranoia whenever anyone mentions the name of Lew Nichols around him.”