Speaker 1: My first experience with a great logician by Jacques Foutrelle.
It was once my good fortune to meet in person
Professor Augustus s. F X Van Duson, pH D, L D,
frs M, D, et cetera. The meeting came about through
a singular happening which was as mystifying as it was
dangerous to me. He saved my life in fact, and
in process of hauling me back from eternity, the edge
of that appalling mist which separates life and death, I
had full opportunity of witnessing the workings of that marvelously keen,
cold brain which has made him the most distinguished scientist
and logician of his day. It was some time afterward, however,
that Professor Van Dusson was identified in my mind with
the thinking machine. I had dined at the Hotel Teutonic,
taken a cigar from my pocket, lighted it, and started
for a stroll across Boston Common. It was after eight
o'clock on one of those clear, nippy evenings of winter.
I was near the center of the Common, on one
of the many little bipaths which lead toward Beacon Hill,
when I became conscious of an acute pain in my chest,
a sudden fluttering of my heart, and a constriction in
my throat. The lights in the distance began to waver
and grow dim. Perspiration broke out all over me from
an inward, gnawing agony, which grew more intense each moment.
I felt myself reeling. My cigar dropped from my fingers,
and I clutched at a seat to steady myself. There
was no one near me. I tried to call. Then
everything grew dark and I sank down on the ground.
My last recollection was of a figure approaching me. The
last words I heard were a petulant, irritable dear me.
Then I was lost to consciousness. When I recovered consciousness,
I lay on a couch in a strange room. My
eyes wandered weakly about and lingered with a certain childish
interest on half a dozen spots which reflected glitteringly the
light of an electric bulb sat high up on one side.
These bright spots, I came to realize after a moment,
were metal parts of various instruments of a laboratory. For
a time, I lay helpless, listless, with trembling pulse and
ear drums thumping. Then I heard steps approaching, and someone
bent over and peered into my face. It was a man,
but such a man as I had never seen before.
A great shock of straw yellow hair tumbled about a broad,
high forehead, a small, wrinkled, querulous face, the face of
an aged child, a pair of watery blue eyes squinting
aggressively through thicked spectacles, and a thin lipped mouth as
straight as the mark of a surgeon's knife, save for
the drooping corners. My impression then was that it was
some sort of hallucination, the distorted vagary of a disordered brain.
But gradually my vision cleared, and the grip of slender
fingers on my pulse made me realize the actuality of
the apparition. How do you feel? The thin lips had
opened just enough to let out the question. The tone
was curt and belligerent, and the voice rasped unpleasantly. At
the same time, the squint eyes were focused on mine
with a steady, piercing glare that made me uneasy. I tried,
I had to answer, but my tongue refused to move.
The gaze continued for an instant. Then the man the
thinking machine, turned away and prepared a particularly vile smelling concoction,
which he poured into me. Then I was lost again.
After a time it might have been minutes or hours,
I felt again the hand on my pulse, and again
the thinking machine favored me with a glare. An hour later,
I was sitting up on the couch with unclouded brain
and a heartbeat which was nearly normal. It was then
I learned why Professor van Dusen, an eminent man of
the sciences, had been dubbed the thinking machine. I understood
firsthand how material muddles were so unfailingly dissipated by unadulterated,
infallible logic. Remember that I had gone into that room,
an inanimate thing, inert, unconscious, mentally and physically dead to
all practical intents, beyond the point where I might have
babbled any elucidating fact, and remembered, too please that I
didn't know, had not the faintest idea what had happened
to me beyond the fact that I had fallen unconscious.
The thinking machine didn't ask questions, yet he supplied all
the missing details, together with a host of personal, intimate
things of which he could personally have had no knowledge.
In other words, I was an abtruse problem. And he
solved me. With head tilted back against the cushion of
the chair, and such a head with eyes unwaveringly turned upward,
and fingertips pressed idly together. He sat there, a strange,
grotesque little figure in the midst of his laboratory apparatus.
Not for a moment did he display the slightest interest
in me personally. It was all as if I had
been written down on a slate to be wiped off
when I was solved. Did this ever happen to you before?
He asked abruptly, No, I replied, What was it? You
were poisoned? He said. The poison was a deadly one,
corrosive's subliment, or by chloride or mercury. The shock was
very severe. But you'll be all right in poisoned, I exclaimed,
aghast who poisoned me? Why you poisoned yourself? He replied testily,
It was your own carelessness. Nine out of ten persons
handle poison as if it were candy, and you are
like all the rest. But I couldn't have poisoned myself,
I protested, Why I've had no occasion to handle poisons,
not for I don't know how long. I do know,
he said, it was nearly a year ago when you
handled this. The corrosive sublement is always dangerous. The tone
irritated me. The impassive arrogance of the little man inflamed
my reeling brain. And I'm not sure that I did
not shake my finger in his face. If I was poisoned,
I declared, with some heat, it was not my fault.
Somebody gave it to me, somebody tried to You poisoned yourself,
said the thinking machine again, impatiently. You talk like a child.
How do you know I poisoned myself? How do you
know I ever handled it poisoned? And how do you
know it was a year ago? If I did? The
Thinking Machine regarded me coldly for an instant, and then
those strange eyes of his wandered upward again. I know
those things, he said, just as I know your name, address,
and profession from cards I found in your pockets, Just
as I know you smoke from half a dozen cigars
on you, just as I know that you're wearing those
clothes for the first time this winter, Just as I
know you lost your wife within a few months that
you kept house then, and that your house was an
infested with insects. I know, just as I know everything else,
by the rules of inevitable logic. My head was whirling.
I stared at him in blank astonishment. But how do
you know those things? I insisted in bewilderment. The average
person of today replied, the scientist knows nothing unless it
is written down and thrust under his nose. I happened
to be a physician. I saw you fall and went
to you, my first thought being of heart trouble. Your
pulse showed it was not that, and it was obviously
not apoplexy. Now there was no visible reason why you
should have collapsed like that. There had been no shot,
There was no wound, therefore poisoned. An examination confirmed this
first hypothesis. Your symptoms showed that the poison was by
chloride of mercury. I put you in a cab and
brought you here. From the fact you were not dead,
then I knew that your system had absorbed only a
minute quantity of poison, a quantity so small that it
demonstrated instantly that there had been no suicidal intent, and
was indicated too that no one else had administered it.
If that was true, I knew. I didn't guess. I
knew that the poisoning was accidental. How accidental. My first surmise, naturally,
was that the poison had been absorbed through the mouth.
I searched your pockets. The only thing I found that
you would put in your mouth were the cigars where
they poisoned. A test showed they were all of them
with intent to kill. No, not enough poison was used.
Was the poison a part of the gum used to
bind the cigar? Possible, of course, but not probable. Then
what his eyes and squinted at me suddenly aggressively, I
shook my head, and as an afterthought, I closed my
gaping mouth. Perhaps you carried corrosive supplement in your pocket.
I didn't find any, but perhaps you once carried it.
I tore out the coat pocket in which I found
the cigars and subjected it to the test. At some
time there had been corrosive supplement in the form of
powder or crystals in the pocket, and in some manner,
perhaps because of an imperfection in the package, a minute
quantity was loose in your pocket. Here was an answer
to every question, and more, Here was how the cigars
were poisoned, and in combination with a tailor's tag inside
your pocket, a short history of your life. Briefly, it
was like this. Once you had corrosive supplement in your pocket.
For what purpose? First thought, to rid your home of insects?
Second thought, if you were boarding, married or unmarried, the
task of getting rid of the insects would have been
left to the servant. This would possibly have been the
case if you had been living at home. So I
assumed for the instant that you were keeping house, And
if keeping house you were married, you bought the poison
for use in your own house. Now without an effort, naturally,
I had you married and keeping house. Then what the
tailor's tag with your name and the date your clothing
was made one year and three months ago. It is
winter clothing. If you had worn it since the poison
was loose in your pocket, the thing that happened to
you to night would have happened to you before. But
it never happened before. Therefore, I assumed that you had
the poison early last spring, when insects began to be troublesome,
and immediately after that you laid away the suit until
this winter. I know you are wearing the suit for
the first time this winter, because again, this thing has
not happened before, and because two of the faint odor
of mothballs, a band of crape on your hat, the
picture of a young woman in your watch, and the
fact you are now living at your club as your
bill for last month's shows established beyond doubt that you
are a widower. It's perfectly miraculous, I exclaimed. Logic. Logic, Logic,
snapped the irritable little scientist. You are a lawyer. You
ought to know the correlation of facts. You ought to
know that two and two make four, not sometimes, but
all the time. End of my first experience with the
great logician.