Chase put the tips of his fingers together and looked at Beauregard through narrowed lids. "Isn't that tantamount to saying that all the astrologers except your school—I -assume it is a school—are subject to a thirty-degree error in their fundamental assumptions?"
"I don't say nothing about nobody else. I make my calculations and I git paid. It just seems to me if you're a-goin' to applicate a leonine influence to Leo, it's a lot more reasonable to hang it on the constellation Leo, 'stead of the sign Leo that's just an imagined place marked off in the sky."
Chase favored the astrologer with a stare so concentrated the latter shifted his feet. "I don't agree," he said. "In the first place, that's sloppy a priori reasoning. More reasonable with regard to what criteria? If you mean that it satisfies your personal sense of logic better, then you're talking a kind of home-made religion. And you need something more than that if you're going to contradict the whole development of modern astrology, which states its principles, not on any absolute basis, but because they check with the observed facts."
I don't care so very much about that," said Beauregard. "All I gotta know in my business is unless I'm right proportionably lots of the time, pretty soon I haven't got no business."
"I daresay," said the psychologist, rubbing his chin but maintaining his scrutiny, "though it depends upon the type of client you cater to. And the type of reading they ask for."
Finch said: "I am the type of client he caters to, and if you'll pardon my saying so, your remark sounded rather like an insinuation against both of us."
Chase's face remained pleasant. But he said: "I'm afraid I can't withdraw it in view of the position you're taking. If there is an accusation, it is made by the psychological facts of the case and not by me as a person." He turned to Beauregard and looked him up and down with the cold eye of an art critic gazing at an imperfect statue. "Aren't you an MN 1313 type?" he demanded.
The negro went a purplish dusky hue. "You can't go drafting me for no reconstruction!" he cried, his voice going almost to a break on the high note. "I'm engrossed in work of public service. I ain't goin' to have my tongue cut out like them others!"
"The Board has held that exemption from experimental work is granted only in cases where the exempted public service is performed scientifically, without regard to personal considerations. I'm afraid the matter has gone beyond me. I should be failing my own duty, did I not submit the facts of what seems to me an attempt to prostitute the science of astrology."
The liquor he had drunk came flooding redly back to Finch's face. "Science of astrology!" he almost shouted. "Why not the science of divination or palmistry? Good God, are you trying to make me believe you treat that damned charlatanism as a body of systemized knowledge responding to general laws?"
"I think so—yes." Chase cocked his head on one side.
"As long as its steps follow logically from the primary assumptions. Everything depends on those. Surely, you're not ignorant of the fact that in these days of relativity, only one of the Aristotelian axioms stands up—the one of identity, that a thing cannot be both itself and something else."
Something like a glow irradiated the downcast countenance of Washington Beauregard. "Yes, sir," he said emphatically. "Aristotle is the foundationist of astrology in its scientified aspect, just like he is the other departments. Dr. Chase, sir, I'm sorry I was embalmed in the miseries of this here—"
"But look here," protested Finch, "that isn't right. Astrology has variables that depend on the individual; it isn't exact and—"
The psychologist threw back his head and laughed. "From a historian, above all a reconstruction historian, that's a jewel. You make this elaborate set-up on the other side of the river and fill it with people to represent historical characters. But how do you know the right psychological types have been chosen? You never saw the original characters. It's all your assumption."
"We have the evidence of what happened to go on, and you yourself deduce the psychological patterns."
"Nonsense." Chase reached for the bottle. "We have only the evidence of what you say—or you assume— happened. You can't even write history from the documents in the old style without reading into it your personal picture of events. How do you know it's correct? How do you even know that your senses are reporting to you the correct impressions? Assumption again."
Finch pulled an ear-lobe. "You're defying the validity of all science," he said.
"Not at all. I'm only saying it's relative to the observer and that the observer must obey certain rules in order to correlate his work with others. I might add that the rules are designed precisely to eliminate such displays of emotionalism and subjectivity as you have been giving over this matter of Miss Bow."
"Who makes the rules?" demanded Finch. "Your damned scientific board! Do you think you're eliminating the personal factor that way? You scientists are about as objective and impersonal as a medieval Pope, handing down a ruling that he's infallible. Yes, and you enforce your ideas through a batch of hedge-priests, too. Here's one of them." He swept a hand at Beauregard. "I wish I were out of the whole dirty business."
Chase stood up. "I'm afraid we had better go, Beauregard," he said. "Hope you'll feel better in the morning, Finch. After all, you can hardly get out of it—except into a better and more perfect world."
The door closed behind him, and the recollection came flooding in on Finch. Another and a better world— doomed to wander forever through this cycle of dreamed unpalatable existences? ... But there was no Tiridat here, no one who in the least resembled that personage who had been the key to his other escapes from impossible situations. Nor was he, now that he thought of it, sure that he wanted to escape this one... . Thera. He had thought there was something slightly shocking, almost indecent, about a man raising the middle forties falling into the desperate love that excludes .all other responsibility—when it happened to Edward VIII, King of England. Now here he was, himself, and to make it perfect she was very likely a dream-girl in more than one sense of the word, a pure figment of his imagination. Ridiculous, and Chase was right. But no, ridiculous or not, the touch •f her hand had sent that long thrill tingling up his spine, he was bound to her till death did them part—or the re-enactment of the fall of King Shalmanesar, with types supplied by Dr. Theophilus Chase.
"Damn all," said Arthur Finch aloud, and poured himself another drink.
Twenty-Two:
Let the scribe Ninudunadin speak without fear and tell what the sons of men in the camp say of the Glory of Asshur."
Finch frowned. The walls of the interior tent were cloth, not too thick, and it was no part of his intention as recorder to be drawn into the intrigues of an Assyrian court. In fact, it would ruin—
Queen Ishtaramat chuckled amiably, the jelly of her chins shaking. "It is written that the tree that bears no fruit shall be cut away; and also that the tongue is the tree of the mouth."
She probably meant it. "And it is also written," countered Finch, "that he who repeats a lie told by another is the son of it; and also that the son of a lie is a fool."