The Cosmic Clinic

When he was just a kid, Roy Beebe decided that illness was unnecessary. He resolved to spend his life hunting for a cureall. In 1910 he saw Halley's comet through a homemade telescope and decided that human ailments are caused by static. He had quit school after the fourth grade and thus had no scientific prejudices. It was obvious to him that cosmic rays would clean static out of the human system and thus end all ills.

It took him only two years to work out his method of extracting cosmic rays from outer space. In 1912 he built a cosmic aerial, a cosmic booster box and a small cosmic rectifier. Jubilantly he moved to Long Beach, Calif., to await recognition.

But the years passed and nobody paid any attention to him. Southern California was full of quacks with whom he would not stoop to compete. It was not until last spring, when he was 61 years old, that success finally came. Hundreds of people suddenly began turning up at his frame house to have their static removed and to chew on wheat kernels soaked in cosmic rays.

A Leaf, a Hand. They found something very comforting about Beebe. He looked like a prospector, a stooped, greying man in khaki shirt, riding breeches and high-laced boots. He was always calm, dignified and assured. He wanted no money. Unlike doctors, he recited no baffling mumbo jumbo, but merely looked at his visitors' left hands to see what was the matter with them. "You look at a leaf to tell what's wrong with a tree," he explained gravely. "I look at your hand." The visitors began to feel better already.

Daily, they crowded his backyard, filled with wires attached to the cosmic rectifier. Some held the wires in their hands, others put them between their teeth to get better contact. After treatment, some thrust cosmic wires into jugs of water, thus manufacturing free medicine to take home. The crowds swelled to 3,000 a day.

Then, as it must to all innovators, came criticism. Beebe's neighbors went to the city prosecutor, complained that Beebe was a nuisance. The neighbors. Beebe explained, were just full of static. His followers outnumbered the neighbors.

Last week crowds were still mobbing the Beebe house and tramping across the neighbors' lawns. The city manager was checking ordinances to see if Beebe had committed any violations. Beebe didn't seem to be paying much attention. He was preparing to publish a catalogue containing photographs of hair roots from the heads of static sufferers. After it is off the press, he prophesied, all previous methods of diagnosis will become archaic. Doctors will simply jerk a hair from a patient's head, put it under a microscope, and leaf through Beebe's booklet to find the trouble.

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