THWARTING A BURGLAR : Caveman Syndrome : Rational thoughts evaporate, atavism takes over, and a normally sane man heads for battle armed with a fry pan.

You’ve thought about it, even feared it, but never had to really deal with it. Things are nicer that way.

You are, after all, peaceable and reasonable. Dark thoughts, much less violent deeds, don’t come easy, if at all. A gun? You’ve never wanted one around the house.

Instead, you just hear about it and sigh. If it happens on the next block, you’ll get by. Better to read about it here, in the newspaper--the poor Smiths, they’re such nice people--and keep it an abstract notion, a TV-like episode.

Things are nicer that way.

But your Saturday afternoon nap is interrupted, bringing you closer to it. It’s 5 p.m., the day’s light is giving out, and your darkening house looks unoccupied. Your mate has just driven off for groceries, leaving the driveway empty.

The sound that wakes you is odd, like lumber being shuffled: a crunching, groaning sound, from outside the bedroom window. You roll over--surely, it’s the next-door neighbor, clearing trash from his driveway a mere eight feet away. Pop a pillow over the head, and you’re heading right back into sleep. Things are nicer that way.

THUMP.

The noise is connected to the house, rattling through the wall of your bedroom.

You bolt upright. Somewhere, between sleep and surging consciousness, a terrible truth invades: Someone is out there. On the property. Trying to get in. Somebody you don’t know.

Somebody who doesn’t know you’re here.

The somebody is 10 feet away, occluded by mere plaster, possibly armed, possibly crazed, possibly so strung out on drugs he doesn’t even care you’re there.

Brain, please kick in. The event is in real time.

Tick. Tick.

Thump .

His progress, your inertia.

Stay calm. Think. Think.

You reach for the lamp, only to halt. Don’t turn the lights on. Don’t startle him.

You decide: Take a peek out the window. Again, don’t startle him.

You walk softly in stockinged feet to the blinds. Gently, you pull them back and peer out. There he is: the plaid-lumberjack-shirted, hunched back of a man creeping along the wall of the house just beneath your windowsill, literally three feet beneath your nose. The six-foot-tall, solid-wood gate that secures this part of your property is gone entirely: It has been completely removed from its hinges, which hang like busted spigots from the side wall of the house.

He doesn’t see you. His woolly back bobs by, and you wonder: Is he large? For a second, you feel suspended, frozen in place. Now your brain reels; you troll through it for instruction, guidance, a voice, anything. Then, you hear leaves crunching under his feet.

It’s the sound of the leaves that does it. Sets you in motion. Halts and overtakes the brain, which you’d jump-started so well. Triggers what everyone insists needn’t occur: the atavism. The undeliberated reflex to halt the invasion. To do what it takes to stop it.

To strike out. To stop, to hurt, to damage; to take away the burglar’s ability to finish the job. To be, if you will, an animal. Yes: to go back 50,000 years.

Cops? You’ll call them later. You’re operating in real time.

Tick. Tick.

The atavism is lovely. It makes the world simple. In making you thoughtless, in making you animal, it truncates consciousness, washing away doubt and blocking from consideration any details that might save your life. The atavism, after all, is more powerful than an intruder’s bullets--at first, anyway. Things are nicer that way.

You’re off. You’ll catch him. Just meet him out back, where he’s headed. You’ll nail him at the patio. Yes you, you in your blue flannel robe and white baseball socks.

You sprint silently through the living room, the dining room, and then the long kitchen, whizzing past the stove.

What’s this? A fry pan? Yes. The Wagner No. 8, five pounds of cold black iron.

Grab it. You might need it. Don’t think about it. You’re running on atavism. Your brain is off. Just get out the back door.

His head. Bop him in the head, knock him out, call the cops; that’s what you’ll do. It’s the one thought that you’ll allow yourself as you fly out the door, leap cleanly down four descending steps, careen around huge yucca plants and halt, in a crouch, clenching the egg pan, facing straight up the alley alongside the house. You have become a threat, at this point, to all area rodents.

He’s heard you. Probably heard the door open. All you see is his backside, about 20 feet before you, and he’s running straight back out where he came from, to the front of the house. You start to go after him but remember the construction debris in the alley. You’ll cut your feet to pieces.

Head around the house on the other side, sprint down the driveway, leap the locked fence. Let that robe flap in the wind! You’ll get him!

Stop at the sidewalk. Look up and down the street. Nothing. He’s vanished into a neighbor’s yard.

Your heart is pounding. Your lungs sting. It’s cold, getting darker. It’s silent.

Go ahead and stand there, alone on the sidewalk in your robe and socks and clutching the fry pan. And then, as the atavism leaves you and your brain restarts, ask: What if you had caught him?

The police will come and cruise the street and find nothing. Your work-mates will hear your story with concern, even horror--hearing it much like a news report you’d read in the paper, the one involving the people on the next block over, when it was nicer that way.

Most, however, will ask: What were you going to do if you had caught him?

And one, hands thrown into the air, will ask: Does your fry pan stop bullets? Outstab a cold blade? Whatever happened to 911? Are you crazy?

Yet another will recite to you the legal problems of felling an intruder and laugh at the irony of your possibly going to jail.

You will sleep on these matters, listening for noises as you doze. You’ll decide in your head that 911 is, in fact, the way to go and yet not be able to completely trust that you are free of the vestigial caveman gene.

As days pass, you’ll retrieve from the garage your baseball bat. It’s the scuffed wooden beauty you used in Little League in 1960 in Burlington, Vt., the 31-inch Louisville Slugger that you proudly burned your full name into. Putting your name on it, you had truly believed, helped you hit the big ones. You’ll swing it a few times. Alone on the patio, near the yuccas. It feels good, as always.

Your mate has long since returned from Ralphs, and you have sought in lengthy discussions to find what it means to be prudent in these situations, to be adult, to be a member of civilization, to weigh the need for society’s institutions to do their jobs, to be a fine American. You will not show her the bat, however. While the bat is sleeker and probably more effective than a fry pan, it is, standing up in the bedroom closet amid the grown-ups’ shoes, its own hapless embarrassment.

Still, it could happen again. And you don’t yet know, exactly, whether atavism will turn a proud boy’s bat into a caveman’s club or whether reason will get you to 911 and out the front door.

Things are not nicer this way, you’ll come to know. But then the world is not only as dangerous as it was 50,000 years ago but a hell of a lot more complicated.

THE PREMISE

There are plenty of things you have never tried. Fun things, dangerous things, character-building things. The Reluctant Novice tries them for you and reports the results. After all, the Novice gets paid to do them--and has no choice in the matter. If you want to tell the Novice where to go, please call us at 658-5547. If we use your idea, we’ll send you a present.

This week’s Reluctant Novice is staff writer Leonard Reed.