The Whole Man (13 page)

Waldemar stared. Then he gave a chuckle. “I was going to tell you that,” he said. “But if you’ve worked it out already … well, with you and Ilse to guide him, he’ll survive.”

“He’ll do much more than just survive,” answered Singh.

Book Threee

 
– - Mens

XIV
xiv

Because he was who he was, he had once asked for—and they had given him—a private aircraft to travel anywhere in the world, thinking to escape the dismayed stares and the whispering of ordinary people. But because he was what he was, even the faint shock which the pilot betrayed on meeting him hurt, and hurt badly. He bore with it for a little; then he cut short the trip and never asked for the plane again.

Because he was as he was, he could scarcely be alone. The next best thing was to be here at the therapy center in Ulan Bator, where those who knew him had outgrown their first instinctive reactions, and those who did not know him could assume he was a patient like themselves.

There had been certain changes in eleven years. , but he was the same, even though he wore a different label now. He was Gerald Howson, Psi.D., curative telepathist first class, World Health Organization. He was one of the hundred least replaceable persons on Earth. It was good. It helped—a little. But he was still a runt, and his short leg still dragged as he limped through the corridors, and the same ugly face greeted him each morning in the mirror.

He had clung long to hope. He had remembered the deaf-and-dumb girl, given speech and hearing, and the way she came to thank him—him, Gerald Howson—with tears in her eyes. But that hadn’t lasted. The visits grew fewer; finally they stopped, and he heard she had married a man from the city where he and she both had been born, and had children.

Whereas he was a hideous cripple.

There had been half promises—new techniques, new surgical processes. Once they had got as far as attempting a skin graft on him. But long before the slow-growing tissues had knit, before blood vessels could twine into the graft, it had gangrened and sloughed off. He was dully resigned by then. No matter how much thought he took, he could not add the wanted cubit to his stature; he was better employed any other way than pitying himself.

When the guards of consciousness were lowered by sleep, though, there was no escape if the lurking sorrows of the past chose to return.

Out nf of a dismal dream he snapped awake.
That
wasn’t the usual imagery of his nightmares! He had them frequently enough to recognize their roots in real life, and nothing in what had startled him corresponded to direct experience.

He did not open his eyes. There was no point: the room was in darkness, and anyway the source of the signal which had stabbed into his brain was some distance away, partly masked by the “noise” of people dreaming. The message had loomed up suddenly like a shout from a quiet conversation. And it was a shout of terror.

Breathing evenly, forcing himself to remain relaxed, he sought identifying images in the mental flow. High mountains capped with snow, caravans winding through valleys, and the cadences of a language he did not understand. …

Got it—I think
.

There was that Nepalese girl in Ward Four, the novice telepathist they had found too late, after her ignorant and terrified kinfolk had stoned her for a vessel of evil. She must be having a bad dream of her own.

Well, if that was the case, he could right matters without even leaving his bed. He made as though to contact her openly and soothe away her shapeless fear. One instant before revealing himself, he checked himself, and felt a frown draw down his eyebrows.

That wasn’t Nepal, present time. Not even a country as isolated and mountainous as hers could be so primitive. Feudal customs? Magic?
Magic?

He had sat up and thumbed the switch of the bedside intercom before he realized it. Waiting for an answer, he probed deeper into the extraordinary images echoing up to him. A sense of dependence and absolute mastery; a mood of defiant arrogance.
Those
weren’t from the girl. And least characteristic of all was the feeling of masculinity coloring the thoughts. Like most people from a peasant background, she had rigid preconceptions of masculinity and femininity; she had conformed religiously to the social pattern at home in order to evade the worst consequences of her budding talent.

A tired voice spoke from the intercom. “Schacht here— duty doctor. What is it?”

“It’s Gerry, Ludwig. Something’s wrong with the Nepalese girl in Ward Four—something bad enough to waken me.”

“Hmmm?” A wordless question as Schacht scanned the Ward Four tell-tale board. “I have nothing here from her. According to the tell-tales she’s asleep.”

“It’s not original with her,” Howson said. He was sweating; there was tremendous depth and complexity in the mental background of what he was picking up, and the more he groped into it the less sure he became of his ready-made explanations. Still, he had no better suggestion.

“Have we any male Chinese paranoids under therapy?”

“Yes; there’s one undergoing coma and regression in the same wing as the girl.” Schacht hesitated. “Not original with her, you said. Do you mean she’s picking up the thoughts of an insane mind?”

“She’s picking up somebody, and it’s scaring hell out of her. Check the paranoid you mentioned. It might be him.” He heard the doubt in his high-pitched voice.

“The chemotherapy tell-tales are blank, too. I thought the ego was completely masked in coma—out of reach.”

“Maybe the depressant supply broke down. Check him anyway.”

A pause. The impression of a shrug. “Very well. But if it isn’t the Chinese paranoid, are you sure it can’t be the girl herself?”

“Certain,” Howson declared. “Hurry, Ludwig—please!”

“Gerry? He’s totally unconscious. Are you
sure
it’s not the girl herself—a schizoid secondary, maybe?”

Howson repressed an impulse to snap at him. He was sure, but he couldn’t demonstrate why, using words. “Hang on,” he said resignedly. So much for his chance of a night’s unbroken rest!

He touched the control that moved the headboard of the bed into position as a contoured support for his deformed spine, and leaned back against its padding, staring into darkness.

First he would have to sort out from the inchoate succession of telepathic concepts some more clues than he had. Masculinity, Asian nationality, and enjoyment of power were hardly unique characteristics on this densely populated side of the planet. He surveyed the deeper levels cautiously. At least, he told himself, this didn’t feel like the emanation of a sick mind. It wasn’t even as irrational as most otherwise sane people became when they slept.

No; wait a moment. That must be wrong. He caught himself with a start. Hadn’t there been referents in the very first contact which he’d defined reflexively as magic?

Growing more puzzled every second, he examined it closer. No good. It was blurred by the girl’s incomprehension, and probably made unrecognizable. He’d have to look for the original source. In one way it shouldn’t be too difficult: to reach into the awareness of a sleeping novice, the signal must be both close and powerful. But in another way the task was immense. “Close” could mean anywhere in the city, and there were a million-odd inhabitants.

“Gerry? You there?” Schacht demanded over the intercom.

“Shut up,” Howson told him. “This feels big, Ludwig. Big—and bad.”

He sensed Schacht’s unspoken disbelief, and ignored it. Schacht at least made an attempt to master his instinctual revulsion against telepathists, and that was more than some people bothered to do.

He let his mind rove out over the night city, where a million brains made dreams sigh like the wind between tall white towers, down wide straight streets. That was a cosmopolitan consciousness, stranded together from all over the world and sometimes from farther away still— from the Moon, or Mars. …

He had rationalized his unwillingness to travel. Why go, when it all came to him? In this man’s mind, a desert remembered; in that man’s, a jungle; in another’s, naked space, hurtful with stars sharp as knives.

But it wasn’t a good rationalization. To live vicariously was to be a parasite, and even a symbiote could have little self-respect.

He jerked his train of thought back under control. He had had barely an hour’s sleep before he was wakened, and he felt extremely tired. Nonetheless, he’d have to finish what he’d started before he could sleep again.

And all at once he had it.

“Got anything yet?” Schacht said with growing impatience. Howson barely heard the words; he was too depressed at the realization of what was happening.

“Gerry!”

“I’m—I’m listening, Ludwig,” Howson forced out. “You’d better call Pan and get him to come up here, and Deirdre, too. And call an ambulance, and a car.”

“What on earth have you found, then?”

“There’s another catapathic grouping been set up. It’s out in the city somewhere; I guess I can track it down.” Images ef absolute power, over natural law as well as men’s minds, thrust the words down to second place in Howson’s attention.

“Oh, marvelous!” Schacht said bitterly. “This is really my night! I’ve had two knife wounds, three burns, a car accident and two premature labors since I came on duty!”

Howson paid no attention. He was reeling under the violence of the events that were storming into his mind. Lacking any connection with external reality, yet charged with the full force of consciousness—as dreams, though equally illogical, never were—they gave him no fulcrum and no purchase. When he had viewed them through the intermediary mind of the Nepalese girl (who must have a sleeping pill to save her from this bombardment, he remembered dazedly), he hadn’t realized the power driving them. And worse, there was this aura of perfect calm tinged with—with amusement. …

He exerted every ounce of will power and withdrew from contact, trembling. He had driven his nails deeply into his palms. Why should that surprise him? This was what he feared most in all the world.

He spoke, both aloud and mentally, to the unknown telepathist, putting all his hate and anger into a single concept:
Damn you, whoever you are!

Secure in fugue, pursuing a gaudy fantasy for his own private reasons, the unknown might have sensed the signal and chuckled, inviting Howson to lay seige if he wished to the fortress of his brain—or the idea might have been Howson’s own. He was too upset to tell which.

Agonized, he faced the inevitable future. No projective telepathist was worthless, and going by his current signals this man was exceptional among exceptions. What intolerable strain had forced him to abandon reality didn’t matter; they would want him dragged back. They would call on Howson, and because this was what he did best in the world he would attempt it, and be sublimely terrified, and maybe, this time, find that—

NO
.

The order was to himself, but it was given as a deafening telepathic scream, and elsewhere in the hospital other telepathists, including the Nepalese girl, reacted with sleepy surprise. Blindly he reached to the shelf beside the bed where he kept his stock of medicaments—he was prey to as many emergencies as any patient in the place—and found the tranquilizer bottle. He gulped two of the pills down, and sat rock-still while they strait-jacketed his writhing mind.

His breathing grew easier. The temptation to turn his attention back to the glowing fantasies projected by the unknown, receded, as though he had mastered the urge to probe a rotten tooth and make it ache. When he judged he was capable of movement, he got awkwardly off the bed and reached for his clothes, preparing to go in search of his anonymous enemy.

XV
xv

From the elevator he limped slowly down the main lobby of the hospital, passing the waiting emergency apparatus: oxygen cylinders on angular trolleys, like praying mantises, their shadows gawky on the cream- painted wall; wheeled stretchers with blankets neatly folded at the end; a machine called a heart, a machine called a lung, a machine called a kidney, as though one could take them, patch them together, and make a man.

With whose brain? Mine? I’d almost rather
—

But the door had swung back, whispering with the rubber lip that kissed the rubber floor, and Pandit Singh was there in black sweater and gray pants, the light resting on his shock of hair like an aura.

“Gerry! What’s this about a catapathic grouping? Brought in without notice? Where from? And what are you doing here, anyway? Isn’t Ludwig Schacht on duty?”

The frost of fierceness in the words no more bespoke anger than the frost of gray on his bushy eyebrows bespoke age. He seemed changelessly young—on the inside, where it mattered. Promotion from his old. post as head of therapy A to director in chief of the hospital hadn’t altered him a jot. Howson had liked him on first meeting; now, after their long years together, he loved him as he would have wanted to love his father.