The Whole Man (26 page)

Only all the time he was listening to an orchestra.

Howson felt very tired. Someone was slapping his cheeks gently with a towel dipped in ice water. He opened his eyes and found he was still on the chair by Rudi’s bed.

“Are you all right?” said Clara anxiously, peering over the shoulder of the nurse who was wielding the wet towel. “You—you were frightened …?”

“How long was I away?” demanded Howson in a hoarse voice.

“It’s been nearly three hours,” said the surgeon, glancing at her watch.

“Less than I thought; still, you were right to pull me back.” Howson got gingerly to his feet and took a step to ease the pins-and-needles in his legs. He glanced at Clara.

What did you make of it?

I don’t quite know. …There was a lot of fear.

Your own.
Howson frowned. Something wouldn’t come clear to consciousness—something he had half sensed in the chaos of Rudi’s mental imagery. Still, it was no good trying to rush things. He spoke aloud to the surgeon.

“Thank you for letting me study him. I hope I haven’t put a strain on him. Would you check how well he stood it, and say how soon you think he’ll be able to face full-scale therapy?”

“Are you proposing to treat him here?” said the surgeon. She was torn between being flattered that a curative telepathist of such renown should want to work here, and annoyance at the intrusion of an outsider. Flattery won; Howson made gently sure of that.

She checked Rudi thoroughly and swiftly. “Pulse strong; blood pressure not too bad; respiration fair …” She rolled back an eyelid and flashed a light into the pupil. “Yes, Dr. Howson, he seems to have stood up to it well. He should be strong enough for you in … well, at a fair guess, a week to ten days.”

Howson repressed his disappointment. He wanted to get to grips with Rudi’s fascinating mind as soon as possible. How would he contain himself for a full week after the tantalizing glimpse of riches in that mental store?

Well, that would have to take care of itself.

He and Clara found a restaurant near the hospital and sat long over a meal and several cups of coffee, while he sorted out his memories of Rudi’s mind and put them up clearly and in order for her to inspect. But the prolonged strain began to mist her perception, so they reverted to words at last.

“Poor Rudi,” Clara said, absently stirring emptiness in her coffee cup. “No wonder he was so frustrated. … How can he ever hope to communicate with an audience?”

“Oh, I know he recognizes that no one else shares precisely his association of one sensation with another. In one sense, a telepathist is the only ideal audience for him. But consciously he would be satisfied if he could create a passable objective facsimile of his mental images, to which his audience could add their own associations. What he can’t reconcile himself to is the fact that, since practically no one else can perform feats of mental cross- connection on such a grand scale, no one has ever seen exactly what he was driving at.”

“Until you?” suggested Clara.

“Until me. Put it in concrete terms. You’ve mentioned his run-in with the university authorities. I take it he was doing experimental composition of some kind, though not the kind of thing the authorities expected. Right?”

Clara nodded. “Some of it was really weird! But they might have put up with that. The main trouble came when he enlisted Jay Home’s Horne’s support. He started, as they said, interfering with Jay’s own work, which is far more accessible, and they warned him not to take up so much of Jay’s time. That was what sparked the row and led to the cancellation of his grant. At least, so Charma told me; I’ve known her longer than Jay.”

“I see. So anyway, it goes like this: Rudi produces an experimental work, whose logic is that of his own associations and not that of the orchestral sounds. He’d be satisfied with even minimal comprehension on the part of the listener; instead, his audience listens only for the sake of the sounds themselves, thus missing the whole point of the work. His hopes dwindle. He gets more and more helpless even when he deliberately restricts the range of associations on which he bases his music, and as he approaches nearer to the conventional, he more and more feels that he’s abandoning what he wants—rather, needs—to achieve.

“If he enlists Jay’s help, it’s because he’s cut himself down to the absolute bearable minimum. Discarding all other sensory cross references such as those he himself experiences, he thinks he might as well convey plain images of color and movement rather than nothing at all. Right? I haven’t a very clear impression of Jay’s work, except for the description Rudi gave me, but he made me feel he didn’t regard it too highly.”

“He does, though. He doesn’t regard Jay himself too highly, which isn’t the same thing.”

“Hmmm!” Howson rubbed his chin. “But the difficulty one always runs up against in every attempt to integrate music and visual impressions is that the machinery is expensive, complicated and generally inadequate. What one needs is an instrument as simple and versatile as a piano, which combines the resources of a color-organ with those of an unlimited film library.”

Clara stared at him. “Do you know, those are almost exactly the same words that Charma once used to me when things were going badly between Rudi and Jay?”

“Not surprising. Probably they were the words Rudi himself used.” Howson stared into space. “Clara, let’s go and call on the HomesHornes. There are things I ought to know before I try any therapy for Rudi.”

“You said,” Clara reminded him timidly, “you were on a vacation?”

“A man at Ulan Bator hospital asked me why I didn’t use my talents for my own satisfaction,” said Howson with a hint of bitterness. “So that’s what I propose to do. I can’t deny that I look forward to seeing Rudi Allef thank me for all I’ve done for him. Only first I’ve got to find something I
can
do for him. Let’s go.”

xxix

Jay and Charma lived in a two-room apartment on the top of an old house not far from Grand Avenue. The air was full of dust from the demolition work in progress nearby. When the visitors arrived, Charma was attempting to cope with the additional housework this caused under a barrage of furious complaints from Jay about the disturbance to his precious equipment. Howson and Clara exchanged glances; they could sense the raised tempers from outside the door.

However, they knocked and were let in, and when Charma had cleared off a couple of chairs and conjured a pot of coffee out of the wrecked-looking kitchenette, Howson realized that he could detect a harmony of attitude between the couple which underlay and supported their superficial eternal disagreement. It rather took him aback, but evidently it was a workable arrangement.

He repressed the desire to probe further and stated the purpose of their call. It wasn’t until he had almost finished that he realized neither Jay nor Charma knew who he really was. He explained, wondering what their reaction would be.

“Good
grief!”
said Jay, his mild blue eyes growing round with astonishment. “Talk about angels unawares! When- 1 I think where poor old Rudi would be now, if it hadn’t been for you! Thanks, Dr. Howson. I think he was worth saving. He’s going places—even if he does get on my nerves.”

“Call me Gerry,” said Howson, relieved beyond measure at the ready acceptance Jay revealed. “Anyway, I came hoping to see something of what you and Rudi have been doing together.”

“That’s no trouble. Charma, honey, suppose you clear the piano and get out that thing we were looking at yesterday. I’ll turn on the gadgets.”

At one side of the small, crowded room there stood a battered upright piano; Howson hadn’t noticed it for the tangle of electrical and other equipment hanging down over it. When Charma cleared it off, he saw that it wasn’t quite an ordinary piano: it had two additional keyboards, one governing an organ-simulator and the other controlling a battery of strips of tape, each with a separate playing head.

“That’s for special effects,” explained Jay as he went from point to point in the room, turning switches. “Rudi is hell for getting everything just so. Now, here’s my own particular pet.” And he took the wooden lid off a large glass box like an aquarium, at the bottom of which a pool of luminescent fluid gleamed faintly. A row of colored lights shone down each side of the tank.

“Lights down,” said Jay, taking his place at a haywire panel of electrical controls. There was darkness as Charma hauled the curtains across the window; by the eerie green glow of the luminous liquid, Howson saw her sit down at the piano.

“Watch the tank,” Jay said briefly. “OK, honey—one, two, three.”

A succession of irregular intervals down the keyboard, ending in a swelling peal of bells from one of the special keys, and shapes began to form in the glass tank: multicolored, responding vaguely and randomly to the music. Within a few seconds they were growing definite, and hard square forms followed hard square chords.

Watching intently, Howson thought he detected a shallow, distorted resemblance to certain things he had seen in Rudi’s mind, but how elementary this makeshift was compared to the vivid, far-reaching volumes of association he had perceived there!

The music stopped. “That’s as far as we got with that one,” said Jay coolly. “Open the curtains, there’s a dear.”

And as Charma let in the light, he looked at Howson. He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“It’s clever,” said Howson. “But it’s much too limited for really ambitious treatment.”

Jay looked delighted. “Precisely what I’ve been saying. I’ve gone along with almost everything Rudi has asked me to do, because he’s a genuine creative artist and I’m a tinker. But he’s taken up a hell of a lot of my time, and we don’t seem to have been very happy collaborators. If you’ll come into the other room, I’ll show you what I’m doing myself.”

In the other room there were dozens of the glass tanks ranged on shelves, some of them dusty, all dark and unprepossessing. Jay went to an electric outlet and plugged in a wandering cord.

“My ‘wet fireworks,’ as my beloved wife will insist on calling them,” he murmured. “Watch—this is my latest.”

He connected the cord to a socket beneath one of the larger tanks. A faint hght light came on; after a pause, it brightened, and a stream of opalescent bubbles began to work their way through the tank in a switchback formation. Shafts of green, yellow and blue shifted through the tank in an irregular series of graceful loops; then a square form in bright red loomed up from a point till it almost filled the side of the tank nearest to the watchers. It vanished, and the graceful swerving curves continued.

“It never repeats itself,” said Jay thoughtfully. “It’s like a kaleidoscope—in fact, I guess that’s what it most resembles.”

“It’s much more successful than what you’ve been doing with Rudi,” said Howson. “But its scope isn’t so great.”

Jay connected another of the tanks; this one was darker—dark red, midnight blue and purple shot with heavy gold and rare flashes of white. His eyes fixed on it, he nodded. “And yet this is what I’m trying to do,” he said. “I’m after something quite simple: I just want to convey movement and color in a … well, in a beautiful combination. Or an ugly one, for that matter. Like this!” He snapped a switch, and a third tank lighted up— hesitantly moving, abrupt in its changes of color, the drab pattern dissolving frequently into muddy brown and a sickly olive-gray.

“But you see,” he continued,
“I
know what I’m after. Sometimes I’ve had the impression Rudi doesn’t. I mean, I’d follow his instructions to the letter, spending hours over a single effect, and then have him go through the roof because it wasn’t what he wanted after all.”

“I’m not surprised,” Howson said musingly. “Rudi’s sensory impressions are so interlocked that I doubt if he can visualize anything straightforwardly. He hears a chord struck on your piano, and he immediately links it up with—oh, let’s say the taste and texture of a slice of bread, the color of a stormy sky, and the smell of stagnant water, together with a bodily sensation of anxiety and pins-and-needles in the left arm. All these interlock with still other ideas. Result—chaos! He probably can’t single out the different items; he can’t separate the color of the sky from the color of the greenish weed on the water or the bread color of the bread. He mingles them all together. But no one else could possibly take them in simultaneously and achieve the same associations that he gets.”

“Except you,” said Clara.

“Yes,” Howson agreed, his eyes on her. “Except me. Or another telepathist … Jay, what are the resources of that gadget in the room where we were just now?”

“Aside from the obvious limits imposed by the speed of response—and its small size, of course—pretty well inexhaustible. We’ve worked on it, on and off, for almost a year. At the moment it’s programmed for a particular item, but it can be controlled manually, too.”

“I see. Right. Let me think for a while, will you?” Howson leaned his elbow on a vacant shelf and closed his eyes, knowing that Jay and Charma would assume he was thinking for his own attention only. In fact. …

Clara! Tell me something, will you? Why was it that you took such an interest in Rudi if you scarcely knew him?