The Whole Man

14

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 centre 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 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 kinsfolk 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, 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 colouring 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 woken, and he felt extremely tired. None the less, 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 of absolute power, over natural law as well as men’s minds, thrust the words down to second place in Howson’s attention.

“Oh, marvellous!” Schacht said bitterly. “This is really my night! I’ve had two knife-wounds, three burns, a car accident and two premature labours 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 connexion 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 deep 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 siege 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 tranquillizer bottle. He gulped two of the pills down, and sat rock-still while they straitjacketed 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.

15

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 ends; 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 grey 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 on the words no more bespoke anger than the frost of grey 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.

Once he had wished that his gift could be taken from him, to be abolished. The wish recurred occasionally, but now he would not have wanted to see it go from the world completely. Rather, he would have given it to Pandit Singh, as a man fit to wield such power.

Why me? Why me, the weakling?

He was dreadfully tired. But his thin voice was steady enough as he corrected Singh’s mistaken assumptions.

“You must have come straight out without stopping to ask Ludwig for details. Pan. It’s not that a grouping has been brought in. There’s one out in the city. The Nepalese girl picked up some stray images in her sleep — it just happens that the setting of the fantasy corresponds to her own background — and I was woken by her instinctive fear.”

“I see!” Singh stroked his beard. “Can you locate them for us, or do we have to search ?”

“Oh, I can track them down,” Howson confirmed sourly. “That’s why I got dressed.”

Singh studied him for long seconds. Then, with one of his blinding bursts of insight, he said, “Gerry, it’s not just that you haven’t had your sleep. Is this an especially bad one?”

Miserably, Howson nodded. “It feels wrong. Pan. It hasn’t got the right overtones of — of weakness, or escape. I get an impression… What the hell would you call it? Sardonic! Tough! Premeditated!”

Singh’s mental reaction was grave. Yet it was somehow comforting, too; put into words, it might have gone: If he’s worried, he has good reason, so I can’t contradict him. But he’s the greatest — I know what he can do.

Howson essayed a wry smile. The door of the lobby opened again, and Deirdre van Osterbeck came striding in, Singh’s successor as head of therapy A — voluminous as a thundercloud in a great blue-black cloak, her face above it round and pale “as the full moon. Ludwig Schacht emerged from the night office looking irritable, to announce that the car and the ambulance were on their way.

“Will one be enough, do you think?” he added, with a glance at Singh.

The automatic answer rose to Singh’s lips: that there had never been a catapathic grouping consisting of more than eight persons, so one large ambulance and the estate car would suffice. Howson checked him, with a silent mental gesture.

“Make it two, Ludwig,” he said. “I’m afraid that this man is breaking all the rules.”

And to himself only, he repeated: I’m afraid….

Fragmentary images tormented Howson as the car sped down the broad highway towards the heart of the city. They showed him bright impossible events which — if he let them—could displace reality for ever. The hushing of their vehicle, the dark fronts of the buildings, the street-lights, even the presence of other people near him would be blotted out, having no violence. Who could the unknown be? The submergence of real memory was so nearly total that Howson feared he might have to plunge deep, deep into the mental whirlpool before he found a clue…

“Gerry!” Singh exclaimed. Howson caught himself. Without realizing, he had let himself drift.

“I’m sorry,” he said thickly. “It’s so strong… I have to keep turning my attention on the source because I’m trying to locate it, and whenever I think in that direction I — I — Tell the driver to turn right, anyway. It’s quite close now.”

The car swung into a broad boulevard flanked by multistorey buildings. Signs on their façades — red, green, blue—identified most of them as hotels.

“In one of these hotels, you think ?” Singh suggested.

“Very likely,” Howson murmured, the words drab with weariness.

“Then take your mind off the subject!” Singh snapped. “We can go from one to the next checking recent registrations. A few minutes” delay won’t make any difference now.”

“I can find them!” Howson protested. “Just a little—”

“I said take your mind off the subject! You’re considerably too valuable to use as a bloodhound, hear?” Deliberately Singh visualized a large, slobber-chopped, snuffling dog with its ears trailing so far along the ground that its front paws kept treading on them. Howson caught the image and had to smile.

You win.

The car pulled up at the kerb. Singh opened the door, and Howson made to follow him out.

“No need for you to come, Gerry!” Singh objected.

“If I don’t have something to distract me, I’m apt to — uh — revert to the subject,” Howson countered. “I’m coming with you.”

There followed half an hour of tramping along the sidewalk from hotel lobby to hotel lobby. Marble walls and plaques of artificial gems, mock animal skins rigged like a vast yurt and illuminated tanks of green-dyed water witnessed a succession of sleepy night-clerks raise their heads to stare in surprise at the intrusion of Howson and Singh, hesitate over displaying their registration lists, examine Singh’s catch-all WHO authorization card, and yield reluctantly.

Six hotels, and nothing to guide them. As they emerged from the latest of them and signified no progress to the anxious watchers in the car and ambulance at the roadside, Singh gave Howson a keen glance.

“Still keeping off the subject, Gerry ?”

Howson gave an almost guilty grin. “How well you know me, Pan !” he replied with forced lightness.

“Well, stop it!” Singh said roughly. “If our man wasn’t damned close you’d never have let me stop the car, and I can’t think of a likelier place than a top hotel for an out-of-town telepathist to be found in. We’ll probably get him at the next one we try.”

The next one was decorated in a flamboyant Chinese rococo, with huge twisted brass pillars and red and black dragons lacquered on the walls. The night-clerk was a stout middle-aged woman who kept one hand on an alarm button all the time she was talking to them; she was terrified of rape, and the concept flamed beacon-bright in her mind. Howson had to stifle a pang of disgust at the masochism which underlay her conscious terror.

Singh persuaded her to produce the file of registration cards, and riffled through a dozen or so before stopping, an exclamation rising to his lips. He snapped the important card from its holder and mutely showed it to Howson. In bold letters the name was inscribed: Hugh Choong.

“But he’s — !” Howson began, and checked at Singh’s frown. Wordlessly, he continued: But he’s a top, top man!

Correct. Eleven years of close association with Howson had enabled Singh to verbalize an unspoken communication almost as clearly as a telepathist. An arbitrator based on Hong Kong — maintains the Pacific Seaboard beat virtually single-handed.

Also a therapist retained occasionally by top UN staff. Not met him ?

No.

Nor have I. But we’re about to, aren’t we?

For the life of him, Howson could not have matched that mock-cynical comment. He felt only dismay. What was an arbitrator doing setting up a catapathic grouping? They were all chosen from the most stable, capable, highly-trained telepathists; they had to be like Caesar’s wife, beyond any breath of suspicion, for on the knife-edge of their self-control rested the uneasy peace of the planet.

If even such a man as that could choose fugue rather than reality, how secure was he, the cripple who could not even face strangers without being hurt ?

Singh was speaking briskly to the night-clerk. “Which is Mr Choong’s room, please ? I shall have to disturb him.”

“Mr Choong’s suite,” the woman corrected morosely. “His party booked into our penthouse early this evening. But I don’t think I can let you—”

“His party! How many?” Singh interrupted.

“Ten altogether.” And unwillingly: “Sir.”

“You were right about the need for another ambulance, Gerry,” Singh grunted. “All right,” he added to the night-clerk. “Get a porter or someone to take us up — and hurry! It’s a medical emergency, hear?”

Howson was content to comply with the course of events. He said nothing as he hobbled towards the elevator, in the wake of a porter wearing a sleepsuit and a startled expression. The ambulance attendants had gone around with their stretchers to the freight elevators. Howson left all that to Singh; he was busy trying to ride the bucking bronco of his thoughts, which threatened to run out of control whenever he let his attention wander towards the telepathic fantasies Choong was elaborating.

Try not to think of a white horse…

The car stopped at penthouse level. Singh automatically made to use the pass-key he had obtained from the night-clerk, but the door opened before he applied it. And beyond…

“It reminds me,” Singh said with ghastly calmness, “of the stage at the end of a performance of Hamlet.”

Bodies everywhere! Only — not bodies yet. Wax-pale, they sat or lay immobile, on chairs, couches, stacked cushions, nine of them in a circle around the tenth: a plump man with a Eurasian cast of features, relaxed in a padded arm-chair and wearing a splendid silk robe. At his side, as though this moment removed and set down, lay a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim spectacles. And that was, therefore, Hugh Choong.

Howson’s fists clenched ridiculously. Like a badly jointed puppet he limped towards the trance-lost telepathist, the violence of his anger fouling the air.

Damn you, damn you, damn you—

“Gerry!” Singh’s words lanced into his brain. “You can’t reach him, so don’t waste the effort!”

Howson’s rage, punctured, faded to nothing, leaving only a sick apathy. He made an empty gesture and turned his back.

“Where he’s gone, he doesn’t want anyone to reach him.”

“I’m not so sure,” Singh countered. “Look!” He strode over the soft carpet towards the wall-mounted phone and pointed to something on a low table close by. Howson’s lack-lustre gaze followed him.

“There’s a time-switch on the phone, and it’s set for eight tomorrow morning. And this is a recorder. Let’s see what it says.” He lifted up the small device, cased in a fine lacquered box, and discovered that it was connected to the phone by a gossamer-weight flex. A tug snapped the link; he depressed the replay switch.

At once a firm voice rang out.

“This is Hugh Choong in the penthouse. Good morning. Please do not be alarmed at this recorded message, which is set to repeat in case you don’t take it all in at one go.

“Please contact the director in chief of the WHO therapy centre, Dr. Pandit Singh. Inform him of my identity, and request him or one of his senior aides to come and see me. The elevator door is set to open automatically, so he will have no difficulty in entering. Thank you!”

“Shut it off!” said Howson savagely. “So he had it all worked out! The best of therapy, for no good reason! And now, I presume—” He broke off, his mouth working.

“Yes, Gerry ?” Singh prompted.

“You know exactly what I was going to say!” Howson flared. “Now somebody’s got to go in after him, drag him out of fugue by force, waste time and effort that ought to go to somebody who needs it!”

“As far as I’m concerned, Gerry,” said Singh in a tone he did not need to colour with reproof, “the fact that Hugh Choong is here, in this state, makes him a person in need of therapy. Am I wrong ?”

Howson flushed. He made as though to contradict, but before he had a chance to speak the ambulance attendants came from the freight elevator, and Singh’s entire attention went over to the supervision of their work.

Howson drew back into a corner out of the way, and gazed at the waxwork calm of Choong’s face as they manhandled him on to his stretcher, completing his statement for himself alone.

No, damn you. That’s why there’s such a stench of smugness reeking around you! You can’t have needed help, because you’ve taken so much care to make sure of getting it!

And you will — damn you again. They’ll make me chase after you into that nowhere-land, destroy your dreams, pester and persecute you till you come back. And I’ll take on the job, because this is all I have: my skill that nobody in the world can match.

So who will come after me, to help me, Choong? Who else is there? Damn you to hell.

16

His bitterness was still growing, accentuated by his lack of sleep, when the special conference convened next afternoon. For any ordinary patient, a place on the regular daily agenda sufficed; for anyone else in UN employ, at most a multi-line phone link was used to discuss the case. But for Choong the high executives came swarming in by Mach Five express.

In the chair reserved for him at Singh’s right, he sat trying to think of unimportant matters — the long low sea-green ceiling, the exquisite crafting of the beechwood furniture. He failed. He was much too aware of the guiltily curious stares of the strangers, which asked as clearly as a direct telepathic signal: The world’s greatest curative telepathist? Him?

He could barely prevent himself from blasting at them aloud: “What the hell did you expect, anyway ? A superman ? A pair of horns?”

Fortunately their attention had been distracted by the arrival of copies of the physical examination reports on Choong and his companions. Now they were doggedly ploughing through a welter of detail, hoping to save themselves from asking ignorant questions later and looking foolish.

Except one, he suddenly realized. Lockspeiser, the big Canadian with the red face and the bald patch on his crown, had shut his folder of papers and pushed it away. That was an honest action, anyway…

“Excuse me being blunt, Dr. Singh,” the Canadian said. “But this stuff is for doctors, and I’m not one. I’m an allegedly practical politician working with the Trade Co-ordination Commission, and my interest in Dr. Choong is confined to the fact that he was supposed to arbitrate in the balance-of-credits crisis you may have heard about — the Sino-Indonesian mess. It was hell’s own job cooling people’s tempers to the point where they’d accept an outside referee, and they want Choong or nobody. That’s what counts with me. Can we skip the jargon and boil out some hard facts now ?”

So he had been running away from a job, had he ? The idea was oddly comforting to Howson. For seconds only, though. Singh raised his head.

“Had he been notified that his services were required ?”

“I don’t know,” Lockspeiser grunted. “I warned his Hong Kong office, naturally. You’re from there, aren’t you?” He glanced at the worried Chinese opposite him, who had been presented to the meeting as Mr Jeremy Ho.

“Yes. Ah—” Ho looked very unhappy. “The answer to Dr. Singh’s question is negative. We hadn’t heard from Dr. Choong in over a week.”

“And it didn’t bother you?” Lockspeiser asked incredulously.

“Put it the other way around: we didn’t — don’t — bother Dr. Choong.” Ho’s tone was mildly reproachful. “We assumed he was making one of his regular study-tours. He goes off to sound out public opinion, gathering background data which may prove useful in the future. Only he can say what’s important to him.”

Singh gave a polite cough. “I don’t think we need pursue this any further. We’ve located Choong; our immediate difficulty is getting to him. We’d better concentrate on that.”

“Agreed.” That was the self-possessed woman with auburn hair, age — probably — thirty-five to forty, in black and green, who sat a little apart from her neighbour Lockspeiser. Her status was so far unknown to Howson, and he was curious about her. He was certain she was a telepathist, but when he had made the automatic polite approach to her he had been met by a well-disciplined mental gesture equivalent to a cool shrug. It was effectively a snub, and it had upset him.

Singh blinked at the woman. “Thank you, Miss Moreno. Now I understand from you that nothing of importance is known about Dr. Choong’s companions. Correct?”

Miss Moreno gave an emphatic nod. “None of them has come to our attention previously,” she confirmed.

“Our attention?” Howson said. All eyes switched to him, and instantly switched away again, except Miss Moreno’s. Her answer was prompt and casual.

“World Intelligence, Dr. Howson.”

Of course. When a man who holds the key to peace over a sixth of the globe defaults, you’d expect them to come running. Embarrassed at his own lack of perspicacity, and more troubled than ever at her refusal to acknowledge him on a telepathic level, Howson mumbled something indistinct.

Singh hurried on. “You’ve all been briefed on what’s happened to Choong, naturally. What we can’t figure out yet is why he’s done it. We’re analysing the confidential psycho-medical reports Mr Ho brought from Hong Kong, but till we’ve done so we can only speculate. Before today I’d have said the reason for setting up a catapathic grouping was the same for which any non-telepathist may go into fugue — to escape an unbearable crisis in real life. All our data, however, point to Choong being excellently adjusted, to his work, his private life, his talent… Yes, Miss Moreno ?”

“Do we really have to prolong this conference?” the woman said brittlely. Howson tensed. For all her careful control, a leakage of indisputable alarm was reaching him. “There’s only one course of action open, and the sooner it’s tackled, the better!”

Lockspeiser slapped the table with his palm. “Great! Will someone tell me what action ? I’d never checked up on this—this catapathic thing before I heard about Choong. Seems to me he’s blocked every way of reaching him — hasn’t he ?”

“What has to be done is this,” Howson said in a voice as shrill and hard as a scream. “Somebody has to follow him into fantasy. Somebody has to risk his own sanity to work out the rules by which his universe operates — to sort out from ten real personalities and God knows how many schizoid secondaries the ego of the telepathist — to make the fantasy so uninhabitable that from sheer disgust he withdraws the links between himself and the others and reverts to normal perception.”

He raised his eyes to meet Miss Moreno’s directly. She gazed steadily back as he finished, “And it’s not easy!”

“Did I say it was?” A hint of a flush deepened the olive tan of her cheeks.

“You said the sooner we tackled Choong the better.” Howson parodied a bow of invitation. “You’re welcome! For one thing, you have to learn your subject by heart first. If you don’t, he can hide from you behind an infinite succession of masks, until you’re too angry to out-think him, or too worn out to care, or — or too fascinated…” He swallowed and licked his lips, still looking towards Miss Moreno but no longer seeing her. “For another thing, while the body retains its energy reserves, an intruder has to slither in or not enter at all. If he’s clumsy and obvious, he meets the combined resources of the participants head-on, and they deny his existence as they’ve denied their own bodies. This time there are ten in the grouping, and you may bet that Choong hasn’t invited nincompoops and milksops to share his dreams! And lastly—” He checked. They waited for him, the pause becoming like the interval between the lightning and the thunder.

“And lastly,” Howson repeated very slowly, “Choong isn’t an inadequate personality on the run.”

Then why? Why? WHY?

He left them to get on with it after that. There were only the peripheral questions to settle, and it didn’t matter who asked which; they were all predictable.

“Can’t their resistance be lowered — by drugs, maybe ?”

“Not by drugs. An electric shock to the organ of Funck is sometimes helpful. But any depressant we used would affect the motor functions — the heart, the breathing reflex — as well as the higher centres involved in imagination. We have nothing Chat selective on the nervous system.”

“Well — prosthetic hearts, lungs?”

“No good until the telepathic linkage is already broken. Prior to that, they’d welcome it. It would mean that much less demand from their bodies, and the natural functions might cease for good.”

“Does physical separation make any difference?”

“They use telepathists to communicate with Mars. I hope that answers your question!” Singh was getting edgy; his mind wasn’t on the questioner, but on the absent Howson, wondering if he were eavesdropping from elsewhere in the building. He was, of course. He couldn’t resist it.

Sensing the growing impatience of the director in chief, the others changed their minds about asking more questions, and Lockspeiser came straight to the point.

“All right, Dr. Singh! All that remains to be settled is this: will Dr. Howson tackle the job, and what are his chances of success in a reasonably short time?”

I wish I knew… But Singh masked that thought skilfully; maybe not even Miss Moreno detected it. He said aloud, “As to tackling the job — I’m sure he will. As to succeeding in a reasonably short time — he has an unbroken record of success in his previous cases, and few of his cures took more than forty-eight hours once they got started. Mark you, the ground has to be prepared, as he pointed out; he has to learn his patient from birth on before he enters the fantasy.”

“Fair enough,” Lockspeiser grunted, and rose to his feet.

But Miss Moreno lingered, catching Singh’s eye, and spoke when the door had closed behind Ho and Lockspeiser.

“I’m going to put that question again, Dr. Singh, if you don’t mind. It’s essential that we don’t gamble in this matter. Are you sure Dr. Howson will get Choong back ?”

Instantly, rage, as much as Pandit Singh ever allowed himself. And, spoken aloud: ” Don’t let yourself say or even think that! Damnation, I’ve worked with Gerry for eleven years. I’ve seen him develop from a frightened, shy, retarded adolescent into a capable — hell, a brilliant! — therapist. His mind’s as keen as a scalpel. I know that — how is it you don’t ? You’re a telepathist yourself, aren’t you ?”

There was a moment of chill. Eyes closed, rocking a little on his special chair, Howson waited to feel Singh hear the answer. He had no wish to investigate Miss Moreno’s mind if she had refused him contact previously.

Then: “How did you know ? My office was under orders not to tell you. I think I made it pretty clear to Howson that I—”

“I didn’t have to be told!” Singh waved the words aside with an impatient gesture. “I’ve seen better than two hundred telepathists, sick and well, trained and novice. I still want an answer, though. How is it you don’t know that Gerry is the one and only living man who can get Choong back ?”

“Because—” There was a pause, coloured by the gathering of will-power towards a decision. “Because Choong scares me, if I’ve got to be frank! Ever since Vargas discovered the catapathic linkage, out of — I don’t know — frustration, maladjustment… Oh, skip that. Ever since, anyway, it’s been a standing temptation to all of us. You’re probably an exception if you’ve worked with so many telepathists, but most people imagine the talent is absolutely rewarding and satisfying. For all the careful propaganda to the contrary, they get jealous.” The words were bitter now. “Well, a telepathist can be frustrated, or depressed, or lose heart. And any of us could say at any time, ‘Let the world go to blazes! I can make my own!’ But we’re held back. We think, ‘It’s the weaklings who give in !’

“But Choong has done it now. A weakling? Him? Never! He apparently went into fugue by simple choice, in full possession of his faculties. Is that where I’m going to end up ? Or Howson ? Or all of us ? I’ve been refusing rapport with Gerry Howson, doctor. I know it’s upsetting him. But you see… I’m afraid that if I find he’s as tempted as I am, and if he finds I’m tempted, we’ll have lost not only Choong, but him, and me as well.”

Singh had no answer. He merely bowed his head.

So there it was, in all its nakedness: the fear. Abruptly Howson didn’t dislike Miss Moreno any longer. She had meant well. She had simply not realized that it was more help to him to know that his terror was shared, rather than a product of his individual plight.

How had Marlowe put it in the mouth of Mephistopheles ? Something about it being sweet to have companions in adversity? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The principle applied, and he felt comforted.

His hand went to the switch of the intercom. A pause, and then Deirdre van Osterbeck spoke.

“Yes?”

“Gerry here, Deirdre. Send me the background on the Choong case, please. I’m ready to start work on it now.”

17

Usually he relied at least in part on inspiration to achieve his ultimate success. Many times in the past he had brought about a swift and drastic disruption of a catapathic grouping by exploiting a weakness revealed only in the fantasy itself, never previously admitted by the telepathist even to his analyst, even to his wife. If he had a wife; rather few telepathists bothered to marry, in view of the unlikelihood of their having children with the gift.

This time, however, nothing was left to last-moment improvisation. He employed every trick in the book.

First there were the long, long hours under the hood: the close-fitting device combining microfilm viewer, microphone and audible commentary outputs. He used a mild stimulant to help him fix the endless facts in his brain, and came out from each session limp and sweating.

Then there were the direct investigations. They brought him anyone and everyone they could find who had known Choong at all closely: former schoolfellows, elderly relatives, ex-girl-friends, professional colleagues, in all more than two hundred minds for him to dip into, sift, pick clues and hints from.

Last, they brought Choong’s wife.

He had not wanted to face her. He had tried to tell himself, her, and Singh that it wasn’t necessary — he had enough material to satisfy him. But in the end he had to accept the ordeal. She herself insisted. She wanted her husband back, and if her memory held anything of use to Howson, she wanted him to have it.

She was a small woman, podgy, not very attractive, a receptive telepathist of fair accomplishment. Her ancestors were mostly Polynesian, but her present work was largely concerned with cultural adjustment in New Guinea, cushioning the impact of modern technology on people whose grandfathers had been born in the Stone Age. She had been away working for more than three months, and had not expected to see her husband again for another six weeks.

When Howson first probed her, he was already convinced what he would find. Here if anywhere must be the intolerable situation Choong was running from, surely! He looked for the signs of marital, probably sexual, strain — and was bewildered.

They weren’t there. He found only a hurt puzzlement, a mute question: why did he go without me?

And she didn’t know the answer, even when he burrowed into the chaos of her subconscious. To all outward and inward appearance, Choong was the best-adjusted telepathist Howson had ever run across, and his adjustment to his wife was as good as any other part of his existence.

Shaken, he resisted the growing impulse to cut short his preparations. He knew Lockspeiser and Ho were getting anxious, he knew even Singh, whose confidence in him was tremendous had started to wonder whether these elaborate precautions were necessary or just an attempt to postpone the eventual therapy. Not even if the Sino-Indonesian crisis flared into violence would he dare to face Choong without knowing his weak points.

And since Choong didn’t have any, to speak of, that left his companions.

Here the task was infinitely easier. Although none of these nine people would have succumbed to escapist fantasy of their own accord, they had required little persuading to join with Choong. Consequently he found hopeful indications in their psychological records.

This man: repressed will-to-power, king-and-slave fantasies revealed in analysis a few years earlier.

And this man: a childhood history of lying, petty theft and furniture-breaking.

And this woman: attempted suicide after an unhappy love-affair.

I’m a ghoul, Howson thought, not for the first time. Here are people at the end of their tethers, and in despair they’ve tried to break loose. So what do I do? I play on their private misery, and make even escape unbearable.

“Set them up, Deirdre. I’m on my way down now.”

“Good! We’ll be ready when you arrive — I’ve had staff standing by all day.”

Howson turned off the intercom, got to his feet, and stretched. He wished he could stretch completely, and tense the withered muscles of his back which had never been drawn out. Still… wishing was futile. He ought to have learnt that by now.

His mind buzzed with the information he had packed into it over the past few days as he limped through the corridors towards the room where his patient waited. It was like being pursued by hornets.

Moreover, there was memory to dog his footsteps. Maybe it was a mistake that he had never moved from the room he was first assigned when he came here. Maybe he should have gone to an apartment out in the city. Then he wouldn’t now be walking the same route as he had followed, blind with tears, when Ilse Kronstadt came so near to death in her encounter with Pericles Phranakis.

Was this his own hour of crisis? Ilse too had had an unblemished record, until (what had she compared it to?) the bullet-sized tumour in her brain weakened her. His physical powers were no worse than they had ever been, but his control had none the less been subtly undermined, for just the reasons Miss Moreno had confided to Pandit Singh. He was embarking, scared, on an enterprise in which only the most sublime confidence in his own ability could uphold him. And there was no reluctant novice to come storming to his rescue at the eleventh hour.

It’ll come to teamwork eventually — we’ll have to take two or three low-grade projectives and maybe use hypnosis to subdue their individual egos, and put a curative telepathist in command, and… But that’s a catapathic grouping, almost!

No, that wasn’t the answer. Not yet. Not until the process of assimilating telepathists into a world run by ordinary people was complete. And by then, maybe, there wouldn’t be the pressure on telepathists which drove them into fugue, anyway.

Maybe there would only be cases like Choong’s…

He came into the room where they awaited him, and looked around, nodding. He hadn’t carried out a preliminary sweep of those present — he was preoccupied with his own worries — so it came as a surprise to see that Miss Moreno was here. He glanced at Singh, asking a wordless question.

She answered him directly, before Singh could speak.

I’d like to watch you, Dr. Howson. I’m so impressed by what I’ve learned from Dr. Singh.

“Well, well!” Howson spoke aloud by reflex. “What a change was there !” He looked steadily at her, and saw her wince, but she kept her mind open. It was a good, sinewy impression he received: stable, resilient, in some ways comparable to Choong’s but with a strong feminine component.

“I see,” he said finally. “It’s to impress on me that not all telepathists have gone the way Choong chose to go. Rather elementary — I mean, here we are, after all… But watch all you like. Just don’t, whatever happens, try to take a hand.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but moved to the bed. An attentive male nurse made as though to help him. It wasn’t necessary; this was perhaps the thirtieth time he had taken his place for such a task. He looked around as the various machines were disposed on his body.

There had been very few changes since he first saw this room, he reflected. Experience had suggested improvements in the layout; there had been developments in medical technology, and superior recording devices and superior prosthetics had replaced the ones from Ilse Kronstadt’s day. That apart, the scene was essentially identical to the setting for his introduction to his career.

He looked at Singh, who gave him a big smile half-swamped by beard and moustache. He looked at Deirdre van Osterbeck, who was too busy checking the encephalographs to notice. In both their minds he sensed a conflict between hope and anxiety. The therapy watchdog — a tubby young man with slanted eyes and a fixed mechanical smile, named Pak Chang Mee—settled in his chair next to Howson. He had worked with How-son twice before, and a quick mental scan revealed that he Was extremely confident of success.

And there were all the technicians, their minds clearing as their equipment proved to be working faultlessly. And…

And there was Choong.

“Ready,” Deirdre said curtly. The technicians echoed her, nodding to Singh. At the back of the room near the door Howson sensed Miss Moreno composing herself in a soft chair; he did not see her move, for he had already closed his eyes. “Record now,” he said. Images welled up, the instant he began to relax towards contact. “I’m getting the main pattern — the city, the mountains… I reported winter previously. That’s fading. The scene is being set for some big event. I shall try and go in along fringe path K, the trade and travel path. Caravans come to the city and I have detected at least one schizoid secondary of very high order using that as a background.”

He had probed Choong cautiously a score of times while he was building up his store of information. Now the imaginary world seemed familiar, almost welcoming. Knowledge of the hospital faded, and there was only…

18

… the rocking motion, like a small boat on a choppy sea, and a smell like no other smell that ever was.

Camels. He opened his eyes. The illusion was absolute, but he had not expected it otherwise. He was dealing, after all, with a brilliant opponent.

By degrees facts sorted themselves out. He was — he was Hao Sen the mercenary, the caravan guard, and he rode negligently on his magnificent she-camel Starlight alongside the motley gang of traders and travellers through the gates of Tiger City. The air was sharp and stimulating; the winter was almost over, and this was the first of the spring caravans to brave the bandits and cross the mountains from the north.

Bandits… The concept brought a sense of weariness and satisfaction, and he remembered. There had been fighting; the bandits had laid an ambush. Signs were all around him — that man was limping, and that one had a bloody bandage on his head. He himself — he tensed his square-set, muscular body—had not a few bruises where his armour of brass plates on leather had turned a sword-cut. But they had won through, and this summer, said the common gossip, the Emperor would raise an army and smoke the bandits out of the hills for good and all.

He yawned cavernously behind his spade-shaped black beard. His hand fell to the familiar hilt of his short, broad sword, and he urged his camel on towards the city gate.

The walls were huge and solid; the black puppet-forms of soldiers tramped back and forth along them. Above the gate itself was a balcony on which were ranged shields bearing the stylized black-and-yellow emblem of a tiger’s head. This was magical protection, wisely chosen; the city was impressive, and deserved that the name of the second most powerful beast in the world be bestowed on it. (Where had he learned that? Who had told him that the ancient Chinese so regarded the tiger? He frowned for a moment, and then had to set the question aside for later consideration.)

Now the populace were coming down to the street inside the gate, cheering and waving, and some tumblers near the head of the procession turned wild handsprings to return the greeting. Hao Sen gave a booming laugh at their antics, and eyed the moon-faced girls as he passed, like any soldier who had spent a long time without women.

There were city guards in squads to direct the caravan and clear its path; there were sharp-nosed merchants closing their houses to get down to the market and snap up bargains. There were touts for local taverns, there were — oh, a myriad different people assembling.

Into the great market-place they poured to the accompaniment of shouts, firecrackers, brazen gongs. Hao Sen rode steadily at walking pace, absorbing all possible information about his environment.

He was shaken by its detail. This was — fantastic!

“You there!” A booming bass voice penetrated his reverie, and an officer of the city guard, splendid in magical black and yellow, came striding towards him. “Dismount at once! It’s not permitted to ride any beast through the market.”

Hao Sen grunted and complied. That was irritating, but he dared not object — it was far too early to start drawing attention to himself. Starlight showed her opinion with the derisory curl of the upper lip which passes for expression among camels, and he failed to repress a grin.

“What’s to be done with my camel, then?” he demanded.

The officer pointed a short distance back down the way he had come.

“You’ll find taverns there, with stables to your liking. I’d hurry if I were you, or all the places will be taken.”

A short time later, on foot, his sword clinking at his side in its leather-and-brass scabbard, he returned to the market-place. It was a scene of tremendous activity now; the loads from the pack-animals of the caravan had been spread out around three sides of the square, for purchasers to inspect, and booths had sprung up everywhere in the centre: barbers importuned passers-by to have their hair trimmed and their noses and ears cleaned out, conjurers, tumblers and jugglers were practising their skills, musicians had taken station and launched into wailing song to the accompaniment of twanging moon-guitars. Among the crowd Hao Sen wandered randomly, a frown etched deep into his forehead.

The fourth side of the square, the one from which the traders had been kept away, was none the less busy. On to it fronted a vast building with twenty pagoda-curved roofs and a flight of probably a hundred steps leading to its main doors. In red-and-gold ideograms on the façade there was spelled out its title: the Temple of Heavenly Favours.

On the steps, a gang of workmen were busily completing a dais for a throne. Hao Sen contemplated them. From the gaudy silk hangings they were draping over their work, a visit from the Emperor was anticipated.

The assumption was confirmed when he noticed that there was a stout man making a circuit of the market, accompanied by armed guards, and pointing out items of specially choice nature for the merchants to hold back from their stock. Some of these items were being collected by grunting youths in grimy white clothing and toted across the square to the foot of the steps before the temple.

The Emperor. Hao Sen contemplated the chance that the obvious focus of his attention was the real ruler. He decided against the possibility; at least one of the reflective personalities involved in this superb imaginary city had had king-and-slave fantasies, and the Emperor was more likely to be a subsidiary than a main personality.

On the other hand, of course—

Hao Sen checked his train of thought with a start. He had just caught sight of a dragon-trainer between two colourful booths across the square.

He shouldered his way towards the spectacle, ignoring the objections of those he pushed aside, and halted at the front of the ring of watchers surrounding the trainer and his beast. They were keeping a respectful distance.

Not that this was much of a dragon. It looked half-starved, and was barely three-quarters grown; moreover, its scales were patched with a mildew-like fungus disease. Its vicious three-inch teeth, none the less, were white and sharp as it bared them in ineffectual snarls. The trainer — a thick-set swarthy man, probably a gipsy from the south — was making it move its legs in a kind of clumsy dance, goading it with a pointed ankh which he heated at intervals in a brazier.

Hao Sen shivered as he watched, not at the baleful threat in the beast’s eyes which promised it would not stand for much more such treatment, but at the significance of the disease afflicting it.

While he was still reflecting on the implications, there was a blasting of trumpets from behind him, and he turned. A procession of gorgeously uniformed soldiers was striding into the square, followed by men bearing a palanquin of rich silk and rare woods. Officers bawled for the proper respect to the Emperor, and like a forest felled at a single blow everyone in the square dropped into the imperial kotow.

When permission was given to rise, the Emperor was in place on his throne, surrounded by his train: mandarins of the peacock feather, personal servants with symbolic fans, and high officers of his army. Hao Sen scanned them with interest. His attention was drawn almost at once to a tall man in magnificent silken robes standing at the Emperor’s right, a little apart from the rest and apparently having no personal attendants with him.

Somehow that — smelt right. Hao Sen ignored the business which followed, the presentation of the caravan master and the display of choice goods to the Emperor, and studied the tall man. There was no overt resemblance, but that was hardly evidence. Consider, after all, his own body now…

He broke off that thought with an almost physical jolt, and wondered whether it was still too soon to draw attention to himself. On the one hand, the completeness of the detail was a sign of caution; on the other, it implied that the secondaries were exceptionally well developed. He had arrived, in his own chosen disguise, and so far no hint had been given that his presence was suspect…

He made up his mind, and worked forward through the crowd to the front row of those who had forgotten the attractions of the conjurers and mountebanks for the privilege of seeing the Celestial Emperor at close quarters. By now the Emperor had completed his inspection of the caravan master’s wares, and was leaning back on his throne, casually eyeing the scene. It was a matter of moments before he caught sight of Hao Sen and said something to the caravan master.

“Why, we owe him a great debt!” the caravan master exclaimed. “He it was who chiefly inspired our guard to repel the bandits.”

“Let him come forward,” the Emperor said negligently.

An officer signalled to Hao Sen, who obediently marched to the foot of the steps and dropped on his knees in the kotow. Directly he had completed the obeisance, he rose and stood with his hand on his sword and his shoulders thrown back.

The Emperor looked him over. “A good fighting man,” he said with approval. “Ask him if he plans to join my army.”

“Celestial Master, your humble servant hears that the army will go forth this summer against the bandits! If he is granted the privilege of joining the enterprise, he will serve with all his heart!”

“Good,” said the Emperor briefly. His eyes lingered a moment on Hao Sen’s brawny frame. “Take his name, one of you,” he added. “And convey me back to the palace.”

Mechanically Hao Sen complied with the request of the officer who came to take his name and details of his experience. This was a routine precaution; if he was reduced to stripping away the reflectives one by one, he now had the background for turning a king-and-slave fantasy into something altogether less palatable. But he was satisfied the Emperor himself was only a reflective.

Then was the real ruler that tall man, standing apart? Or someone else, not engaged in this subsidiary part of the drama ?

Once more, he postponed a decision.

The imperial procession had left the square when the shout went up.

“The dragon ! The dragon!”

He spun around, seeing a wave of catastrophic panic break across the market like a bore in a river-mouth. Buyers, sellers and entertainers alike streamed outwards from the square, overturning booths, scattering merchandise and trampling old people and children in the rush. Hao Sen stood his ground, waiting for a clear view.

When he got it, he was chilled. The dragon was no longer sullenly submissive. It was an incarnation of menace. On three of its sharp-taloned legs it stood over the corpse of its former master, slashing at his face and turning it to bloody ruin.

It tired of its play, and paused, its yellow eyes scanning the great square. Hao Sen had half-expected it to feed, for it would certainly have been kept hungry to weaken it. Yet its head did not dip to gnaw the corpse, and his heart gave a lurch as he realized that the square, apart from himself, was now completely empty.

He might have run. He had delayed too long. The slightest move would attract its attention, and somehow he was sure it could catch him, no matter how fast he fled. The reason why he had been made to leave his camel out of the square struck him like a blow. He had used his favourite trick once too often, and here was an opponent who employed it himself.

The dragon began to move, sidling towards him, its eyes unblinking and burning bright as the coals of the brazier it had overset. Hao Sen glanced frantically around for a weapon. He saw the broken shaft of a tent close by, and jumped for it. The instant he did so, the dragon charged.

He hurled the tent-pole javelin-fashion and dropped on his face. More by luck than accuracy of aim, the sharp wood hit fair on one of the mildew-weakened patches of scales. It made a barely noticeable gash, but the dragon howled with pain. It spun around and returned to the attack.

The first time he threw himself aside, dragging out his sword. The second time, he failed to dodge completely; the beast cunningly curled its tail in mid-air so that it caught his shoulder and the blow sent him sprawling. That tail was like a club, and the dragon must weigh as much as a man.

It landed now among a tangle of cords on a rope-seller’s stall, and was hindered long enough for Hao Sen to devise a tactic to meet its next pounce. This time, instead of leaping sideways, he flung himself backward, in the same movement bringing up his sword point foremost so that it sank into the dragon’s under-belly.

The hilt was wrenched away with such force it nearly sprained his wrist, and the impact made his head ring as it hit the paving. Shrieking with agony, the dragon scrabbled with its clawed hind feet, and a triple line of pain told him where the slashes penetrated his leggings.

He brought up one booted foot with all his force and kicked at the base of the beast’s tail. That hurt it sufficiently for it to forget him momentarily, while it doubled its neck back under its body and tried to pull the sword out with its teeth. Dark blood leaked down the hilt, but slowly.

Hao Sen rolled clear instantly. He considered attempting to gouge out the dragon’s eyes, but they were shielded by bony orbital ridges; he was more likely to lose his fingers. Desperately he sought a weapon to replace the lost sword, and saw none. The dragon abandoned its futile tugging at the sword, snarled, leapt again.

It came at him crookedly because the blade in its belly weakened one of its hindlegs; none the less, its heavy tail curved towards his head in what threatened to be a stunning blow as it passed him. Gasping, Hao Sen seized the tail in both hands — and began to spin on his heels.

For one fantastic second he thought it was trying to climb down its own tail to get at him. Then the weight on his arm gave place to an outward tug. Four times — five — the market whirled dizzily; the dragon’s blood spattered an ever wider circle on the ground. He added one last ounce of violence to its course, swinging it upwards, and let go.

Across the rope-seller’s stall it flew, over the spilt coins in the booth of a money-changer, and fell, its head twisted at a strange angle against the lowermost of the temple steps.

Hao Sen dropped his aching arms to his sides, panting. He looked at the dragon’s carcase — and beyond it, up the steps, until he met the gaze of the tall man who had stood there watching, leaning on a staff.

And then he knew.

19

“A good fight,” the man with the staff said in a tone calculated to suggest he had seen a dozen such. Hao Sen made no reply; his heart was hammering too violently. All his plans had gone to nothing now. He was utterly vulnerable.

His only hope was to try and maintain the fiction that his guise was merely the effect of the creation of a schizoid secondary personality in the general run of the fantasy. He spat in the dust, rubbed his hands together, and went over to the dragon to draw his sword from its belly.

A glance showed him it was useless; the hilt was bent at right angles to the blade. Cursing, he made to toss it aside.

“Wait!” said the man on the temple steps in a commanding tone. “A sword that has taken the life of a dragon is not a weapon to discard so lightly. Give it here.”

Reluctantly Hao Sen complied. The man took it and examined it carefully; then, muttering something Hao Sen could not catch — a charm, presumably — he made a ring of his thumb and first finger, which he ran the length of the staff he carried. He kept the ring closed while he put the staff in the crook of his elbow and grasped the sword-hilt with his free hand. Then he passed the ring down the blade.

The blood curdled and fell away, leaving the metal bright. When he reached the point where it was bent, it first quivered and then sprang to straightness, singing.

“I am the wizard Chu Lao,” said the tall man in an off-hand voice. “Here, take your sword !”

And the second after, he was gone.

Bleakly Hao Sen considered the facts as they presented themselves. They made a depressing total.

It was clear that for all his careful preparations he had made one hidden and potentially fatal assumption : that he was dealing with an opponent like his other opponents. He was not. He was up against a man capable of taking just such thorough precautions in the elaboration of his fantasies as in any other department of his existence. The patch of mildew on the flank of the dragon should have been warning enough. Detail like that was almost inconceivable unless either it was a product of Hao Sen’s reaction with his environment, or the dragon was a schizoid secondary, not a construct.

He’d used that trick himself often enough; he was planning to use it again when he conceived the camel Starlight. And whether by guesswork or foresight he’d had that gun spiked at once.

So the dragon had been a schizoid secondary, with its own “real” personality. And the master of Tiger City was not the Emperor, luxuriating in pomp and adulation. He was Chu Lao, the wizard.

Wizard! He shivered. No wonder the very first breaths of this fantasy had borne to him suggestions of magic !

True, he remembered previous occasions on which there had been magic incorporated into a world-picture. But then he had found it to be mere childish grandiosity, hastily cobbled together and lacking coherence. The magic practised by Chu Lao, on the other hand, would be consistent, rigorous, governed by carefully-worked-out laws — it would be as rigid and inflexible as science. And Chu Lao knew those laws. Hao Sen didn’t.

He abandoned his original plans completely. Not for him now the subtle undermining, the fencing for a chance to seize control, which had been his favourite technique in the past. To use weapons forged by his enemy and fight on ground chosen by him — that was a certain path to exhaustion and defeat. He looked over the sword the magician had mended for him, his thoughts grim.

At all costs he must avoid defeat. To be beaten once would be an irrevocable sentence of doom.

Yet somehow he must still work within the pattern set by his opponent; to disturb the basic hypotheses too drastically would give a chance for the mental rapport to be broken, and he might find himself wandering in a fantasy world of his own creation, in which he was deluded into believing he had actually succeeded, whereas all the opposition he had overcome consisted in straw men…

He reached his decision. Brute force was the only chance he now had. Then let it be by force.

They came down from the hills, purposefully, in ordered ranks: no barbarian rabble, these bandits, but an army welded together by discipline into a single efficient machine. When they were still miles from Tiger City the glint of morning sun on their shields and helmets caught the attention of the city guards, and at once there was a great running to and fro on the ramparts.

Riding easily on his camel at the head of his army, Hao Sen grinned into his beard. His long pike with its cruel head was couched in its rest, alongside Starlight’s stately neck; his sword tapped lightly on his thigh.

Let them fuss and flurry! It would do them little good. What he had in store was enough to shake everyone in Tiger City up to and including the arrogant Chu Lao.

For more than an hour the bandits tramped down from the hills, silently except for the banging of gongs which marked the step. They made no attempt to come within bowshot of the city, but followed the circumference of a circle and surrounded it. Pack-animals laden with brushwood, wagons with dismantled siege-engines, and great stores of food added up to an obvious conclusion: they were determined to besiege the city before the Emperor could equip his army and provide adequate forage for his planned campaign against them.

Pleased, Hao Sen studied his work. He had chosen a comparatively minor post for himself, at the head of a detachment of camel cavalry, and the apparent chief of the bandits enjoyed all the luxuries a horde such as this could afford: a huge travelling yurt gorgeous with fine furs and pieces of stained Turkey carpet, on a four-wheeled wagon drawn by ten oxen. Around the wagon buzzed a continual swarm of officers, messengers, and slaves.

The army halted. On the ramparts of the city were visible the leaders of the defending force. After a while, these collected on the balcony over the main gate, opposite which the chief’s wagon had taken station.

A herald went down to begin the formal preliminaries by demanding the surrender of the city without resistance. The answer was dignified but negative. It was followed by a shower of arrows, and the herald rode hastily back to his lines.

Fair enough. Hao Sen watched the defenders duck as the fire was returned. Then there was an interval punctuated only by desultory shots while messengers brought in information about the defences.

It seemed that the main gate was the only vulnerable spot. Accordingly, the bowmen kept the heads of the defenders down while loads of brushwood and pots of pitch were dragged towards the heavy wooden doors closing it. Several men fell, but the job was well under way when it was abruptly abandoned. The attackers drew back, and the surprised defenders took stock of the situation. Cautiously they peered out from behind the black-and-yellow tiger’s head shields to see what had changed the minds of the bandits.

The answer was soon apparent. The sky was clouding over rapidly, and a few drops of rain were spitting down already. No fire fierce enough to harm the gate could survive such a downpour as was threatening.

Hao Sen stared narrow-eyed towards the balcony over the gate. Surely that was — yes, indeed ! There was the wizard Chu Lao, in a dark cloak that almost blended with the stone wall behind him, staring up towards the oncoming clouds. His magic was being called on to defend the city, and so far it looked as though he had the upper hand.

Hao Sen gave another wolfish grin, and the attackers leapt into action.

The furs and gaudy hangings on the “chiefs wagon” were snatched aside, revealing that they covered only a light bamboo frame with enough space for a man to enter, wait as if talking to the chief, and turn around to leave again. Apart from that, the whole wagon was an incendiary machine, full of tinder, pitch and jars of oil.

Now they whipped the only pair of oxen which had not been unharnessed. The startled beasts bellowed and leaned on the traces; the wagon rolled. After ten yards men dashed in with swords and slashed the oxen free, and the wagon continued by itself down the sloping road to the gate, its wooden wheels rumbling.

Hao Sen waited tensely. The defenders had seen what was happening, and were scrambling frantically to get off the balcony over the gate.

Another ten yards…

The fire-arrows went whizzing after the wagon, the second and third struck fair on oil-soaked rags at the back of the inflammable pile, and flames soared twenty feet, crowned with licking black thunderheads of smoke. The wagon slammed into the gate with a crunch of collapsing boards, and at once there was an inferno.

So far, so good. But had Chu Lao been taken unawares ?

Apparently not, for the rain came streaming down after only a few minutes” hesitation. As the smoke and flames died, it could be seen that a wide gash had opened in the gate. Another incendiary wagon was being readied at the head of the slope to follow the first when the gate was hurled open and the defenders charged out in force.

This was such an illogical act that Hao Sen was startled. Tiger City’s best strategy would clearly be to wear the attackers down — or so he had thought. For a moment he questioned his own planning; then the city guards, both mounted and on foot, were streaming forward with yells and much brandishing of swords, and there was no time to wonder about second-best courses of action.

The fighting spread by degrees all around the city. It was tough work. After a while Hao Sen spotted a large silken banber being borne forward from the gate, and dismissed his own command into the charge of a junior officer whom he suspected of being one of his schizoid secondaries. That banner was embroidered with a tiger, and must belong to the Emperor—

No! Wait!

Sudden insight, as blinding as lightning, pierced the grey sober mood of Hao Sen’s mind. The tiger banner couldn’t be the Emperor’s; the Imperial symbol was the dragon, the most powerful of all beasts. So the tiger would be reserved to Chu Lao, the wizard, because this was his city — Tiger City — and magic operated here according to strict rules of which he had seen an example when Chu Lao repaired his sword and told him that a weapon which had killed a dragon was worth keeping…

And the tiger was only the second most powerful beast!

Hao Sen urged Starlight forward, his mind racing, trying to beat his path to the spot where the tiger-gaudy banner was set up.

There was a violent melee all around it, so it was a while before he could reach a spot from where he could see if indeed Chu Lao had come out to supervise the battle. Three times he had to use his spike to spit a construct soldier, and the third time lost his grasp on it; shocked, because that implied he was much tireder than he had believed, he took a firm grip on himself as well as his sword.

At the same moment he saw the wizard under his banner, and the wizard saw him. Instantly, guards formed to block his path. Hoping that Chu Lao’s attention was distracted, he hurled himself sideways from his saddle, and Starlight rose on her hind legs, kicking furiously. The guards went flying.

The camel afforded only an instant’s respite, though. She was slashed across the forelegs the moment she touched ground with them. Hao Sen ignored her dying wails and fought onward, his sword sweeping an arc of death. Twice glancing blows made his helmet ring; twice he felt his sword-point slow and then free itself in a manner that meant it had cut clean through flesh. A dismembered arm seemed for one wild moment trying to catch hold of him by the beard.

Then he was through, and into the circle of enchanted ground surrounding the wizard.

“Chu Lao!” he shouted. “Chu Lao!”

The wizard, astonished, gazed at him — and yet that wasn’t only astonishment. There was — sardonic amusement…

Hao Sen rushed on. “Chu Lao, I name your city!”

All over the battlefield men seemed to lose heart for the fight. As though struck by a premonition, Chu Lao wavered.

“The city is Tiger City! That tiger is your city! And the tiger is less powerful than the dragon!”

How it happened could not be seen, but where the city had stood was a green-eyed striped cat, crouching and snarling, its claws unsheathed and huge beyond imagining.

“My tiger!” cried Chu Lao. “Yes, that is my tiger!”

“And this sword has drunk a dragon’s blood!” Hao Sen shouted “This sword is my dragon!”

He whirled the blade once around his head and flung it sparkling into the air; as it twisted, it changed, and as it fell it fell on four gigantic taloned feet. It raised its spiny head and waved its monstrous tail. Its open jaws roared defiance at the tiger.

It reared up. It slashed, and its talons added stripes of blood to the tiger’s hide. It bit, and rivers of blood stained the earth. Vainly the tiger clawed at its impenetrable scales. It had no chance. In moments it was struck down, with a thud to shake the world. Everything was riven apart, and with it Hao Sen.

For an instant he saw the rival armies, the gory ground, the dead and dying, and—

And it was over and he was Howson, not Hao Sen, and he was full of a nameless terror because of the way he had won.

20

He stood at the end of the bed where they had put Choong to recover, waiting for him to wake up. Meantime, he had no refuge from his thoughts.

I think that Miss Moreno knew — at any rate, she left so quickly, before I’d slept off my exhaustion… And Pak knows, but I can trust him after the times we’ve worked together…

Pandit Singh, of course, had no inkling of the terrible truth which had come to Howson. He was going around radiating paternal pride, and all the UN people — Lockspeiser and Ho and everybody — were feeling apologetic for doubting him in the first place, and Howson felt mainly a dull ache.

His triumph, had been a sham. The whole business had been set up like tenpins for him, and he had been given an unlimited number of balls.

And here was Choong, who had treated him like a plaything, who was happily married and physically whole, and the world was so grossly unjust he didn’t know how long he could stand it.

Choong stirred, and it was as though a gigantic light had been switched on in the room; everything stood out in bright three-dimensional forms compared to which there had been grey dusk. That was his perception waking up. Only another telepathist would have realized there was a difference.

His eyes opened. There was a moment of blankness. Then:

I seem to know you… ?

“Yes, you know me. Gerald Howson.” Deliberately he used words; he was shutting down every batten he could over his raging mind. “You’ve made a fool of me, haven’t you? Well, I want to know why !”

There was another blank moment during which Choong ordered his thoughts with a swiftness which impressed Howson despite his preconceived anger.

“So you handled my — ah — case,” Choong said, and gave a wry smile. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to bother you, of all people. A comparative novice should have been assigned to me. I thought I’d made it pretty clear that I wasn’t on the run, and would be willing to be brought back.”

Howson almost choked before he could reply; when he did, it was with such a blaze of fury that he used projection instead of words.

How can you be so casually selfish? Don’t you care about the worry and trouble you’ve caused? Don’t you care about the annoyance to me personally? What about the time I wasted — time I could have given to somebody in real need?

Choong cried out and put his hand to his head. The door of the room slammed back and a nurse looked in to ask what was wrong. Recovering, Choong waved her away, and with a suspicious glance at Howson she complied.

“You have some power on you!” Choong said. “Do you mind sticking to speech ? My mind feels rather — ah — bruised from your earlier shock tactics.”

Howson remained sullenly mute.

“Did it honestly not occur to you that I wouldn’t resist?” Choong pursued. “Yes, I see it was so, right up till the last moment! I find that astonishing, if you’ll forgive my saying so. You must have jumped to the conclusion that the only reason a telepathist could wish to set up a catapathic grouping was to escape; it never struck you that I might simply wish to exercise my talent for its own rewarding sake!”

“Don’t gloat,” Howson muttered. “I know I could never have dragged you back if you hadn’t co-operated.”

“No, I think you’re missing the point.” Choong activated the headboard of the bed and got himself into a more comfortable position from which to look at Howson. “Damn it, How-son, you wouldn’t blame a man with physical gifts for enjoying himself at sports. Yet it seems to me that you have a block against the idea that telepathy can be used for pleasure. Why ? You have a fabulous talent! And I’m by no means so sure you wouldn’t have got me back even if I had resisted — the sudden final inspiration was brilliant, and took me absolutely by surprise. Don’t you ever get any fun out of your gift? For instance, my wife and I usually link up before we go to sleep; I dream much more vividly than she does, and I like her to share my dreams.”

“I’m not married,” Howson said in a tight voice. Choong flashed an impolite glance into his mind, briefly vulnerable from the strength of his emotion. When he spoke again, it was with a change of manner.

“I’m sorry. That was tactless of me. But—”

“I—” Howson felt a stir of puzzlement. Why should he need to justify himself suddenly to this man who had put him to such trouble? But he did. Haltingly, he went on, “I’ve done that sort of thing. With a deaf-and-dumb girl I knew.”

“Well then! And you must enjoy your work to some extent. If for no other reason than that it makes a change to be a tough, resilient character capable of great physical effort.”

“I — yes, I do. I’m sometimes afraid of taking longer than necessary over a cure so that I can escape my limitations.” Howson licked his lips.

“That sounds dangerous,” Choong said judiciously. “My belief is that if you allowed yourself to derive more pleasure from your talent you wouldn’t be tempted to — ah — borrow other people’s fantasies.”

“What are you suggesting?” Howson demanded. “That I set up a catapathic grouping myself? How could I dare to? Even if I accepted your casual attitude towards them!” Vargas. and dust on his eyelids… “I wouldn’t have much incentive to come back to reality, would I? And whom could I trust to bring me back? I’ve demolished more catapathic groupings than anyone else alive — I know all the tricks and weak points On top of that, if someone did manage to fetch me back, what would happen to my confidence in my own ability?”

The nurse opened the door again. “Dr. Howson! Message from Dr. van Osterbeck — you’re not to undo your work by making Dr. Choong overtired!”

Howson made an empty gesture and turned to limp away. Behind him Choong spoke up one final time.

“Just because an escape which suits me or someone else doesn’t suit you, Howson, doesn’t mean there isn’t one for you. You’re a unique individual. Find your own way. There’s bound to be one!”

Howson wasn’t quite sure whether Choong had physically spoken those last few words, or eased them telepathically into his mind with the practised skill of a first-class psychiatrist implanting a suggestion in a patient. In a patient — that was funny! A few days before, Howson had been the doctor in charge; a moment had seen the roles reversed.

Except that Choong had never actually been the patient Howson had believed him to be.

He had already ordered his personal attendant to pack his bags. Now, outside Pandit Singh’s office, he found himself hesitating. Would he be able to make clear what he felt, what he wanted ? Did he in fact know himself what he wanted ?

He steeled himself and went in. Anything, surely, would be better than his present dilemma!

Singh didn’t raise his head from the mound of papers before him, merely waved at a chair. “Sit down, Gerry — won’t keep you a moment. Ah, there!” He scrawled a hasty signature on the topmost document and threw it into the out tray.

Leaning back, he said, “I agree, Gerry. You need a vacation.”

Not for the first time, not for the hundredth, Howson found he was wondering whether Singh had embryo telepathic faculties himself. Flushing, he said, “What—?”

“Oh, Gerry, for pity’s sake!” Singh rumbled a cheerful laugh. “I’ve been told about your bags being packed. When I heard, I calculated that it was six years since you last had a rest. It’s partly my fault — I’ve grown accustomed to leaning on you. But you haven’t seemed nearly as pleased as you should be with your success in Choong’s case, and my deduction is that you want a vacation. I’m glad you agree with me.”

Howson was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Pan, I’m afraid you’re wrong.”

“You’re not—?” The suspicion that Howson was planning a permanent departure leapt up in Singh’s appalled mind.

“Ohhh!” In exasperation Howson cancelled the mistaken assumption with a telepathic correction, and went on aloud. “The Choong case wasn’t a success for me, Pan. He wanted to be brought back. If he hadn’t co-operated — or at least not resisted with any seriousness — I’d have been beaten.”

“Gerry, I don’t understand!”

“No? Nor did I, at first,” Howson agreed bitterly. “And Pak wouldn’t have told you, I guess, because I warned him not to until I had a chance to get used to the idea. Listen! All the telepathists I’ve previously routed out of their dreams were the inadequate personalities we assumed them to be, broken by the harshness of the world. Them I can tackle. Choong in full command of his faculties, in a world of his own devising and operating at his own whim, could have brushed me off like an annoying fly.

“He didn’t. He had the sense to see that he was going to have to help whoever came after him, as a precaution against enjoying his absolute power too greatly. So he followed sets of easily deducible rules. In particular, when he incorporated magic into his private universe, he employed the basic James Frazer rules of like-to-like and part-to-whole. I took him by surprise when I suddenly realized this during the crucial encounter, and — well, never mind the details. Just say that’s the only thing I’m pleased with, and it doesn’t satisfy me, because it was a lucky inspiration, not the result of planning and foresight.

“Pan, he’s punctured my confidence! I’ve had to admit something I’ve hidden for years from you, even from myself. I’m jealous of people who can escape into fugue! Why not? Look at me! And I’m scared because I’m jealous. There’s no one I know of who could come and get me back out of fantasy! Unless I do something to help myself, I’m apt to go into some patient’s universe and find it so much to my liking I don’t want to come back. I haven’t the guts to go into it the way Choong did. But I might well not have the guts to cut short a — a trip to some especially attractive fantasy.”

Singh was staring down at the top of his desk. He said, “Do I take it that you have in mind something you can do to help yourself?”

“I — I’m not sure.” Sweat was prickly on Howson’s face and hands now. “All I’ve decided so far is that I’m going away for a while. Alone. Not the way I used to go when I first came here, with someone to watch over me in case I cut myself or children mocked me, but alone. Maybe I can’t go rock-climbing in the Caucasus; maybe I can’t go surfing at Bondi Beach. But — damn it, Pan, I looked after myself, more or less, for twenty years before I was discovered and brought in. If I can re-learn to do that much, I may be on the track of an answer to my problems.”

“I see.” Singh turned a pen over between his short, capable fingers. “You’re not going to do anything as stupid as throwing away your prothrombin, I take it ?”

“Hardly! Independence has limits. But dependence has, too. I want to set some for myself, that’s all.”

“So what do you propose to do now ?”

“Send for a cab, go to the airport, and take a plane somewhere. I’ll be back in — oh — a couple of months, I guess. You’ll see I get money ?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then — Howson felt at a loss. “Well, that seems to be all, doesn’t it?”

“I imagine so.” Singh rose and came around the desk, holding out his hand. “Good luck, Gerry. I hope you find what you want for yourself.”

Abruptly he wasn’t looking at Howson any longer. He was facing an olive-skinned man with a square black beard, standing taller than himself, wearing a peculiar barbaric costume mostly of leather studded with tarnished brass. A huge sword dangled from his belt. He was muscular, good-looking; he radiated health and contentment.

The stranger changed; melted; shrank until he was barely five feet tall and beardless and slightly deformed — until he was, in fact, Gerald Howson.

“That’s what I want,” said Howson in a thin voice. “That’s not what will be any good to me, though. Good-bye, Pan. And thank you.”

21

At the airport he inquired about flights to the city where he had been born, and was almost shocked to recollect that it had once been his home.

Home! How long since he last thought of it as such? For years “home” had meant his apartment in the therapy centre, with everything tailored to his special needs — even the sanitary fittings in the adjacent bathroom — so that the chair he kept for visitors, of normal size, seemed intrusive.

Yet some part of him had never caught up with that shift of perspective. Maybe this trip was really intended to look for what he had left behind.

Would people remember and recognize him? He hadn’t changed much, but he was well dressed instead of shabby, well fed instead of pinched and scrawny — enough change maybe, to make people pucker their foreheads in search of a half-vanished memory.

A curious heady excitement began to take hold of him as his cab rolled through familiar streets towards the district where most of his childhood had been spent. On impulse, he told the hackie to stop and let him out. He had checked most of his bags at the airport, keeping only a light valise which he could easily handle, and he wanted to take this stage of the journey slowly, on foot, to let the impact of old associations seep into his mind.

The first major fact to register on him was that his old home had gone.

He stood on a street-corner and looked at the towering stack of low-priced apartments which had taken the place of the plaster-peeling rabbit-warren of a tenement he had known.

The same kind of street gangs chased past him; the same wheezing old cars rolled by; the same crowded buses clanged and burped down the street. But the building wasn’t there.

An unexpected pang of nostalgia touched him. He had never imagined he could regret the disappearance of a place which had brought him so little of pleasure to cherish. He changed hands on his valise and limped on. As he went, he found people staring at him; a small boy bravely threw a dirty word at him and dissolved into laughter. He knew, now, why such things were done, and felt no resentment.

A block or two north, he remembered, was a bar and grill where he had done odd jobs during his mother’s illness. The way to it would take him past the school he had attended. He turned northward, making mental comparisons as he went.

The atmosphere was different from what he recollected. He had a sense of something like tranquillity, contrasting with the frenzied modernity of Ulan Bator with its cosmopolitan influx of strangers. Maybe this was the ultimate effect of the crisis in whose shadow he had been born. The closest he could come to summing it up in a single word was “chastened’. But there was no regret apparent.

He found himself rather liking the sensation, and wishing he had been back earlier.

The bar and grill had changed in layout and décor, but it was still there. It seemed more prosperous than in the old days. There were high stools at the counter, but he went to a table, earning a grimace from the lounging counterhand; he found it much too difficult to perch on a stool.

“What’ll it be ?” the counterhand called.

He was hungry after his journey, Howson found. “Small portion of steak and French fries, and a can of beer,” he responded.

While he was waiting for the food to come from the kitchen, the counterhand eyed his visitor curiously. It was plain why, but Howson waited until he raised the question openly.

“Here y’are, shorty,” the young man said in a friendly enough manner, setting the plate and glass on Howson’s table.

“Hey — I think I seen you around here some place, a long time back. Didn’t I?”

He would have been about twelve when Howson left, probably; it was quite possible he remembered. “You might have,” Howson agreed cautiously. “Does Charlie Birberger still run this place?”

“Mm-hm. You a friend of his ?”

“I used to be,” Howson hesitated. “If he’s in, maybe he’d come and have a word with me.”

“I’ll ask,” said the counterhand obligingly.

There was an exchange of shouts; then Birberger himself, older, fatter, but otherwise unchanged, came blinking into the bar. He caught sight of Howson and stopped dead, his mind a kaleidoscope of astonishment.

He recovered quickly, and waddled across the floor with a jovial air. “By God! Sarah Howson’s boy! Well, I never expected to see you in this place again after all we heard about you! Making out pretty well, hey ?”

“Pretty well,” Howson said. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Uh? Oh, sure!” Birberger fumbled a chair away from the table and entrusted his bulk to it gingerly. He put both elbows on the table, leaning forward. “We see about you in the papers sometimes, y’know! Must be wonderful work you’re doing Must admit, I never expected you’d wind up where you are Uh — been a pretty long time since you were in here, hey ? Ten years!”

“Eleven,” said Howson quietly.

“Long as that? Well, well!” Birberger rambled on. There was a faint quaver in his rotund voice, and Howson was suddenly struck by a strange realization: damn it, the man’s scared !

“Uh — any special reason for coming back?” Birberger probed clumsily. “Or just looking up the old place?”

“Looking up old friends, more,” Howson corrected. He took a sip of his beer. “You’re the first I’ve met since I flew in an hour or two back.”

“Well, it’s good of you to count me as an old friend,” Birberger said, brightening. “Y’know, I often think of the days when I useta let you help out in here. I remember you had quite an appetite for a—” He might have been going to say “runt’, but caught himself and finished with a change of mental gears: “Uh — young fella !”

He sat back. “Y’know, I like to think maybe I managed to give you a helping hand now and again. With your mother sick, and all…”

Howson could see the rose-coloured filters going up in his memory. He hid a smile. Charlie Birberger had been an irritable, hard-to-geton-with employer, given to bawling out his assistants mercilessly — especially Gerry Howson.

Well, no matter. He nodded as though in agreement, and Birberger’s original disquiet faded still further.

“Hey, tell you something!” the fat man said. “I still have all the cuttings from the papers about how they found you. I guess I could dig them out and show you. Hang on !”

He hoisted himself to his feet and disappeared into the back rooms. In a few minutes he returned with a dusty album, which he made ineffectual attempts to blow clean as he sat down again.

“There !” he said, opening it and turning it so that Howson could read the yellowed cuttings it contained.

Howson laid down his knife and fork and leafed through the album curiously. He hadn’t realized that the discovery of a telepathist had created such a furore in the city. Here were front-page items from all the leading local papers, some of them with pictures of Danny Waldemar and other UN personnel.

He had come to the last page and was about to hand the book back with a word of thanks, when he checked. The final item seemed to be completely irrelevant; it was a single paragraph reporting the marriage of Miss Mary Hall and Mr Stephen Williams, and the date was about two years after his departure.

“This one,” he said, putting a finger on it. “Is it connected with the rest?”

Birberger craned to study it. He frowned. “Now what in—? If it’s there, sure as hell there’s a reason. Must have something to do with — Good God, I remember!” He stared in astonishment at Howson. “Don’t you know the name? I’d have thought you of all people…”

Blankly, Howson returned the gaze. And then he had it.

He shut his eyes; the impact was almost physical. In a husky tone he said, “No — no, I never knew her name. She was deaf and dumb, you see, so she couldn’t tell me. And after she got her speech and hearing she only came to see me a few times.”

“She never wrote you?” Birberger was turning back the leaves of the album. “After all you did for her, too! I’m really surprised. Yes, here we are: ‘A plane from Ulan Bator today brought in eighteen-year-old Mary Hall, the deaf-and-dumb girl who befriended novice telepathist Gerry Howson. She told reporters at the city airport that the operation to give her artificial speech and hearing was completely successful, and now all she wanted was the chance to lead a quiet, normal life.’ Look!”

At first glance he must have missed it because he wanted to, Howson told himself. For the newspaper photo wasn’t a bad one. There she was, standing at the door of the plane: smartly dressed, true, and wearing makeup and with her hair properly styled — but recognizably the girl he had known.

“Is there any chance of finding out where she’s living?” He had uttered the question unplanned, but realized its inevitability while Birberger was still rubbing his chin and considering the problem.

“I’ll get the city directory!” he said, rather too eagerly, as though anxious to get Howson on his way.

There were several dozen Williamses, but only one Stephen Williams. Howson studied the address.

“West Walnut,” he said. “Where’s that ?”

“New district since your time, I believe. Big development outside town. A number nineteen bus goes direct.” Birberger was hardly making any attempt to disguise his desire to see the back of his visitor now.

So Howson, dispirited, accommodated him, paying for his food and beer and gathering up his valise. Birberger stumped to the door with him and insisted on shaking his hand, treating it with care as if touching something rare and fragile. But his invitation to come back as soon as possible rang thin.

On impulse Howson asked him, “Say, Mr Birberger! What’s your picture of the kind of work I do nowadays ?”

Startled, the fat man improvised. “Why, you — you sort of look into crazy people’s minds and tell what’s wrong with them. And straighten them out. Don’t you ?”

“That’s right,” Howson said a little unkindly. “Don’t worry, though — I’m not looking into your mind. After all, you’re not crazy, are you?”

The seeds of the most peculiar kind of doubt were germinating in Birberger’s mind as Howson limped down the street towards the stop for a nineteen bus.

Odd: people’s different reactions to telepathists… Howson contemplated them as he sat in the single seat near the driver up front in the bus. He hadn’t examined that problem for years; at the WHO therapy centre he was in isolation from it, because telepathists had become a completely accepted part of the regular staff.

Occasionally, though not as often as he would have liked, trainees came in, and he assisted with their development. Each was unique, and consequently each responded differently to knowledge of his talent. Some were like children with a newfound toy; others were like members of a family in Nazi Germany, who had just discovered that they had Jewish blood and were desperately pretending it made no difference.

It was getting easier to accept the gift, granted. The years of carefully devised propaganda had had some effect. But telepathists were so few they barely even constituted a minority group, and that, rather than conditioning of the public, had been their salvation — at least in Howson’s view. A tiny fraction of the population had actually met someone with the power; consequently, though most people had opinions (’I don’t doubt they do wonderful work, but I wouldn’t like someone poking around in my mind — I mean, it’s the ultimate invasion of privacy!’) few had formed lasting attitudes.

“West Walnut, pal!” the driver called to him, slowing the bus. He was trying to control his prejudice-reactions at Howson’s appearance, and for that Howson gave him a projective wave of warm gratitude. It lit the man’s mind like a gaudy show of fireworks, and he was whistling a cheerful tune as he drove away.

Howson gave a bitter chuckle. If it were always that easy things would be fine !

22

The new development was clean, airy, spacious, with small houses set among bright green lawns. Children on their way home from school ran and laughed along the paths. He thought achingly of the dose ugly streets of his own childhood, and repressed absurd envy. Briskening his pace as much as possible, he followed signs towards the Williams home.

Yes, there was the name on the mailbox: S. Williams. He reached up and pressed the bell.

After a while the door was cautiously opened on a security chain, and a girl of about seven looked through the gap. “What do you want ?” she said timidly.

“Is Mrs Williams in ?”

“Mummy isn’t home,” the girl said in her most grown-up and authoritative voice. “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“Will she be back soon? I’m an old friend of hers, and I want to—”

“What is it, Jill ?” a boy’s voice inquired from out of sight.

“There’s a man here who wants to see Mummy,” the girl explained, and a clatter of shoes announced her brother’s descent of the stairs. In a moment another pair of eyes was peering at the visitor. The boy was startled at Howson’s appearance, and failed to conceal the fact, but he had obviously been trained to be polite, and opened the door with an invitation to come in and wait.

“Mummy’s gone to see Mrs Olling next door,” he said. “She won’t be long.”

Howson thanked him and limped into the lounge. Behind him he heard an argument going on in whispers — Jill complaining that they oughtn’t to have let a stranger into the house, and her brother countering scornfully that Howson was no bigger than himself, so how could he be dangerous ?

Shyly, the children followed him into the lounge and sat down on a sofa opposite the chair he had taken, at a loss for anything to say. Howson had not had anything to do with children for many years; he felt almost equally tongue-tied.

“Maybe your mother has told you about me,” he ventured. “I’m called Gerry — Gerry Howson. I used to know your mother when she was — uh — before she met your daddy. You’re Jill, aren’t you? And—?”

“I’m Bobby,” said the boy. “Er — do you live near here, Mr Howson ?”

“No, I live at Ulan Bator. I’m a doctor at the big hospital there.”

“A doctor!” This began to thaw Jill’s shyness. She leaned forward excitedly. “Ooh! I’m going to be a nurse when I grow up.”

“How about you, Bobby ? Do you want to be a doctor ?”

“No, I don’t,” said the boy rather slightingly. “I want to be a Mars pilot or a submarine captain,” Then he relented, and with a gravity exactly imitated from some stiff-mannered adult, he added, “I’m sure a doctor’s work is very interesting, though.”

“Mr Howson,” said Jill with a puzzled expression, “if you’re a doctor, why have you got a bad leg? Can’t you have it fixed?”

“Jill!” exclaimed Bobby, horrified. “You know you shouldn’t say things like that to people!”

He was being grown-up, thought Howson with amusement. “I don’t mind,” he said. “No, Jill, I can’t have it fixed. I was born like it, and now there’s nothing than can be done. Besides, I’m not that kind of doctor. I—” He recollected Birberger’s halting, naive description of his work, and finished, “I look into sick people’s minds and tell what’s wrong with them.”

Bobby’s adult manners vanished in a wave of surprise. “You mean you’re a crazy doctor ?”

“Well, now!” Howson countered with a hint of a smile, “I don’t think ‘crazy’ is a very nice word. The people who come to my hospital are pretty much the same as anybody — they just need help because life has got too complicated for them.”

They didn’t contest the statement, but their scepticism was apparent. Howson sighed. “How would you like me to tell you a story about my work?” he suggested. “I used to tell stories to your mother, and she enjoyed it.”

“Depends on the story,” said Bobby cautiously. Jill had been sitting in wide-eyed wonder since Howson’s revelation that he was a “crazy doctor’. Now she spoke up in support of her brother.

“I don’t think we’d like a story about crazy people,” she said doubtfully.

“It’s very exciting,” Howson promised quietly. “Much more exciting than being a spaceman or a submarine captain, really. I have a wonderful job.” He found time to ask himself when he had last realized how completely he meant that declaration before he went on.

“Suppose I tell you about this person who came to my hospital…”

The technique came back to him as though he had used it yesterday, instead of eleven years before. Gently he projected the hint that the children should shut their eyes, just as he had done long ago for the deaf-and-dumb girl whose mind was closed to anything but bright plain images and rich sensory impressions.

First… A hospital ward: efficiency, confidence, kindliness. Pretty nurses — Jill could be one of them for an instant, calming a patient whose face reflected gratitude.

Now…A glance inside the patient’s mind. Nightmare: but not a child’s nightmare, which would have been too terrifying for them. An adult nightmare, rather — too complex for them to recognize more than its superficial nature.

And then… Sharp, well-defined images: the patient running through the corridors of his own mind pursued by monsters from his subconscious; running for help and finding none until the presence of the doctor suggested reassurance and comfort. Then the harrying horrors paused in their chase: armed themselves with weapons which they could create merely by thinking, patient and doctor together cowed the things, drove them back, cornered them — and they were not.

It was a compound of half a dozen cases he had handled as a novice, simple, vigorous and exciting without being too fearful. When he had done, Howson broke the link and suggested that they open their eyes again.

“Goodness!” said Bobby with considerable new respect. “I didn’t know it was like that at all!”

Jill was about to confirm his reaction when she glanced through the open door into the hallway and bounced to her feet. “There’s Mummy!” she exclaimed. “Mummy, here’s somebody to see you — he’s been telling us such an exciting story like the ones he used to tell you!”

Mary Williams pushed the door fully open and looked at Howson. Her face — rather coarse, as he remembered it, but showing more personality and cleverly made up — set in a frozen stare. Through lips which barely opened she said, “That was nice of him. Now you run along so I can talk to Mr How-son on my own.”

Obediently the children started for the door. “Will you tell us some more stories some time, please?” Jill threw over her shoulder as she went out.

“If you like,” Howson promised, smiling, and when they had gone added to Mary, “Two fine children you have there!”

She ignored the remark. With her face still icy cold and empty, she said, “Well, Gerry ? So you’ve come back to plague me, have you?”

Howson waited in blank astonishment for a few seconds. When she did not amplify this amazing statement, he got to his feet. “I came to find out how you were getting on,” he snapped. “If you call it plaguing you, I’ll go. Right now!”

He picked up his valise, half-expecting her to open the door and say it was good riddance. Instead, she burst into tears.

“Mary!” he exclaimed, and realized and added aloud in the same moment: “Why, that’s the first time I’ve ever called you by name! And we knew each other pretty well, didn’t we?”

She mastered her sobs, and gestured for him to sit down again. “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. It was amazing how completely she had learned to use her artificial vocal cords; unless one looked carefully for the scar on her throat it was impossible to detect they had been inserted by the hand of man. “It just took me by surprise, I guess. It — it’s nice of you to call, Gerry.”

“But what did you mean when you said I’d come to plague you?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She moved to the place where Jill had been sitting, and waved vaguely at her surroundings — the room, the house, the whole suburb. “Now you have come, what have you found ? An ordinary housewife with a couple of ordinary kids and a decent enough guy for a husband. You can find a million people like me wherever you go. Only—”

She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and sat up, crossing her legs. “Only seeing you reminded me of what I was going to be… That was why I stopped coming to see you.”

“I think I understand,” Howson said faintly. A cold weight was settling in the pit of his stomach. “But I never suspected there was anything wrong. You seemed so happy!”

“Oh — I guess I didn’t really suspect it myself.” She stared past him at the plain pastel walls. “It was after I came home that I realized. You remember how — in the stories you used to tell me — I was always beautiful and sought after, and I could hear and talk like anyone else.” She gave a harsh laugh.

“Well, the only part that came true was the ‘like anyone else’! I thought I’d got over it — until I came through the door and saw you sitting there. And it reminded me that instead of being the — the princess in the fairy tale, I’m plain Mary Williams the West Walnut housewife, and I shall never be anything else.”

There was silence for a moment. Howson could think of nothing to say.

“And of course I’ve been so jealous of you,” she went on in a level tone. “While I had to drop back into this anonymous existence, you became important and famous…”

“I suppose you wouldn’t believe me,” said Howson meditatively, “if I were to tell you that sometimes I feel I’d give up fame, importance, everything, for the privilege of looking other men straight in the eye and walking down the street without a limp.”

In an odd voice she said, “Yes, Gerry, I think I do believe you. I heard they hadn’t been able to do anything — about your leg, I mean. And the rest of it. I’m sorry.”

A thought struck her, and she stiffened. “Gerry, you haven’t really been telling Jill and Bobby the same kind of stories you told me? I’d never forgive you if you cursed them with the same kind of discontent.”

“I’ve learned a lot in eleven years,” Howson said bitterly. “You needn’t worry. I just told them about my work at Ulan Bator, and Jill says she wants to be a nurse anyway. I don’t think it will leave them discontented.”

“It left me that way,” Mary mused. “I remember the stories you told me much more vividly than I remember the dreadful place where we were living. The stories are more—more definite. While the real world has faded into a blur of grey.”

Howson had not yet replied when there were steps in the hall, and the sound of the children running. A man’s voice was heard greeting them affectionately.

“There’s Steve,” said Mary dispiritedly. “I wish—”

Howson didn’t hear what she wished, for at that moment Williams entered the lounge and stopped in surprise at seeing Howson there. “Uh — good afternoon!” he said blankly, his eyes asking furious questions of his wife.

“Steve, this is — I guess I should call you ‘doctor’, shouldn’t I, Gerry? — Dr. Gerry Howson, from Ulan Bator. He used to be a friend of mine before I met you.”

Williams signally failed to mask the fact that he thought his wife’s choice of friends must have been peculiar, but he offered his hand and Howson rose to take it.

“Gerry’s a psychiatrist,” Mary explained further, and Howson shook his head, wondering why she hadn’t told her husband about him.

“Not exactly. I’m actually a curative telepathist on the staff of the therapy centre there — the Asian headquarters of WHO.”

“A telepathist!” The information shook Williams severely. “Well, how — uh — interesting! I never met one of you people before.” And never particularly wanted to, his mind glossed silently.

There was a pause. Mary tried to fill it by saying in a bright voice, “You’ll stay for supper with us, Gerry, I hope?” But behind the words he could read desperate anxiety: please say no, I never told him about you and I don’t think I could bear to have you reminding me, reminding me…

Howson made great play of looking at his watch. “I’d love to,” he lied. “But I haven’t got too much time and I want to look up a good many old acquaintances. I’d better say no.”

He collected his valise and took his leave. On the doorstep he looked back at Mary.

“Apologize to the children for my not being able to stay and tell them another story, won’t you?” he said. “And — try not to hate me.”

“I promise,” said Mary with a wan smile.

“And try not to pity me, either!” he finished savagely, turning his back. He wished he could have stormed down the path from the house, instead of hobbling like a rather ridiculous jointed doll.

23

For many years the hope had endured in his mind: that the deaf-and-dumb girl who had been kind to him had not suffered lastingly because of him. He had believed that there, if anywhere, he had managed ultimately to ensure a person’s happiness.

He had avoided questioning the assumption — why ? Because he subconsciously realized the truth ?

The encounter with her had jolted his personality to its foundations. For a while, as he limped towards the highway fringing the West Walnut development, he was inclined to abandon his trip at once, unwilling to face any more such revelations. But this was exactly what he must not do; no matter how unique his talent made him, he remained a human being, and he had come hunting for the completion of that humanity.

He sighed, put his valise down on the sidewalk and looked both ways along the street. A cab was turning around after dropping a dark-suited man, home from work. He waved at the driver, wondering where he should ask to be taken now.

The vehicle went on by. In sudden anger Howson made as if to project a deafening mental shout after it, but at the last moment he realized the driver had mistaken him for a kid waving a greeting because of his small size, and contented himself with suggesting that the man think again.

The cab braked, reversed, pulled up to where he stood. The hackie, a thick-set man with humorous eyes, took in Howson’s appearance, considered it, shrugged. He said, “Sorry, pal—dreaming, I guess. I lose more fares — Where to, anyway?”

“Grand Avenue,” Howson said briefly, and scrambled in.

Now, the name was ridiculous. The process of disintegration which had begun at the time of Howson’s birth and was well under way when he left for Ulan Bator had gone nearly to completion. A stretch of four blocks at the north end of the avenue was being demolished and laid out as a city housing project; beyond, as though disheartened by the threat of extinction, the stores had closed their eyes behind lids of crude bright posters — everything must go! clearance sale! lease up, bargain time now!

An evening wind pushed balls of paper and clouds of dust down the unswept gutters, and the few people about walked with an air of gloom.

There was the movie theatre where he had conceived his first and disastrous attempt at importance, still struggling on, but grimy and neglected. And beyond it, something entirely new: a handsome, clean, tall block with discreet bronze lettering on the marble pillars of its main door. Frowning, Howson considered what they said.

CENTRAL UNIVERSITY — FACULTY OF PURE AND APPLIED SCIENCE.

“Driver!” he called. “Take it slow along here, will you?”

Complying with a dab on his brakes, the driver glanced over his shoulder. “Makes a difference, doesn’t it?” he commented. “That’s the Drake Gift, that place. Whole big piece of land given to the university a few years back. Going to have room for a thousand students when they’re through — study halls, offices, hostels!”

Well, that was an improvement, no denying. But once more Howson felt the unaccountable stab of nostalgia at the disappearance of a place he had never thought he would want to see again.

“Is it already in use ?” he asked.

“Oh, sure — since last fall. They put the students into rooms all around this district so they needn’t wait till the hostels are ready.”

Way, way back young Gerry Howson had had visions of going to college, then on to some academic career… He stifled the memory with an effort. Even if he had got farther than he had done towards his goal, his gift would have developed sooner or later and everything else would have had to take second place anyway. He wouldn’t have got where he was by the same route, but he would have been forced here eventually.

“Is there still a bar along here on the right?” he asked. “The one that used to be run by a guy called Horace Hampton?”

“The Snake?” The driver twisted his head clear around at that. “You must have been away a long time, pal! I recall the Snake, but only just! Why — uh — ten years back, I guess, some teeps came in from the UN and went through the big rackets and cleared “em out. The Snake got five years with compulsory rehabilitation for accessory to murder, and last I heard he was going to join some UN outfit and make good.”

Teeps — TP’s — telepathists. Howson nodded. He didn’t remember hearing the nickname before, which surprised him; it was so obvious. As for the news about Snake Hampton, it was less strange that he shouldn’t have known that. This was, after all, a city that the new world was passing by. A minor law-enforcement action was petty compared to the big jobs the—the teeps had undertaken here.

“But his bar’s still going,” the driver said. “Just coming into sight ahead, there. I don’t know who runs it now.”

“There’s a hotel the other side of it,” Howson said. “Drop me there.”

Having checked in at the hotel and arranged for the rest of his bags to be sent down from the airport, he ate a solitary meal and reflected on what he had found out so far. He felt despondent. Why should he have expected to be able to come back to where he had left off eleven years ago? It seemed an arrogant assumption, and annoyed him.

He was a stranger now. He’d have to accept that.

After his meal he left the hotel and went along the street to what had been Hampton’s bar. It was shabbier, more dimly lit than he remembered, its mirrors fly-specked, its floor worn by many feet. Were the rooms in back as they had been — the blue room where he had spent those anxious hours with Lots, for example? Did it matter? He had made up his mind not to look for things as they had been, but as they were now. He moved to a corner table at the back of the bar, ordered a beer, and sat miserably contemplating it.

The image of Mary’s face kept getting between him and the world around him. It was going to take a long time to adjust to what she had confessed to him. “Why,” Hugh Choong had asked him, in effect, “do you feel guilty about using your ability for your own enjoyment?”

And he might have answered, “Because when I did I was repaid with the subconscious knowledge that I had created suffering.”

Poor Mary… Poor fairy-tale princess!

Other things were growing clear in his mind, too. Charlie Birberger had been eager to convince himself that he had given Howson a helping hand; well, how much of Howson’s own insistence on staying the year around at the Ulan Bator hospital was due to a desire to see as many patients as possible feel indebted to him? Was he in fact being influenced by the urge to secure their admiration and gratitude, as he had sought Mary’s admiration and gratitude eleven years before?

He broke off the train of thought in annoyance. Self-analysis like this could go on indefinitely and never get anywhere. He had indisputably done a hell of a lot of good work, and he would do more — provided only that he could restore his confidence in himself. So far he had managed to destroy some self-defensive illusions; granted, if they were illusions they were fragile anyway, but they had helped to sustain him in the past, so he was making his situation worse instead of better.

Where to from here? What next?

He raised his beer and sipped it, thinking about the first time he had come in here and the exchange he had had with Lots about the reason for his not drinking. He had learned from the minds of well-adjusted colleagues why people did like to drink, and stopped there, with the vicarious ability to copy them. He had also seen why some of his patients drank to excess, and preferred not to be taken in by the same fallacy.

Setting the glass down, he became aware of raised voices at the table in the opposite corner to his own. A group of two young men — untidily dressed and about two days unshaven—and a plain girl with fair hair in a rather shapeless dress, were involved in heated argument. At least, one man and the girl were; the other man seemed to be listening with amusement.

“But don’t you see?” thundered the girl, slamming her open palm on the table so that the trio’s glasses jumped “You’re ignoring the lessons of the whole of the past century in order to rehash things which have been done twenty times over better than you’ll ever manage to do them!”

“You must be blind, deaf, dumb and moronic to say a thing like that!” blazed back her opponent. “One of your most damnable faults, and you’ve got plenty, is making wild and empty generalizations! Anyone with a grain of intelligence—”

“Excuse me, you two,” said the mildly amused young man. “I’ll come back when it’s less noisy around here.”

“Good riddance!” snapped the girl as he picked up his drink and crossed the floor to Howson’s table. Howson bridled instinctively, but the stranger betrayed no reaction to his appearance.

“Mind if I sit here for a bit ? I won’t be able to get a word in edgewise until they calm down, and since neither of them really knows what they’re talking about… Cigarette ?”

Howson was on the point of refusing — smoking was discouraged at the therapy centre, even with carcinogen-free tobacco available now — when it occurred to him that the young man was being extremely courteous. He had no means of knowing that Howson was more than his vacuous face suggested, yet had addressed him with perfect aplomb.

He accepted the cigarette with a word of thanks.

“What’s it all about, anyway?” he ventured as he bent to receive a light.

“Charma,” said the other around his cigarette, “insists that Jay is doing incompetent and unsatisfactory work. She’s right. She is, however, totally wrong in maintaining that he’s merely repeating something that’s been done hundreds of times. He does have a fairly original idea; he simply isn’t good enough to cope with it properly. He thinks he is. So — they disagree.”

“Does this happen a lot ?”

“It goes on all the blasted time!” said the young man in a ponderously aggrieved tone.

“And what sort of work ?”

“Oh — bit hard to define. I guess you might call his things liquid mobiles. Charma refers to them as wet fireworks, and though I suppose you could argue that she has something there, it doesn’t exactly delight Jay. Main trouble is, he ought to be a chemist and hydrodynamicist as well as a guy with an eye for a lighting effect, and he isn’t, so he can’t exploit the very genuine possibilities of his technique.”

About twenty-two or—three, Howson judged as he looked at his new acquaintance. He was of medium height, plumply good-looking, with untidy black hair and heavy glasses. He wore a faded shirt open at the neck, dark trousers with light stains on the knees, and open sandals. An enormous watch caught the light on his wrist. A sheaf of pens and pencils was clipped in his shirt pocket.

“You’re students?” suggested Howson, recollecting the nearness of the new university building.

“No more, no more. We got a wee bit dissatisfied with academic standards a while back, and since the academic standard-bearers were likewise less than pleased with us we agreed to stop “bothering each other. Another drink ?”

“No, let me,” said Howson, and signalled a waiter. He paid with the topmost of a bundle of bills which made his companion purse his mouth in parodied awe.

“It always gives me pleasure to accept a drink from the rich,” he said solemnly. “It means I’m doing my humble bit towards the redistribution of capital.”

“Set “em up for those two as well,” Howson told the waiter indicating Jay and Charma. “Ah — what’s your particular line, by the way?”

“I compose. Badly. What’s yours ?”

“I’m a doctor,” said Howson after a moment’s hesitation.

“I’d never have guessed. We ought to try you on Man, maybe — an embryo sociologist we know, who’s a fanatical determinist. Trying to make out that professions and trades can be correlated with physical types. Mark you, someone like you is calculated to throw a spanner in the works no matter what you do for a living — sort of wild variable. Say, you’ve managed to quiet them down!” He twisted on his chair to face Jay and Charma.

Howson followed his movement. Charma was lifting her newly filled glass to him. “Your doing?” she said. “Thanks! And gulped it thirstily. Small wonder, after all the shouting she had done.

“Rudi!” Jay said, displaying his wrist-watch. “Things ought to be waking up at Clara’s now. Think we could drop by ?”

“Good idea,” said Howson’s new friend. “Say, this guy here is a doctor. We ought to tell Brian and see how his face falls, no?”

“He’d never believe you,” Charma said. She drained her glass.

“And even if he did,” supplemented Jay, “he has more special exceptions than conforming cases in the scheme already.”

“We should prove it to him, then,” insisted Rudi. “Is he going to be at Clara’s this evening ?”

“When did you know that man miss a party?” countered Jay.

“Okay!” Rudi turned to Howson. “That is, if you’re not doing anything. I’m sorry — I seem to have made plans for you — uh—?”

“Gerry,” Howson supplied. “Well, as a matter of fact…”

As a matter of fact I’d love to go to this party. If I want to learn to face people, I’d like to start with people like these—iconoclastic, angry about prejudice, willing to accept me even if only because I’m out of the ordinary.

“Clara won’t mind an extra guest,” Rudi prompted, mistaking his hesitation. “We’ll take along a couple of packs of beer, and everything will be okay.”

“ In that case,” Howson said, rising,” I’ll surely come.”

On the threshold, waiting while Jay and Rudi manoeuvred the big packs of beer-cans through the narrow door, he suggested, Taking a cab ?”

Jay gave a hoot of laughter, elbowing back the door.

“Jay. you’re an unobservant bastard,” said Rudi severely. “Just because you’re long-legged and bursting with vitamins you think everyone shares your passion for sore feet. Now I, since I’m observant, happen to know that Gerry here has a wad of cash big enough to buy us a cab for the trip. Charma, get out in the gutter and pull up your skirt!”

24

Howson was in the grip of an excitement so violently contrasted with his earlier depression that he had to try and analyse his reactions for the sake of his own peace of mind.

Otherwise he would have lost much of his pleasure in subconscious worrying.

What was it that had hit him so hard ? He achieved a working explanation by the time the cab stopped.

First off, he’d missed this kind of people. Which was hardly to be wondered at. One of the first benefits of an improved standard of living, as he had already been superficially aware, is to postpone the age at which a person’s opinions congeal for life. Someone forced by poverty to avoid spending on enlarging his horizons the energy and time needed simply for staying alive adopted the attitudes, ready-made, of his environment. This was why students formed the backbone of so many revolutionary movements, for instance.

Improved standards of living hadn’t made much impact on his early life. When his mother died, fifteen years previously, the effects were still filtering down to his level.

But ten minutes with Rudi and his friends had informed him that this was something he wanted to catch up on, and he had a chance not to be missed.

When Rudi picked up Howson’s bag for him and gave him a hand out of the cab, he didn’t raise an objection. It wasn’t a reminder of his plight, somehow. Not this time, in this company.

As he scrambled up the narrow, ill-lit staircase of the apartment house they had come to, he found himself wondering whether people who hadn’t accepted the conventional attitudes towards cripples were also free of prejudice about telepathists But he didn’t feel inclined to find out directly. That was too delicate a subject; he’d best postpone it for a while.

Detachment returned to temper his wave of heady enthusiasm, however, when he had been at the party an hour or so. The premises were small — a bed-sitting-room, with minuscule kitchen adjacent and a shared lavatory on the landing—and there were a lot of people crammed into the place. Not apparently, including Brian, the man he was supposed to meet but including a great many other students from the university.

For the first few minutes he was shown around as a wrench to be tossed into Brian’s works. Then, though, after a rapid series of introductions, the three who had brought him became embroiled in conversation with older friends and left him to his own devices.

He was at two disadvantages then: his stature made it hard for other people to keep him in on an argument unless they were sitting and he was standing, and there was little room left to sit anywhere but on the floor; moreover, his voice was weak and hard to follow at the best of times, and here there was a tremendous amount of noise to combat — voices raised in violent disagreement, cups and glasses and bottles clattering, even before someone arrived with a concertina and began to play regardless of who cared to listen.

He was beginning to feel lost and out of place when he noticed that someone had vacated a few square inches of the edge of the divan bed, next to the wall. He sat down promptly before he missed the opportunity; someone came by and poured him a fresh drink, and after that no one paid him any attention for some while.

He occupied himself in eavesdropping telepathically on a number of the conversations — it was impolite, but it was too interesting to be forgone. It was obvious that the new branch of the university was a very good one, and the instruction must be of high quality. Even the well-adapted telepathists among the students he had associated with in Ulan Bator hadn’t displayed such keenness in the use of their intellect.

Of course, the comparison was hardly fair. All the student telepathists he had known well were outnumbered by the crowd in this one room.

Group A (he categorized them in the course of a brief survey): two girls in yellow, apparently sisters, and a man of twenty-five or so; subject under examination, religion as a necessity of human social evolution. Group B: Jay, whom he knew, a long-haired boy still in his teens, another with a slight stammer getting in the way of his arguments, and a plain girl with a fringe; subject, a revue for which Jay was being persuaded to do the decor. Group C: a beautiful girl of twenty and a man in a red sweater; subject, each other. Howson felt a stir of envy and firmly diverted his attention.

Group D: four men with very loud voices standing close to the concertina-player; subject, sparked off by the instrument, the influence of new musical devices on the work of contemporary composers. One of the group kept trying to talk about his own work, and the others kept forcibly steering him away from it. (Where was Rudi, anyway ? Oh yes, circling the room pouring drinks.)

Group E: two girls, one slightly drunk, and two men; subject, the drunker girl’s view on modern poetry. Group F: three men, two in open shirts and one in a sweater; subject, the impossibility of living up to one’s ideals in later life.

And so on. Howson was flirting dangerously with the idea of joining in one of these conversations (any of them bar Group C) by telepathic means, when he realized the suggestion probably came out of his latest drink and stopped himself with a sigh. Looking about him with his physical eyesight, he became aware that a girl had sat down next to him while he was distracted, and was now looking at him with an amused expression. She was young and rather attractive, despite wearing a blue cardigan which clashed horribly with the green of her eyes.

“Good evening,” she said with mocking formality. “Meet me. I’m your hostess.”

Howson sat up. “I’m sorry!” he began. “Rudi and Jay insisted on my coming—”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” she said, dismissing the point with a wave. “I’m the one who ought to apologize for neglecting a guest so long. I just haven’t had a spare moment Are you enjoying yourself ?”

“Tremendously, thanks.”

“I thought you might be, behind that mask of non-engagement. What were you doing — drinking in atmosphere ?”

“Actually I was thinking what a lot of impressive and lively discussion there was here.”

“Bloody, isn’t it ? At any party like this people dream up a dozen wonderful world-changing schemes, and they never put them into practice. Well, we should worry — been happening for centuries and it’s likely to go on. Might be a good idea to note down some of the schemes and publish them — get them to someone who could make use of them…” She unfocused her eyes, as though studying a future possibility. “Might have a crack at it. But that’s probably just another of those same vanishing schemes.”

“Are you a writer ?” Howson guessed.

“Potential. Somebody tell you ?”

“No. But you have a lot of creative people here.”

The girl (her name would be Clara, since she was the hostess) offered him a cigarette. He refused, but borrowed someone else’s burning one to light hers with. Where the hell had he got that trick from ? He’d never done it in his life before. Out of a movie, maybe, from — from…

It was with a start he recollected that he was in the same city where he had seen that movie.

“No, me,” Clara was saying, “I suffer from a congenital dissatisfaction with words. I mean — hell, if you tried to explore fully just the few people here during the few hours the party lasted, you’d wind up with an unmanageable monster. How long does Ulysses last, for instance — eighteen hours, is it? And you still couldn’t be sure you were communicating with your audience. What I’d like is a technique which would enable a pre-Columbian Amerind to understand a twentieth-century Chinese. Then — brother! I’d be a writer!”

She chuckled at the grandiosity of her own ambition, and changed the sububject.

“How about you ? What’s your line ?”

“I’m a doctor,” Howson said after considering and dismissing the idea of sounding her out on the possibilities of telepathy as a solution to the problem in communication she had propounded. “Matter of fact, Rudi wanted me to come along to meet someone trying to correlate physical types with trades and professions. Brian — someone.”

“Oh yes. Rudi’s for ever trying to deflate him. I imagine he needed some mental acrobatics to fit you into the pattern, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been introduced to him yet.”

“Well, if that isn’t Rudi all over! Damn it, Brian’s been here the better part of an hour… Oh, maybe he’ll remember and bring you together sooner or later. Do you mind? Or would you rather get it over and go ?”

Howson shook his head. “I’m enjoying this,” he affirmed.

Someone tapped his arm and held a bottle ovehis now empty glass; he covered it quickly with his palm to indicate a refusal, and then turned to put it on a handy table. For a while there was a companionable silence between them, while the party’s chatter and music circled around like the winds enclosing a hurricane’s eye.

25

Finally, since Clara showed no immediate desire to move on, he stirred and glanced at her.

“Who and what, exactly, is Rudi ?” he asked. He was rather more interested in Rudi than in the other two he had met in the bar this evening. He had not trespassed in the younger man’s mind, of course; a single telepathic sweep would have told him all he wanted to know, but he shrank from the notion as he shrank from invading anyone’s mental privacy without invitation or necessity. Even on the strength of externals, however, Rudi impressed him as having a deeper and more mature personality than his friends.

“Rudi?” Clara blew smoke through her nostrils. “Rudi Allef is his full name. He’s half-Israeli. He came here on a UN grant He was doing — well, I think he was doing — some good work. Unfortunately it wasn’t the work he was supposed to do to qualify for the grant he was getting. So they discontinued it. So Jay and Charma Home—”

“Jay and Charma Horne ? Brother and sister ?”

Clara stared at him. “Whatever gave you that extraordinary-idea ? They’re married.”

“Married?”

“Well — why shouldn’t they be ?”

Howson recovered himself and shrugged; he didn’t do it too well, for reasons connected with the curvature of his spine. “It was just the way they were rowing with each other when I first met them Sorry, go on.”

“Ah-h-h — yes. So Jay and Charma, being slightly crazy anyway as you might expect in view of their having got married under the circumstances, quit in sympathy and aren’t finding life any too easy. Still, you were asking about Rudi, not the Homes. Rudi is — well, a problem.”

“Odd you should say that,” Howson remarked, puzzled. “Obviously you know him better than I do, but I’d have said he seemed like a well-balanced and integrated person.”

“He gives that impression, certainly.” Clara looked across the room to where the object of their discussion sat on the floor near the concertina-player. “Maybe one of these days, if he keeps the act up long enough, he’ll convince himself that’s the way he really is. And a good thing too. Otherwise he’ll suffer a serious breakdown and not be much good to himself or anybody else for a long, long time.”

Momentarily unsure whether they were talking about the same person, Howson stared. “Does he show signs of cracking?” he demanded.

She seemed to draw her mind back from elsewhere, and shook herself very slightly. “Oh, if you know where to look… I ought to circulate and attend to my guests, I suppose. See you later.”

She had just risen to her feet when she checked. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But you seem to be a bit of a problem yourself. Are you ?”

Howson looked at her as hard in the eye as he could. “You claim to be good at spotting problems,” he answered. “Make up your own mind.”

She flushed. “I deserved that,” she admitted, and turned away.

After which, Howson realized, he still didn’t know much about Rudi Allef.

But at that moment Rudi himself remembered the bomb he had wanted to place under Brian’s sociological theory. He climbed to his feet, dragged Brian out of the argument he was involved in, and presented Howson to him. More than ever, as he looked at Rudi’s eager grin, Howson found himself tempted to take a quick peep — just one! — inside that well-shaped head.

And if he did, and proceeded inadvertently to display a knowledge of Rudi he couldn’t possibly have obtained ordinarily in the course of such a short acquaintance… ? How-son suddenly realized what it must be like for a mulatto “passing” in a place where such things counted, and the room grew cold.

He just hadn’t known this feeling before. He was an undersized cripple; all right, these people were defiantly taking so much for granted. But even here there might be those who would consider him alien. Maybe, when the time came for them to find out who he really was (and that time would inevitably come, whether he was still among them or not), they would shrug and maintain their open-mindedness. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t.

Perhaps, in sheer self-defence, he ought to find out their opinions before committing himself—? He could do it in a moment!

Then he realized he had failed to catch something that was said to him, and reflexively picked the words out of Rudi’s mind. He was half-way through his answer before he realized what he had done, and the room grew even colder. He was so used to being among people from whom his talent was no secret that he had acquired many automatic habits such as that. The shock made him stumble in his reply, but he recovered quickly enough to hide his alarm.

The one glimpse inside Rudi’s mind had made the idea of probing deeper still more tempting, but he told himself carefully : he’s not my patient, not a professional colleague. I may have gone too far already — no farther!

He forced himself to concentrate on the conversation. Brian, whom he didn’t like at all, was shaking off his harassed mood and returning to his old comfortable dogmas. “After all,” he was saying, “people like Dr. Howson here are bound to be exceptions wherever you try to fit them in. I mean, they’re like trying to predict the next atom due to disintegrate in a chunk of uranium. You know one of them is going to pop, but you can’t say which. Equally, you know that Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere, but you couldn’t predict where without a lot of other data…”

He droned on, while Howson’s mind took hold of one short phrase and worried it over and over.

“Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere!”

It was very much later when Clara sat down near him again. The room was far less crowded; some people had gone home, and others had apparently decided to camp out on the stairs.

“Oh, that Rudi!” she said in a tone Which mingled annoyance with tolerant long-suffering. “He’s out in the kitchen being miserable. You’d never think it to look at him, of course. He’s giving imitations of the stuffed shirts on the university staff, with props, and about half a dozen idiots are laughing at him.”

“If you wouldn’t think it to look at him, how would you know?” said Howson bluntly. Then a possibility occurred to him, and he caught himself. “I’m sorry. Presumably you know him very well.”

“If you think he’s my — well, shall we be polite and say ‘intimate friend’ ? — you’re wrong,” Clara countered in a cool, slightly reproachful voice. “As a matter of fact, I hardly knew him except by sight until this thing of his grant being stopped came up a short while ago.”

She paused, looking puzzled. “Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t be so…”

Howson shared her puzzlement. He had jumped to the exact conclusion Clara had just disabused him of; even though it didn’t fit quite all the facts, it was the most obvious explanation. But if that wasn’t the truth, what the — ?

Several people came out of the kitchen, laughing heartily, surrounding Rudi and clapping him on the back. Howson scanned the dark, good-looking face. No, it betrayed no hint of the misery Clara claimed to detect.

While his companions took their leave, reducing the number of survivors to a mere dozen or so, Rudi helped himself from a handy bottle without seeming to care much what was in it, and went back into the kitchen. Howson assumed he had gone to rejoin somebody. He looked around the room, trying to ignore the girl and the man n in the red sweater, who had progressed far beyond conversation as a means of showing their interest in each other.

“You seem, as I said before,” Clara remarked as she came back to him after seeing off the departing guests, “to have — to be — a problem. Yes, I’ve made up my own mind on the point. What’s worse, I’ve had to discard all the nice simple reasons to account for it. After all, you can’t be too badly handicapped if you’re a doctor. Correct?”

Her green eyes were very penetrating. Howson felt a prickle on his nape, and it had nothing to do with her reference to his deformity. With an attempt at lightness he said, “Do you put all your guests through detailed interrogation ?”

“Only the uninvited ones who intrigue me,” she said, unperturbed. “Like you, for instance.”

Howson suspended his intention to answer for a few seconds. A possibility had struck him which seemed on the face of it so unlikely that he was literally afraid to formulate it even to himself. He was still debating it when—

The shock almost threw him forward to the floor. The intensity of it blinded him completely; it raged inside his skull like a fire. He knew what it was, of course. Even before he had fully regained his senses he found himself shouting. “In the kitchen! It’s Rudi!”

Everyone in the room looked around in blank astonishment. And Howson realized that there hadn’t been a sound.

Everyone in the room — except, it dawned on him, Clara. And Clara, white-faced, was already opening the kitchen door. She couldn’t have reached it so quickly in answer to his words of warning. She couldn’t have. And that meant—

Cursing his unresponsive body, Howson struggled to his feet. Already half a dozen astonished people were crowding with a babble of horrified cries through the kitchen door.

Their voices were incoherent, and their minds were clouded with shock. It didn’t matter. Howson knew perfectly well what had happened.

The voice of Brian, the would-be sociologist, rose authoritatively above the din. “Don’t touch him! Get the little guy in here — he’s a doctor. And someone phone for an ambulance. Clara, is there a phone ?”

“Down the basement,” the girl answered in a shaky but controlled voice.

Meantime, Howson was dragging himself through five seconds of time slowed to the duration of an hour. I’m a doctor, he was thinking. I know about lesions of the cerebellum. I know about maladjustment and psychosis from the inside. But what the hell good is that to a guy leaking his life away on a hard kitchen floor?

They stood aside to let him pass, and he looked down with physical sight for the first time at something already too familiar to him. Rudi had literally and precisely committed hara-kiri (why? A tantalizing hint of explanation hovered just beyond Howson’s mental reach) with a common carving knife from a nearby drawer.

Now he was unconscious the blinding pain-signal from his mind was easier to shut out. But the pain of his own helplessness remained. These people — these people! — were looking to him for advice and guidance…

He found his voice. “Anyone gone for an ambulance?”

A chorus assured him someone had.

“Good. Then get out of here and shut the door. Keep as quiet as you can. Better yet, get the hell out of the apartment — no, the police may want to — oh, Wast the police! Go home!”

Clara was moving to join the others, but he frowned and said nothing, and she heard him. Shyly she closed the door and came back to his side.

“Know anything about this sort of thing ?” he said grimly.

“N-no. But I’ll do anything you say. Is there anything we can do?”

“He’ll be dead in about five minutes unless we do something.” Howson laughed without humour. “And the joke is that I’m not a medical doctor. I’ve never so much as dressed a cut finger in my life — barring my own.”

26

At the end of an eternal silence lasting the space of three heartbeats, she absorbed the words and was able to react. To herself she said, colouring the concepts with grey despair: Oh, God — poor stupid Rudi! And aloud, more fiercely, she said, “Then why did you say you were a doctor if you aren’t one?”

“But I am, of a kind. And things aren’t quite as bad as you’re imagining. Do you know you’re a receptive telepathist ?”

“A what?” Coming on top of the shock of seeing Rudi weltering in his pool of blood and undigested liquor, the information was at first meaningless. Howson sensed a shield of incomprehension and subconscious denial, and hammered at it.

“I’m telling you, you can read people’s minds. And my doctorate happens to be in curative telepathy. Got that ? Good! Now there’s one person in this room who knows — perhaps—what Rudi Allef needs to heal him. And that’s Rudi Allef.”

She tried to interrupt, but he rushed on, abandoning the use of slow words. Instead, he slammed whole blocks of associated concepts into her mind directly.

Deep in Rudi’s brain, as in all ordinary people’s, there’s what we all call body image — a master plan the body uses lor its major repairs. I’m going after it. You’ll have to take instructions from me and carry them out because my hands are too clumsy for delicate work. Don’t try to think for yourself — let go.

And with that, he simultaneously reached deep into Rudi’s failing mind and took over control of Clara’s hands.

She struggled, but gamely tried to overcome her instinctive resistance, and within a minute he was able to make her lift back Rudi’s shoulders so they could see the gashed opening in his belly.

The sight shocked her so much Howson momentarily lost control; he spared a valuable few seconds to reassure her and then continued his exploration of Rudi’s body image.

So many of his nerves were reporting damage and pain that he could not at first distinguish between them. He decreased his sensitivity, but that only resulted in a vague blur.

He sat down on a chair and steeled himself. Then he began again.

This time it was as if the nerves were reporting their agony directly to himself, from his own body lying torn and ruined. But none of that must be relayed to Clara, for it would render her incapable of assisting him. He had to absorb and master the pain within himself…

All right, now. What first? Stop the leakage of blood before the activity of the brain wasted completely away. Something — clips? Hair-clips? Didn’t women usually have such things?

Clara had some in a bowl only a foot from her shoulder. She seized them and furiously began to clip the open ends of the major bloodvessels. The weakening of the brain diminished, remained steady at an irreducible trickle.

All right. Tut back the displaced intestines, so.

Covered with blood, Clara’s hands seized the grey-blue living guts and settled them tenderly in place; pushed at torn mesenteries and got them back roughly where they belonged. With each action came a reduction of the pain and damage reports battering at Howson. By the time she had completed the replacement of the vital organs he was able to open his eyes. He had not realized they were shut.

“An ordinary needle and thread,” he said huskily, and she got them; she left bloody hand-prints on the table, on the door-handle, everywhere. “Stitch the stomach wall together,” he directed, and she did, clumsily by surgical standards, but well enough. “Now the skin itself; now wash your hands, wash the skin, get a clean piece of cloth to dress it—”

Rudi’s mind blazed up as he returned to consciousness for an instant, unexpectedly; Howson gritted his teeth and slapped the ego back into oblivion. Rough-and-ready treatment — but then, so much damage had already been done to Rudi’s personality, a little more would make no difference.

What counted was that the tiny flicker of life smouldered on. It would last until a blood transfusion; then they could repair the damage properly. Meantime, Howson had achieved all he could ask: survival.

It had taken exactly five minutes.

Now there would be the ambulance, and police, with questions. He couldn’t remember if attempted suicide was still a crime here; in some places, he had a vague idea, the antique Christian attitude endured…

Clara came back from putting away the needle and thread, and stood gazing down at her handiwork. “Why did he have to try and kill himself?” she said half-angrily, and Howson shook his head. He felt as tired as if he had walked a thousand miles, but he must not let weariness claim him.

“He didn’t try to kill himself,” he said. “It was an accident. It was stupid, but not suicidal. Part of a joke that went too far.”

She sensed what lay behind that, in his mind, and nodded without his needing to explain further, but he had to explain when the ambulance arrived, and again when the police came, and after it all he was so exhausted he sat down in the nearest chair and went to sleep.

When he awoke, he was for a long time puzzled as to where he could be. He lay on his back between sheets, a pillow comfortably under his head. But the bed didn’t have that slight ingenious bias which had been built into his own bed at Ulan Bator and which favoured his back so subtly. More, the light played on the too-high ceiling in the wrong manner-

He came fully awake and turned on his side, and saw that Clara, wrapped in a plaid blanket, was dozing uneasily in the room’s one arm-chair.

She sensed his awakening and blinked her eyes open. She didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she smiled.

“Feeling all right?” she asked banally. “You were so fast asleep you didn’t even notice when I put you to bed.”

“You what?”

“Did you expect me to put you on the floor?” She got to her feet, unwrapped the blanket, and stretched. She was wearing the same clothes she had had on during the party.

“ I’d have been all right in the chair where I was !”

“Oh, shut up!” she said almost angrily. “You deserved the bed more than I did, by Christ. I don’t want to argue about it, anyway. Feel capable of breakfast ?”

Howson sat up. He found she had taken off his shoes and jacket and left him otherwise fully dressed, so he pushed aside the bedclothes and got his feet to the floor. “Well, you know — you know, I think I do.”

She brought cereal and coffee and opened a can of fruit juice, and they sat eating off their knees on the edge of the unmade bed.

“What I want to know,” she said after a while, “is how you managed to fob everyone off with that phony story about an accident.”

Howson grunted. “If there’s one thing a projective telepathist can do convincingly, it’s tell a lie. I could make the average man believe the sun was out at midnight with no difficulty. I ought really to have fixed the same idea in the skulls of tile other people who were here, for the sake of consistency, instead of ordering them off the premises. But I was so worried in case their presence distracted me…Oh, what the hell ? None of them actually saw him do it.”

He put aside the bowl from which he had been eating. “I should have asked you before. How do you feel about being a telepathist yourself ?”

The green eyes held a hint of uncertainty. “Then you meant what you said ? I tried to — to receive something from you last night, after the police had gone, and nothing happened, so I guessed you’d just spun me a yarn to boost my confidence. Or something,” she finished lamely.

“You were probably too exhausted. I did mean what I said, of course. Tell me something: how did you know what Rudi had done ?”

“Why, he — he screamed!”

“He didn’t utter a sound. He might have been a genuine Samurai. If he had screamed, everyone in the room would have heard it. Only you and I knew what had happened beyond the closed door of the kitchen, and that means you’re a receptive telepathist. I’d already begun to suspect that you might be; I’m surprised you hadn’t wondered about it yourself.”

She finished eating and lit a cigarette. “Oh, this is all so—disturbing! I mean, I’d always thought of telepathists as people — you know — apart.”

“They are,” confirmed Howson with quiet grimness.

“And I didn’t even know there were — what do you call them — receptive ones.”

“They do seem to be rather rare, as a matter of fact. I suspect there are probably a lot more than we know about. I mean, you can spot a projective telepathist easily, if he’s reasonably powerful and totally untrained — he stands out like a fire-alarm. Me” — he chuckled — “they overheard from a satellite orbiting at six thousand miles! But how do you spot a receptive unless something happens positively to identify him, or her?”

He leaned back against the wall. “However, you may take all that as read, in your case. You’re about the right age for the talent to show itself, you know; mine came on when I was twenty, and that’s typical. So what are you going to do ?”

“I’ve no idea.” She looked rather frightened. “I haven’t even worked out how I’m going to tell my family.”

“That’s one problem I never had to face,” Howson admitted. “Do they have prejudices, then ?”

“I don’t know. I mean’ the subject sort of never came up.” A thought creased her brow. “Look, what the hell do receptive telepathists do, anyway? Aren’t they pretty limited in their choice of work?”

“By comparison with projectives, I suppose they are,” Howson agreed in a judicious tone. “But a telepathist is a very special person, and the demand for their services isn’t by any means exhausted. You could probably invent your own job if you wanted. I can tell you a few of the standard occupations, to be going on with. Most of the receptives I know are psychiatric diagnosticians and therapy watchdogs—”

“Are what?”

He explained. “Then there’s Olaf Marks, who’s a genius-spotter. He loves kids, so they gave him the business of discovering outstandingly brilliant children in the pre-verbal stage. Then there’s Makerakera, whom you may well have heard of; he’s recognized by the UN as an authority on aggression, and spends his time going from one potential crisis to another identifying grievances and having them put right. Oh, don’t worry about being limited in your choice of a career — we’re near enough unique to be able to pick and choose.”

She gave a little nervous laugh. “It’s funny to hear you say “we” and know you’re including me in it! Still, what you said is quite reassuring.”

“I’m not saying it to reassure you. I’m just telling you. Apart from anything else, you wouldn’t be happy doing anything which didn’t exploit your talent once it’s fully developed. I don’t want to make out that being a telepathist doesn’t pose its own problems, Lord knows…” Howson sighed. “You were right about me last night, as you must have guessed.”

“More — more telepathy?”

“What do you think?”

She got up and began to clear away the breakfast things without answering. After an interval of silence she said, ” How about Rudi, Gerry? Did you have a chance to find out what made him do it?”

“No. One has to learn not to intrude on another mind’s privacy. One has to, or life wouldn’t be worth living. And while we were patching him up, of course, I couldn’t spare the time. You’ve had a much better chance to find out why he did it.”

She made a helpless gesture. “All I could tell was that he was — well, living a lie, as they say. Doing it well, but…”

She gestured to complete the statement. “Gerry, what are you doing here, anyway? You’re from Ulan Bator, aren’t you?”

“Yes — now. But I was born here.”

“Are you looking up old acquaintances?”

“I looked up a couple. That was a failure. No, I’m after new rather than old acquaintances. It’s partly a vacation, partly a voyage of self-discovery___You’ll find out what I mean some day.”

She accepted the hint. “So — what should I do now, to get back to my own worries ?” She smiled faintly.

“Officially, you should drop by the local World Health headquarters and take the aptitude tests. Then they’d fly you to Ulan Bator or Canberra or perhaps Hong Kong for proper training. But I’d say, give yourself time to get used to the prospect before you report in.”

“You seem awfully sure I will report in — yet if I asked you not to tell anyone about me I think you’d agree.”

“Of course. Only after a while you’ll get dissatisfied with your own awkwardness. You’ll get frustrated with things you don’t know how to handle. And one day you’ll say, ‘Ah, the hell with it,’ and go and ask how to use your gift to the full. It wasn’t telepathists who worked out the techniques, you know — it was ordinary psychologists who could no more project an impression than ride a bicycle to the moon. And now I want you to do something for me. Go down to the phone and call the hospital where they took Rudi — it’s the Main General. He’ll probably still be under sedation. Ask if we can — I’m sorry. Are you busy this morning ?”

She shook her head.

“Then ask if we, if you want to come, can see him. Tell them I’m Gerald Howson, Psi.D., Ulan Bator. They’ll fall over themselves to let me come.”

“Then why bother to call up first?”

Howson looked at her steadily. “I want them to have a chance to learn that I’m a runt with a gammy leg instead of a husky superman,” he said calmly. “It hurts less that way.”

Clara bit her lip. “That was tactless of me,” she said. “Yes,” said Howson, and got up. “I’ll go and have a wash while you’re making that call.”

27

Rudi Allef lay in his hospital bed with a cradle to keep the bedding off his injured abdomen. He was not unconscious, but he was chiefly aware of pain. The sedatives he had been given had reduced it to a level like that of a raging headache, and enabled him for short periods to sidestep it within his mind and think coherently; however, most of the time the effort simply did not seem worth while.

When Howson came to him, he lay unmoving with his eyes tightly shut.

The atmosphere and appearance of this place was very much like what he was used to at Ulan Bator, Howson found. What kept reminding him that he was actually a stranger was the ostentatious deference with which he, as a Psi.D. Ulan Bator, was treated. About half the staff had attempted to accompany him to Rudi’s ward, but he had shown temper for the first time in a long while and refused to permit anyone to come with him bar the surgeon who had operated on Rudi and the senior ward nurse. And Clara, naturally.

He could tell she was uncomfortable. Now that she was aware of her gift she was more able to receive the impressions it brought her, and she had not yet learned when in a hospital to concentrate on the undercurrent of healing beneath the ever-present sensations of pain. In memory of his own beginnings he loaned her self-confidence with his mind.

They came into the ward. Screens were drawn around the bed where Rudi lay with a rubber pipe taped to his arm; the last of several transfusions to make up his loss of blood was just ending.

The nurse parted the screens, let the visitors through, and drew them dose again. There was a chair ready for Howson by the bed; awkwardly, because it was full-sized, he scrambled on to it and peered into Rudi’s mind.

Meantime he spoke in words to the surgeon, saying, “What sort of state was he in when you operated ?”

“Bad,” said the surgeon, a straight-bodied woman of forty. “He’d have been dead if it hadn’t been for the first aid you gave him. It was just as well you were there, Dr. Howson—though I didn’t know curative telepathists ever had a full-scale medical course.”

“I never did,” Howson answered. And repeated, “I’d never more than bandaged a cut finger before.”

He could feel resentment hardening in her as the words sank in; it meant, “Not only is this little cripple possessed of superior powers — he can do my job for me without training, without trouble, and boast about his success…”

“That’s hardly a fair thought,” Howson said mildly. “I’m sorry, but it’s not, you know!”

Clara, who had been listening with puzzlement, interrupted unexpectedly. “You should have seen what it cost him! The pain he must have—”

Clara! The single warning thought cut off her hasty words.

“All right,” he said aloud. “May I have silence, please ?”

Rudi…

The figure on the bed stirred very slightly. That was the only visible clue to his reaction. But inside his head he was answering.

What do you want, you interfering bastard?

I saved your life, Rudi.

For what? For pain like this? You condemned me to it when you interfered and stopped me doing what I meant to do.

Howson took a deep breath. He had said earlier to Clara that a projective telepathist could tell a lie convincingly; now he summoned up all his reserves to prove the corollary — that he could equally convincingly tell the truth.

I know, Rudi. I can feel that pain as sharply as you, remember! I’m fully aware of what I’ve done to you. Now I must give you something to compensate — happiness, or satisfaction, whatever you want that I can let you have. Otherwise how would my conscience treat me?

The whole mind was involved in this. Behind the verbalized projection, smoothly, automatically, Howson fed in a reflection of Rudi’s suffering, filtered through his own mind, impressed with his own personality.

A feeble flicker of disbelief: But you’re nothing to me. We’re strangers, and today we might have been a thousand miles apart.

Nobody is nothing to one of us. And behind that, because it was too complex to put into words, Howson made himself consciously feel what was usually so much a part of himself that he never gave it a thought — the shared quality of a telepathist’s existence, the need and hunger and yearning which were all the ordinary individual’s needs and hungers and yearnings a million fold multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors by reflection redoubling and redoubling themselves away towards infinity.

This was why a telepathist became a peacemaker, or a psychiatrist, or a curative telepathist, or a disputes arbitrator — helping people to be happier or better off or more fulfilled. It was also why he had been eager to tell splendid glamorous telepathic stories to the deaf-and-dumb girl he now knew as Mary Williams, and why he had been so bitterly disappointed to learn that the pleasure had turned into a Greek gift.

It was also why (though ordinary people were always suspicions Of the assertion unless they had been shown its truth by someone like Howson) there had never been a telepathist who was antisocial, who became a master criminal or general of an army. No telepathist could stand in the place of Chaka Zulu and order his hordes to ravage a season’s journey in the direction in which he cast his spear; no telepathist could consign fellow-beings to a gas chamber, or annihilate them in atomic war. They were too human to have shed all desire for power, but to enjoy it they had to take the road into the isolation of madness; in the real world they suffered their victims” pain, and had no pleasure from cruelty.

It was also the naked truth.

Rudi’s eyes flickered open, and he looked at the vacuous face masking the keen mind. Last night, when they first met, he had ignored the conventional reaction to Howson’s small stature, deformity, unprepossessing appearance — but because on principle he ignored the conventions which demanded the reactions. He was half-Israeli; perhaps his people had a legacy of conventional prejudices enough to last them for eternity—all directed against them. So, by analogy, he would have leaned over backwards to avoid offending a negro. So would millions of people; only most of them, if they failed to learn the logic of prejudice, learned the logic of self-interest and therefore conformed. Rudi would not.

He yielded now to the pressure of pain; it was easy to slip back into the fog of despair. For Howson, it was very hard to follow him, but it had to be done — and he had done it often in the past.

Why did you do it, Rudi?

A complex picture of dissatisfaction with the work he had set himself to do; with the reception it had had; with the inability of other people to understand what he was doing. Add to that: money troubles, because of the stopping of his grant; emotional problems on a personal level — he needed the affection and acceptance of a woman, any woman who could understand his needs — he was good-looking and pleasant, but that was not enough to secure the right partner. He had tried many, and the last had been cruel. And the mask he had put up to protect himself against the scrutiny of the world had proved his undoing — people who could not penetrate it, and therefore had no idea of the turmoil of sorrow boiling in his brain, had been tactless, unkind, reopening old sores without realizing.

So he had picked up a knife, and thought how much he would like oblivion.

But Howson could see behind the mask, and therefore would not be tactless and unkind; he understood Rudi’s needs, and could help and advise him. He dismissed the superficialities, such as money trouble, with an impatient mental gesture, and went straight ahead to the factor which all through Rudi’s bitter survey of his reasons for suicide had taken the foremost place: his work.

What work is this?

Chaos, mingled with striving. Behind it all, very deep, was a need to create and bring forth — Howson found it amazingly feminine, much reminiscent of certain urges he had known in the deep unconscious of frustrated single women. From this sprang several consequences; he saw them presented all at once, but had to verbalize them in succession.

Though feminine, this impulse was also general-human. It had by-products which he merely noted and filed for reference — such as the reason why Rudi’s creativity gave him agony (his deep unconscious saw it as parturition, and that brings pain), and the reason why he chose to attempt suicide by hara-kiri (it represented a Caesarean delivery on the cross-identity level of his mind).

But Rudi’s deep unconscious could only inform the probing inquisitorial mind why he needed to create; it did not explain the nature of the creative activity, and the way in which the conscious was tackling it. Howson drew back, dizzying for a moment as he discovered his own body to be cramped and stiff. Small wonder; this chair was a poor substitute for the special bed from which he usually worked. Still, no matter.

“There’s too much pain,” he told the surgeon shortly. “Would it be safe for him to get a local in the stomach wall ?”

Then he focused his physical vision, and found that the nurse had already lifted up the bedclothes and was preparing to give an injection. He looked blankly at her. Then, struck by a sudden realization, he turned to Clara, who stood white-faced with her hands on the bar at the foot of the bed.

She read the question before he could utter it, and nodded. “You told me about therapy watchdogs. So I — uh — already asked for him to be given the anaesthetic.”

Howson felt a deep wave of appreciation and gratitude; he did not check it, but projected it as it stood, and Clara flushed with embarrassment.

How do you feel?

Oh, Gerry — it’s magnificent, but it’s somehow absolutely terrifying, too!

Howson hesitated. Then, as if confessing a serious error of judgement, he said in words, “You know, I might have been wrong this morning. Maybe you won’t have to ask anyone to teach you how to use your gift properly.”

The nurse and the surgeon exchanged puzzled glances at this unforeshadowed remark.

“But” — Clara seemed just as astonished — “but you’re teaching me! You’re teaching me all the time !”

28

Howson was still pondering that when the nurse gently touched Rudi’s bandaged abdomen. He did not wince. “The local’s taken effect, Dr. Howson,” she said quietly.

“Fine.” With an effort Howson returned to the work in hand.

Rudi!

Yes… ? A pure conscious note of interrogation, blended with assent and willingness to co-operate now he had sensed the telepathist’s power.

And Howson settled down to find clarity and order in something that was not clear to Rudi himself.

Springing from this fundamental creative urge were the reasons why it could not find an outlet in writing, painting, sculpture, or anything else where the creator was divorced from his audience. Rudi could never be satisfied to devise something and leave other people, elsewhere, to appreciate it. Appreciation fed and renewed his desire to create, as an actor feeds on a “good audience” and rises to new interpretative heights.

And yet acting, again, would be inadequate for Rudi because it was interpretative. So was ballet; so was almost every other form of art in which there was the direct audience contact Rudi craved — although he had been a first-class debater, conjuring up splendid impromptu orations. (Howson had to sift through a dozen such qualifications and explanations before he arrived at a clear picture of what Rudi was actually trying to do.)

Essentially, though, it was music which attracted him most. And-

And Howson found himself on the top of a dizzying slide, lost his grip, and went headlong skidding and slipping into a vast uncharted jungle of interlocked sensory experiences.

Rudi Allef’s mind was almost as far from the ordinary as was Howson’s own, but in a different direction. Somehow, Rudi’s sense-data cross-referred interchangeably. Howson had experience of minds with limited audio-vision — those of people to whom musical sounds called up associated colours or pictures — but compared to what went on in Rudi’s mind that was puerile.

(Once, long before, he had seen a tattered print of Disney’s Fantasia; he had enjoyed it, and had wished there had been more attempts to combine sound and vision in a similar way. Now he was finding out what the combination could be like on the highest level.)

Like a swimmer struggling in a torrential river, Howson sought wildly for solidity in this roaring stream of memory. Images presented themselves: a voice/velvet/a kitten’s claws scratching/purple/ripe fruit — a ship’s siren/fog/steel/yellowish-grey/cold/insecurity/sense of loss and emptiness — a common chord of C major struck on a piano/childhood/wood/ black and white overlaid with bright gold/hate/something burning/tightness about the forehead/shame/stiffness in the wrists/liquidity/roundness…

There was virtually no end to that one. Howson drew back a little and tried again.

He was walking through a forest of ferns a hundred feet high with gigantic animals browsing off their bark; he was rather tired, as if he had come a long way, and the sun was extremely hot. But he came to a blue river and became an icefloe bobbing on a gentle current, melting slowly into the water around. He/the water plunged over a precipice; the pain of striking rock after rock in the long descent was somehow satisfying and fulfilling because he was standing back watching the white spray as he flowed down and there was solidity being worn away as the water eroded the underlying rocks and the spray diffused out with vastness and blackness and far down below a sensation of warmth and redness not seen but imagined (infra-redness ?) as though he was on an airless world with a red sun, a giant red sun, crawling over the horizon to turn into something scuttering and four-legged on an endless black plain which was only a few feet across and around which giants, unheeding, went about their business with bass footsteps and bass voices—

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-connexion 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 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 colour 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 colour-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 Homes. There are things I ought to know before I try any therapy for Rudi.”

“You said,” Clara reminded him timidly, “you were on 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.”

29

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 near by. 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 farther 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 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 coloured 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 to the piano.

“Watch the tank,” Jay said briefly. “Okay, 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: multi-coloured, 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 point and plugged in a wandering lead.

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

He connected the lead to a socket beneath one of the larger tanks. A faint 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 colour in a — well, in a beautiful combination. Or an ugly one, come to that. Like this!” He snapped a switch, and a third tank lit — hesitantly moving, abrupt in its changes of colour, the drab pattern dissolving frequently into muddy brown and a sickly olive-grey.

“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 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, 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 colour of the sky from the colour of the greenish weed on the water or the bread-colour 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?

Why — A sense of embarrassment and uncertainty. I guess I felt sorry for him…?

Be honest with me. It’s bigger than that, isn’t it? You find him attractive, don’t you?

Y-yes…

In fact, you’d like to know him a lot better. And the idea that you might wind up by falling in love with him has crossed your mind — hasn’t it?

You’re a peeping tom! But there was no real annoyance in the sentiment; clearly, she found the idea very acceptable.

Howson grinned like a Cheshire cat. He opened his eyes and glanced at Jay.

“Can you spare the time to do a little more work on that machine of yours?” he inquired, and on noting a momentary hesitation, hurried on, “Look, it’s going to get you out of your impasse with Rudi. I agree with you — he’s going places. Given the right opportunity, he could create what amounts to a new channel of artistic expression. It won’t happen overnight; it’ll take time and enough public interest to make resources available so that he can integrate sight, sound, smell, maybe even more complex imagery. What he needs right now, though, is chiefly hope. And I believe I know how we can give him that”

Rudi!

Howson felt the mind shrink a little and then remember. The healing was progressing well; Howson felt a stir of envy at the healthy normality of Rudi’s bodily functions. He could never have sustained an injury one-tenth as bad as the one the younger man was recovering from.

They had moved Rudi into a private, soundproof room, and now they were all here: Jay, Charma and Clara, with a nurse standing by. Howson renewed his approach gently.

Rudi, think of your music.

As though floodgates had opened, a wave of imagined sound poured into Rudi’s aching consciousness. Howson fought to channel and control it. When he had gained the minimal mastery he needed, he signalled to Clara.

The tank — which had taken four men to bring it into the room — lit. Clara, a strained look on her face, flashed the controls, and Howson suggested that Rudi open his eyes. He did so; he saw…

Jay and Charma, of course, could not hear the music that pulsed and raged in Rudi’s mind. But Howson could, and so could Clara, and that was what mattered.

They had spent the week experimenting, improving, and training; now the tank’s speed of response was phenomenal, and Jay had jury-rigged new, simpler controls to make the device as versatile and essentially as straightforward as a theremin. And Clara—

Howson had wondered sometimes in the course of the time they had spent together whether it was just that she was a ready subject, or that he was himself a remarkable instructor in telepathy, for she was reading Rudi’s fantastic mental projections, sifting them and extracting their essentials, and converting them to visual images, as fast as Rudi himself could think them.

Awed amazement was plain on Rudi’s face as he watched the tank. Jay and Charma, who could not hear the music to which Clara was responding, were almost as startled. And Howson felt purely overjoyed.

Mountains grey in the tank, distorted as if looked at from below, purple-blue and overpowering; mists gathered at their peaks, and an avalanche thundered into a valley surrounded by white sprays of snow, as a distant and melancholy horn theme dissolved in Rudi’s mind into a cataclysm of orchestral sounds and a hundred un-musical noises. The tank blurred; a wisp of smoke rose from a connexion leading to it, and Jay leapt forward with an exclamation.

It was over.

Hoping that the breakdown had not outweighed the pleasure Rudi had shown, Howson turned to the bed. His hope was fulfilled. Rudi was struggling to sit up, his face radiant.

Howson cut across his incoherent babble of thanks with a calming thought. “You don’t need to thank me,” he said with a twisted smile. “I can tell you’re pleased! You were stupid to think of giving up when success was in your grasp, weren’t you?”

“But it wasn’t!” Rudi protested. “If it hadn’t been for you—and Clara, of course… But — but damnation, this isn’t success, if I have to rely on you to help me.”

“Rely on me?” Howson was genuinely astonished. “Oh! I suppose you think I was projecting your imagery to Clara!” Succinctly he explained the actual situation. Relief grew plain on Rudi’s face, but soon faded as he turned to Clara.

“Clara, how do you feel about this ? You won’t want to act as an interpreter for me indefinitely, for goodness” sake!”

“I’d like to do it for a while,” she answered shyly. “But it won’t always have to be done this way. Gerry says that the work we two can do together will excite people enough to show them what you’re really after, and let you work with a full orchestra. And you can learn to use this thing yourself—Jay’s made it so simple it only took me a few hours to get the hang of it. And eventually…”

She appealed wordlessly to Howson, who obliged by projecting the future he envisaged for Rudi’s work directly into his mind.

There was a hall — vast, in darkness. At the far end lights glowed over music stands, and there was rustling and tuning up to be heard. Stillness was broken by the opening bars of Rudi’s composition. Darkness was interrupted by the creation in a huge counterpart of Jay’s yard-square tank of vivid, fluid, pictorial, corresponding images. The response in the audience could be felt, grew almost tangible, and in turn the brilliance of the imagery fed on the appreciation it evoked.

He finished, and found Rudi with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together on the coverlet. Howson got to his feet and beckoned his companions, and stealthily they crept from the room, leaving Rudi with the vision of his ambition fulfilled.

Later they sat in Jay and Charma’s apartment celebrating their success with wine. “You — you didn’t exaggerate at all, did you, Gerry?” Clara asked timidly when they had toasted him half a dozen times.

“Not much. Oh, slightly, perhaps — I mean, the sort of world-wide acclaim I promised him may take twenty years to come. But it damned well should come ; Rudi has a gift as outstanding in its way as yours and mine. I’m sorry, you two,” he added to Jay and Charma. “I didn’t mean to sound conceited.”

Jay shrugged. “I’ll not deny I’d like to have some special talent, as you two have — but hell, it must entail a lot of heartbreak, too. I think I’ll be a success in my own small way, and I doubt if I’ll have the frustrations Rudi or yourselves will undergo.”

“I’m glad you take it like that,” Howson said thoughtfully. “And — you know, I’ve been giving the matter a little consideration, and I believe I could open up a market for as many of your fluid mobiles as you care to build. They have a certain restful fascination about them… Suppose I recommended you to my director in chief and interested him in the idea of using them in place of the standard mobiles and tanks of tropical fish we use in the mental wards — especially for autistic children — you wouldn’t think that was demeaning to your art, would you?”

“Good heavens, no!” said Jay, staring. “What do you think I make myself out to be — a second Michelangelo ? I’m a glorified interior decorator, that is all.”

“And even if he did make himself out to be a genius,” said Charma with mock grimness, “I’d cure him of the delusion quick enough. Thanks a million, Gerry — I’d practically given up hope of any return from these wet fireworks of his.”

Then she looked directly at Howson.

“What about you? What have you got out of all this? It wouldn’t be fair if there wasn’t anything.”

“Me?” Howson chuckled. “I’ve got just about everything. The mere fact that I’ve had it for years without realizing doesn’t make me any less pleased. You see… Well, Rudi, so to speak, has just given his first public performance. I think I might go ahead and give mine.”

He had been looking forward to this moment; indeed, he had had difficulty containing himself so long. He reached out gently with his mind and began to tell a story.

How could he have been so blind ? How could he have failed to realize that the solution to his problem was here, under his nose?

He — Gerry Howson — had more power behind his telepathic voice than anyone had ever had, even Ilse Kronstadt. So why should he have to lock himself and his audience away into a catapathic grouping to prevent the outside world breaking the flow of pleasurable fantasy? All he needed was a degree of concentration about as deep as people achieved of their own accord when they were carried away by brilliant acting or great music.

Moreover, he wasn’t so disillusioned with reality that he needed to hide from it. What he craved wasn’t the exercise of unbridled power, or any of the other unfeasible yearnings which a telepathist had to retreat into fugue to let loose. He wanted acceptance. He wanted to wipe out the legacy of twenty years during which he was only a runt with a gammy leg, and people judged him entirely on that basis. Put at its simplest, he wanted to make friends with the world that had been hostile to him.

And he could.

He conjured up a simple fantasy, a fairy-tale, with sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, emotions — all drawn from the vast store of unreal and real memory with which his intimate knowledge of so many minds besides his own had armed him. It was only a trial run, of course. One day there would be something more. But for now, this was enough.

His audience came slowly back to reality, eyes shining, and he knew he had won.

And now — ?

Maybe a trip around the world to add a knowledge of reality to his knowledge of other people’s dreams and nightmares and imaginings, drawing here a little and there a little from the consciousness of Asians, Europeans, Americans, Australasians… The whole world lay open to him now.

He smiled, and poured himself more wine.

30

As usual the stadium had been packed to capacity. The very rarity of the occasions on which Gerald Howson invited people to hear him “thinking aloud” ensured that all available accommodation went as soon as it was advertised — he never allowed this to conflict with his work at the Ulan Bator therapy centre. But whenever he got the opportunity, he would notify some city with a suitable arena or hall, and people would travel a thousand miles if they could manage it. In two years he had achieved a reputation on every continent.

Tonight he had coped with his biggest audience yet — almost five thousand. Now they were wistfully filing from the exits, and Howson was receiving — and largely ignoring — the inevitable wave of congratulations from distinguished listeners. As always, he had to keep denying that he was tired after his efforts; perhaps he should explain as a coda to the performance that he did this at least in part to refresh himself after a tough period of work. He never felt so relaxed and happy as after one of these rare public appearances.

Tonight he had skipped from idea to idea, now telling his audience of his work, now telling them the thoughts of a normal happy person, in India, in Venezuela, in Italy, in many other places where he had garnered his material. It had become a virtuoso achievement; often he improvised on the reactions of the members of the audience, leaving those who were lonely and unhappy proud to have been singled out. And always, if there was anyone present labouring under an intolerable problem, he found someone else, generally an influential official, and left the suggestion that something be done to right matters.

Ilse, Ilse! If you had stumbled on this you would not have died so burdened with regret!

“Gerry,” said Pandit Singh softly through the babble of voices. “Gerry, there’s someone here whom you ought to see.”

Hullo, Rudi — I knew you were there. Just give me a chance to get rid of these so-and-so’s!

A silent suggestion that the onlookers should take their leave, and he was free to come and shake Rudi’s hand. Clara was with him, and he greeted her affectionately.

How are you?

Fine! You’ll be seeing a lot of me from now on — I start training as a therapy watchdog at Ulan Bator next month.

Delight!

“Hullo, Gerry,” said Rudi, unaware of this mental exchange. He seemed almost embarrassed. “You were wonderful.”

“I know,” said Howson, smiling; Rudi could hardly recognize him as the same person, so greatly had his new self-assurance transfigured him. “When are you going to join me in show business ?”

“I’m giving my first performance in a few weeks. Mainly, I came to invite you and make sure you can be there. If you can’t, I’ll postpone it — I’m determined to have you in on the first night.”

“Congratulations! You may be sure I’ll come — emergencies permitting.”

Rudi glanced sidelong at Pandit Singh. A slight flush coloured his cheekbones. “Gerry — I’ve been talking with Dr. Singh here, about you, and I’ve been finding out quite a lot about your—uh — your disability. I don’t know much about either medicine or telepathy, but I seem to have come up with an idea that’s not as foolish as I thought it might be. Ah — as I understand it, the trouble is that some part of your brain which ought to look after the repair and upkeep of your body has been sacrificed to your telepathic organ.”

“Roughly,” confirmed Howson. He searched Rudi’s face keenly, but the evident tension there held him back from forestalling his next words. In his own mind he felt a taut premonition.

“Well, what I was thinking was… If you can transfer practically anything from another person’s mind to your own — couldn’t you sort of borrow the necessary part of my mind to make up for what you haven’t got?” The last part came in a rush, and Rudi looked at once hopeful and excited. “You see, I owe you everything, including my life, and I’d like to do something equally valuable in return.”

The world was spinning around Howson. He stared at Pandit Singh, mutely inquiring whether this thing could be.

“I’ve hardly had a chance to think it through,” Singh said. “But at first sight I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be tried. It might mean that your bodily appearance would tend towards Mr Allef’s, but it also holds out the hope of our being able to operate on you and give you a chance of healing normally. It might even mean you growing in height. I’ve warned Mr Allef that it would mean lying in a hospital bed as long as was required, unable to do anything and enduring as much pain as if he himself had been operated on, and that with no sure promise of success—”

“And I still insist on being allowed to do it,” said Rudi firmly.

Howson closed his eyes. He could do nothing else but accept, of course — but even as he uttered grateful words he felt it was unnecessary. Whether or not this hope was granted, whether or not the operations were successful, was of little account. For in the moment when Rudi made his offer, he, Gerald Howson, had become a whole man.