“Did you really need to send for me, Ilse?” Singh spoke the words because he knew the thought had emerged too forcibly into consciousness to disguise it anyhow.
“Yes, Pan.” The words dropped like stones. “It’s getting worse. I need to economize on the use of my telepathy now; I tire quickly, and I get confused. It makes me feel very old.”
last, “You know, I’d have liked to marry, have children.
There was silence. Not looking at him, she went on at … I think I’d have tried it, in spite of everything, if I hadn’t seen from the inside what hell it is to be a non- telepathist child of telepathists. Remember Nola GriiningGrüning?”
“I do,” Singh muttered. Nola Griining Grüning had married—a telepathist, naturally; it was the only sane course—and had a child which didn’t inherit. And she had wound up in a catapathic grouping of children, her fantasies bright nursery images, from which Use Ilse had had to detach the reflective personalities one by one, leaving Nola hopelessly insane.
“So!” Use Ilse said with forced brightness. “So the autobiography. I can leave words behind, at least. Now tell me what it was that brought me into the pattern of your worry.”
Singh didn’t trouble to speak; he merely marshaled the facts in his mind for her to inspect.
She sighed. “You’re right, of course, Pan. I couldn’t face a situation that complex—not any more. It would break me into little pieces. It’s the frustration, you see. You tackle the big problem, and it leaves unsolved scores, maybe thousands of small problems, and every single one hurts. … I used to be able to resign myself. I—I’ve been forced now to resign period.”
She moved as though shrugging off a bad dream. “Still, people have gone blind, people have gone crazy, since the dawn of history. I’m still human, after all! Is Danny getting anywhere with his novice, by the way?”
“Not yet. That’s why I’ve been radiating worry, of course.”
“What a damned shame! Sometimes I think I was unbelievably lucky in spite of everything, Pan. At least I had intelligent parents, a healthy childhood, first-rate education. … Assuming the late appearance of the gift—never before seventeen, most often at twenty or over—is a kind of natural insurance against it destroying an immature personality, I reckon I was just about as well equipped as I could have been. But he’s a real mess, isn’t he? Orphaned, crippled, hemophiliac …”
“Have you any ideas that would help Danny?” Singh ventured.
“You’re late, Pan!” She gave a harsh laugh. “Danny asked me a week ago if I could help.”
“And can you?”
Her face went blank, as if a light behind it had been turned off. Stonily she said, “I daren’t, Pan. I’ve touched the fringes of his mind. I sheered off. In the old days I might have risked it—I’d have banked on my experience outweighing the naked power he possesses. I could have insured against him panicking. I’m too old to cope with him now, Pan—and too sick.”
“What’s going to become of him, then? Are we likely to lose him?” Singh spoke thickly.
“I can’t reach deep enough into his personality to tell you. Obviously, he has empathy waiting to be tapped; if it is, he’ll be my successor. You realize that, I hope? If it isn’t, he may hate himself into insanity. What we could do to tip the balance I just don’t
know,
Pan! I tell you, I daren’t look so far into his mind!”
XI
xi
There came a time not long afterward when they started to leave Howson alone, and—as he was honest enough to admit when he took a firm grip on himself—that too became a source of resentment. The way he analyzed his feelings, his desire to be treated as important was still active in his subconscious; his mood of stubborn resistance to Singh’s pleading, Waldemar’s telepathic persuasion, was satisfying in a back-to-front fashion because it was a means of ensuring the continuation of their interest. Once he had yielded and begun to cooperate, most of his training would be done by himself. Another telepathist could only guide him away from blind alleys. Each was unique, and each had to teach himself.
Of course, that was only half of it. The other half looked at him out of the mirror.
So much was easy to understand. Other things puzzled Mm a little. The rather gingerly way in which Waldemar approached a contact with him was mystifying for a long while after his arrival in Ulan Bator; one day, however, Waldemar’s control over the explanation slipped, and the reason emerged into plain view. He was afraid that Howson might become insane, and the possibility of an insane telepathist with Howson’s power was bleakly fearful.
More appalling still was the discovery Howson made after the idea had germinated in his own mind: the idea of escape into madness had a horrid fascination, offering a chance to exercise unbridled power without the restraint imposed by causing suffering which he would in turn experience—as he had experienced the pain of the men in the crashed helicopter.
Before the incident which distracted everybody’s attention from him, he had allowed himself to be shown over the hospital, and had found it sufficiently interesting to want to limp down the corridors by himself occasionally, unchallenged by the staff, who had received instructions from Singh never to interfere wth him. He had felt recurrent pangs of envy, though, each time he considered a patient on the way to recovery, whether from a mental or a physical illness, and now he preferred to sit brooding in his room, letting his mind rove. That he could not resist; as he had learned when the gift first made its appearance, there was no way to close it off as simple as shutting one’s eyes.
When he opened up to maximum sensitivity, the hospital, and the city beyond, became a chaos of nonsense. He was developing his powers of selection, though, and proving for himself what he found he had subconsciously assumed: accuracy was a function not so much of range as of extraneous mental “noise,” and careful concentration would enable him to pick a single mind out of thousands in the same “way one can follow a single speaker amid the hubbub of a lively party.
Some personalities were very easy to pick out; they bloomed like fireballs against a black sky. The staff telepathists were naturally the easiest of all, but he was reluctant to make contact with them; he sensed a basic friendliness when he did so, yet it was discolored because to them it seemed so obvious that any telepathist would want the gift he had received, and they were puzzled and upset by Howson’s depression.
In any case, all but one of them were preoccupied with their work. The exception was the possessor of a mind that lighted the whole of one wing of the hospital with an invisible radiance so bright that it shielded the personality behind it. He had probed around the fringes of that radiance, and sensed an aura of confident power that gave him pause; then, unexpectedly, there had been a disturbance in the personality, and the aura darkened and almost faded away. If one could imagine a star overcome by weariness, one might comprehend what had happened. Howson found it beyond him; he preferred to turn his attention elsewhere.
He had asked whose this remarkable mind was, naturally, and the answer—that it was the half-legendary Use Ilse Kronstadt, on whom had been based a character in the movie he had watched along with the man in brown— made him even less inclined to pester her.
There were also the non-telepathists who stood out. Singh was the most striking. He had a mind as clear as standing water, into which one might plunge indefinitely without fathoming the limits of his compassion. Again, though, Howson preferred not to dip into Singh’s awareness. Too much of it was concerned with his own plight, and the patent impossibility of healing his deformity.
He chose rather to touch the minds that were more ordinary—staff and patients. At first he moved with utmost caution; then as he grew surer of his skill he grew bolder also, and spent long hours in contemplation that appealed to him the same way as movies and TV had formerly done. This was so much richer that the TV set standing in a corner of his room was not turned on after the first week of his stay.
The hospital held patients and staff of more than fifty nationalities. Their languages, customs, hopes and fears were endlessly fascinating to him, and it was only when he came back to reality, drunk with the delight of shared experience, after a voyage through a dozen minds, that he found himself seriously inclined to fall in with the wishes of Singh and Waldemar.
Yet he still hung back. There was one group of patients in the hospital whose minds he could not fail to be aware of, and who were sometimes responsible for his waking in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched, a victim of nameless terrors. They were the insane, lost in their private universes of illogic, and of course it was among them that the work of the staff telepathists lay.
Once, and only once, he “watched” a telepathic psychiatrist brace himself for a therapeutic session. The patient was a paranoid with an obsessive sexual jealousy, and the telepathist was attempting to locate the root experiences behind it. It was too big a job to be completed by telepathy, of course; once the experiences had been identified, there would be hypnosis, drug-abreaction and probably a regression in coma to bring the man to terms with his past. At the moment, though, his brain was a hell of irrational torments, and the telepathist had to pick his way through them like a man braving a jungle crammed with monsters.
Howson did not stay with the psychiatrist past that point. But he was more afraid than ever afterward.
And then the crisis broke, and Howson, uncooperative, was left on one side while frantic attempts were made at rescue.
His picture of what was really going on remained for a long time rather confused. He hadn’t bothered to look at a newspaper or switch on a TV news bulletin for weeks now; if he had done so he would have learned immediately that Hemmikaini’s “second best” hadn’t been good enough, and as a result the crisis in Southern Africa had turned into a dirty, bloc/ody, tangled mess.
While Makerakera, the expert on aggression, sweated frantically to weld together a scratch team of whoever could be spared to join him—Choong from Hong Kong, Jenny Pender from Indiana, Stanislaus Danquah from Accra, and some trainees—the little Greek Pericles Phra- nakis turned his back on the catastrophe and went away down a path of his own, to a land where success had crowned his efforts with a wreath of bay.
At Salisbury, Nairobi, Johannesburg, the troops came down from the sky; after them, the mobile hospitals, the transport copters, the cans and sacks and bales of basic food; after them, the jurists and the politicians (what do you do with a man in jail on a murder charge when the organs of the arraigning government collapse?). A great hollow silence succeeded the tumult, and it was broken by the sound of children crying.
Meantime, a Mach Five stratoplane carried the shell of Pericles Phranakis to Ulan Bator, and the computers were proved right: it would take Ilse Kronstadt to cope with the crisis, and if she couldn’t go to it, it would come to her.
Howson caught stray images from the fantasy Phranakis was enjoying, and shuddered. He was reminded strongly of his own daydreams, which—according to Danny Waldemar, at least—might finally have tempted him to enter a catapathic grouping with the deaf-and-dumb girl. Thinking of the first such, he remembered the dust on Vargas’ eyes, and almost moaned aloud.
A curious sense of isolation had resulted from the diversion of everyone’s thoughts to Phranakis, and in a panic because he was experiencing loneliness—worse by contrast with the month-long flow of concern about him that he had been basking in—he hastened to involve himself with the problems occupying the outstanding minds near him.
He did not immediately venture to intrude on the privacy of Ilse Kronstadt herself, but he sensed her anxiety like a bad odor. Dimly he grasped the fact that even if Phranakis had failed, he was still regarded as the nearest competitor she had in her original specialty, the elimination of aggression; facing the task of breaking open his fantasy, she quailed.
Embarrassed, he switched his attention elsewhere, and found Phranakis forming a paranoid obsession in the forefront of the staff’s collective mind. Like a flight of crows following a plowman, people who knew him were coming in, and the voices of the dead on paper and on record and on film spoke guidance to Ilse Kronstadt. When he was five years old, he did such-and-so; with his first girl, he liked to do this; during his training in telepathy, he had difficulty with that.
As a sculptor might take odds and ends of scrap metal and fuse them into a work of art, Ilse Kronstadt now selected from these data and created a mental image of Phranakis. Howson was fascinated; he was so absorbed that he never realized when he trespassed on her awareness for the first time. Either he did not notice that he was “watching” her, or she was too preoccupied to care. He thought the latter, and felt a stab of guilt at his unwillingness to exploit his own talent as she was exploiting hers.
Sitting still as stone in the special chair more comfortable than any he had ever used before, he absorbed the self-disciplining methods by which she built up her sagging confidence. There were glimpses of past successes, which had seemed equally daunting yet which ended in triumph; there were concepts of self-esteem, conceit almost, deliberately fostered to strengthen her determination.