When Howson first probed her, he was already convinced of 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 learned 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 toward 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 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? UseIlse, too, had had an unblemished record, until (what had she compared it to?) the bullet-sized tumor in her brain weakened her. His physical powers were no worse than they had ever been, but his control had nonetheless 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 uqtil 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 there was!” 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 Use 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 mustache. 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 Howson twice before, and a quick mental scan revealed that he was extremely confident of success.
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 toward 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. 1 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 …
XVIII
xviii
… 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 degree 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 travelers 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 armor 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 toward 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 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 toward 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 Häverns 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 marketplace. 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 center: barbers importuned passers-by to have their hair trimmed and their noses and ears cleaned out, conjurers, tumblers and jugglers were practicing their skills, musicians had taken station and launched into wailing song to the accompaniment of twanging moon-guitars. Among the crowd Hao Sen wandered at random, a frown etched deep into his forehead.
The fourth side of the square, the one from which the traders had been kept away, was nonetheless 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 fagade façade there was spelled out its title: the temple of heavenly favors.
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 colorful booths across the square.
He shouldered his way toward 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, nonetheless, were white and sharp as it bared them in effectual snarls. The trainer—a thick-set, swarthy man, probably a gypsy 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.