“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 center, 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, it’s a 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 fighting 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 fight 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 signaled a waiter. He paid with the topmost of a bundle of bills that 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 toward 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 Brian, 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 monkey wrench in the works no matter what you do for a living—sort of a 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 wristwatch. “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 thr 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 to miss a party?” countered Jay.
“OK!” 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 mattej 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 OK.”
“In that case,” Howson said, rising, “I’ll surely come.”
On the threshold, waiting while Jay and Rudi maneuvered 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!”
XXIV
xxiv
Howson was in the grip of an excitement so violently contrasted with his earlier depression that he had to try and analyze 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 •’a void 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 toward cripples were also free of prejudice about telepathists. But he didn’t feel inclined to find out immediately. That was too delicate a subject; he’d better 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 toilet 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 sofa bed, next to the wall. He sat down promptly before he missed the opportunity; someone came by and poured him a fresh drink, and Äer 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 bangs; 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 ofl 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 views 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, “1 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 subject.
“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.”