“Oh, yes. Rudi’s forever 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 over his 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.
XXIV
xxiv
Finally, since Gara 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 HomeHorne—”
“Jay and Charma HomeHorne? 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 bickering 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 HomesHornes. 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 hesitated. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But you seem to be a bit of a problem yourself. Are you?”
Howson looked 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 …? Howson 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 undersize 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-defense, 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 halfway 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 further!
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 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—
She screamed.
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 times slowed to the duration of an hour.
I’m a t doctdor, he was thinking. I know about lesions of the cerecllumcerebellum. 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 loc 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 that he was unconscious, the blinding pain signal from his mind was easier to shut out. But the pain of his cwn own helplessness remained. These people—these people! —were looking to him for advice and guidance. …
He lound found his voice. “Anyone gone for an ambulance?”
A chorus assured him some 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,
blast
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 humor. “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.”
XXVI
xxvi
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, coloring the concepts with gray 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.”