When Howson came to him, he lay unmoving with his eyes tightly shut.
The atmosphere and apppearance 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 except 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 close 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 from 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 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 feel 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 millionfold multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors by reflection redoubling and redoubling themselves away toward 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 suspicious 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 backward 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 Caesarian delivery on the cross-reference 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 anesthetic.”
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 judgment, 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!”
XXVIII
xxviii
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 cooperate 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 colors 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-gray/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 ice floe 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 a 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 (infraredness?) 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 …