Giddy with pain, panicking because the richness of this communication was so casual and so far beyond his ^own untrained competence, Howson came to the top of the pile of debris and swayed in the opening of the balfhalf- window. There was a drop of twelve feet beyond, into what had been a basement level. Horrified, he though’ of jumping down.
I can protect you from fear and pain. Let me.
NO NO NO LEA VE ME ALONE!
The contact wavered; the telepathist seemed to gather his strength. He “said”:
All right, you deserve this for being a fool. Hold still!
A grip like iron closed on the motor centers of Howson’s brain. His hands clutched the frame of the old window, his feet found a steady purchase on its sill, and after that he could not move; the telepathist had frozen his limbs. He could not even scream his terror at discovering that this was possible.
Then images appeared.
A door giving onto an alley. Creaking open. Behind, the form of a man, skeletally thin, eyes bloodshot, cheeks sunken, dragging himself on by sheer will power. Through the door it could be seen that he had left a smeared trail in a layer of dust on the floor.
Half in, half out of the entrance, he collapsed. Time passed; a child chasing a ball down the alley found him, and went screaming to look for help.
A policeman came, made the starved man comfortable on his coat for a pillow. A doctor came with ambulance attendants. The trail in the dust was noticed, and the policeman and the doctor went into the dark passageway, tracing the man’s progress.
And now a room lit through dirty panes—a pigsty of a room containing four more skeletal shapes, a woman and three men, on empty wooden crates covered with rags, incapable of thought or movement, and on their faces and hands—
Howson revolted, vomit rising in his throat, but the stern mental grip held.
On their faces, on their eyelids and in the creases of their foreheads and behind their ears and everywhere:
dust.
Settled gently and inexorably because they could not move to disturb it.
That one was a telepathist,
the message said.
His name was Vargas. He too preferred to lose himself in fantasies, performed to an admiring audience. He, and the audience, died.
Howson screamed. He managed it. He forced off the grasp that held him captive, and swayed, and knew in an instant of insane terror that he had lost his balance and was tumbling. His last conscious thought was of a tree branch and a bruise that had lasted weeks without healing.
“You’re going to be all right.”
The words were spoken aloud, and subtly reinforced by a mental indication of confidence in the future. Howson opened his eyes to see a calm face above him. It was rather a good-looking face, in fact, and it wore a smile.
He licked his lips and tried to croak an answer, but his mind was ahead of his voice.
“Don’t bother trying to talk. I’m the telepathist—I’m Danny Waldemar.”
Awareness of bandages on his head and arms: a confused question.
“You’re all right! We gave you prothrombin the moment we realized you were bleeding so badly. All the cuts are scabbing over.” And abruptly, a switch to telepathy:
You’re a miracle, do you know that? You could have died a hundred times over, from accidents!
He hadn’t done so, and therefore the point seemed irrelevant. He pursued a more important matter.
What’s going to happen to me?
The question was blurred with fear and vague images of human vivisection.
“Don’t be afraid.” Waldemar spoke aloud, slowly, with emphasis. “Nothing can be done to you that you don’t understand. Nothing! From now on and forever you can always know what anyone is doing, and why!”
Of … course!
Howson felt a sort of smile come to his twisted face, and at its reassuring appearance Waldemar chuckled and got to his feet.
Load you aboard the copter now. Get you somewhere and attend to those cuts properly.
Wait.
Waldemar checked, expressing attention.
The girl. She’s deaf and dumb. I was all she had—all that mattered in her life. If you take me you’ve got to take her, too. It’s not fair.
Surprised, Waldemar pursed his lips. There was a momentary sensation of listening, as though he had made a mental investigation and been satisfied.
“Yes, why not? It’s absurd that anyone should be left like that nowadays. Her brain’s uninjured, and that means she can have an artificial voice, artificial ears. … Why not? We’ll take her with us, by all means.”
Howson closed his eyes. He was fairly certain that the suggestion had been planted in his mind by Waldemar, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that he was content with what had happened, and the future no longer made him terrified.
A mental chuckle came to him from Waldemar, and then he slept.ßook Two Agitat
Book Two
– - Agitat
IX
ix
Howson sat staring dully out over Ulan Bator, thinking how much its condition resembled his own. He could sense its collective mood; for the rest of his life he would be unendingly subject to a kind of emotional weather, the sum of the individual minds surrounding him.
The city had been a rather dowdy, provincial-feeling one, even though it was the capital of a country. The changing pattern of the world—transport, commerce, communications—had hurried it into modern times; now it was a place of fine white towers and broad avenues, and travelers of all kinds came. Amid the turmoil of change, old people could do no more than wonder what had hit them, and long without enthusiasm for the simpler past.
So, too, he had been overtaken by a change he didn’t want, and believed he would accept only if other changes were found to be possible—changes he did desire.
It wasn’t that they had not been kind to him. They had gone to a great deal of trouble. Apart from the immensely thorough medical examinations their specialists had given him—and this hospital at Ulan Bator was the main therapy center for WHO in all Asia, with staff commensurate—there were such minor luxuries as this chair in which he sat. It was subtly designed to accommodate him, Gerald Howson; it was smaller than usual, and the padding matched his deformities. The bed was designed for him, too, and the equipment in the adjacent bathroom, and everything.
But he didn’t want that. It was the same as being helped onto a crowded bus: a hateful reminder of his handicap.
There came a tapping at the door. Automatically he turned his attention to the visitor—no, visitors. So far he had accepted almost no formal training in the use of his talent, but there were trained telepathists on the permanent staff of the hospital, and merely being close to them had increased his control and sensitivity. He couldn’t help admiring them—who could? But so far he had learned nothing about them which reconciled him to being what they were not: a runt, and deformed into the bargain.
He said, both aloud and telepathically, in a tone hinged with weariness, “All right, come in.”
Pandit Singh was the first to enter. A burly man running to fat, with a neatly combed beard and sharp bright eyes, he was the head of therapy A—responsible, in other words, for all neurological and psychological treatment undertaken at the hospital. People, including Howson, liked him; Howson had been impressed by the fact that his sympathy was always colored by determination to
do
something if possible. Too many people’s pity was soured by relief that they at least were physically whole.
Along with him had come Danny Waldemar and one of the staff neurologists, a woman named Christine Bakwa, whom Howson had met previously in one of the many examination rooms he had been taken to. She wasn’t good at disciplining her verbalized thoughts, the most easily accessible to a casual telepathic “glance,” and even before she entered the room Howson had learned from her most of what Singh had to say.
Nonetheless, he made a curt gesture indicating that they should sit down, and turned his own chair on its smoothly operating casters to face Singh.
“Morning, Gerry,” Singh said. “I hear your girl friend was around to see you. How is she? I meant to have a word with her, but I was too busy.”
“She’s getting on well,” Howson said. She was; she was becoming used to the impulses given off by the trembler coils deft surgeons had inserted in her ears, and the bio-activated plastic vocal cords that had replaced her own. There was promise that she would stumble into possession of a musical, if hesitant, speaking voice once she had completed training. Howson slapped down envy at her childish joy, and added the question to which he already sensed the answer.
“And how about me?”
Singh looked at him steadily. He said, “You know I have bad news for you. I couldn’t conceivably hide the fact.”
“Spell it out,” Howson said stubbornly.
“Very well.” Singh sighed. He gestured to Christine Bakwa, and she gave him a folder of papers from a portfolio she was carrying. Selecting the topmost enclosure, he continued, “To begin with, Gerry, there’s the question of your grandfather—your mother’s father.”
“He died long before I was born,” Howson muttered.
“That’s right. Were you ever told why he died so young?”
Howson shook his head.
“I guess I knew my mother didn’t like talking about it, so I never pushed the point to an answer.”
“Well, she must have known. He was what they call a hemophiliac—in other words, a bleeder, whose normal supply of thrombic enzyme was absent. He ought never to have had children. But he did, and through your mother you inherited the condition.”
“I told you this,” Danny Waldemar put in. “When we were taking you aboard the helicopter—remember? I told you we’d given you prothrombin, which is an artificial clotting agent. Your scratches and bruises have always taken a long time to heal, haven’t they? A serious hemorrhage—a nosebleed, say—would have put you in the hospital for a month, and quite possibly would have killed you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Am I?
Howson kept the counter on the telepathic level, but it was so bitter Waldemar flinched visibly.
Aloud, Howson objected, “So what? Prothrombin works on me: the cuts I got when you picked me up healed fast enough once the scabs had formed.”
Singh exchanged a glance with his companion. Before he could speak again, Howson had caught on to what was in the big Indian’s mind.
“No?” he whispered.
“No. I’m sorry, Gerry. Those cuts in fact healed at barely half the rate you’d expect in a healthy person. And anything much more serious than a cut—say a broken bone—will probably never heal at all. Yet paradoxically this is what has made you the most promising novice telepathist to come to our notice since Ilse Kronstadt. Let me make that clear.”
He held up the paper from the file so that Howson could see it. It was a large black-and-white schematic representation of a human brain. At the base of the cortex, a small red arrow had been inked in.
“You’ve probably picked up most of what I have to tell you,” he said. “As Danny pointed out when you first met, you need never again fail to understand what’s being done to you and why. But I’ll go over it, if you don’t mind; not being a telepathist myself, I organize words better than unverbalized concepts.”
Howson nodded, staring with aching misery at the drawing.
“Information is stored in the brain rather casually,” Singh went on. “There’s so much spare capacity, you see. But there are certain areas where particular data are normally concentrated, and what we call ‘body image’—a sort of reference standard of the condition of the body—is kept where that arrow’s marked. A great deal of the data required for healing is right down on the cellular level, naturally, but in your case that mechanism’s faulty—witness your hemophilia. One could get around that with the aid of artificial stimulation of your body-image center, but for this paradox I mentioned.”
He changed the drawing for another, showing the brain from below, also bearing a red arrow.
“Now, here’s a typical average brain—like mine or Christine’s. The red arrow points to a group of cells called the organ of Funck. It’s so small its very existence was overlooked until the first telepathists were discovered. In my brain, for instance, it consists of about a hundred cells, not much different from their neighbors. YouH You’ll note its location.”
Again he extracted a fresh item from the folder. This one was a large X-ray transparency, the whitish outline of a skull with jaw and neck vertebrae.
“YouH You’ll remember we took X rays of your head, Gerry, after giving you a radio-opaque substance which selectively … ah … ‘stains’ cells in the organ of Funck. Take a look at the result.”
Howson gazed numbly at the picture.