John Brunner - The Whole Man

He gasped and opened his eyes, sitting up with a jerk. A stab of pain from cramp-stiffened back muscles followed the movement. Beside him, the girl whimpered her complaint at losing contact. He ignored her, scrambled to his feet and plunged through the sacking-screened opening which served as their doorway.

Outside, the rain drizzled down, scarcely thick enough to veil the surrounding buildings, but quite enough to make it impossible to stare upward when he tried it. The water, dirty with city smoke and dust, ran into his eyes and made him blink helplessly. Besides, what he was looking for was hidden behind the clouds still.

Hidden! How could he hide?

That last distracting concept, the one which had jolted him to his feet, had been neither his own nor the girl’s. Behind its simple verbalization had lain layer on layer of remembered experience, belonging to a telepathist with full training and tremendous skill. He didn’t have to have previous knowledge to sense that. The message was self-identifying.

So they had come for him, who could not run and had not yet learned how to blank out his projections.

The din of the helicopters battered at his ears, the rain stung his eyes. Without forethought he found himself stumbling across the uneven ground; a patch of slimy mud moved under his foot, and he was sprawling in a puddle. Heedless of wet and dirt, he got up again, hearing the formless bubbling voice of the girl behind him, seeing that the hunters had located him now beyond doubt, expecting momently that the angular insect-shapes of the helicopters would buzz through the grey overcast and close on him like vultures circling a lost explorer.

And there was one of them! Gasping, cursing, he turned, slipping and sliding and clutching whatever support he could to prevent another headlong fall. A vast vertical gale hammered the top of his head with accelerated raindrops, like birdshot, as the “copter passed above him, and stayed there. The downdraught formed a cage around him, its bars the needles of rain.

The girl was screaming now, as nearly as she could; the disgusting noise of her moans blended in confusion with the yammer of the “copter engine.

Telepathist, why are you afraid?

The silent voice came into his head like a cold cleansing wind, islanding his consciousness in the eye of the hurricane of noise and fear. It was laden with encouragement to accept what was happening. For a moment he was too startled to resist the intrusion — this wasn’t a random concept picked up by himself from a passive mind, but a deliberate projection with the force of years of mental discipline behind it. Then the second helicopter dropped into view, and he found strength in terror.

no, no, no! leave me alone!

The thought blasted out unaimed, and the “copter directly above him reacted as though he had riddled it with gunfire. Its nose dipped, it twisted and slid across the bare ground, it jerked crazily as one of its outstretched legs crashed into the wall of the ruined warehouse, and turned over around the point of impact. On its side it fell crunching among piled rubble, and the rotor blades snapped like dry sticks and the engine died instantly.

Unbelieving, Howson watched it crash, hardly daring to accept that he could have been responsible. Yet he knew he was — he had sensed the blinding shock in the pilot’s mind as all his reflexes were deranged. Moreover, he had driven out the mental voice of the telepathist addressing him, and where the link had formed between them there was a sensation like a half-healed bruise.

In the same instant he also realized that the girl’s mind had been switched off, and when he looked, he saw she had slumped unconscious in the mud.

Elation seized him briefly. If he could do this, he could do anything! Let them come for him — he would drive them back with blasts of mental resistance until they did what he wanted and left him alone.

And then he felt the pain.

From the shattered hulk of the helicopter, it welled out in black blinding waves, beyond all conscious control, and aimed at Howson by the coexistent awareness of the sufferers that he was responsible. He gasped, thinking his own leg was broken, his own rib-cage crushed, his own head laid open and bleeding by a sharp metal edge. Into his startled mind the telepathist reached again.

You did that.

leave me alone!

And this time the surviving “copter remained steady, the telepathic link only trembled and did not break, because the fury of Howson’s projection was muted by the received pain. He started to move again, swaying, vaguely intending to hide in the ruined warehouse, and trying to form contradictions to answer the telepathist’s accusations.

Leave me alone — I don’t want to be important! When I get involved with the world bad things happen (confusion of concepts radiated from this: police waiting at his door, the helicopter pilot snatching convulsively at his controls).

He clambered up a mound of bricks and broken lumps of concrete, towards a wall in which half a window frame made a gap like a single battlement. The cool projection of the telepathist continued.

You waste your talent on fantasy. You don’t know how to use it. That’s why disaster — like a fast car you never learn to drive! And skillfully associated with the message, images that made the pile of rubble seem to be the shell of a wrecked car, burning against the wall it had hit head-on.

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 half-window. There was a drop of twelve feet beyond, into what had been a basement level. Horrified, he thought of jumping down.

I can protect you from fear and pain. Let me.

no, no, no! leave me alone!

The contact wavered; the telepathist seemed to gather his strength. He “said’: All right, you deserve this tor 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 on to 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 forehead 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.