John Brunner: The Whole Man

“How about the father?” the doctor said, swallowing against nausea. Call this a part of the crisis, too: it didn’t help.

‘Him? He was killed. I thought that was how he’d end up, you know — once it came down to fighting. Oh God, oh God.”

“We’ll bring you your son now, Miss Howson,” the nurse said.

When the doctor got back to the ward office there was the short-haired woman waiting for him. She had taken off the jacket of her battledress and hung it on a peg while she went through the records of admission. The national flash on the shoulder said israel.

The doctor thought irrelevantly that she didn’t look like a Jewess with her scalpel-thin nose and piercing blue eyes.

“A woman called Howson,” she said, looking up. “We had a dossier on a man named Gerald Pond, whose body was found near the reservoir they dynamited right at the start of the rising. He’s supposed to have had a woman-friend called Howson.”

“That could be right,” the doctor said. He dropped limp into a chair. “I just delivered her of a son. Crippled.”

“Badly?”

“One shoulder higher than the other, one leg shorter than the other, spinal deformity — pretty much of a mess.” The doctor hesitated. “You’re not thinking of taking her in for questioning, for heaven’s sake! She had a hell of a time on the delivery table, and now she has to face the shock of the kid — it’s monstrous!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said the Israeli woman. “Where is she?”

“ In the ward. Fourth bed from the end.”

“I’d like to take a look at her.”

She rose. The doctor made no move to accompany her. He waited till she was out of the room, and then went behind the desk at which she had been sitting and took out from a drawer the last cigarette in the last pack he had. He had lit it and returned to his chair before she came back.

“Are you arresting her?” he asked sourly.

“No.” The Israeli woman sat down briskly and made a note on the carbon copy of a list she was consulting. “No, she’s not involved with the terrorists. She’s about as a-political as one can get and still talk coherently. She was afraid of being left alone — she must be what? Forty? — and she didn’t believe that this man Pond meant exactly what he said: he regarded sex as a necessary act and her as a routine provision. She kidded herself into thinking she could break through his obsession with revolution and sabotage and reduce him to — wedding-bells, furniture on credit, all that…” She gave a wry smile. “Sad, isn’t it?”

“You have a dossier on her too, presumably,” said the doctor in a sarcastic tone. “You didn’t get details like that on the spur of the moment.”

“Hmmm? No, we have no dossier on her, and it won’t be worth the trouble of putting one together, to my mind.”

“Oh, marvelous!” the doctor said. “I’m glad to know you draw the line occasionally.”

“We don’t make the messes, you know,” the Israeli woman said. “They just call us in to clear them up.”

“Well, hell! If all you have to do is — is walk in that ward and look at someone and say there’s trouble, yes or no, it’s a pity you don’t do it before the mess happens instead of afterwards!” The doctor was very tired, and moreover very resentful of these polyglot strangers with the authority of world opinion at their back; he scarcely knew what he was saying.

He also scarcely knew what the Israeli woman meant when she answered, “There aren’t enough of us yet, doctor. Not yet.”

After three days they sent Sarah Howson home from the hospital with the child, and also with papers: a nursing mother’s emergency ration card, a medical supply voucher, a medical inspection voucher, a booklet of baby-food coupons and a diaper-service voucher.

She came back to the narrow, long street with its double row of identical three-storey houses, facades covered in cracked yellow plaster, garbage piled up in the gutters because “the crisis” had stopped municipal clearance services. The day after her return, a pair of huge trucks painted the same drab green as the soldiers” battledress came growling down the street: one ate the garbage with a maw above which a roller-brush turned like a dirty moustache; the other hosed the pavement with a smelly germicide. Water was still being sold from carts; it would take months to repair the reservoir Gerald Pond and his companions had so efficiently dynamited, and there was little rain at this time of year.

She spent the first evening back at home clearing her two rooms of everything that might remind her of Gerald Pond—old clothes, shoes, letters, books on political subjects. She kept the novels, not to read but because they might be saleable. If the baby hadn’t been quiet, she would cheerfully have thrown him out with the rest, and Gerald Howson would unknowing have left the unknowing world.

But he was a passive child, then and always. Hunger might bring a thin crying; the noise didn’t last, and he accepted discomfort as a fact of existence, because his distorted body was uncomfortable simply to live in.

The evening little Gerald achieved his first week of individual existence the soldiers came down the street in an open truck: four of them, and an officer, and a driver. The driver stopped alongside the entrance of the house where Sarah Howson lodged, pulling into a gap between two parked cars but not making any serious attempt to get to the kerb. “The crisis” had also interrupted gasoline distribution; the cars here had mostly not moved for a fortnight, and already kids had begun to treat them as abandoned wrecks, slashing the tires, opening the filler caps, scratching names and obscene words on the paintwork with knives or nails.

The people on the street, the people looking from their cautiously curtained windows, saw the soldiers arrive and felt a stir of nameless alarm. A few of them knew for sure they had done something illegal; a black market had followed the crisis with blurring speed. Many more, adrift on the unfamiliar sea of circumstance, were afraid that they might have infringed some regulation imposed by the pacifying forces, or unwittingly have aided the terrorists. The fact of pacification was scarcely new, but it had been an elsewhere thing — it was reported in the papers and on TV, and it affected people with dark skins in distant countries with jungles and deserts.

Two of the soldiers waited, lounging, by the house door. Their shoulder-flashes said pakistan and they were tall, good-looking, swarthy, with bright wide smiles as they exchanged casual comments. But they also carried slung guns.

The other two soldiers and the officer banged on the door until they were admitted. With the frightened landlord they went upstairs, to the top, to Sarah Howson’s two rooms. They knocked again there.

When she opened to them, the deflated woman with her big rayon house-dress belted to a wide overlap around her waist, the officer was polite, and saluted parade-stiffly. He said, “Miss Sarah Howson?”

“Yes. What is it?” The dark dull eyes searched the military exterior, seeming to plead for clues to an inward humanity.

“I believe you were formerly an — ah — an intimate friend of Gerald Pond. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” She seemed to sag still more, but there was no protestation in the tone with which she uttered the rest of what she had to say. “But he’s dead now. And anyway I never mixed in these political things.”

The officer made no comment. He said only, “Well, I must ask you to come with us, please. It is necessary to ask you some questions.”

“All right.” She stood back apathetically from the door. “Come in and wait while I get changed. Is it going to take long?”