John Brunner - The Whole Man

Singh felt his own heart give an answering lurch. There was no sense to be got out of the watchdog in his present state of shock, whatever had caused it; he hurried to stare at the encephalograph instead.

“See here!” The technician stabbed his finger at the weaving traces. “It’s smoothing now, going into normal phase, but when it first came on it was heterodyning so much I thought she was done for.”

“Is it Phranakis taking control of her entire mind ?”

“It can’t be!” the technician said with savagery. “I know his trace like — like his handwriting. And that’s not his.”

The air seemed to go stiff, as swiftly as supercooled water freezing. Totally lost, they looked at one another for an explanation.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Singh said at last “We can only wait.”

Slow nods answered him. And while they were still preparing themselves to endure the last crucial minutes, there came the noise from the passageway outside.

There were angry voices, raised to try and stop somebody.

There were running feet, light and muffled on the sound-absorbent floor. There was a hammering on the outermost of the soundproof doors, and a thin, barely heard scream.

The watchdog, still in shock, made two steps towards the door, jerking like a badly-manipulated puppet. Singh turned slowly, preconceived words about silence and danger dying as he sensed the truth and tried to remember what hope was like.

Then the doors slammed back and the giant came in, weeping, limping, and barely five feet tall.

There was the child, and I so wanted to help him, and I had to say those cheap rationalizing words about big problems and little problems… The doctor said: one shoulder higher than the other, one leg shorter than the other — pretty much of a mess. And later I found out about his grandfather, and found it out from the woman’s mind — she knew, and had the kid in spite of it, to use for blackmail… Big problems! What bigger problem could there possibly be? And I so wanted to help, and my whole life has been like that because there are so many people sick and sad and I can help… could help… DAMN THIS LUMP IN MY BRAIN! No bigger than a bullet, and like a bullet it’s killing me before I’m ready to die.

That was when Howson forgot himself.

At first she didn’t understand the power that had suddenly come to her. It was like becoming a torrential river, vast and deep and terrible. It was raw because it was as new as a baby, but it blazed.

Life force ? ? ? No such — but: life force!

Defeat? DEFEAT?

There was no room left for ideas of death and defeat !

Slowly, calmly as she had considered the prospect of dying, she began to take charge of what she had been given. There was no resistance, and she never questioned the source of the power — she was too accustomed to meeting strangers in her own mind to waste effort in finding out. The fatal images forced on her by Phranakis receded, becoming ghostly-faint; she sensed his terror and immediately postponed consideration of it. She was a little frightened herself, but calm yet.

Seeking levers with which to direct the force, she found almost at once a familiar concept, and it related so strongly to her recent conscious preoccupations that she was shaken.

Mother-child: images of parturition, nourishment, support, warmth, love. Child-mother: images of reflected pride, hope, gratitude, love. The forms were ill defined, as though from a source which knew little about such matters in real life. A faint puzzlement crossed her mind, and she dismissed it. With her detached consciousness she knew she had to make use of the power before she exhausted herself and lost her grip on it, and the first — the only — necessity was to struggle free of the hate Phranakis felt for her.

“She’s breaking loose!” someone exclaimed.

“I saw her eyelids flutter,” Singh whispered. There was a tightness in his chest he could not account for. His eyes were aching with the intentness of his staring; all his will was summed into the hope that his old, dear, marvellous friend should live. By what means she was rescued, he didn’t care. Later—later!

“But she’s only breaking loose!” muttered the technician by the encephalograph. “She isn’t bringing Phranakis with her—no, wait a second!” He bent close to the Phranakis tape, as if he could see through the present and read what had not yet been recorded. “Something’s happening, but heaven knows what!”

Cowed, bewildered, at a loss, the hero felt his satisfaction turn to ashes. A moment ago he was secure and confident; he had thwarted an attack on — well, his life, which sounded better than the truth, which was fearful to him. The last treacherous attempt of the barbarians to square accounts with him had been beaten off. The greatest city of all time, Athens the flower of civilization, was his, and its citizens were at his beck and call. Through the centuries they would remember him, Pericles the Great!

Yet now he felt unreasoned terror. It seemed to him that he was darting about like a frightened rabbit, with a sword in his hand, looking for his enemies, hysterically defying them to come into the open. Out from the marble hall, out under the blue arch of the sky where he would roar defiance to the gods themselves if need be!

He threw back his head, filled his lungs, and could not speak. To his terror-stricken gaze it appeared that the sky rolled back, like a slashed tent, and the gods were manifest.

He wanted to fall on his face, bury his head in dirt, deny this as he had denied — what ? Something terrible but not as fearful as this! He was paralysed. Whimpering, he had to look, and what he saw seemed to him to be the majesty of Zeus the Thundered, who raised his bolt of lightning and cast it down on the mortal who had presumed to usurp the divine right.

Pericles the Great became Pericles Phranakis. Pericles Phranakis woke like a child screaming from nightmares, and those who watched over his body pounced to stop him going back.

And Zeus the Thunderer, drained of all energy in a single terrific blast of mental mastery, fell headlong fainting to the floor.

“Do we know how he did it?” muttered Danny Waldemar, looking down with incredulous awe at the limp little body in the hospital bed.

The watchdog was too overcome to follow it exactly,” Singh answered. He ached for Howson to recover consciousness; he knew he could never express his gratitude for sparing Ilse the humiliation of death in defeat, but he wanted the cripple to see it in his mind, at least. “We got a little of it. It was the sheer power that worked in the end, naturally — he was able to take anything Phranakis offered and turn it into some hostile, hateful image. I think he was babbling about the Greek gods when he woke up — perhaps he saw them when Howson broke into his fantasy… Never mind; we’ll know soon.”

“What I don’t understand is what persuaded him to help,”

Waldemar said. “I haven’t contacted Ilse, of course — she’s still so weak… Do you know ?”

“Yes, she was awake long enough to tell me while they were detaching the prosthetics.” Singh paused and wiped his face.

“It seems that Howson’s father was Gerald Pond. Mean anything to you?”

“The — the terrorist? That one? Why, Ilse had to go and clear up after him while she was working for UN Pacification!”

“Exactly. And while she was probing wounded survivors for aggression data in a hospital there, she met Howson’s mother. He’d just been born a few hours earlier.

“He’s never been loved — do you know that ? His mother had him to try and blackmail Pond into marrying her, and never cared much about him otherwise. And people have always seen his face first, and been — disturbed. So he’s never been loved except once.”