John Brunner - The Whole Man

First he would have to sort out from the inchoate succession of telepathic concepts some more clues than he had. Masculinity, Asian nationality, and enjoyment of power were hardly unique characteristics on this densely populated side of the planet. He surveyed the deeper levels cautiously. At least, he told himself, this didn’t feel like the emanation of a sick mind. It wasn’t even as irrational as most otherwise sane people became when they slept.

No: wait a moment. That must be wrong. He caught himself with a start. Hadn’t there been referents in the very first contact which he’d defined reflexively as magic ?

Growing more puzzled every second, he examined it closer. No good. It was blurred by the girl’s incomprehension, and probably made unrecognizable. He’d have to look for the original source. In one way it shouldn’t be too difficult — to reach into the awareness of a sleeping novice the signal must be both close and powerful. But in another way the task was immense. “Close” could mean anywhere in the city, and there were a million-odd inhabitants.

“Gerry? You there?” Schacht demanded over the intercom.

“Shut up,” Howson told him. “This feels big, Ludwig. Big — and bad.”

He sensed Schacht’s unspoken disbelief, and ignored it. Schacht at least made an attempt to master his instinctual revulsion against telepathists, and that was more than some people bothered to do.

He let his mind rove out over the night city, where a million brains made dreams sigh like the wind between tall white towers, down wide, straight streets. That was a cosmopolitan consciousness, stranded together from all over the world and sometimes from farther away still — from the Moon, or Mars…

He had rationalized his unwillingness to travel. Why go, when it all came to him ? In this man’s mind, a desert remembered; in that man’s, a jungle; in another’s, naked space, hurtful with stars sharp as knives.

But it wasn’t a good rationalization. To live vicariously was to be a parasite, and even a symbiote could have little self-respect.

He jerked his train of thought back under control. He had had barely an hour’s sleep before he was woken, and he felt extremely tired. None the less, he’d have to finish what he’d started before he could sleep again.

And all at once he had it.

“Got anything yet?” Schacht said with growing impatience, Howson barely heard the words; he was too depressed at the realization of what was happening.

“Gerry!”

“I’m — I’m listening, Ludwig,” Howson forced out. “You’d better call Pan and get him to come up here, and Deirdre too. And call an ambulance, and a car.”

“What on earth have you found, then ?”

“There’s another catapathic grouping been set up. It’s out in the city somewhere — I guess I can track it down.” Images of absolute power, over natural law as well as men’s minds, thrust the words down to second place in Howson’s attention.

“Oh, marvellous!” Schacht said bitterly. “This is really my night! I’ve had two knife-wounds, three burns, a car accident and two premature labours since I came on duty !”

Howson paid no attention. He was reeling under the violence of the events that were storming into his mind. Lacking any connexion with external reality, yet charged with the full force of consciousness — as dreams, though equally illogical, never were — they gave him no fulcrum and no purchase. When he had viewed them through the intermediary mind of the Nepalese girl (who must have a sleeping-pill to save her from this bombardment, he remembered dazedly), he hadn’t realized the power driving them. And worse, there was this aura of perfect calm tinged with — with amusement…

He exerted every ounce of will-power and withdrew from contact, trembling. He had driven his nails deep into his palms. Why should that surprise him? This was what he feared most in all the world.

He spoke, both aloud and mentally, to the unknown telepathist, putting all his hate and anger into a single concept: Damn you, whoever you are!

Secure in fugue, pursuing a gaudy fantasy for his own private reasons, the unknown might have sensed the signal and chuckled, inviting Howson to lay siege if he wished to the fortress of his brain… or the idea might have been Howson’s own. He was too upset to tell which.

Agonized, he faced the inevitable future. No projective telepathist was worthless, and going by his current signals this man was exceptional among exceptions. What intolerable strain had forced him to abandon reality didn’t matter; they would want him dragged back. They would call on Howson, and because this was what he did best in the world he would attempt it, and be sublimely terrified, and maybe, this time, find that—

no.

The order was to himself, but it was given as a deafening telepathic scream, and elsewhere in the hospital other telepathists, including the Nepalese girl, reacted with sleepy surprise. Blindly he reached to the shelf beside the bed where he kept his stock of medicaments — he was prey to as many emergencies as any patient in the place — and found the tranquillizer bottle. He gulped two of the pills down, and sat rock-still while they straitjacketed his writhing mind.

His breathing grew easier. The temptation to turn his attention back to the glowing fantasies projected by the unknown receded, as though he had mastered the urge to probe a rotten tooth and make it ache. When he judged he was capable of movement, he got awkwardly off the bed and reached for his clothes, preparing to go in search of his anonymous enemy.

From the elevator he limped slowly down the main lobby of the hospital, passing the waiting emergency apparatus: oxygen cylinders on angular trolleys, like praying mantises, their shadows gawky on the cream-painted wall; wheeled stretchers with blankets neatly folded at the ends; a machine called a heart, a machine called a lung, a machine called a kidney, as though one could take them, patch them together, and make a man.

With whose brain? Mine? I’d almost rather…

But the door had swung back, whispering with the rubber lip that kissed the rubber floor, and Pandit Singh was there in black sweater and grey pants, the light resting on his shock of hair like an aura.

“Gerry! What’s this about a catapathic grouping ? Brought in without notice ? Where from ? And what are you doing here, anyway ? Isn’t Ludwig Schacht on duty ?”

The frost of fierceness on the words no more bespoke anger than the frost of grey on his bushy eyebrows bespoke age. He seemed changelessly young — on the inside, where it mattered. Promotion from his old post as head of therapy A to director in chief of the hospital hadn’t altered him a jot. Howson had liked him on first meeting; now, after their long years together, he loved him as he would have wanted to love his father.

Once he had wished that his gift could be taken from him, to be abolished. The wish recurred occasionally, but now he would not have wanted to see it go from the world completely. Rather, he would have given it to Pandit Singh, as a man fit to wield such power.

Why me? Why me, the weakling?

He was dreadfully tired. But his thin voice was steady enough as he corrected Singh’s mistaken assumptions.

“You must have come straight out without stopping to ask Ludwig for details. Pan. It’s not that a grouping has been brought in. There’s one out in the city. The Nepalese girl picked up some stray images in her sleep — it just happens that the setting of the fantasy corresponds to her own background — and I was woken by her instinctive fear.”

“I see!” Singh stroked his beard. “Can you locate them for us, or do we have to search ?”