John Brunner - The Whole Man

Teeps — TP’s — telepathists. Howson nodded. He didn’t remember hearing the nickname before, which surprised him; it was so obvious. As for the news about Snake Hampton, it was less strange that he shouldn’t have known that. This was, after all, a city that the new world was passing by. A minor law-enforcement action was petty compared to the big jobs the—the teeps had undertaken here.

“But his bar’s still going,” the driver said. “Just coming into sight ahead, there. I don’t know who runs it now.”

“There’s a hotel the other side of it,” Howson said. “Drop me there.”

Having checked in at the hotel and arranged for the rest of his bags to be sent down from the airport, he ate a solitary meal and reflected on what he had found out so far. He felt despondent. Why should he have expected to be able to come back to where he had left off eleven years ago? It seemed an arrogant assumption, and annoyed him.

He was a stranger now. He’d have to accept that.

After his meal he left the hotel and went along the street to what had been Hampton’s bar. It was shabbier, more dimly lit than he remembered, its mirrors fly-specked, its floor worn by many feet. Were the rooms in back as they had been — the blue room where he had spent those anxious hours with Lots, for example? Did it matter? He had made up his mind not to look for things as they had been, but as they were now. He moved to a corner table at the back of the bar, ordered a beer, and sat miserably contemplating it.

The image of Mary’s face kept getting between him and the world around him. It was going to take a long time to adjust to what she had confessed to him. “Why,” Hugh Choong had asked him, in effect, “do you feel guilty about using your ability for your own enjoyment?”

And he might have answered, “Because when I did I was repaid with the subconscious knowledge that I had created suffering.”

Poor Mary… Poor fairy-tale princess!

Other things were growing clear in his mind, too. Charlie Birberger had been eager to convince himself that he had given Howson a helping hand; well, how much of Howson’s own insistence on staying the year around at the Ulan Bator hospital was due to a desire to see as many patients as possible feel indebted to him? Was he in fact being influenced by the urge to secure their admiration and gratitude, as he had sought Mary’s admiration and gratitude eleven years before?

He broke off the train of thought in annoyance. Self-analysis like this could go on indefinitely and never get anywhere. He had indisputably done a hell of a lot of good work, and he would do more — provided only that he could restore his confidence in himself. So far he had managed to destroy some self-defensive illusions; granted, if they were illusions they were fragile anyway, but they had helped to sustain him in the past, so he was making his situation worse instead of better.

Where to from here? What next?

He raised his beer and sipped it, thinking about the first time he had come in here and the exchange he had had with Lots about the reason for his not drinking. He had learned from the minds of well-adjusted colleagues why people did like to drink, and stopped there, with the vicarious ability to copy them. He had also seen why some of his patients drank to excess, and preferred not to be taken in by the same fallacy.

Setting the glass down, he became aware of raised voices at the table in the opposite corner to his own. A group of two young men — untidily dressed and about two days unshaven—and a plain girl with fair hair in a rather shapeless dress, were involved in heated argument. At least, one man and the girl were; the other man seemed to be listening with amusement.

“But don’t you see?” thundered the girl, slamming her open palm on the table so that the trio’s glasses jumped “You’re ignoring the lessons of the whole of the past century in order to rehash things which have been done twenty times over better than you’ll ever manage to do them!”

“You must be blind, deaf, dumb and moronic to say a thing like that!” blazed back her opponent. “One of your most damnable faults, and you’ve got plenty, is making wild and empty generalizations! Anyone with a grain of intelligence—”

“Excuse me, you two,” said the mildly amused young man. “I’ll come back when it’s less noisy around here.”

“Good riddance!” snapped the girl as he picked up his drink and crossed the floor to Howson’s table. Howson bridled instinctively, but the stranger betrayed no reaction to his appearance.

“Mind if I sit here for a bit ? I won’t be able to get a word in edgewise until they calm down, and since neither of them really knows what they’re talking about… Cigarette ?”

Howson was on the point of refusing — smoking was discouraged at the therapy centre, even with carcinogen-free tobacco available now — when it occurred to him that the young man was being extremely courteous. He had no means of knowing that Howson was more than his vacuous face suggested, yet had addressed him with perfect aplomb.

He accepted the cigarette with a word of thanks.

“What’s it all about, anyway?” he ventured as he bent to receive a light.

“Charma,” said the other around his cigarette, “insists that Jay is doing incompetent and unsatisfactory work. She’s right. She is, however, totally wrong in maintaining that he’s merely repeating something that’s been done hundreds of times. He does have a fairly original idea; he simply isn’t good enough to cope with it properly. He thinks he is. So — they disagree.”

“Does this happen a lot ?”

“It goes on all the blasted time!” said the young man in a ponderously aggrieved tone.

“And what sort of work ?”

“Oh — bit hard to define. I guess you might call his things liquid mobiles. Charma refers to them as wet fireworks, and though I suppose you could argue that she has something there, it doesn’t exactly delight Jay. Main trouble is, he ought to be a chemist and hydrodynamicist as well as a guy with an eye for a lighting effect, and he isn’t, so he can’t exploit the very genuine possibilities of his technique.”

About twenty-two or—three, Howson judged as he looked at his new acquaintance. He was of medium height, plumply good-looking, with untidy black hair and heavy glasses. He wore a faded shirt open at the neck, dark trousers with light stains on the knees, and open sandals. An enormous watch caught the light on his wrist. A sheaf of pens and pencils was clipped in his shirt pocket.

“You’re students?” suggested Howson, recollecting the nearness of the new university building.

“No more, no more. We got a wee bit dissatisfied with academic standards a while back, and since the academic standard-bearers were likewise less than pleased with us we agreed to stop “bothering each other. Another drink ?”

“No, let me,” said Howson, and signalled a waiter. He paid with the topmost of a bundle of bills which made his companion purse his mouth in parodied awe.

“It always gives me pleasure to accept a drink from the rich,” he said solemnly. “It means I’m doing my humble bit towards the redistribution of capital.”

“Set “em up for those two as well,” Howson told the waiter indicating Jay and Charma. “Ah — what’s your particular line, by the way?”

“I compose. Badly. What’s yours ?”

“I’m a doctor,” said Howson after a moment’s hesitation.

“I’d never have guessed. We ought to try you on Man, maybe — an embryo sociologist we know, who’s a fanatical determinist. Trying to make out that professions and trades can be correlated with physical types. Mark you, someone like you is calculated to throw a spanner in the works no matter what you do for a living — sort of wild variable. Say, you’ve managed to quiet them down!” He twisted on his chair to face Jay and Charma.