John Brunner - The Whole Man

Howson sat up. “I’m sorry!” he began. “Rudi and Jay insisted on my coming—”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” she said, dismissing the point with a wave. “I’m the one who ought to apologize for neglecting a guest so long. I just haven’t had a spare moment Are you enjoying yourself ?”

“Tremendously, thanks.”

“I thought you might be, behind that mask of non-engagement. What were you doing — drinking in atmosphere ?”

“Actually I was thinking what a lot of impressive and lively discussion there was here.”

“Bloody, isn’t it ? At any party like this people dream up a dozen wonderful world-changing schemes, and they never put them into practice. Well, we should worry — been happening for centuries and it’s likely to go on. Might be a good idea to note down some of the schemes and publish them — get them to someone who could make use of them…” She unfocused her eyes, as though studying a future possibility. “Might have a crack at it. But that’s probably just another of those same vanishing schemes.”

“Are you a writer ?” Howson guessed.

“Potential. Somebody tell you ?”

“No. But you have a lot of creative people here.”

The girl (her name would be Clara, since she was the hostess) offered him a cigarette. He refused, but borrowed someone else’s burning one to light hers with. Where the hell had he got that trick from ? He’d never done it in his life before. Out of a movie, maybe, from — from…

It was with a start he recollected that he was in the same city where he had seen that movie.

“No, me,” Clara was saying, “I suffer from a congenital dissatisfaction with words. I mean — hell, if you tried to explore fully just the few people here during the few hours the party lasted, you’d wind up with an unmanageable monster. How long does Ulysses last, for instance — eighteen hours, is it? And you still couldn’t be sure you were communicating with your audience. What I’d like is a technique which would enable a pre-Columbian Amerind to understand a twentieth-century Chinese. Then — brother! I’d be a writer!”

She chuckled at the grandiosity of her own ambition, and changed the sububject.

“How about you ? What’s your line ?”

“I’m a doctor,” Howson said after considering and dismissing the idea of sounding her out on the possibilities of telepathy as a solution to the problem in communication she had propounded. “Matter of fact, Rudi wanted me to come along to meet someone trying to correlate physical types with trades and professions. Brian — someone.”

“Oh yes. Rudi’s for ever trying to deflate him. I imagine he needed some mental acrobatics to fit you into the pattern, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been introduced to him yet.”

“Well, if that isn’t Rudi all over! Damn it, Brian’s been here the better part of an hour… Oh, maybe he’ll remember and bring you together sooner or later. Do you mind? Or would you rather get it over and go ?”

Howson shook his head. “I’m enjoying this,” he affirmed.

Someone tapped his arm and held a bottle ovehis now empty glass; he covered it quickly with his palm to indicate a refusal, and then turned to put it on a handy table. For a while there was a companionable silence between them, while the party’s chatter and music circled around like the winds enclosing a hurricane’s eye.

Finally, since Clara showed no immediate desire to move on, he stirred and glanced at her.

“Who and what, exactly, is Rudi ?” he asked. He was rather more interested in Rudi than in the other two he had met in the bar this evening. He had not trespassed in the younger man’s mind, of course; a single telepathic sweep would have told him all he wanted to know, but he shrank from the notion as he shrank from invading anyone’s mental privacy without invitation or necessity. Even on the strength of externals, however, Rudi impressed him as having a deeper and more mature personality than his friends.

“Rudi?” Clara blew smoke through her nostrils. “Rudi Allef is his full name. He’s half-Israeli. He came here on a UN grant He was doing — well, I think he was doing — some good work. Unfortunately it wasn’t the work he was supposed to do to qualify for the grant he was getting. So they discontinued it. So Jay and Charma Home—”

“Jay and Charma Horne ? Brother and sister ?”

Clara stared at him. “Whatever gave you that extraordinary-idea ? They’re married.”

“Married?”

“Well — why shouldn’t they be ?”

Howson recovered himself and shrugged; he didn’t do it too well, for reasons connected with the curvature of his spine. “It was just the way they were rowing with each other when I first met them Sorry, go on.”

“Ah-h-h — yes. So Jay and Charma, being slightly crazy anyway as you might expect in view of their having got married under the circumstances, quit in sympathy and aren’t finding life any too easy. Still, you were asking about Rudi, not the Homes. Rudi is — well, a problem.”

“Odd you should say that,” Howson remarked, puzzled. “Obviously you know him better than I do, but I’d have said he seemed like a well-balanced and integrated person.”

“He gives that impression, certainly.” Clara looked across the room to where the object of their discussion sat on the floor near the concertina-player. “Maybe one of these days, if he keeps the act up long enough, he’ll convince himself that’s the way he really is. And a good thing too. Otherwise he’ll suffer a serious breakdown and not be much good to himself or anybody else for a long, long time.”

Momentarily unsure whether they were talking about the same person, Howson stared. “Does he show signs of cracking?” he demanded.

She seemed to draw her mind back from elsewhere, and shook herself very slightly. “Oh, if you know where to look… I ought to circulate and attend to my guests, I suppose. See you later.”

She had just risen to her feet when she checked. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But you seem to be a bit of a problem yourself. Are you ?”

Howson looked at her as hard in the eye as he could. “You claim to be good at spotting problems,” he answered. “Make up your own mind.”

She flushed. “I deserved that,” she admitted, and turned away.

After which, Howson realized, he still didn’t know much about Rudi Allef.

But at that moment Rudi himself remembered the bomb he had wanted to place under Brian’s sociological theory. He climbed to his feet, dragged Brian out of the argument he was involved in, and presented Howson to him. More than ever, as he looked at Rudi’s eager grin, Howson found himself tempted to take a quick peep — just one! — inside that well-shaped head.

And if he did, and proceeded inadvertently to display a knowledge of Rudi he couldn’t possibly have obtained ordinarily in the course of such a short acquaintance… ? How-son suddenly realized what it must be like for a mulatto “passing” in a place where such things counted, and the room grew cold.

He just hadn’t known this feeling before. He was an undersized cripple; all right, these people were defiantly taking so much for granted. But even here there might be those who would consider him alien. Maybe, when the time came for them to find out who he really was (and that time would inevitably come, whether he was still among them or not), they would shrug and maintain their open-mindedness. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t.

Perhaps, in sheer self-defence, he ought to find out their opinions before committing himself—? He could do it in a moment!

Then he realized he had failed to catch something that was said to him, and reflexively picked the words out of Rudi’s mind. He was half-way through his answer before he realized what he had done, and the room grew even colder. He was so used to being among people from whom his talent was no secret that he had acquired many automatic habits such as that. The shock made him stumble in his reply, but he recovered quickly enough to hide his alarm.