John Brunner: The Whole Man

So all through. But the cars lingered longest. To be on the Sahara Highway, knife cut-straight for two hundred miles at a stretch, where there was no limping: the photo reactive glass of the roof automatically darkened against the harsh sun, the counter of the turbine steady at its two hundred thousand revs, the gangs of dark-skinned men at work with the sand sweeps, one every ten miles, the glimpses of artificial oases islanded by sand, where with water and tough grass and mutated conifers men struggled to reclaim once-fertile land… that was a dream to cherish.

Advertisements. Coming attractions. His mind wandered, and his attention centered briefly on the man in brown, who was checking his watch again and gazing around as though expecting someone. Girl-friend? Somehow not. Howson let the problem slide as the main titles of the big feature sprang into red life on the screen.

Howson knew little about his father; he had learned tact early because it was the complement, as it were, of the treatment he received in school, so scraps of information put together had to take the place of direct questioning of his mother. He still knew scarcely anything about the political crisis that had gestated along with him, and its worst after-effects were over by the time he became aware of such things as news and international affairs.

Even so, he sensed something special about movies of this kind. He couldn’t analyze what led to the reaction of audiences watching them, but he knew he liked the feeling; everyone seemed to be cautiously self-conscious, as though they were testing out a leg fresh from surgical splints, and establishing by the absence of expected pain that it would take their full weight.

In a way, that parallel was exact. The trauma of the crisis had subsided to such a degree that it would soon be possible to teach children about it, treating it as history. Experience had persuaded those who recalled it clearly that it wasn’t the end of everything — here was life going on, and the country was prosperous, and children were growing up happy, and worry had proved needless.

So now the movie theatres were full when there was a picture like this one playing — and there were lots like this one, and Howson had seen several. Absurd, spectacular, violent, melodramatic, they always centered on terrorism or war-prevention in some colorful corner of the world, and their heroes were the mysterious, half-understood agents of the UN who read minds: the honorable spies, the telepathists.

Here now the story was a romance. Clean-cut, tall, good-looking, mind-reading agent encounters blonde, tall, beautiful, sadly misled, mind-reading girl maintained under hypnosis by fanatical group bent on blowing up a nuclear power station in the furtherance of their greed for conquest. The older members of the audience squirmed a little under the impact of too-familiar images: olive-green trucks thundering down a moonlit road, soldiers deploying unhurriedly around the main intersections of a big city, an abandoned child weeping as it wandered through silent alleys.

There were obvious attempts to parallel reality at certain points, but not many. There was, for instance, a motherly Jewish woman telepathist intended to resemble the legendary Ilse Kronstadt; in the front rows of the audience, teenage girls who had let their boys” hands wander too intimately across a breast squirmed under the horrible but delicious idea that real mothers should read this memory from them later — horrible, for the expected row to follow, delicious, for the hope that parents were indeed ultimately dependable.

And the boys wondered about being telepathic, and thought of knowing for sure whether the girls would or wouldn’t, and power, and money.

Meantime: Howson. It didn’t seem to him especially insightful to realize that it couldn’t actually happen this way; for him, this fictionalization was on the same footing as a camera trick, something to be taken on its own terms, with its own artificial logic. His fantasies and his real environment were too unalike to become confused in his mind.

His genetic handicap had at least spared him any obsession with sexuality, and he was diffusely grateful that he had no intolerable yearnings which his appearance would bar from fulfillment. But he did hunger after acceptance, and made the most of such crumbs of consideration as were thrown to him.

Accordingly he thought about these telepathists from a different standpoint: as persons set apart by a mental, rather than a physical, abnormality. He was sufficiently cynical to have realized that the admiration for telepathists provoked by this movie, by others like it, by official news stories, was artificial. Telepathists were elsewhere people, remote, wonderful, like snow on distant mountains. The thought of being able to pry secrets from other people’s minds appealed to this audience around him, but no matter how carefully the dialogue and action skirted the point, the instant the corollary presented itself — the idea of having your mind invaded — there was a violent revulsion. The ambivalence was omnipresent: consciously one could know that telepathists were saving life, saving sanity, guiding countries (like this one) away from war… and it made no difference to the instinctual alarm.

Their existence had been eased into public consciousness with shoehorn care: rumors purposely allowed to run wild to the point of absurdity had been deflated by calm official announcements rendered believable by sheer contrast; quiet ceremonies made small items for news bulletins — such-and-such a telepathist working for the UN was today decorated with the highest order of such-and-such a country recently saved from civil war. For the real people behind the public image one might hunt indefinitely, and end up with no more than a few names, a few blurred photographs, and some inexact second-hand information.

There was a policy behind even such far-out melodrama as this movie, Howson was sure. And for that reason, he was envious. He knew beyond doubt that the uncushioned impact of their abnormality on ordinary people would have culminated in persecution, maybe pogroms. But because the telepathists were important, the impact was cushioned — the world’s resources were marshaled to help them.

He felt achingly the desire to be at least a little important, so that his deformity — no more extraordinary than a telepathist’s mental peculiarities — would seem less catastrophic.

His mind wandered from the screen and was caught by the man in brown, who was no longer alone. His head was bent towards another man who had arrived without Howson realizing in the seat over which the man in brown had first thrown his topcoat. Searching back in memory, Howson realized he had seen the door of the men’s lavatory swing twice within the past few minutes.

He listened out of curiosity, and was suddenly sweating. He caught mumbled phrases, and pieced the rest together.

Boat on the river… two a.m. at Black Wharf… Cudgels has a personal stake in this lot… worth a good half-million, I’d say… little diversion lore the Snake, keep his men busy other side of town…no problem with fuzz, bought the sergeant off…

The men grinned at each other. The late-comer got up and went back to the lavatory; before he returned and headed to his former seat elsewhere in the theatre, the man in brown had put his topcoat over his arm and headed for the exit. Howson sat frozen, the chance of being important handed to him at the very moment when he was wishing for it.

Cudgels: the Snake: yes, it was certain. He’d never mixed in such business, but you couldn’t live in this broken-down quarter of the city without hearing those names occasionally and learning that they were gang-bosses and rivals. A club would be smashed up, a store’s biggest plate-glass window broken, a young tough carried to hospital from an alley lined with garbage-cans and floored with his blood — then, one heard mention of Cudgels Lister and Horace “Snake” Hampton. Also a car would be pointed out by a knowing youth: “The smart way to the top — I’m going that way one day!”