The Whole Man

1

After the birth they put her in a bed, a large woman wasted by worry and hunger, so that it was not only over her emptied belly that her skin hung old-clothes-fashion. In spite of her wide pelvic girdle she had had a difficult labor; the tired-faced doctor had judged her a few per cent worse off than those others who competed for space in the hospital ward, so she had been allotted the bed. She showed no sign of appreciation. She would have shown no sign of resentment, either, if she had been treated the same as most other women passed through the delivery room that day, and taken to an arm-chair to rest for a mere couple of hours while they scrubbed down the floor with a solution of caustic soda, for lack of disinfectant, burned the craft paper off the delivery table and put on fresh, for lack of laundry facilities.

The crisis had been gestating just about as long as the child. It had culminated a week or two ahead of him. There were two panes out from the window next to her bed, and the gaps had been covered with newspaper and adhesive tape. The woman in the bed on the right had a gunshot wound and lay with puzzled eyes staring at the ceiling. In one corner of that ceiling was the trace left by a licking tongue of greasy smoke, exactly the same shade of black edged with grey as would have been left by a candle, but two feet wide.

From the street noise came, unfamiliar, disturbing. Last month there would have been the drone of traffic, a buzz of people wandering in sunlight, a predictable, comforting background with commonplace associations. Now there was the occasional hoarse shout, grossly amplified, but blurred by the direction of the portable loudhailer so that it was impossible to tell more than that orders were being given. Also there was the growl-rumble-clank of a heavy tracked vehicle; the acid bite of police whistles; stamping of unison feet. Automatically the mind tensed, wondering whether there would follow the stammer of guns.

An hour or so after the birth a woman in olive-green battle-dress came to the door of the ward. Her hair was cut man-short and there was a belt with a shiny brown holster strapped around her waist. She looked about her curiously and went away.

Another hour, and an old man came pushing a squeaky trolley with two urns on it, one containing watery soup and one containing watery coffee. There was also bread. A nurse hurried in directly after and distributed bowls and mugs to those patients who could eat.

And a little later still another nurse came, her face drawn and her mouth down-turned, with the doctor who had supervised the delivery.

Every available bed was in use; only the fact that there weren’t more beds had ensured the floor-space was left between patient and patient. Awkwardly, sometimes having to sidle, the nurse and doctor came to the new mother.

“You — uh—” The doctor changed his mind about putting it that way, cleared his throat, tried again. “You haven’t seen your baby yet, Mrs—?”

“Miss,” said the woman in the bed. Her eyelids rolled down like blinds over her lack-luster eyes. Her hair tangled untidily on the pillow, dark and greasy. “Miss Sarah Howson.”

“I see.” The doctor wasn’t sure if he did or didn’t, but the remark filled a silence even though the silence was subjective, already occupied in reality by the clanging of empty tin bowls as they were collected up after the patients” meal.

The nurse whispered something to the doctor, showing him a roneotyped form: square grey lines on grey paper. He nodded.

“I’m sorry about the delay, Miss Howson,” he said. “But things are difficult at the moment… Have you chosen a name for him yet?” And, catching himself because he was never sure under present circumstances how far the normal routine had actually deteriorated: “You were told you have a boy, weren’t you?”

“I guess so. Yes, somebody did say.” The woman rolled her heavy head from side to side as though seeking an impossible position of comfort.

“If you’ve chosen a name, we can enter it on the record of the birth,” the doctor prompted.

“I—” She rubbed her forehead. “I guess… Say, are you the doctor who was there?” Her eyes opened again, searched his face. “Yes, you’re the one. Doc, it was bad, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was pretty bad,” the doctor agreed.

“Did it — ? I mean, is there permanent—?”

“Oh no, there’s no permanent damage!” the doctor cut in, hoping to sound reassuring in spite of his splitting headache and gut-souring exhaustion. He wasn’t sure of anything any more, it seemed — no one was, currently — but it was a habit to be reassuring.

Where had it all gone? How? The safe calm world of a few weeks back had split apart, and they said “crisis” without explaining anything. To most people it meant nothing of itself; it was just that a bus didn’t show at your regular stop, and the electricity failed in the middle of cooking dinner, and there was a slogan half-finished, smeared letters of red paint, on the sidewalk, and a monument to a dead hero had tilted crazily on its shattered plinth, and the prices of food had soared, and the radio groaned old records and said every fifteen minutes that people should be calm.

Also to the doctor it meant probing hideous wounds for bits of stone and splinters of glass; it meant shortages of disinfectants, antibiotics and even blankets; it meant concussion, shot-wounds and home-made incendiary bombs thrown through the windows.

Now there were the strange uniformed men speaking a dozen languages, on street-corners with their guns easily slung; there were officers who came asking questions about needed supplies and surplus bed space if any; there were food-ration stands at big intersections and measured handouts of basic nourishment, followed by the stamping of the left hand with a one-day indelible ink to prevent you calling back until tomorrow — all as though the population had been turned at a blow into a blend of criminals and charity patients.

“Oh, damn…” said the mother, head rolling anew. “I hoped never to go through that again. And I still could, huh?”

The nurse gave a sour glance at the doctor, who forced himself back to the present. The idea was to get the name fixed in the woman’s mind, to displace the simple idea “baby’, to offer some sort of handle to her when she was compelled to grasp the facts.

“Have you chosen a name for your son?” the doctor demanded loudly.

“Name? Well — Gerald, I guess. After his father.” Beginning to reveal puzzlement, the woman gazed directly at the doctor and frowned. “What’s this all about, anyway? Why didn’t you bring him to me long ago? Is something wrong?”

The hell with soft-pedaling. The hell with finesse. The doctor said shortly, “Yes, I’m sorry to tell you there is.”

“Such as what? No arms, no legs?”

“No, nothing so bad, fortunately. There’s a — a generalized deformity. It may well be possible to put it right, in time, of course; it’s too soon to say, though.”

The woman stared for a long moment. Then she gave a harsh chuckle.

“Well, God damn! Isn’t that just like the bastard? He wouldn’t marry me — said there wasn’t anything certain enough about the world to make plans for life… So then when I’d been through it I was telling myself at least I’d have a son for my old age — heh-heh — and here’s a cripple. I have to support him instead of…” The chuckling returned, and ran together into a dull shuddering moan.

“How about the father?” the doctor said, swallowing against nausea. Call this a part of the crisis, too: it didn’t help.

‘Him? He was killed. I thought that was how he’d end up, you know — once it came down to fighting. Oh God, oh God.”

“We’ll bring you your son now, Miss Howson,” the nurse said.

When the doctor got back to the ward office there was the short-haired woman waiting for him. She had taken off the jacket of her battledress and hung it on a peg while she went through the records of admission. The national flash on the shoulder said israel.

The doctor thought irrelevantly that she didn’t look like a Jewess with her scalpel-thin nose and piercing blue eyes.

“A woman called Howson,” she said, looking up. “We had a dossier on a man named Gerald Pond, whose body was found near the reservoir they dynamited right at the start of the rising. He’s supposed to have had a woman-friend called Howson.”

“That could be right,” the doctor said. He dropped limp into a chair. “I just delivered her of a son. Crippled.”

“Badly?”

“One shoulder higher than the other, one leg shorter than the other, spinal deformity — pretty much of a mess.” The doctor hesitated. “You’re not thinking of taking her in for questioning, for heaven’s sake! She had a hell of a time on the delivery table, and now she has to face the shock of the kid — it’s monstrous!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said the Israeli woman. “Where is she?”

“ In the ward. Fourth bed from the end.”

“I’d like to take a look at her.”

She rose. The doctor made no move to accompany her. He waited till she was out of the room, and then went behind the desk at which she had been sitting and took out from a drawer the last cigarette in the last pack he had. He had lit it and returned to his chair before she came back.

“Are you arresting her?” he asked sourly.

“No.” The Israeli woman sat down briskly and made a note on the carbon copy of a list she was consulting. “No, she’s not involved with the terrorists. She’s about as a-political as one can get and still talk coherently. She was afraid of being left alone — she must be what? Forty? — and she didn’t believe that this man Pond meant exactly what he said: he regarded sex as a necessary act and her as a routine provision. She kidded herself into thinking she could break through his obsession with revolution and sabotage and reduce him to — wedding-bells, furniture on credit, all that…” She gave a wry smile. “Sad, isn’t it?”

“You have a dossier on her too, presumably,” said the doctor in a sarcastic tone. “You didn’t get details like that on the spur of the moment.”

“Hmmm? No, we have no dossier on her, and it won’t be worth the trouble of putting one together, to my mind.”

“Oh, marvelous!” the doctor said. “I’m glad to know you draw the line occasionally.”

“We don’t make the messes, you know,” the Israeli woman said. “They just call us in to clear them up.”

“Well, hell! If all you have to do is — is walk in that ward and look at someone and say there’s trouble, yes or no, it’s a pity you don’t do it before the mess happens instead of afterwards!” The doctor was very tired, and moreover very resentful of these polyglot strangers with the authority of world opinion at their back; he scarcely knew what he was saying.

He also scarcely knew what the Israeli woman meant when she answered, “There aren’t enough of us yet, doctor. Not yet.”

2

After three days they sent Sarah Howson home from the hospital with the child, and also with papers: a nursing mother’s emergency ration card, a medical supply voucher, a medical inspection voucher, a booklet of baby-food coupons and a diaper-service voucher.

She came back to the narrow, long street with its double row of identical three-storey houses, facades covered in cracked yellow plaster, garbage piled up in the gutters because “the crisis” had stopped municipal clearance services. The day after her return, a pair of huge trucks painted the same drab green as the soldiers” battledress came growling down the street: one ate the garbage with a maw above which a roller-brush turned like a dirty moustache; the other hosed the pavement with a smelly germicide. Water was still being sold from carts; it would take months to repair the reservoir Gerald Pond and his companions had so efficiently dynamited, and there was little rain at this time of year.

She spent the first evening back at home clearing her two rooms of everything that might remind her of Gerald Pond—old clothes, shoes, letters, books on political subjects. She kept the novels, not to read but because they might be saleable. If the baby hadn’t been quiet, she would cheerfully have thrown him out with the rest, and Gerald Howson would unknowing have left the unknowing world.

But he was a passive child, then and always. Hunger might bring a thin crying; the noise didn’t last, and he accepted discomfort as a fact of existence, because his distorted body was uncomfortable simply to live in.

The evening little Gerald achieved his first week of individual existence the soldiers came down the street in an open truck: four of them, and an officer, and a driver. The driver stopped alongside the entrance of the house where Sarah Howson lodged, pulling into a gap between two parked cars but not making any serious attempt to get to the kerb. “The crisis” had also interrupted gasoline distribution; the cars here had mostly not moved for a fortnight, and already kids had begun to treat them as abandoned wrecks, slashing the tires, opening the filler caps, scratching names and obscene words on the paintwork with knives or nails.

The people on the street, the people looking from their cautiously curtained windows, saw the soldiers arrive and felt a stir of nameless alarm. A few of them knew for sure they had done something illegal; a black market had followed the crisis with blurring speed. Many more, adrift on the unfamiliar sea of circumstance, were afraid that they might have infringed some regulation imposed by the pacifying forces, or unwittingly have aided the terrorists. The fact of pacification was scarcely new, but it had been an elsewhere thing — it was reported in the papers and on TV, and it affected people with dark skins in distant countries with jungles and deserts.

Two of the soldiers waited, lounging, by the house door. Their shoulder-flashes said pakistan and they were tall, good-looking, swarthy, with bright wide smiles as they exchanged casual comments. But they also carried slung guns.

The other two soldiers and the officer banged on the door until they were admitted. With the frightened landlord they went upstairs, to the top, to Sarah Howson’s two rooms. They knocked again there.

When she opened to them, the deflated woman with her big rayon house-dress belted to a wide overlap around her waist, the officer was polite, and saluted parade-stiffly. He said, “Miss Sarah Howson?”

“Yes. What is it?” The dark dull eyes searched the military exterior, seeming to plead for clues to an inward humanity.

“I believe you were formerly an — ah — an intimate friend of Gerald Pond. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” She seemed to sag still more, but there was no protestation in the tone with which she uttered the rest of what she had to say. “But he’s dead now. And anyway I never mixed in these political things.”

The officer made no comment. He said only, “Well, I must ask you to come with us, please. It is necessary to ask you some questions.”

“All right.” She stood back apathetically from the door. “Come in and wait while I get changed. Is it going to take long?”

“That depends on you, I’m afraid,” the officer shrugged.

“It’s the kid, you see.” She scuffed at the floor with bare feet. “Do I take him along or try and get someone to mind him for awhile?”

The officer frowned and consulted a paper from his pocket. “Oh, that’s right,” he said after a pause. “Well, you’d better bring him with you, I guess.”

They went to police headquarters. There had been blood on the handsome white stone steps, but that was gone now; there were still shrapnel-scars and bullet-pocks, however, and some smashed windows were still out. The police were no longer in charge. Uniformed or not, they had to show passes on entering, and the armed men guarding the door had shoulder-flashes saying denmark. Sarah Howson looked at them, and not for the first time since Pond’s death wondered how he had convinced himself that he and his companions would win out when the world stood ready to act against them.

In the lobby of the building the officer spotted and called to a uniformed woman whose blouse bore white discs with a red cross instead of the national identification marks. She was pleasant-voiced and smiling, and Sarah Howson let her take the shawl-wrapped bundle of her son.

The smile vanished the instant hands discerned, through the thin cloth, the twisted spine and lopsided shoulders.

“Your baby will be well looked after until you leave,” the officer said. “This way, please.” He pointed down a door-flanked corridor. “It may be necessary to wait a while, I’m afraid.”

They went to an office overlooking the square in front of the building. The evening sun lit it, orange and gold over the pale grey walls and brown and dark-green furniture.

“Sit down, please,” the officer said, and went to the desk to pick up the handset of the internal phone. He dialed a three-digit code, waited.

Then: “Miss Kronstadt, please.”

And after a further pause: “Oh, Miss Kronstadt! We have rather an interesting visitor. One of our bright young sanitary experts was down at the municipal incinerators yesterday, getting them back in regular operation, and he happened to spot a name on a letter when it blew out of the truck being unloaded. The name was Gerald Pond. We had him listed for dead, of course, so we didn’t follow up until this afternoon when we found out he had a mistress still living at the same address—”

He checked, and looked at the phone as though it had bitten him. Rather slowly, he said, “You mean I just send her home? Are you sure she wasn’t — ?… Damn! I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but I never thought you’d have reached her so quickly. Okay, I’ll have her taken home… What?”

He listened. Sarah Howson felt a stir of interest disperse the cloud of her apathy, and found that if she paid attention she could just catch the words from the phone.

“No, keep her there a few minutes. I’ll drop in as soon as I can. I would like to have another chance to see her, though I doubt if we can use more information on Pond than we have already — there’s a two-hundred-page dossier here now.”

The officer cradled the phone with a shrug and opened the pocket of his jacket to extract a pack of curious cigarettes with paper striped in pale grey and white. He gave one to Sarah Howson and lit it for her with a zippo lighter made from an expended shell-case.

The door opened and the woman came in briskly: the one with man-short hair and Israeli shoulder-flashes. Sarah Howson crushed out her cigarette and looked at her.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said.

“That’s right.” A quick smile. “I’m Ilse Kronstadt. You were in the city hospital when I called there the other day.” She perched on the edge of the desk, one leg swinging. “How’s the baby?”

Sarah Howson shrugged.

“You’re being looked after all right? I mean — you’re provided with proper rations, proper services for the kid?”

“I guess so. Not that—” She broke off.

“Not that diaper-service and baby-food coupons help much with the real problem,” Ilse Kronstadt murmured. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

Sarah How son nodded. Distractedly, she played with the dead butt of her cigarette. Watching her, Ilse Kronstadt began to frown.

“Is it right — about your grandfather, I mean?” she said suddenly.

“What?” Startled, Sarah Howson jerked her head back. “My grandfather — what about him?’

Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.

“That was bad,” she said. “You weren’t any shy virgin, were you? And you knew you shouldn’t have children, with your family history! To use a pregnancy as blackmail — especially on a man like Pond, who didn’t give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power — Ach!” Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire, and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from one to the other of them.

“No, it’s not true!” stammered Sarah Howson. “I didn’t— I—!”

“Well, it’s done now,” Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. “I guess all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be okay — there’s first-rate material on the Pond side, and you’re not stupid. Lazy-minded and selfish, but not stupid.”

Sullen, resentful color was creeping into Sarah Howson’s face. She said after a pause, “All right, tell me: what do I do to — ‘make it up to the kid’? I’m not a kid myself any longer, am I? I’ve no money, no special training, no husband! What’s left for me? Sweeping floors! Washing dishes!’

“The only way that matters, to make it up to the kid,” Ilse Kronstadt said, “is to love him.”

“Oh, sure,” Sarah Howson said bitterly. “What’s that bit about ‘flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone’? Don’t preach to me. I had nothing but preaching from Gerald, and it got him a shot in the head and me a crippled boy to nurse. Can I go now? I’ve had enough.”

The piercing blue eyes closed briefly, and the lids squeezed and the lips pressed together and the forehead drew down to furrows at the top of the Sharp nose.

“Yes, you can go. There are too many people like you in the world for us to cure the world’s sickness overnight. But even if you can’t love the kid wholeheartedly, Miss Howson, you can at least remember that there was a time when you wanted a baby, for a reason you aren’t likely to forget.”

“He’ll remind me every time I look at him,” Sarah Howson said curtly, and got up from her chair. The officer reached for the phone again and spoke to a different number.

“Nurse, bring the Howson baby back to the lobby, please!’

When the unwilling mother had gone, he gave Ilse Kronstadt a questioning glance.

“What was that about her grandfather?”

“Never mind,” was the sighing answer. “There are a million problems like hers. I wish I could concern myself with all of them, but I just can’t.”

She briskened. “At least the big problem is soluble. We should be out of here in another month, I guess.”

3

Things continued badly for a while longer. Stores remained closed; sporadic outbreaks confirmed that the thwarted terrorists were still capable of striking blindly, like children in tantrums. There were some fires, and the main city bridge was closed for two days by a plastic bomb explosion.

Little by little calm oozed back. Sarah Howson made no attempt to chart its progress. There was news on TV when the broadcasting schedule was restored; there was also — had been, throughout the crisis — radio news. Sometimes she caught snatches of information: something about the new; government, something else about advisers and foreign loans and public welfare services… It was beyond her scope. She saw black headlines on discarded newspapers when she went down the street, and read them without understanding. There was no association in her mind between the arrival of technical experts and the fact that water became available at her kitchen sink whenever she wanted it, as in the old days, rather than for two hours morning and evening, as during “the crisis’. There was no connextion that she could see between the new government and the cans of baby-food issued against coupons at the corner store, labeled in six languages and bearing a colored picture as well, for the benefit of illiterates.

It was agreed by everyone that things were worse now. In fact, from the material point of view, things were slightly better. What depressed people so much was a subjective consideration. It had happened here. We, our families, our city, our country, have been shamed in the eyes of the world; murder was done on our streets, there were dynamite outrages and acts of terrorism here. Shame and self-condemnation turned readily to depression and apathy.

There was no true economic depression, and little unemployment, during the next few years, but some of the savoir of life seemed to be missing. Fashions no longer changed so quickly and colorfully. Cars no longer sported startling decoration, but became functional and monotonous. People felt obscurely that to treat themselves to luxuries was a betrayal of — of something; as it were, they wanted to be seen to concentrate on the search for a new national goal, a symbol of status to redeem their world-watched failure.

Extravagance became a mark of social irresponsibility, the badge of the fringe criminal — the man with influence, the black marketer. These latter regarded the average run of the population, puritanical, working hard as though to escape a horrible memory, as mugs. The “mugs” condemned those who were blatantly enjoying themselves as parasites.

Through this epoch Sarah Howson moved like a sleepwalker, measuring her life by routine events. For a while there was some sort of an allowance, issued in scrip and redeemable at specified stores, which was just about enough to keep her and the child. She didn’t bother to wonder about it, even though it was much discussed by ordinary folk — usually they condemned it, because it was available to women like Sarah Howson, who had committed the double crime of bearing an illegitimate child and also associating with a known terrorist. But these discussions she seldom heard; hardly anyone talked to her in the street where she lived, now.

When the period of the allowance expired, she got work for a while cleaning offices and serving at the counter of a canteen. Wages were low, part of the general syndrome of reaction against affluence which had followed the upheaval. She hunted without much success for better-paid employment.

Then she met a widower with a teenage son and daughter who wanted a housekeeper-mistress and didn’t mind about the brat or her decaying looks. She moved across the city to his apartment in a large, crumbling near-tenement block and was at least secured against poverty. There was a roof and a bed, food, a little spending money for clothes, for the child, for a bottle of liquor on Saturday night.

Young Gerald endured what happened to him without objection: being placed in a crèche while his mother worked as a cleaner, being put aside, like an inanimate object, at the widower’s apartment when they moved there. At the crèche, naturally, they had clucked sympathetically about his deformity and made inquiries into his medical record, which was already long. But there was nothing to be done except exercise his limbs and enable him to make the best possible use of them. He learned to talk late, but quickly; surveying the world with bright grave eyes set in his idiot’s face, he progressed from concrete to abstract concepts without difficulty, as though he had delayed speaking deliberately until he had thought the matter through.

But by then he was no longer being sent to the crèche, so no one with specialized knowledge noted this promising development.

Crawling hurt him; he did it only for a short period, whimpering after a brief all-fours excursion like a dog with a thorn in its pad. He was four before he got his awkward limbs sufficiently organized to stand up without support, but he had already learned to get around a room with his hands on the wall or clutching chairs and tables. Once he could stand without toppling, he seemed almost to force himself to finish the job; swaying on slow uneven legs, he set out into the middle of the room — fell — rose without complaint and tried again.

He would always limp, but at least when it came time for schooling he could walk a straight line, achieve a hobbling run for twenty yards, and climb stairs with alternate feet rather than using the same foot for every step.

His mother’s attitude was one of indifference by now. Here he was: a fact, to be endured. So there was no praise or encouragement when he mastered some difficult task such as the stairs — only a shrug of qualified relief that he wasn’t totally helpless. The widower sometimes took him on his knee, told him stories, or answered questions for him, but showed no great enthusiasm for the job. He would excuse himself by saying he was too old to be much interested in young kids — after all, his own children were of an age to leave home, maybe to marry. But sometimes he was more honest, and confessed that the kid disturbed him. The eyes — maybe that was it: the bright eyes in the slack face. Or else it was the adult form of the sentences that emerged in the hesitant babyish voice.

When she was feeling more than usually tolerant of her son, Sarah Howson took him around the stores with her, defiantly accepting the murmurs of false pity which inevitably echoed around her. Here, in this part of the city, she wasn’t known as Gerald Pond’s mistress. But taking him out involved getting the folding push-chair down the narrow, many-angled stairway of the apartment block, so she didn’t do it often. Before she left to get married, the widower’s daughter took him a few times to a children’s park and put him on swings and showed him the animals kept there — a pony, rabbits, squirrels and bush babies. But the last time she tried it he sat silent, staring at the agility of the monkeys, and tears crawled down his cheeks.

There was TV in the apartment, and he learned early how to switch it on and change channels. He spent a great deal of time gazing at it, obviously not understanding a fraction of what was going on… and yet perhaps he did; it was impossible to be sure. One thing was definite, if surprising: before he started school, before he could read or write, he could be trusted to answer the phone and memorize a message flawlessly, even if it included a phone number of full cross-country direct-dialing length.

He had seen few books before he began in school. Neither his mother nor the widower read for pleasure, though they took in a daily paper. The son bought men’s magazines for the spicy items and the nudes; the daughter bought fashion magazines occasionally, though the climate was still against excessive elegance, and romantic novels and love-comics.

His first steps towards reading came from the TV. He figured out for himself the sound-to-symbol idea, and school only filled in the details for him — he already had the outline. He progressed so rapidly that the class-teacher into whose care he was put came around to see his mother after six weeks. She was young and idealistic, and acutely conscious of the prevailing mood of the country.

She tried to persuade Sarah Howson that her son was too promising to be made to suffer the knocks and mockery of the other children in a regular school The government had lately set up a number of special schools, one of them on the outskirts of the city, for children in need of unusual treatment. Why not, she demanded, arrange for his transfer?

Sarah Howson was briefly tempted, although she had visions of forms, applications, letters to write, interviews, appointments, all of which dismayed her. She inquired if he could be sent to the special school as a boarding pupil.

The teacher checked the regulations, and found the answer: no, not when the home was less than one hour’s travel by public transport from the nearest such school. (Except as provided for in clause X, subsection Y, paragraph Z… and so on.)

Sarah Howson thought it over. And finally shook her head. She said, listen! You’re pretty much of a kid yourself still. I’m not. Anything could happen to me. My man isn’t going to want to be responsible for Gerry, is he? Not his kid! No, Gerry has to learn to look after himself. It’s a hard world, for God’s sake! If he’s as bright as you say, he’ll make out To my mind, he’s got to. Sooner or later.”

For a while thereafter, she did take more interest in him, though; she had vague visions that he wasn’t going to be useless after all — support in old age, earn a decent living at some desk job… But the habit wasn’t there, and the interest declined.

There was trouble sometimes. There was taunting and sometimes cruelty, and once he was made to climb a tree under goading from a kids” gang and fell from a ten-foot branch, a fall which luckily did no more than bruise him, but the bruise was huge and remained tender for more than three weeks. Seeing it, Sarah Howson had a sudden appalling recollection of her meeting with the Israeli woman, and firmly slapped down the memory.

There was also the time when he wouldn’t go to school because of the torment he underwent. When he was escorted there to stop him playing hookey, he refused to co-operate; he drew faces on his books, or sat gazing at the ceiling and pretended not to hear when he was spoken to.

He got over that eventually. The mood of the city, and the country, was changing. The trauma of “the crisis” was receding, a little joy was no longer suspect, frills and fun were coming back into style. Relaxing, people were more tolerant. He made his first friends when he was about thirteen, at about the same time that local storekeepers and housewives found that he was willing to limp on errands or feed the cat when the family was away — and could be trusted to complete the job, unlike other boys who might equally well decide to go to a movie with the gang instead.

He was considering a career when the widower died. He had vague thoughts of some job where his deformity and other, newly discovered, peculiarities were irrelevant. But the widower died, and he was legally of age to quit school.

And his mother was ill. It was some months before it was known to be from inoperable cancer, but he had suspected it might be ever since the first symptoms. Before she was ill enough to be hospitalized, he was having to support her by what odd jobs he could find: making up accounts for people, washing-up in a nearby bar and grill on Saturdays, and suchlike. He had had little acquaintance with hope in his life so far. By the time of his mother’s death, which left him alone at seventeen, ugly, awkward, a year lost on the schooling which he had figured would continue to college if he could get a public scholarship, he was embittered.

He found a room a couple of blocks from the old apartment, which had been reclaimed by the municipal housing authority for a family with children. And kept going as he had been: with odd jobs for subsistence, with books and magazines, with TV when he could beg entrance to someone’s home and a movie occasionally When he had spare cash for escapism.

At twenty, Gerald Howson was convinced that the world which had been uncaring when he was born was uncaring now, and he spent as much time as possible withdrawing from it into a private universe where there was nobody to stare at him, nobody to shout at him for clumsiness, nobody to resent his existence because his form blasphemed the shape of humanity.

4

The girl at the pay-desk of the neighbourhood movie theatre knew him by sight. When he limped to join the waiting line she made a kind of mental check-mark, and his ticket was already clicking from the machine before he could ask for it; one for the cheapest seats, as always. He appreciated that He was given to speaking rather little now, being so aware of the piping immature quality of his voice.

Some few things about himself he had been able to disguise. His height, naturally, wasn’t one of them. He had stopped growing at twelve, when he was barely five feet tall. But an old woman had taken pity on him a year back; she had formerly been a trained seamstress and worked in high-class tailor shops, and she got out her old needles and re-made a jacket he had bought, setting shoulder-pads into it and cunningly adjusting the hang of the back so that from the waist up he could pass a casual inspection. Also he had a high heel on the shoe of his shorter leg. It couldn’t stop him limping, because the leg still dragged slightly, but it gave him a better posture and seemed to lessen the endless ache from the muscles in the small of his back.

The jacket had been worn almost every day for a year, and was fraying, and the old woman was dead. He tried not to think about it. He went across the lobby to the kind darkness of the auditorium, with occasional snatched glances at the advertisements on the wall. Next week’s show, the same as this, held over by public demand.

Consequently, with the house lights up and minutes still to go before the start of the programme, there were many people to stare at him over popcorn-full mouths as he went down towards the base of the gigantic screen. He tried not to be aware of that, either.

The centre front rows were all full of teenage kids. He turned down a side aisle and went to an unoccupied end seat; the view of the screen would be badly angled, but it was that, or a tedious business of stumbling over other people’s feet, maybe treading on toes with his dragging shorter leg. He sat down and looked at the blank screen, his mind filling as always with fantasy images. The mere environment of the theatre seemed to take him out of himself, even before the movie started — snatches of conversation, pictures, moods of elation and depression, all flickered past his attention, and brought a sense of taut excitement. Some of the material in this mental variety-show could startle him with its unfamiliarity, but he had always assumed it was due to his surroundings provoking a recurrence of otherwise forgotten memory. He had seen hundreds of movies here; they must be the source of the ideas crowding his mind.

And yet… that wasn’t too satisfying as an explanation, somehow.

A man in brown came striding down the main aisle, all the way to the front, turned sharply towards the side where How-son sat, took the seat diagonally in front of him, and threw an overcoat across the seat adjacent. He shrugged aside his sleeve and stared at his watch before leaning back and turning his head towards the screen.

That — or the fact that he was well dressed, and should by appearances have been in the expensive seats — or something not available to consciousness, attracted Howson’s attention to him. For no definable reason, he was sure the man in brown hadn’t consulted his watch simply to know how long remained before show-time. The man was — not exactly nervous, but on edge about something, and it wasn’t the prospect of a good movie.

His puzzlement was cut short by the darkening of the auditorium, and he forgot everything except the huge colored images parading across the screen. By night and day his dreams were populated from movies, TV and magazines; he preferred movies because his fellow watchers didn’t care about his presence, and although people were willing enough to let him sit and see their TV there was always that tense awkwardness.

Besides, with every breath he seemed to draw in the enjoyment of the rest of the audience, adding it to his own.

First: a travelogue, Playgrounds of the Planet. The crashing music of surf at Bondi Beach, the humming roar of turbine cars as they streaked down the Sahara Highway, the whish and whir of skis on an Alpine slope and then the yammer of pulse-jet skimmers on blue Pacific water. Howson shut his ears to the syrupy wisecracking commentator. He made his own commentary, as though he could shift personalities like shifting gears, choosing a hardboiled masculine frame of mind for the admiring next-to-nude girls at Bondi, a worried near-feminine attitude for the ski-jumpers — thoughts of pain on failure, bruises, broken bones… He shied away from the recollection of a tree he had fallen out of.

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!”

Painful, to the accompaniment of hard breathing, Howson forced himself to the crucial decision.

5

The street was still called Grand Avenue, but it had been one of the focal points of the crisis period. Afterwards people shied away from it, beginning the decline which had now reduced the side streets near by to a status barely above slums. Even so, it was well lit, and the garish stores had glaring windows, and Howson would normally have avoided it. He preferred the darker side of any street, and night to day.

Now, heart hammering, he braved it. There was a place at the far end — a club and bar — which served as the Snake’s front for tax and other purposes. It was no use trying to make his ill-formed face look severe for the menacing encounter he was bound to; a mirror on the door of a barber’s told him that as he passed. The best he could hope to do would be to look — well—casual.

The hell. It was what he had to say that mattered.

He hobbled clear past his destination the first time, because his mouth was so dry and his guts were so tense. He stopped a few yards farther on, and deliberately evened his breathing until he had some semblance of control. Then he plunged.

The bar was chromed, mirrored, neoned. Music blasted from high speakers on the wall. At tables early drinkers were grouped in twos and threes, but there was no one at the bar yet. A bored “tender leaned on his elbows and eyed the short stranger with the limp.

He said, “What’ll it be?”

Howson didn’t drink — had never tried alcohol. He’d seen shambling drunks and wondered why the hell anyone gifted with ordinary physical control should want to throw it away. The thought of being still worse co-coordinated filled him with disgust. In any case, he had no spare money.

He said,” Is — uh — Mr Hampton here?’

The bartender took his elbows off the counter. He said, “What’s that to you, crooky? He’s not for public show!”

“I have something he’ll want to hear,” Howson said, mentally cursing the reedy pipe which had to serve him for a voice.

“He knows everything he wants to know,” the bartender said curtly. “There’s the door. Use it.”

He picked up a damp cloth and began to swab beer-rings off the bar.

Howson looked around and licked his lips. The customers had decided not to stare at him any more. Encouraged, he went the sidewise pace necessary to confront the “tender again.

“It’s about some business of Cudgel’s,” he whispered. His whisper was better than his ordinary voice — less distinctive.

“Since when did Cudgels tell you his stories?” the bartender said sourly. But he thought it over, and after a pause gave a shrug. Reaching under the bar, he seemed to grope for something — a bell-push, maybe. Shortly, a door behind the bar opened and a man with oily black hair appeared.

“Crooky here,” the barman said. “Wants to sell news about Cudgels to Mr Hampton.”

The oily-haired man stared unbelieving at Howson. Then he too shrugged, gestured; the flap of the bar was raised for Howson to limp through.

In back was the stockroom of the bar. Oily-hair escorted Howson through there, through a door lined with red baize, down a badly-lit corridor to another similar door. And beyond that, sat him down in a room furnished with four identical red velvet lounges, decorated with gilt pillars and pretty abstract paintings.

“Wait,” oily-hair said curtly, and went out.

Howson sat, very tense on the edge of the velvet cushions, eyes roving as he tried to figure out what went on back here. He fancied he caught a clicking noise, and recalled a shot from a favorite movie. Roulette. The air smelt of anxiety, and that would be why.

Shortly, oily-hair returned, beckoned him, and this time took him into a business-like office where a lean man with pale hands presided behind a telephone-laden desk, tall youths like guards at either side of him. At Howson’s entrance the looks on their faces changed; they had been wary, and became astonished.

Looking at the man behind the desk, Howson could see why he was called the Snake. His mere presence was devious; cunning lit the dark irises of his eyes.

He studied Howson for a long moment, then lifted an eyebrow in wordless inquiry to oily-hair.

“Crooky here wants to sell information about Cudgels,” was the condensed explanation. “That’s all I know.”

“Hmmm…” The Snake rubbed his smooth chin. “And walks in unannounced. Interesting. Who are you, crook?’

It didn’t seem to be as unkindly meant as it usually was; it was simply a label. Maybe a man who was called Snake was casual about such things. Howson cleared his throat.

“My name’s Gerry Howson,” he said. “I was down the movie theatre an hour back. There was this guy waiting for someone to move to the next seat while the picture was playing. They whispered together, and I overheard them.”

“Uh-huh,” the Snake commented. “So-o-o?”

“This is where we get to the price,” oily-hair suggested.

“Shut up, Collar,” the Snake said. He kept his eyes on Howson.

“A boat’s coming up-river to Black Wharf at 2 a.m. I don’t know for sure it’s tonight, but I think so. It has half a million worth of stuff on it.”

Howson waited, thinking belatedly that Collar was probably right — he should have named a price, at least, or fed the news by stages. Then he caught himself. No, he’d done it the right way. There was total silence. And it was lasting.

“So that’s how he does it,” the Snake said finally. “Hear that, Collar? Well, if you heard it, what are you doing standing there?”

Collar gulped audibly and snatched at one of the phones on the desk. There was another silence, during which the two guards stared with interest at Howson.

“Gizmo?” Collar said in a low voice to the phone. “Collar. You can talk? General call. We have some night work… Yes, okay. Not more than two hours. Smooth!’

He cradled the phone. The Snake was getting to his feet. The process appeared to be complete. Howson felt a stab of panic at its speed. He said, “Uh — I guess it’s worth something, isn’t it?”

“Possibly.” The Snake gave him a sleepy smile. “We’ll know soon enough, won’t we? Right now what its worth is—oh, let’s say a few drinks, a square meal which you look like you could do with, and some company. Hear me, Lots?’

One of the youthful guards nodded and stepped forward.

“Look after him. He may be valuable, he may not — we’ll see. Dingus!”

The other guard responded.

“He says his name is Gerry Howson. Get his address off him. Go down around where he lives and put some questions. Don’t take more than a couple of hours over it. If you get the slightest smell — if anyone says he’s even been seen on the same bus with one of Cudgel’s boys — blow in and warn me. And sound out the fuzz on your way if you can find one of our friends on duty at headquarters.”

Howson, fighting terror, said huskily. “This man in brown—he said he bought the sergeant, whichever that one is.”

“He would. You didn’t know either of these men, did you?” the Snake added, struck by the thought.

“No, I — uh — never saw them before.”

“Mm-hm. All right, Lots, take him in the blue room and keep him there till Dingus gets back.”

Lots wasn’t unfriendly, Howson found; he dropped enough hints to make it clear that if the news he’d brought was true, it would plug a gap in the Snake’s monopoly of some illegal goods or other — exactly what, Howson didn’t ask. He fancied it might be drugs. His reaction of disgust against alcohol carried over to drugs, and he preferred not to pursue that line of thought. All he cared about was being momentarily of importance.

He sat with Lots in the blue room — decorated with a midnight-sky ceiling and a heavy blue carpet — and told himself that it was only sense on the part of the Snake to make sure before he acted. Desultorily, he answered questions.

“What’s your trouble from, crooky?” Lots inquired. “Hurt in an accident?’

“Born like it,” Howson said. Then the idea occurred to him that Lots was trying to be sympathetic, and he added in a tone of apology, “I don’t talk about it much.”

“Mm-hah.” Lots yawned and stretched his legs straight out. ‘Drink? Or that meal the Snake said you were to have?’

“I don’t drink,” Howson said. Again he felt the rare impulse to explain. “It isn’t easy to walk when I’m sober, if you see what I mean.”

Lots stared at him. After a moment he laughed harshly. “I don’t guess I could make a crack like that, with your problem. Okay, take a cola or something. I’m wiring for gin.”

There were crawling hours. Talk ceased after the food was brought. Lots proposed a game of stud, offered to teach the rules to him, changed his mind on seeing that Howson’s awkward fingers couldn’t cope with the task of dealing one card at a time. Embarrassed, Howson suggested chess or checkers, but Lots wasn’t interested in either.

Eventually the door swung open and Dingus put his head in.

“Move it, Lots!” he exclaimed. “The guy checks out clean so far as we can tell. We’re going to Black Wharf now.”

Automatically Howson made to pull himself to his feet. With a sharp gesture Dingus stopped him.

“You still wait, crooky!” he snapped. “Mr Hampton’s a hard man to satisfy, and there’s a while yet till two a.m.”

It felt more like an age, dragging by when he was alone. At last, some time after midnight, he dozed off in his chair. He had no idea how long he had slept when he was jolted awake by the door opening again. His bleary eyes focused on the Snake, on Lots and Dingus and Collar following him into the room. But the instant he saw them he knew his gamble had succeeded.

“You earned your pay, crooky,” the Snake said softly. “You surely did. Which leaves only one question.”

Howson’s mind, still sleep-fogged, groped for it. Would it be: how much he wanted? The guess was wrong. The Snake continued, “And that is — are you an honest politician?’

Howson made a noncommittal noise. His mouth was dry with excitement again. The Snake looked him over thoughtfully for long seconds, and reached his decision. He snapped his fingers at Collar.

“Make it five hundred!” he instructed. “And — listening, crooky? — remember that half of that is for the next time, if there is one. Lots, book out a car and take him home.”

The shock of being given more money than he had ever held in his hand at one time before broke the barrier separating Howson’s fantasies from reality; he barely absorbed the impressions of the next half-hour — the car, the journey to his lodging-house — because of the swarming visions that filled his mind. Not just next time: a time after that, and another and another, piecing gossip together into news, being paid, being (which was infinitely more important) praised and eventually regarded as invaluable. That was what he wanted most in all the world. He had achieved what to almost anyone else would be a minor ambition; he had done something for someone which was not made work, offered out of sympathy, but original with himself. It was a milepost in memory because he had regarded it as impossible, like walking down the street without a limp.

That was the early morning of a Tuesday. His delirium and hope were fed for a few days by scraps of news and gossip: it was reported that there had been some kind of battle, and the police had cleared up the traces but were mystified by the details. It was as though he drew courage like oxygen from the atmosphere of rumor and tension; he went down Grand Avenue in full day, in the middle of the sidewalk instead of skulking to the wall, and could ignore the usual pitying stares because he knew inside himself what he was worth. With what seemed to him great cunning, he had changed his five hundred a long bus-ride distant from his home and taken small bills which would not excite comment; then he had hidden the bulk of them in his room and spent only as much as would get him a new pair of shoes with the unequal heels, a new jacket with the uneven shoulder-pads.

Even so, on the Saturday night his glorious new world fell apart in shards.

6

Early in the evening he had taken five singles from the concealed hoard in his room. He had never thought of spending so much on one spree before; often, after paying room-rent, he would have no more than five left to carry him through a week. Then he was driven to his least-preferred resource: washing cutlery at a nearby diner against plates of unwanted scraps. Cutlery didn’t break when he dropped it; cups and glasses did, so the owner no longer let him wash those. And the knowledge that this was given to him as a favor hurt badly.

Tonight, though, he was going the limit. A movie he hadn’t seen; cokes, candy, ices, all the childish treats he still preferred to anything else. Mostly he was self-conscious about really liking them, but in his present mood he could achieve defiance. The hell with what people might think about a twenty-year-old who craved candy and ices!

He wished that the new jacket and shoes could have been ready by now, but he had been told they would take at least ten days. So nothing for it but to get a shine for the dulled leather, brush awkwardly at the dirty marks on the cloth.

And then out: a Saturday night and a good time, something to make him feel half-way normal, an action ordinary people took.

Down the narrow street where folks knew him, looked at him without the shock of surprise, maybe called a hello — and tonight not, strangely enough. But his mind was preoccupied, and he didn’t spare the energy to wonder why there were no spoken greetings. He had the distinct impression that people were thinking about him, but that was absurd, a by-product of his elation.

Yet the impression wouldn’t leave him. Even when he had braved the lights of Grand Avenue and was moving among crowds of strangers, his mind kept presenting it afresh, like a poker dealer demonstrating his ability to deal complete suits one after another.

At first it had been amusing. After a while it began to irritate him. He changed his mind about taking in the early evening show at the movie theatre of his choice — not his regular one, which was still playing the programme he had seen, but one he had to get to by bus. The public’s mood was good tonight, and somebody had helped him board the bus, making other people stand back, but even that didn’t improve his state of mind. More, it was an annoying emphasis on his state of body.

And at last, an hour and a half after setting out, he was so disturbed that he had to abandon his plan. Instead, he turned homeward, furious with himself, thinking it was lack of guts that spoiled his enjoyment, and determined to convince himself it was an illusion which plagued him.

As he neared the street where he lived, the feeling grew stronger, for all his attempts to deny it. It was as if he was being watched. Once he halted abruptly and swung around, sure somebody’s eyes were fixed on him. There was no one in the place where he looked by reflex; he was staring at a closed door. While he was still bewildered, the door opened and a girl came out, pausing and glancing back to say something to a person inside the house.

From that moment on the sensation pounded at his skull. Dizzily he kept moving, and tried to evade the concept which had crawled from a dark corner of his brain to leer at him. He failed. It took form in sluggish words.

I’m going insane. I must be going insane.

He turned the corner of his own street, and put his hand on the rough concrete wall to steady himself and gulp air. And then he knew.

Ahead of him, standing at his own door, was a large white car, its roof decorated with a flashing beacon, its nose with a plaque saying police. A driver leaned his elbow casually on his lowered window; two uniformed officers were bending together to speak to him.

He could hear them. They were fifty yards away; they were talking barely above a whisper, and he knew every word that passed because they were discussing him.

Out, right now… Goes to movies mostly… Might be doing something for the Snake… Unlikely — new on his payroll, the story is… Must have gone to the Snake first, the Snake doesn’t go shopping for help…

Mortal terror welled up in Howson’s mind. A car jolted around the corner, and before the turn was complete he had fled, with the impossible voices in pursuit, like ghosts.

Ask at the neighborhood movie theatre… Not worth the trouble, is it? Unless someone warned him off, he’ll be back eventually. Wait in his room, or pick him up in the small hours.

Aimed at him — aimed at me, Gerald Howson: as the forces of all the world had been leveled at this city the day of my birth!

But that was only half the reason for his terror. The other and worse half was knowing what he had become. He could not have heard what the policemen were saying so far away. Yet the words had reached him, and they had been colored by what was not exactly a tone of voice but was none the less individual: a tone of thought. One tone was ugly; the thinker had a streak of brutality, and liked the power his uniform implied. He envisaged beating. They said cripple — so what? He’d been responsible for a death, for a gang-fight, for crime. So beat him into talking.

Howson couldn’t face the shock in simple terms: I am a telepathist. It came to him in the form he had conceived when watching the movie about telepathists: I am abnormal mentally as well as physically.

Had he even overheard what the man in brown was telling his seat-neighbor? Or had he then, already, picked up thought?

He couldn’t tackle that question. He was in flight, hobbling into the hoped-for anonymity of a crowd, wanting to go as far and as fast as he could, not capable of halting for a bus because to stand still when he was hunted was intolerable. His eyes blurred, his legs hurt, his lungs pumped straining volumes of air, and he lost all contact with deliberate planning. Merely to move was the maximum he could manage.

Towards what future was he stumbling now? Every looming building seemed to tower infinitely high above his head, making unclimbable canyons out of the familiar streets; every lamp-eyed car seemed to growl at him like a tracking hound; every intersection presaged a collision with doom, so that he was sickened by relief when he saw that there were not roadblocks around each successive corner. His ears rang, his muscles screamed — and he kept on.

His direction was random; he followed as nearly as possible the straight line dictated by his home street. It took him through a maze of grimy residential roads, then through a district of warehouses and light industry where signs reported paper-cup making and tailoring and plastic furniture making. Late trucks nosed down those streets, and he knew the drivers noticed him and was afraid but could do nothing to escape their sight.

The district changed again; there were small stores, bars, music bellowing, TV sets playing silently in display windows to an audience of steam-irons and fluorescent lamps. He kept moving.

Then, abruptly, there were blank walls, twelve feet high in grey concrete and dusty red brick. He halted, thinking confusedly of prison, and turned at hazard to the right. In a while he realized where he had come to; he was close to the big river up which Cudgels had tried to sneak his half million worth of—of whatever it was. Signs warned him that this was east main dock bonding zone for dutiable goods and there was no admission without authority of chief customs inspector.

The idea of “authority” blended with his confused images of police hounding him. He changed direction frantically, and struck off down a twisting alley, away from the high imprisoning wall. In all his life he had never driven himself so hard; the pain in his legs was almost unendurable. And here there was a fearful silence, not heard with the ears, but experienced directly — whole block-sized areas empty of people, appalling to Howson the city child, who had never slept more than twenty feet from another person.

The alley was abruptly only half an alley. The wall on his left ended, and there was bare ground enclosed with wire on wooden poles. He blinked through semi-darkness, for there were few lamps. The promise of haven beckoned — the waste ground was the site of a partly demolished warehouse, the rear section of which still stood. Hung on the wire, smeared with thrown filth, were weathered boards: for sale — purchaser to complete demolition.

He grubbed along the base of the wire fence like a snuffling animal, seeking a point of entry. He found one, where children, presumably, had uprooted a post and pushed it aside. Uncaring that he was smearing himself with mud by crawling through the gap, he twisted under the wire and made his way to the shelter of the ruin.

As he fell into the lee of a jagged wall, his exhaustion, shock and terror mingled, and a wave of blackness gave him release.

His waking was fearful, too. It was the first time in his life that he saw, on waking, without opening his eyes, and the first time he saw himself.

The circuit of consciousness closed, and muddy images came to him, conflicting with the evidence of his familiar senses. He felt stiff, cold; he knew his weight and position, flat on his back on a pile of dirty old sacks, his head raised a little by something rough and unyielding. Simultaneously he knew grey half-light, an awkward, twisted form like a broken doll with a slack face — his own, seen from outside. And blended with all this, he was aware of wrong physical sensations: of level shoulders, which he had never had, and of something heavy on his chest, but pulling down and forward — another deformity?

Then he understood, and cried out, and opened his eyes, and fright taught him how to withdraw from an unsought mental link. He struck out and found his hands tangled in a rope of greasy hair, a foot away from him.

A stifled moan accompanied his attempt to make sense of his surroundings. He hadn’t fallen on his back when he passed out; certainly he hadn’t fallen on this makeshift bed — so he had been put there. And this would be the person responsible: this girl kneeling at his side, with the coarse, heavy face, thick arms, wide, scared eyes.

Scared of me! Never before was anyone scared of me!

But even as he prepared savagely to enjoy the sensation, he discovered that he couldn’t. The sense of fear was like a bad smell in his nostrils. Convulsively he let go the tress of hair he had seized, and the fear diminished. He pushed himself into a sitting position, looking the girl over.

She appeared to be about sixteen or seventeen, although her face was not made up as was customary by that age. She was blockily, built, poorly clothed in a dark grey coat over a thin cotton dress; the garments were clean, but her hands were muddy from the ground.

“Who are you?” Howson said thickly. “What do you want?’

She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached quickly to one side and picked up a paper bag, turning it so that he could see through the mouth of it. Inside there were crusts of bread, a chunk of cheese, two bruised apples. Puzzled, Howson looked from the food to her face, wondering why she was gesturing to him, moving her thick lips in a pantomime of eating but not saying anything.

Then, as though in despair, she uttered a thick bubbling sound, and he understood.

Oh God! You’re deaf and dumb!

Wildly she dropped the bag of food and jumped to her feet, her brain seething with disbelief. She had sensed his thought, projected by his untrained telepathic “voice’, and the total strangeness of the feeling had rocked her already ill-balanced mind on its foundations. Once more the sickening odor of fear colored Howson’s awareness, but this time he knew what was happening and his uncontrolled wave of pity for such another as himself, crippled in a heedless world, reached her also.

Incontinently she dropped to her knees again, this time letting her head fall forward and starting to sob. Uncertainly he put out his hand. She clutched it violently, and a tear splashed, warm and wet, on his fingers.

He registered another first time in his life now. As best he could, he formulated a deliberate message, and let it pass the incomprehensible channel newly opened in his mind. He tried to say don’t be afraid, and then thank you for helping me, and then you’ll get used to me talking to you.

Waiting to see if she understood, he stared at the crown of her head as though he could picture there the strange and dreadful future to which he was condemned.

7

When he thought it over later, he saw that that first simple attempt at communication had by itself implied his future. His instinctive reaction stemmed from his disastrous and unique essay in making himself significant; he had snatched panicky at the chance of passing on news to the Snake, with no more thought of consequences than a starving man falling on a moldy crust. Arriving simultaneously with his recognition that he was telepathic, the shock of realizing that he had made himself by definition a criminal — an accessory to murder, to be precise — had swung the compass needle of his intentions through a semicircle. He wanted nothing so much as to escape back to obscurity, and the idea of being a telepathist appalled him. Challenged during his terror-stricken flight down darkened streets, he would have sworn that he wanted never to use the gift.

As well declare the intention to be deaf for ever! Eyes might be kept shut by an effort of will, but this thing which had come to him was neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch — it was incomparable, and inevitable.

The sensation was giddying at first. It drew from memory forgotten phrases, in which he sought guidance and reassurance: from a long-ago class in school, something about “men as trees walking” — that was curiously meaningful. His problem was multiplied tenfold by the puzzling, abnormal world in which the girl had spent her life, and paradoxically it was also simplified, because the more he learned about the handicap she labored under, the more he came to consider himself lucky. Faced with Howson as a cripple, people might still come to see there was a person inside the awkward shell. But the deaf-and-dumb girl had never been able to convey more than basic wants, using finger-code, so people regarded her as an animal.

The brain was entire — the lack was in the nerves connecting ears and brain, and in the form of her vocal cords, which were so positioned that they could never vibrate correctly, but only slap loosely together to give a bubbling grunt. Yet it seemed to Howson she should have been helped. He knew of special training schemes reported in newspapers and on TV. Groping, he hunted for the reasons why not.

At first he could make no sense of the impressions he took from her mind, because she had never developed verbal thinking; she used kinesthetic and visual data in huge intermingled blocks, like a sour porridge with stones in it. While he struggled to achieve more than the first broad halting concepts of reassurance, she sat gazing at him and weeping silently, released from loneliness after intolerable years, too overcome to question the mode of their communication.

The clue he sought came when he tried to re-interpret the things he had “said” to her. He had “said’: don’t be afraid, and she had formulated the concept into familiar images, half memory, half physical sensations of warmth and satisfaction that traced clear back to infantile experiences at the breast. He had “said’: thank you for helping me, and there were images of her parents smiling. Those were rare. Struggling, he pursued them to find what her life had been like.

There was a peculiar doubling in the areas he explored next. Half the girl’s mind knew what her father was actually like: a dockland roustabout, always dirty, often drunk, with a filthy temper and a mouth that gaped terrifyingly, uttering something which she compared to an invisible vomit because she had never heard a single word spoken. Much to Howson’s surprise, she was quite aware of the function of normal speech; it was only this rage-driven bellowing of her father that she regarded thus.

But at the same time as she saw her father for what he was, she maintained an idealized picture of him, blended out of the times when he had dressed smartly for weddings and parties, and the times when he had shown loving behavior towards her as his daughter, not as a useless burden. And this image was still further overlaid with traces of an immense fantasy from whose fringes Howson shied away reflexively, in the depths of which the girl was a foundling princess.

Her mother was barely remembered; she had got lost at some stage of the girl’s childhood, and had been replaced by a succession of women of all ages from twenty to fifty, their relationship to her father and herself ill-comprehended. They came and went from the tenement house her father rented, in a pattern she could not fathom because she could not speak to ask the necessary questions.

Out of this background of dirt, frustration and deprivation of affection, she had conceived a need which Howson understood instantly because it paralleled his own desire for importance. Even though it had blown up in his face, he still yearned.

But the girl yearned for a key to the mystery of speech, the glass door shutting her off from everybody. In a frantic attempt to substitute some other link for this missing one, she had developed the habit of spending all her time helping, or working for, nearby families; a smile of thanks for minding a baby, or a small payment for running an errand simple enough to explain by signs, was her only emotional sustenance.

Lately, she had needed this support more than ever; her father had drunk so much he had been warned off his job until he sobered up — at least, that was how Howson interpreted the ill-detailed memories available to his investigations. As a result, he had been more violent and bad-tempered than ever, and his daughter had to stay out of the house to avoid him until he was asleep. Finding Howson when she came to the half-ruined warehouse to hide from the wind, she had helped him automatically — making him comfortable on the pile of old sacks, going in search of food for him, in the hope of a little praise and gratitude.

He reached that stage of his fumbling inquiry, and grew aware that his head was aching. The exercise of his new faculty wasn’t difficult in itself — it was perhaps like seeing a picture for the first time, when the shapes and colors were available to vision just by looking, and what had to be learned was a set of rules for matching them to solid objects already known, using enlightened guesswork. On the other hand, it was tiring to concentrate so long. He made to withdraw contact.

Sensing his intention, the girl shot out her hand and seized his, her eyes wide and pleading. Blazing in her mind, universalized but impossible to misconstrue, was a desperate appeal.

The memory of near-disaster, still only a few hours old, was far too fresh for Howson to have conceived any new ambitions. He had no notion of what he wanted to do with his developing talent; using it was giving him a sense of giddy, fearful excitement, like steering a fast car for the first time, and that was all he could think about as yet. His instinct still warned him that he should seek obscurity for fear of consequences.

Yet — here was the chance he craved to be important to somebody. Not much of a somebody, true: just a deprived, unhappy, physically handicapped girl in a plight resembling his own.

It was too early to decide which of these opposing tugs would eventually win out, but for the moment at any rate he had no alternative plan to granting the girl’s desire: be with me!

She chuckled, a thick inhuman sound, and gave a wide grin, and caught up the forgotten bag of food to force it into his hand and make him eat.

Uncounted, time slipped by. It seemed to carry him forward by simple inertia. Things were done, as he grew accustomed to a fugitive existence; by night there were furtive expeditions in search of food, when his telepathic gift gave warning of anyone approaching and there was time to dodge out of sight, and by day there were tasks in plenty which he could not have attempted by himself.

Hidden behind a low wall of the old warehouse, a sort of crude lean-to took shape. As unquestioning as a dog, the girl brought old planks and rusty nails and found rocks to use as hammers. She was stronger than Howson, of course. Almost anyone was stronger than he was.

She never left him after their original encounter. Her father was a shred of mist compared to the presence of Howson who could actually communicate with her; the mere idea of separation from him for longer than a few minutes terrified her, implying a permanent return to her old loneliness. At first he was worried that someone would come looking for her. Then he decided the risk was negligible, and turned his attention to his own problems.

He spent long hours in silent contemplation, his mind clouded with misery, thinking of all the money he had briefly had, now hidden in his old room and impossible to recover—of his new jacket and shoes, which he dared not go to fetch. How long it would be before he could venture back on the streets, he couldn’t tell. Once or twice he picked up the stray thoughts of a patrolling policeman, and knew there was still a description of him being circulated.

This squalid, vegetable existence which was all he felt safe in allowing himself began to prey on him after a few days. Since he could not escape from it physically, he evaded it mentally, day-dreaming after the old fashion but trying to fit his new gifts into the scheme.

The movies about telepathists which he had seen provided a ready-made frame to work with. Curious, he inquired of the girl as to her enjoyment of movies and TV, and found what he expected — that the stories mattered little to her, since she could hardly follow them without the dialogue, but that the color and glamour obsessed her.

Tentatively, borrowing from her own long-time fantasy about the rich father and adoring mother who would come to claim their long-lost child and bring the gift of speech, he tried to make it clear what she had been missing by not hearing anything. As they huddled together for warmth in their draughty shed of a home, he elaborated huge mental dramas, where he was tall, straight-backed, handsome, and where she was fine-featured, shapely, glamorously dressed.

The real, cruel world began to seem less and less important; the little he saw of it was drabber than ever. He came closely to feel that if it never again had any truck with him, he would be happy. Occasionally he recalled that telepathists were well treated by that world, praised and highly valued. But he couldn’t be sure that there were no other consequences of presenting himself for the attention of authority. He considered going to officials and saying, “I’m a telepathist!” He reconsidered it, and postponed the day. Meanwhile, there was a world of dreams to engage his interest, and daily the dreams grew brighter and more elaborate.

Yet, all the time he was hiding from the world, he was telling the world about himself.

The communications man fastened the helmet to the ring around his neck, closing himself off from the universe by all normal sensory channels. Blind, deaf, weightlessly suspended, he let himself be sealed into the insulated compartment of the swinging satellite as it came around the shoulder of Earth and into line-of-sight with the bubble of awareness now drifting, unpowered, towards the red glow of Mars. He used yoga techniques to relax, clearing his mind for the impact of the messages across ten million miles.

? (A silent question, signifying readiness to receive.)

! (A sense of excitement that didn’t dim from day to day, implying that the ship was functioning perfectly, that hopes for the success of the mission were still high.)

And then:

—the evil men cringed before the all-seeing wall-piercing telepathist as he stripped away the deceitful layers of hypnotic conditioning from the mind of—

WHO’S THAT? Earth side, are you picking up a TV spectacular, for pity’s sake?

—the poor imprisoned girl in the ugly fortress where all her life had gone to waste, never speaking to anyone—

Tower, my God, like being hit with an iron bar! WHO ARE YOU?

—Weeping now with sheer relief because her wicked father was only an adopted parent and her rescuer—

MARS SHIP CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL — speak later — that’s an escapist fantasy and the way it’s trending it’ll be a catapathic grouping before we know where we are and—

—taking her from the prison into a bright world of sunshine without misery—

—and we can’t afford to lose a mind like that! Heaven’s name, can’t you feel the power he has? It’s unbelievable!

From the Mars ship, colored with agreement: Where is he? Aground? Where (city) where (street)?

Anywhere over the visible hemisphere. I guess! We’ve got to find him before—

And, aloud, as the communications man hammered on the wall of the insulated chamber: ” Let me out of here! Fast!”

8

Something was happening out in the real world; earlier, the city had been criss-crossed by the roar of aircraft, making a continuous din as they turned and swung back on parallel courses without ever going out of earshot, and now helicopters were droning just beyond the low grey cover of cloud. The clouds were shedding a chilly rain on the rubble-strewn site of the ruined warehouse, creating miniature lakes and rivers tinted red with brick-dust. Howson wasn’t interested in the outside world anyway, he told himself. Besides, it was a miserable day. Better to huddle under cover and let his imagination roam.

Curiously, though, it was becoming more difficult rather than easier to lose himself in his fantasies. Nagging ideas crawled up unbidden, to distract him. Annoyed, he considered obvious explanations: hunger, cold, irrelevant images from the girl’s mind clashing with his.

But they had eaten well during the night, and the little fire over which they had made a mulligan stew still glowed and made their crude shed cozy. And there was no question of the girl’s mind wandering from its link with his — she was an unbelievably passive audience, content to obliterate everything from her awareness but the tempting visions Howson could create.

Nonetheless the distractions continued, at the very edge of consciousness, and were so labile that the act of turning his attention to them altered them. It might seem for a few seconds that he was thinking: this is childish — why don’t I go and learn to use my talents properly? Then, when he tried to blot out that, he was thinking: that way lays danger — I might forget my body and starve while I’m day-dreaming. And the angry counter to that — should I care? — was itself countered: die, without knowing the intimacy of telepathic friendship?

He gasped and opened his eyes, sitting up with a jerk. A stab of pain from cramp-stiffened back muscles followed the movement. Beside him, the girl whimpered her complaint at losing contact. He ignored her, scrambled to his feet and plunged through the sacking-screened opening which served as their doorway.

Outside, the rain drizzled down, scarcely thick enough to veil the surrounding buildings, but quite enough to make it impossible to stare upward when he tried it. The water, dirty with city smoke and dust, ran into his eyes and made him blink helplessly. Besides, what he was looking for was hidden behind the clouds still.

Hidden! How could he hide?

That last distracting concept, the one which had jolted him to his feet, had been neither his own nor the girl’s. Behind its simple verbalization had lain layer on layer of remembered experience, belonging to a telepathist with full training and tremendous skill. He didn’t have to have previous knowledge to sense that. The message was self-identifying.

So they had come for him, who could not run and had not yet learned how to blank out his projections.

The din of the helicopters battered at his ears, the rain stung his eyes. Without forethought he found himself stumbling across the uneven ground; a patch of slimy mud moved under his foot, and he was sprawling in a puddle. Heedless of wet and dirt, he got up again, hearing the formless bubbling voice of the girl behind him, seeing that the hunters had located him now beyond doubt, expecting momently that the angular insect-shapes of the helicopters would buzz through the grey overcast and close on him like vultures circling a lost explorer.

And there was one of them! Gasping, cursing, he turned, slipping and sliding and clutching whatever support he could to prevent another headlong fall. A vast vertical gale hammered the top of his head with accelerated raindrops, like birdshot, as the “copter passed above him, and stayed there. The downdraught formed a cage around him, its bars the needles of rain.

The girl was screaming now, as nearly as she could; the disgusting noise of her moans blended in confusion with the yammer of the “copter engine.

Telepathist, why are you afraid?

The silent voice came into his head like a cold cleansing wind, islanding his consciousness in the eye of the hurricane of noise and fear. It was laden with encouragement to accept what was happening. For a moment he was too startled to resist the intrusion — this wasn’t a random concept picked up by himself from a passive mind, but a deliberate projection with the force of years of mental discipline behind it. Then the second helicopter dropped into view, and he found strength in terror.

no, no, no! leave me alone!

The thought blasted out unaimed, and the “copter directly above him reacted as though he had riddled it with gunfire. Its nose dipped, it twisted and slid across the bare ground, it jerked crazily as one of its outstretched legs crashed into the wall of the ruined warehouse, and turned over around the point of impact. On its side it fell crunching among piled rubble, and the rotor blades snapped like dry sticks and the engine died instantly.

Unbelieving, Howson watched it crash, hardly daring to accept that he could have been responsible. Yet he knew he was — he had sensed the blinding shock in the pilot’s mind as all his reflexes were deranged. Moreover, he had driven out the mental voice of the telepathist addressing him, and where the link had formed between them there was a sensation like a half-healed bruise.

In the same instant he also realized that the girl’s mind had been switched off, and when he looked, he saw she had slumped unconscious in the mud.

Elation seized him briefly. If he could do this, he could do anything! Let them come for him — he would drive them back with blasts of mental resistance until they did what he wanted and left him alone.

And then he felt the pain.

From the shattered hulk of the helicopter, it welled out in black blinding waves, beyond all conscious control, and aimed at Howson by the coexistent awareness of the sufferers that he was responsible. He gasped, thinking his own leg was broken, his own rib-cage crushed, his own head laid open and bleeding by a sharp metal edge. Into his startled mind the telepathist reached again.

You did that.

leave me alone!

And this time the surviving “copter remained steady, the telepathic link only trembled and did not break, because the fury of Howson’s projection was muted by the received pain. He started to move again, swaying, vaguely intending to hide in the ruined warehouse, and trying to form contradictions to answer the telepathist’s accusations.

Leave me alone — I don’t want to be important! When I get involved with the world bad things happen (confusion of concepts radiated from this: police waiting at his door, the helicopter pilot snatching convulsively at his controls).

He clambered up a mound of bricks and broken lumps of concrete, towards a wall in which half a window frame made a gap like a single battlement. The cool projection of the telepathist continued.

You waste your talent on fantasy. You don’t know how to use it. That’s why disaster — like a fast car you never learn to drive! And skillfully associated with the message, images that made the pile of rubble seem to be the shell of a wrecked car, burning against the wall it had hit head-on.

Giddy with pain, panicking because the richness of this communication was so casual and so far beyond his own untrained competence, Howson came to the top of the pile of debris and swayed in the opening of the half-window. There was a drop of twelve feet beyond, into what had been a basement level. Horrified, he thought of jumping down.

I can protect you from fear and pain. Let me.

no, no, no! leave me alone!

The contact wavered; the telepathist seemed to gather his strength. He “said’: All right, you deserve this tor being a fool. Hold still!

A grip like iron closed on the motor centers of Howson’s brain. His hands clutched the frame of the old window, his feet found a steady purchase on its sill, and after that he could not move; the telepathist had frozen his limbs. He could not even scream his terror at discovering that this was possible.

Then images appeared.

A door giving on to an alley. Creaking open. Behind, the form of a man, skeletally thin, eyes bloodshot, cheeks sunken, dragging himself on by sheer will-power. Through the door it could be seen that he had left a smeared trail in a layer of dust on the floor.

Half in, half out of the entrance, he collapsed. Time passed; a child chasing a ball down the alley found him, and went screaming to look for help.

A policeman came, made the starved man comfortable on his coat for a pillow. A doctor came with ambulance attendants, the trail in the dust was noticed, and the policeman and the doctor went into the dark passageway, tracing the man’s progress.

And now a room lit through dirty panes: a pigsty of a room containing four more skeletal shapes, a woman and three men, on empty wooden crates covered with rags, incapable of thought or movement, and on their faces and hands—

Howson revolted, vomit rising in his throat, but the stern mental grip held.

On their faces, on their eyelids and in the creases of their forehead and behind their ears and everywhere: dust. Settled gently and inexorably because they could not move to disturb it.

That one was a telepathist, the message said. His name was Vargas. He too preferred to lose himself in fantasies, performed to an admiring audience. He, and the audience, died.

Howson screamed. He managed it. He forced off the grasp that held him captive, and swayed, and knew in an instant of insane terror that he had lost his balance and was tumbling. His last conscious thought was of a tree-branch and a bruise that had lasted weeks without healing.

“You’re going to be all right.”

The words were spoken aloud, and subtly reinforced by a mental indication of confidence in the future. Howson opened his eyes to see a calm face above him. It was rather a good-looking face, in fact, and it wore a smile.

He licked his lips and tried to croak an answer, but his mind was ahead of his voice.

“Don’t bother trying to talk. I’m the telepathist — I’m Danny Waldemar.”

Awareness of bandages on his head and arms: a confused question.

“You’re all right! We gave you prothrombin the moment we realized you were bleeding so badly. All the cuts are scabbing over.” And abruptly, a switch to telepathy: You’re a miracle, do you know that? You could have died a hundred times over, from accidents!

He hadn’t done so, and therefore the point seemed irrelevant. He pursued a more important matter.

What’s going to happen to me? The question was blurred with fear and vague images of human vivisection.

“Don’t be afraid.” Waldemar spoke aloud, slowly, with emphasis; “Nothing can be done to you that you don’t understand. Nothing! From now on and for ever you can always know what anyone is doing, and why!”

Of — course! Howson felt a sort of smile come to his twisted face, and at its reassuring appearance Waldemar chuckled and got to his feet.

Load you aboard the “copter now. Get you somewhere and attend to those cuts properly.

Wait…

Waldemar checked, expressing attention.

The girl. She’s deaf and dumb. I was all she had — all that mattered in her life. If you take me you’ve got to take her too. It’s not fair.

Surprised, Waldemar pursed his lips. There was a momentary sensation of listening, as though he had made a mental investigation and been satisfied.

“Yes, why not? It’s absurd that anyone should be left like that nowadays — her brain’s uninjured, and that means she can have an artificial voice, artificial ears… Why not? We’ll take her with us by all means.”

Howson closed his eyes. He was fairly certain that the suggestion, had been planted in his mind by Waldemar, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that he was content with what had happened, and the future no longer made him terrified.

A mental chuckle came to him from Waldemar, and then he slept.