The Whole Man

9

Howson sat staring dully out over Ulan Bator, thinking how much its condition resembled his own. He could sense its collective mood; for the rest of his life he would be unendingly subject to a kind of emotional weather, the sum of the individual minds surrounding him.

The city had been a rather dowdy, provincial-feeling one, even though it was the capital of a country. The changing pattern of the world — transport, commerce, communications—had hurried it into modern times; now it was a place of fine white towers and broad avenues, and travellers of all kinds came. Amid the turmoil of change, old people could do no more than wonder what had hit them, and long without enthusiasm for the simpler past.

So, too, he had been overtaken by a change he didn’t want, and believed he would only accept if other changes were found to be possible — changes he did desire.

It wasn’t that they had not been kind to him. They had gone to a great deal of trouble. Apart from the immensely thorough medical examinations their specialists had given him — and this hospital at Ulan Bator was the main therapy centre for WHO in all Asia, with staff commensurate — there were such minor luxuries as this chair in which he sat. In was subtly designed to accommodate him, Gerald Howson; it was smaller than usual, and the padding matched his deformities. The bed was designed for him, too, and the equipment in the adjacent bathroom, and everything.

But he didn’t want that. It was the same as being helped on to a crowded bus: a hateful reminder of his handicap.

There came a tapping at the door. Automatically he turned his attention to the visitor — no, visitors. So far he had accepted almost no formal training in the use of his talent, but there were trained telepathists on the permanent staff of the hospital, and merely being close to them had increased his control and sensitivity. He couldn’t help admiring them — who could? But so far he had learned nothing about them which reconciled him to being what they were not: a runt, and deformed into the bargain.

He said, both aloud and telepathically, in a tone tinged with weariness, “All right, come in.”

Pandit Singh was the first to enter. A burly man running to fat, with a neatly combed beard and sharp bright eyes, he was the head of therapy A — responsible, in other words, for all neurological and psychological treatment undertaken at the hospital. People, including Howson, liked him; Howson had been impressed by the fact that his sympathy was always coloured by determination to do something if possible. Too many people’s pity was soured by relief that they at least were physically whole.

Along with him had come Danny Waldemar and one of the staff neurologists, a woman named Christine Bakwa, whom Howson had met previously in one of the many examination rooms he had been taken to. She wasn’t good at disciplining her verbalized thoughts, the most easily accessible to a casual telepathic “glance’, and even before she entered the room Howson had learned from her most of what Singh had to say.

None the less, he made a curt gesture indicating that they should sit down, and turned his own chair on its smoothly-operating castors to face Singh.

“Morning, Gerry,” Singh said. “I hear your girl-friend was around to see you. How is she? I meant to have a word with her, but I was too busy.”

“She’s getting on well,” Howson said. She was; she was becoming used to the impulses given off by the trembler coils deft surgeons had inserted in her ears, and the bio-activated plastic vocal cords that had replaced her own. There was promise that she would stumble into possession of a musical, if hesitant, speaking voice once she had completed training.

Howson slapped down envy at her childish joy, and added the question to which he already sensed the answer.

“And how about me?’

Singh looked at him steadily. He said, “You know I have bad news for you. I couldn’t conceivably hide the fact.”

“Spell it out,” Howson said stubbornly.

“Very well,” Singh sighed. He gestured to Christine Bakwa, and she gave him a folder of papers from a portfolio she was carrying. Selecting the topmost enclosure, he continued, “To begin with, Gerry, there’s the question of your grandfather — your mother’s father.”

“He died long before I was born,” Howson muttered.

“That’s right. Were you ever told why he died so young?”

Howson shook his head. “I guess I knew my mother didn’t like talking about it, so I never pushed the point to an answer.”

“Well, she must have known. He was what they call a hemophiliac — in other words, a bleeder, whose normal supply of thrombic enzyme was absent. He ought never to have had children. But he did, and through your mother you inherited the condition.”

“I told you this,” Danny Waldemar put in. “When we were taking you aboard the helicopter — remember? I told you we’d given you prothrombin, which is an artificial clotting agent. Your scratches and bruises have always taken a long time to heal, haven’t they? A serious hemorrhage — a nose-bleed, say — would have put you in hospital for a month, and quite possibly would have killed you. You’re lucky to be alive.”

Am I? Howson kept the counter on the telepathic level, but it was so bitter Waldemar flinched visibly.

Aloud, Howson objected, “So what? Prothrombin works on me — the cuts I got when you picked me up healed fast enough once the scabs had formed.”

Singh exchanged a glance with his companions. Before he could speak again, Howson had caught on to what was in the big Indian’s mind.

‘No?” he whispered.

“No. I’m sorry, Gerry. Those cuts in fact healed at barely half the rate you’d expect in a healthy person. And anything much more serious than a cut — say a broken bone — will probably never heal at all. Yet paradoxically this is what has made you the most promising novice telepathist to come to our notice since Ilse Kronstadt. Let me make that clear.”

He held up the paper from the file so that Howson could see it. It was a large black-and-white schematic representation of a human brain. At the base of the cortex, a small red arrow had been inked in.

“You’ve probably picked up most of what I have to tell you,” he said. “As Danny pointed out when you first met, you need never again fail to understand what’s being done to you and why. But I’ll go over it, if you don’t mind — not being a telepathist myself, I organize words better than universalized concepts.”

Howson nodded, staring with aching misery at the drawing.

“Information is stored in the brain rather casually,” Singh went on. “There’s so much spare capacity, you see. But there are certain areas where particular data are normally concentrated, and what we call ‘body image’ — a sort of reference standard of the condition of the body — is kept where that arrow’s marked. A great deal of the data required for healing is right down on the cellular level, naturally, but in your case that mechanism’s faulty — witness your hemophilia. One could get around that with the aid of artificial stimulation of your body image centre, but for this paradox I mentioned.”

He changed the drawing for another, showing the brain from below, also bearing a red arrow.

“Now here’s a typical average brain — like mine or Christine’s. The red arrow points to a group of cells called the organ of Funck. It’s so small its very existence was overlooked until the first telepathists were discovered. In my brain, for instance, it consists of about a hundred cells, not much different from their neighbors. You’ll note its location!’

Again he extracted a fresh item from the folder. This one was a large X-ray transparency, the whitish outline of a skull with jaw and neck vertebrae.

“You’ll remember we took X-rays of your head, Gerry, after giving you a radio-opaque substance which selectively — ah — ‘stains’ cells in the organ of Funck. Take a look at the result.”

Howson gazed numbly at the picture.

“That whitish mass at the base of the brain,” Singh said. “It’s your organ of Funck. It’s the largest, by almost twenty per cent, that I’ve ever seen. Potentially you have the most powerful telepathic faculty in the world, because that’s the organ which resonates with impulses in other nervous systems. You are capable of coping with an amount of information that staggers the mind.”

“And it’s made me a cripple,” Howson said.

“Yes.” Slowly, Singh put the picture away. “Yes, Gerry. It’s taken over the space normally occupied by body image, and as a result we can do nothing to mend your body. Any operation big enough to help you would also be big enough to kill you.”

“Well, Danny?” said Singh when they had returned to his office. The telepathist, whose specialty was the discovery and training of new members of his kind, slowly shook his head.

“He has no reason to co-operate,” he said. “My God, do you blame him? Think about his plight! His face, every time he looks in the mirror — like an idiot child about to vomit! What compensation is it after twenty years of that to become a telepathist? I’ve picked out things from his mind…” He paused, swallowing hard.

“Consider! He was first overheard from orbit, by a space communicator, so potentially his ‘voice’ is the loudest in history. But his real voice has never broken — he has this silly castrato pipe! He never lost his milk-teeth, for God’s sake—just as well, in view of his hemophilia, but think what that did to his psyche. It takes him three months to grow enough hair to visit the barber. He’s never even begun to have a beard. As to sexuality, he’s acquired superficial attitudes and never experienced the emotions; what that’ll do to him the first time he contacts someone with a bad sexual problem, God knows.”

“Can we tackle that?” Singh suggested.

“Out of the question!” Waldemar snapped. “You can’t seriously want to make his condition worse — and believe me, you would, if you made him sexually competent with hormones and left him in this malformed body. Mark you, I’m not sure you’d succeed; his body image is so far from normal I daren’t guess whether he can respond to hormones or not.”

“What I was thinking was—” put in Christine Bakwa, and broke off. Waldemar glanced at her.

“You were wondering if I could take his mind apart and put it together again, him? To clear out this terrible jealousy he’s conceived for his girl-friend?’

“Yes, I was.” The neurologist made a vague gesture. “I see why he’s so resentful — I mean, fitting her up with speech and hearing was so easy he must subconsciously disbelieve that helping him is impossible, and the very fact that he made it a condition of coming with you suggests that he’s got high empathy.”

“Granted,” Waldemar agreed. “Only-he’s powerful.”

“I thought you managed to control him when you first located him.”

“Briefly. I’d never have got in at all but that he was suffering terribly from the knowledge that he’d caused the pain of the men in the “copter which crashed. And he broke my hold eventually. No, in cold blood he could resist any attempt made to interfere with his mind, and I’m not sure the telepathist who attempted it would retain his sanity.”

There was a hollow silence. It was broken by a soft buzz from a phone on Singh’s desk. Heavily he moved to depress the attention switch.

“Yes?”

“Mr Hemmikaini is here for you, Dr. Singh,” a voice reported.

“Oh—! Oh, very well. Send him up.’ Singh let go the switch and glanced at his companions. “That’s one of the Special Assistants to the UN Secretary General coming in. I guess I have to worry about what he wants rather than spending all my time thinking of Howson. But with the potential Howson represents…”

Getting to his feet, Waldemar finished the sentence for him. “One could wish,” he muttered, “that the rest of the damned world would stop nagging at us for a few days and let us get through the wall of his resentment! Somebody ought to work it out some time — whether we telepathists have caused more bother than we’ve saved.”

He gave Singh a crooked grin and went out.

10

Hemmikaini was a large, round-faced man with fair hair cut extremely short and very pink skin. He looked like what he was — a successful and dedicated executive. It was only the nature of his duties that was unusual.

After giving Singh a plump-fingered hand and setting his black portfolio on the corner of the desk, he dropped into a chair and leaned back.

“Well, you know why I’m here, Dr. Singh. You also know that time is running short, so I’ll waste none of it on fiddling courtesies. We have a problem. We have computer solutions to indicate that we need someone with talents of the order possessed by Ilse Kronstadt. Ergo, we need her — she’s unique. Yet our request for the release of her services, made to the director in chief here, was countered by the suggestion that somebody should come and talk to you. Why?’

Singh placed his elbows on the desk, looked down at his hands, and meticulously put the tips of the fingers together. Without raising has head, he said, “In effect, what you want to know is what Ilse Kronstadt can possibly be doing here that we regard as more important than a UN pacification operation.”

Hemmikaini blinked. After a pause, he nodded. “Since you put it so bluntly, I’ll agree to that.”

Singh made a musing sound. He said, “it’s Southern Africa again, I suppose?’

“A fair guess, if you’ve been reading newspapers. But I’ll make one correction.” Hemmikaini leaned forward impressively. “It’s not just ‘Southern Africa again’, in that tone of voice! Ever since the Black Trek, when half the South African labor force walked out of the country, it’s been a thorn in our flesh — was previously, for pity’s sake! We’ve gone back and back to tidy up after each successive burst of terrorism and violence, and we thought we’d finally solved the problem. We haven’t — quite. But this time we want to do what we’ve been hoping to do ever since we first had telepathists to help us.”

“You want to stop it before it happens,” Singh murmured.

“Correct. We have nearly enough data now — Makerakera has been there for three months, with all the staff we can spare. But the deadline is too close. We need Ilse Kronstadt, to beat it.”

Singh got up from the desk abruptly and strode to the window. Thumbing the switch to “full transparency’, he gazed out over Ulan Bator. His back to Hemmikaini, he said, “You can’t have her, I’m afraid.”

“What?” Hemmikaini bridled. “Now look here, Dr. Singh—!” He checked, realizing the brusqueness of his tone, and went on more politely, “Is that Dr. Kronstadt’s answer?’

“I have no idea. The request hasn’t even been put to her.”

“Then what in hell’s name do you mean?” Hemmikaini made no attempt to remain calm this time.

“You must presumably have wondered,” Singh said, “why Ilse left the UN Pacification Agency, where she virtually pioneered the techniques of non-violent control that have subsequently become standard practice.”

“Yes, of course I have,” Hemmikaini snapped.

“And-?”

“Well — well, I guess I assumed she wanted a change. She worked herself to exhaustion often enough, for pity’s sake!”

“Further than exhaustion, Mr Hemmikaini.” Singh turned now, and the light from the window caught the greying tips of his hair and beard. “Ilse Kronstadt is the next best thing to a dead woman.”

Hemmikaini’s bright pink lips parted. No sound emerged.

“Customarily,” Singh went on inexorably, “someone as indispensable as Ilse is watched by doctors, psychologists, a horde of experts. There was a succession of crises a few years ago—India, Indonesia, Portugal, Latvia, Guiana, in a stream — and these precautions were temporarily let slide. Afterwards we discovered a malignant tumor in Ilse’s brain. If we’d caught it early enough, we could have extricated it micro-surgically; a little later, and we could have used ultrasound or focused electron beams. As it happens, there is now no way of removing it short of major surgery from below the cortex.”

“Oh, my God,” said Hemmikaini. He wasn’t looking at Singh. Probably he couldn’t. “You mean you’d have to cut through her telepathic organ to get to it.”

“Precisely.”

“Does she know?”

“Have you ever tried to keep a secret from a telepathist? Only another telepathist can manage it, and in Ilse’s case I’m not sure anyone else has been born who could keep her out if she was really determined. She’s capable of handling the total personality of another human being, you know — or the ‘I-now’ awareness of about a dozen simultaneously.”

Singh turned his hand over in the air as though spilling a pile of dust from the palm. “You can’t have her, Mr Hemmikaini. So long as she’s here, we can keep her alive and husband her energy for her. She’s not an invalid, exactly — she lives a life similar to anyone else’s on the staff — but she only undertakes one type of work, and that seldom.”

“Because of the strain?’

“Naturally.”

Hemmikaini licked his lips. “What work does she do, then?” “Do you know what a catapathic grouping is?” Singh asked. On the answering headshake, he amplified. “It’s a bastard word, coined from ‘catalepsy’ and ‘telepathic’, of course. Every now and again a telepathist turns out to be an inadequate personality. Maybe he tackles a job too big for him. Maybe he just can’t face the responsibilities that go with his talent. Or maybe he finds the world generally insupportable.” He thought briefly of Howson, crippled, undersized, and hurried on.

“He prefers to retreat into fugue and make a fantasy world which is more tolerable. Well, everyone does that occasionally. A telepathist, though, can do it on the grand scale. He can provide himself with an audience — as many as eight people, if he’s powerful — and take them into fugue with him. We call them ‘reflective personalities’; they mirror and feed the telepathist’s ego.

“When that happens, they forget not just the world but even their bodies. They don’t feel hunger or thirst or pain. And as you’d expect, they don’t want to wake up.”

“Do they never wake up?” Hemmikaini demanded.

“Oh, eventually. But you see, not feeling hunger and thirst doesn’t mean they don’t exist. After five to seven days there is irreversible damage to the brain, and what does finally wake them is the sinking of the telepathist’s power below the level at which he can maintain the complex linkage. And by then, they’re past hope.”

“What’s this got to do with Ilse Kronstadt ?”

“Even an inadequate telepathist is precious,” Singh said. “There is one chance to save a catapathic grouping, if they’re found in time. You have to break into the fantasy world and make it even less tolerable than reality. And Ilse is the one person alive who can consistently succeed. So you see, Mr Hemmikaini” — he permitted himself a grim smile — “I do have an answer to your question: what can possibly be more important as a job for Ilse than a major UN pacification assignment? She’s saved almost two dozen telepathists for the future; collectively, they’ve done far more than she could even as a well woman.”

Hemmikaini was silent for a while. At length he asked, “How long has she got to live?’

“She might die of exhaustion during her next therapeutic session. She might live five years. It’s a guess.”

Again, silence. Then the UN man pulled himself together and rose. “Thank you for the explanation, Dr. Singh,” he muttered. “We’ll just have to make do with our second-best, I suppose.”

It was later in the day that, moved by an unaccountable impulse, Singh went up to the apartment in the west wing of the hospital where Ilse Kronstadt lived. He found her sitting at a typewriter, her fine-boned hands flying over the keys like hummingbirds, the air full of the soft hum of the motor.

“Come in, Pan,” she invited. “One moment and I’ll be with you.”

Singh complied, closing the door. He could not help looking at her, thinking of the way she had changed since he first knew her. The fair hair had gone absolutely white; the strong face was networked with wrinkles, and the healthy tan of her skin was turning to a waxen pallor.

“Yes, Pan, I know,” she said gently. She stripped the paper from the machine and turned to face him. “It makes me frightened sometimes… That’s why I’m exorcising it, of course.”

“What do you mean?” Singh muttered.

“I’ve decided to write my autobiography,” she answered. A mischievous grin crossed her face. “A certain seller, they tell me! Oh, sit down, Pan! No need to be ceremonious with me, is there? Especially since I sent for you.”

Surprise died the instant it took shape in Singh’s mind. He chuckled and moved to a chair. Ilse Kronstadt leaned her elbow on the back of her own chair and cupped her sharp chin in her palm.

“You’re worried, Pan,” she said in an abrupt reversion to a serious tone. “It’s been making the place gloomy for days. Most of it’s because of this novice Danny picked up — poor guy! — but this morning I noticed I’d got fouled up in it, so I thought I’d have a chat. I hope you appreciate my waiting till you weren’t engaged.”

“Did you really need to send for me. Ilse?” Singh spoke the words because he knew the thought had emerged too forcibly into consciousness to disguise it anyhow.

“Yes, Pan.” The words dropped like stones. “It’s getting worse. I need to economize on the use of my telepathy now; I tire quickly, and I get confused. It makes me feel very old.”

There was silence. Not looking at him, she went on at last.

“You know — I’d have liked to marry, have children… I think I’d have tried it, in spite of everything, if I hadn’t seen from the inside what hell it is to be a non-telepathist child of telepathists. Remember Nola Grüning ?”

“I do,” Singh muttered. Nola Grüning had married — a telepathist, naturally; it was the only sane course — and had a child which didn’t inherit. And she had wound up in a catapathic grouping of children, her fantasies bright nursery images, from which Ilse had had to detach the reflective personalities one by one, leaving Nola hopelessly insane.

“So—!” Ilse said with forced brightness. “So the autobiography. I can leave words behind, at least. Now tell me what it was that brought me into the pattern of your worry.”

Singh didn’t trouble to speak — he merely marshaled the facts in his mind for her to inspect.

She sighed. “You’re right, of course, Pan. I couldn’t face a situation that complex — not any more. It would break me into little pieces. It’s the frustration, you see. You tackle the big problem, and it leaves unsolved scores, maybe thousands of small problems, and every single one hurts… I used to be able to resign myself. I — I’ve been forced to resign now, period.”

She moved as though shrugging off a bad dream. “Still, people have gone blind, people have gone crazy, since the dawn of history. I’m still human, after all! Is Danny getting anywhere with his novice, by the way?’

“Not yet. That’s why I’ve been radiating worry, of course.”

“What a damned shame! Sometimes I think I was unbelievably lucky in spite of everything, Pan. At least I had intelligent parents, a healthy childhood, first-rate education… Assuming the late appearance of the gift — never before seventeen, most often at twenty or over — is a kind of natural insurance against it destroying an immature personality, I reckon I was just about as well equipped as I could have been. But he’s a real mess, isn’t he? Orphaned, crippled, hemophiliac…”

“Have you any ideas that would help Danny?” Singh ventured.

“You’re late, Pan!” She gave a harsh laugh. “Danny asked me a week ago if I could help.”

“And can you?”

Her face went blank, as if a light behind it had been turned off. Stonily she said, “I daren’t, Pan. I’ve touched the fringes of his mind. I sheered off. In the old days I might have risked it — I’d have banked on my experience outweighing the naked power he possesses. I could have insured against him panicking. I’m too old to cope with him now, Pan — and too sick.”

“What’s going to become of him, then? Are we likely to lose him?” Singh spoke thickly.

“I can’t reach deep enough into his personality to tell you. Obviously, he has empathy waiting to be tapped — if it is, he’ll be my successor. You realize that, I hope? If it isn’t, he may hate himself into insanity. What we could do to tip the balance I just don’t .know, Pan! I tell you: I daren’t look so far into his mind!”

11

There came a time not long afterwards when they started to leave Howson alone, and — as he was honest enough to admit when he took a firm grip on himself — that too became a source of resentment. The way he analyzed his feelings, his desire to be treated as important was still active in his subconscious; his mood of stubborn resistance to Singh’s pleading, Waldemar’s telepathic persuasion, was satisfying in a back-to-front fashion because it was a means of ensuring the continuation of their interest. Once he had yielded and begun to co-operate, most of his training would be done by himself. Another telepathist could only guide him away from blind alleys. Each was unique, and each had to teach himself.

Of course, that was only half of it. The other half looked at him out of the mirror.

So much was easy to understand. Other things puzzled him a little. The rather gingerly way in which Waldemar approached a contact with him was mystifying for a long while after his arrival in Ulan Bator; one day, however, Waldemar’s control over the explanation slipped, and the reason emerged into plain view. He was afraid that Howson might become insane, and the possibility of an insane telepathist with Howson’s power was bleakly fearful.

More appalling still was the discovery Howson made after the seed had germinated in his own mind: the idea of escape into madness had a horrid fascination, offering a chance to exercise unbridled power without the restraint imposed by causing suffering which he would in turn experience — as he had experienced the pain of the men in the crashed helicopter.

Before the incident which distracted everybody’s attention from him, he had allowed himself to be shown over the hospital, and had found it sufficiently interesting to want to limp down the corridors by himself occasionally, unchallenged by the staff who had received instructions from Singh never to interfere with him. He had felt recurrent pangs of envy, though, each time he considered a patient on the way to recovery, whether from a mental or a physical illness, and now he preferred to sit brooding in his room, letting his mind rove. That, he could not resist; as he had learned when the gift first made its appearance, there was no way to close it off as simple as shutting one’s eyes.

When he opened up to maximum sensitivity, the hospital, and the city beyond, became a chaos of nonsense. He was developing his powers of selection, though, and proving for himself what he found he had subconsciously assumed: accuracy was a function not so much of range as of extraneous mental “noise’, and careful concentration would enable him to pick a single mind out of thousands in the same way one can follow a single speaker amid the hubbub of a lively party.

Some-personalities were very easy to pick out; they bloomed like fireballs against a black sky. The staff telepathists were naturally the easiest of all, but he was reluctant to make contact with them — he sensed a basic friendliness when he did so, yet it was discolored because to them it seemed so obvious that any telepathist would want the gift he had received, and there were puzzled and upset by Howson’s depression.

In any case, all but one of them were preoccupied with their work. The exception was the possessor of a mind that lit the whole of one wing of the hospital with an invisible radiance so bright it shielded the personality behind it. He had probed around the fringes of that radiance, and sensed an aura of confident power that gave him pause; then, unexpectedly, there had been a disturbance in the personality, and the aura darkened and almost faded away. If one could imagine a star overcome by weariness, one might comprehend what had happened. Howson found it beyond him; he preferred to turn his attention elsewhere.

He had asked whose this remarkable mind was, naturally, and the answer — that it was the half-legendary Ilse Kronstadt, on whom had been based a character in the movie he had watched along with the man in brown — made him even less inclined to pester her.

There were also the non-telepathists who stood out. Singh was the most striking. He had a mind as clear as standing water, into which one might plunge indefinitely without fathoming the limits of his compassion. Again, though, Howson preferred not to dip into Singh’s awareness.

Too much of it was concerned with his own plight, and the patent impossibility of healing his deformity.

He chose rather to touch the minds that were more ordinary — staff and patients. At first he moved with utmost caution; then as he grew surer of his skill he grew bolder also, and spent long hours in contemplation that appealed to him the same way as movies and TV had formerly done. This was so much richer that the TV set standing in the corner of his room was not turned on after the first week of his stay.

The hospital held patients and staff of more than fifty nationalities. Their languages, customs, hopes and fears were endlessly fascinating to him, and it was only when he came back to reality, drunk with the delight of shared experience, after a voyage through a dozen minds, that he found himself seriously inclined to fall in with the wishes of Singh and Waldemar.

Yet he still hung back. There was one group of patients in the hospital whose minds he could not fail to be aware of, and who were sometimes responsible for him waking in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched, a victim of nameless terrors. They were the insane, lost in their private universes of illogic, and of course it was among them that the work of the staff telepathists lay.

Once, and only once, he “watched” a telepathic psychiatrist brace himself for a therapeutic session. The patient was a paranoid with an obsessive sexual jealousy, and the telepathist was attempting to locate the root experiences behind it. It was too big a job to be completed by telepathy, of course; once the experiences had been identified, there would be hypnosis, drug-abreaction and probably a regression in coma to bring the man to terms with his past. At the moment, though, his brain was a hell of irrational torments, and the telepathist had to pick his way through them like a man braving a jungle crammed with monsters.

Howson did not stay with the psychiatrist past that point. But he was more afraid than ever afterwards.

And then the crisis broke, and Howson, unco-operative, was left on one side while frantic attempts were made at rescue.

His picture of what was really going on remained for a long time rather confused. He hadn’t bothered to look at a newspaper or switch on a TV news bulletin for weeks now; if he had done so he would have learned immediately that Hemmikaini’s “second-best” hadn’t been good enough, and as a result the crisis in Southern Africa had turned into a duty, bloody, tangled mess.

While Makerakera the expert on aggression sweated frantically to weld together a scratch team of whoever could be spared to join him — Choong from Hong Kong, Jenny Fender from Indiana, Stanislaus Danquah from Accra, and some trainees — the little Greek Pericles Phranakis turned his back on the catastrophe and went away down a path of his own, to a land where success had crowned his efforts with a wreath of bay.

At Salisbury, Nairobi, Johannesburg the troops came down from the sky; after them, the mobile hospitals, the transport “copters, the cans and sacks and bales of basic food; after them, the jurists and the politicians (what do you do with a man in jail on a murder charge when the organs of the arraigning government collapse?). A great hollow silence succeeded the tumult, and it was broken by the sound of children crying.

Meantime, a Mach Five stratoplane carried the shell of Pericles Phranakis to Ulan Bator, and the computers were proved right: it would take Ilse Kronstadt to cope with the crisis, and if she couldn’t go to it, it would come to her.

Howson caught stray images from the fantasy Phranakis was enjoying, and shuddered. He was reminded strongly of his own daydreams which — according to Danny Waldemar, at least — might finally have tempted him to enter a catapathic grouping with the deaf-and-dumb girl. Thinking of the first such, he remembered the dust on Vargas’s eyes, and almost moaned aloud.

A curious sense of isolation had resulted from the diversion of everyone’s thoughts to Phranakis, and in a panic because he was experiencing loneliness — worse by contrast with the month-long flow of concern about him that he had been basking in — he hastened to involve himself with the problems occupying the outstanding minds near him.

He did not immediately venture to intrude on the privacy of Ilse Kronstadt herself, but he sensed her anxiety like a bad odor. Dimly he grasped the fact that even if Phranakis had failed he was still regarded as the nearest competitor she had in her original specialty, the elimination of aggression; facing the task of breaking open his fantasy, she quailed.

Embarrassed, he switched his attention elsewhere, and found Phranakis forming a paranoid obsession in the forefront of the staff’s collective mind. Like a flight of crows following a ploughman, people who knew him were coming in, and the voices of the dead on paper and on record and on film spoke guidance to Ilse Kronstadt. When he was five years old, he did such-and-so; with his first girl, he liked to do this; during his training in telepathy he had difficulty with that.

As a sculptor might take odds and ends of scrap metal and fuse them into a work of art, Ilse Kronstadt now selected from these data and created a mental image of Phranakis. Howson was fascinated; he was so absorbed that he never realized when he trespassed on her awareness for the first time. Either she did not notice that he was “watching” her, or she was too preoccupied to care. He thought the latter, and felt a stab of guilt at his unwillingness to exploit his own talent as she was exploiting hers.

Sitting still as stone in the special chair more comfortable than any he had used before, he absorbed the self-disciplining methods by which she built up her sagging confidence. There were glimpses of past successes, which had seemed equally daunting yet which ended in triumph; there were concepts of self-esteem, conceit almost, deliberately fostered to strengthen her determination.

Howson followed all this with jaw-cramping concentration. Even so, when he let his mind wander towards Phranakis, he was shaken. How could anyone — even the unprecedented Dr. Kronstadt — disturb the armored fantasy around the man’s ego now?

He forgot he was Gerald Howson. He forgot he was a cripple, a runt, a bleeder, an orphan. He remembered only that he was a telepathist, able to snatch facts from any mind he chose if the owner gave permission, and with desperate eagerness filled out his knowledge of what had led to his impasse.

Phranakis: this was how he felt to himself before he went into fugue; this was the face he saw daily in his mirror; this was the mother he remembered, the father, the brothers and sisters; there was the stony village street up which he toiled to school, this was the road that took him to Athens and the disappointments of early manhood, this was the room where he was first shocked into knowledge of his real identity…

Southern Africa: this was the ulcer festering below the slick modern surface; this was the hatred of dark against light skin and this was the greed that burst into violence… He visualized the huge Polynesian, Makerakera, walking a sunny street and absorbing hate like a camera; he was one of the rare receptive telepathists with no projective “voice’, like the therapy watchdogs and lay analysts Howson had met here at the hospital. He knew images of long corridors, rooms where solemn men met to plan this first attempt to give meaning to the ancient platitude about the best time to stop a war. He sensed the reaction of Phranakis when he realized his work had failed — he saw it as nemesis, the reward of hubris, the illimitable conceit which offended the gods of his ancestors.

And he looked also into the minds and lives of those whom Phranakis had taken with him. Taken: that was the really unique aspect of this case, and the one which frightened Ilse Kronstadt worst.

For such was Phranakis’s power that he had not had to wait on the willingness of the reflective personalities in his catapathic grouping. He had simply taken them over — four of his closest non-telepathic associates — and dragged them down with him into his unreal universe.

As awed and fascinated as a rabbit facing a snake, Howson traced the course of events around him. Far below, where the specialists and the high politicians and the families and friends were gathered, they were bringing Phranakis to the room where Ilse Kronstadt waited to do him battle. The hospital seemed to draw in on itself, to tauten till it sang apprehension like a fiddle-string. Howson tautened with it, lost to the world, and scarcely dared to breathe.

12

Down the streets of his brain a procession moved. As youths and maidens, garlanded with flowers, danced in his honour the grave elders gathered at the shrine of Pallas Athene. There they made ready the wreath of bay with which to crown the champion. For all their boasts and cunning, the barbarians had gone down to defeat. The city was safe; civilization and freedom survived, while far away a tyrant cursed and ordered the execution of his generals.

There was a city, certainly. There were, in a sense, elders gathered to the presence of their champion. But Aesculapius was closer to their minds than Athene, and the crown they had prepared for his head was a light metal frame trailing leads to a complex encephalograph. There was no tyrant, apart from the demon of hate, but there were definitely barbarians, although they had passed for civilized until they were broken and demoralized. They had conquered Pericles Phranakis, and were still defying the forces sent against them. He had refused to face that knowledge, and now he had forgotten.

His swarthy face contented, he lay in what was basically a bed, but could become an extension of his body if required. Apart from the instruments monitoring every physical response — heartbeat, respiration, brain rhythms, blood-pressure, and a dozen more — there were elaborate prosthetics attached to him. At present he was being fed artificially, while the other devices remained inert. Should the shock of recovery prove as violent as the shock of collapse, he might relinquish all attempts to live. Then the heart masseur, the oxygenator, the artificial kidney would fight against vagal inhibition and maintain life in his body until he had painfully accepted the frustration of his planned escape from the world.

Near by Ilse Kronstadt had composed herself amid a similar array of instruments. In a chair at her side was a young man with a pale anxious face — a recently qualified receptive telepathist serving as her therapy watchdog. Once she had entered Phranakis’s self-glorifying world, she would be unable to communicate verbally with the nervous doctors supervising the process. By turns around the clock this young man and three others would “listen” to her struggles, and report anything the doctors needed to know.

One by one the technicians, the specialists, the telepathist nodded to Singh, who stood at the foot of Ilse Kronstadt’s bed remembering her past triumphs and trying not to pay too much attention to the mass of cancerous tissue spreading beneath her brain. She looked very small and old lying among the machinery of the bed, and although she had not told him directly he knew she was afraid.

“We’re ready, Ilse,” he said in the levellest tone he could manage.

Without opening her eyes, she answered, “Me too. You can keep quiet now.”

Then, with no further warning, she let herself go. How it could be perceived, Singh had never been able to work out, but it was unmistakable — one second, she was conscious and aware of her body; the next, it was a shell, and she was in another universe.

He kept his aching eyes on the pale face of the watchdog, and was dismayed after only a couple of minutes to see a shock of surprise reflected there. In the same instant Ilse stirred.

“Strong…” she said in a far-away voice.

The alarmed audience oozed tension almost tangibly. She licked her lips and went on, “I have the picture of his fantasy now — he’s the great hero, defender of Athens, darling of the gods and idol of the people… I can’t break in, Pan! Not without making myself so obvious he’ll summon all his will to resist.”

“Take your time,” Singh said reassuringly. “There’s bound to be a chance to form a covering role in the fantasy. It may take time to develop, but it’ll come.”

“I know.” The voice was faint — almost ghostly. Singh wondered how much of it he was actually hearing, how much experiencing telepathically. The bloodless lips scarcely moved. “He has fabulous control, Pan. The schizoid secondary are unbelievably contrasted. And he’s got them from the reflective as well as from himself.”

Singh bit his lip. Only superb powers of self-deception could create the schizoid secondary personalities — individuals acting their part in the drama whose thoughts and reactions were only observable, not controllable, by the telepathist’s ego. Without seeming to pause, however, he uttered new comfort.

“That ought to make it easier, surely! He won’t be surprised at the appearance of an intruder.”

“He hasn’t left room for intruders!” The objection was a shrill cry. “It’s like a flower unfolding — it’s complete and all it has to do is spread out and be perfect!”

No matter how desperately he wanted it, Singh could find no reassuring counter to that. A fantasy so elaborate must have been Phranakis’s companion for years, nurtured in his subconscious, polished and perfected until he could unreel it like a cine-film, without any of the hesitations or doubts which would afford an entry for the therapist, disguised as a mere mental pawn.

Thickly he said, “Well, have patience, Ilse. When the situation looks hopeful, we’ll disturb his brain rhythms and let you in.”

No answer. Why should there be? Other, lesser therapists had resorted to such crude devices; Ilse Kronstadt had never needed to. Already, even before the job was under way, there was a sour smell of defeat in the room.

Alice through the Looking Glass: a path that always turned back on itself, no matter how you struggled to reach your goal.

A concept from relativity: the twisting of space itself.

An image from a science fiction movie: a barrier of force glowing blue with brush-discharges.

A fragment of legend: a wall of magic fire enclosing the place where an enchanted maiden slept away the centuries.

So frightened by the mystery of what was happening that he could not tear himself away from it, Howson snatched these and other mental pictures from the minds of those engaged in the attempt to cure Phranakis. They were clues, no more; they were the personal labels that had been hung on catapathic grouping by people who found unlabelled concepts intolerable. Previously he had accepted Waldemar’s explanation. He hadn’t thought that the reality would be so far beyond preconception, the sun beside the moon, the continent beside the map.

He had probed the minds of conscious telepathists. There he had found the familiar world mirrored: law ruled the passage of event, solid was solid, the senses murmured their news of the body’s condition. But Phranakis had closed and locked every door to the ordinary world, and although there were windows — of one-way glass facing inward, so to say — what went on behind them was insane.

Knowing it, Howson wished with all his might for the will to resist such temptation. He saw his own fantasies paralleled in Phranakis’s — the hero-concepts, the organization of everything around his whim, so that nothing disturbed, nothing upset, nothing offended the all-wise master. Here the human will to power, checked in conscious telepathists by the deterrent of other people’s suffering, could find ghastly outlet. Already the sado-masochistic impulses Phranakis had so long detested were creeping from shadow and coloring the fantasy.

They were casting down captives from the Acropolis, that the city’s savior might the more enjoy his triumph to the music of their screams…

Abruptly the smooth course of the action was shattered. It was like an earthquake; buildings shivered, people wavered, the sky darkened. It lasted only a moment, but the impact was staggering. Howson’s contact was broken, and it was several minutes before he could resume it.

“She’s in,” the therapy watchdog reported, his face drawn by the strain into an inhuman mask. “A captive condemned to death. Trying to get the attention of the hero-ego.”

Singh nodded thoughtfully. “That figures. Fits the data we have on his sexual preferences. Any idea what the long-term plan is?”

“Fixed for a short distance,” the watchdog said. “Idea is: lure him to a sexual situation, rely on failing control to establish dominance…Three main sequences envisaged — want them?”

“If nothing more interesting is developing.”

“No.” The watchdog had to pause and swallow hard. “The captives are still being thrown off the rock. Well, either she’ll establish a quasi-real knife — under cover of a banquet, maybe — and castrate him publicly, or she’ll get him into a drunken stupor and establish a fire in the temple, which is why she wanted the material on the destruction of the Parthenon, or she’ll start picking off the reflectives and stage a slave revolt.”

Singh closed his eyes. After all his years of work as a doctor, he was still capable of being sickened at the cold-bloodedness of some of his and his colleagues” methods. What the public castration would do to Phranakis he dared not think — but it figured. If anything could blast him out of his fugue, that would. All the material on his sexual life pointed to the need to reassure himself about his masculinity. The real world had never threatened him with anything so horrible as what Ilse was preparing.

Howson was following developments better now. He had discovered the reason for the “earthquake” — some sort of electrical impulse had been applied to Phranakis’s organ of Funck, to make an opening for Ilse Kronstadt. Now it was much easier to eavesdrop; she made a link with normal consciousness. With fascinated disgust he came to comprehend her plans, and had to force himself to remember that unless something brutal jarred him out of his pleasant dream Phranakis was as good as dead, and along with him four valuable, hard-working non-telepathists whose precious individuality he had trampled on. In a sense he deserved what was coming. But — could anyone really deserve it?

“She’s getting very tired, the watchdog whispered, as though Ilse could overhear him. That was absurd — nothing could reach her now except the full violence of another telepathist. All her energy had been transmuted to will power as she altered, added to and undermined the pattern of Phranakis’s fantasy.

“Is the crisis close?” Singh muttered.

“She’s summoning up all her resources. Trying to distract him with sexual images while she fixes the knife — Oh, God!”

Everyone present, and Howson in his room high overhead, started at the moaning cry. Eyes rolling with terror, not seeing his surroundings but the fearful mental drama between Ilse and Phranakis, the watchdog gasped out the truth.

“She’s weakening! She’s losing control and he’s creating guards for himself — schizoids — an army of them! He’s made himself Cadmus and thrown down dragons” teeth and soldiers are springing from the floor !”

“Bring her back!” Singh cried, and knew even as he spoke that it was ridiculous. Someone — he didn’t bother to notice who — put the fact into words.

“If you try and wake her now she’ll leave half of herself behind. Pan. And she’d rather be dead than crippled.”

So this was how it felt to lose…

She was very tired. It was almost a relief to feel her imaginary self pinioned by the arms, unable to struggle any longer. There were soldiers all around her, huge men with swarthy faces and coarse beards, armored with bronze and leather. Like a forest they stretched away under the dim roof of the marble hall. There had been a banquet, and a thousand revelers — puppets, a human setting for the glory of the master she had attempted to overthrow.

Had there been a banquet? Already she was uncertain where illusion ended; there was actual pain from the brutal grasp on her arms, and that made it difficult to concentrate. The world wavered. She was — she was — a captive. Yes: a condemned enemy, spared by clemency, caught in treachery. And her sentence was fixed, without appeal, by her intended victim.

Death.

Justice! Approved the roar of a thousand voices, making her skull ring like the echoing marble roof, justice!

Well, then — defeat. But it was not so strange after all. Indeed, in a way she had been defeated in everything she had ever tried, for no single task — a flood of memory welled up—no single task had ever been completed.

13

In incredulous horror Howson followed the decline of that bright glow of power which was now hardly to be called Ilse Kronstadt any longer. It was like seeing the last sparks die in a rain-swamped fire, knowing that the wolves waited at the edge of camp for the moment when they would be able to close in.

He was shouting aloud, in his little ridiculous piping voice, saying no, no, no ! over and over; there were tears streaming down his cheeks because the mind of Ilse Kronstadt had been so beautiful, so clear and luminous, like the childhood image of an angel. Vandals were smashing the panels of stained glass, throwing dirt at the master painting, treading the tapestry into the mud. A madman was biting off the head of a baby. Time eating his children, blood dripping down his chin, hoarse bubbling laughter making mock of human hopes.

And suddenly, without warning, like a last dry stick crackling into flame, the light returned. It showed a whole life, like a pathway seen from its end, with every step and stage of the journey clearly visible. Bewildered, awed, Howson gazed at it.

The flame began to die. There was a sense of illimitable regret — not bitter, because it was impossible for events to have gone otherwise: gently resigned. Mists closed over the path, leaving only the failures as grey shadows in the gloom. So many of them; so many, many, many failures. And that one out of all: the symbol-child of fate, cursed life-long by the heedlessness of a would-be tyrant, the selfishness of an ought-not-to-be mother, and the caprice of a cruel heredity.

The twisted baby whom I could not help…

He was blind, and yet he moved. Walked. Ran, his short leg dragging, finding somehow from somewhere the strength to open doors and go down winding stairs and traverse endless corridors he could not see for the tears that poured from his eyes, over his hollow cheeks. It was only his body that made the journey. He had gone elsewhere.

“Oh my God!” said the watchdog, and came to his feet as though a vast hand had snatched him out of the chair. Singh shot out an arm to steady him, despair blackening his mind.

“Has she gone ?” he whispered.

“Where’s it coming from?” the watchdog cried. “My God, Where’s it coming from?” Like a cornered animal he spun around, his eyes briefly mad with fear.

“What ?” Singh shouted. “What?”

The technician watching the trace on the encephalograph gave a stifled exclamation. “Dr. Singh!” he snapped. “I’m getting an overlay rhythm ! It’s beating out of phase — and look at the amplitude!”

“Her heart’s picking up!” reported another technician in an incredulous tone.

Singh felt his own heart give an answering lurch. There was no sense to be got out of the watchdog in his present state of shock, whatever had caused it; he hurried to stare at the encephalograph instead.

“See here!” The technician stabbed his finger at the weaving traces. “It’s smoothing now, going into normal phase, but when it first came on it was heterodyning so much I thought she was done for.”

“Is it Phranakis taking control of her entire mind ?”

“It can’t be!” the technician said with savagery. “I know his trace like — like his handwriting. And that’s not his.”

The air seemed to go stiff, as swiftly as supercooled water freezing. Totally lost, they looked at one another for an explanation.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Singh said at last “We can only wait.”

Slow nods answered him. And while they were still preparing themselves to endure the last crucial minutes, there came the noise from the passageway outside.

There were angry voices, raised to try and stop somebody.

There were running feet, light and muffled on the sound-absorbent floor. There was a hammering on the outermost of the soundproof doors, and a thin, barely heard scream.

The watchdog, still in shock, made two steps towards the door, jerking like a badly-manipulated puppet. Singh turned slowly, preconceived words about silence and danger dying as he sensed the truth and tried to remember what hope was like.

Then the doors slammed back and the giant came in, weeping, limping, and barely five feet tall.

There was the child, and I so wanted to help him, and I had to say those cheap rationalizing words about big problems and little problems… The doctor said: one shoulder higher than the other, one leg shorter than the other — pretty much of a mess. And later I found out about his grandfather, and found it out from the woman’s mind — she knew, and had the kid in spite of it, to use for blackmail… Big problems! What bigger problem could there possibly be? And I so wanted to help, and my whole life has been like that because there are so many people sick and sad and I can help… could help… DAMN THIS LUMP IN MY BRAIN! No bigger than a bullet, and like a bullet it’s killing me before I’m ready to die.

That was when Howson forgot himself.

At first she didn’t understand the power that had suddenly come to her. It was like becoming a torrential river, vast and deep and terrible. It was raw because it was as new as a baby, but it blazed.

Life force ? ? ? No such — but: life force!

Defeat? DEFEAT?

There was no room left for ideas of death and defeat !

Slowly, calmly as she had considered the prospect of dying, she began to take charge of what she had been given. There was no resistance, and she never questioned the source of the power — she was too accustomed to meeting strangers in her own mind to waste effort in finding out. The fatal images forced on her by Phranakis receded, becoming ghostly-faint; she sensed his terror and immediately postponed consideration of it. She was a little frightened herself, but calm yet.

Seeking levers with which to direct the force, she found almost at once a familiar concept, and it related so strongly to her recent conscious preoccupations that she was shaken.

Mother-child: images of parturition, nourishment, support, warmth, love. Child-mother: images of reflected pride, hope, gratitude, love. The forms were ill defined, as though from a source which knew little about such matters in real life. A faint puzzlement crossed her mind, and she dismissed it. With her detached consciousness she knew she had to make use of the power before she exhausted herself and lost her grip on it, and the first — the only — necessity was to struggle free of the hate Phranakis felt for her.

“She’s breaking loose!” someone exclaimed.

“I saw her eyelids flutter,” Singh whispered. There was a tightness in his chest he could not account for. His eyes were aching with the intentness of his staring; all his will was summed into the hope that his old, dear, marvellous friend should live. By what means she was rescued, he didn’t care. Later—later!

“But she’s only breaking loose!” muttered the technician by the encephalograph. “She isn’t bringing Phranakis with her—no, wait a second!” He bent close to the Phranakis tape, as if he could see through the present and read what had not yet been recorded. “Something’s happening, but heaven knows what!”

Cowed, bewildered, at a loss, the hero felt his satisfaction turn to ashes. A moment ago he was secure and confident; he had thwarted an attack on — well, his life, which sounded better than the truth, which was fearful to him. The last treacherous attempt of the barbarians to square accounts with him had been beaten off. The greatest city of all time, Athens the flower of civilization, was his, and its citizens were at his beck and call. Through the centuries they would remember him, Pericles the Great!

Yet now he felt unreasoned terror. It seemed to him that he was darting about like a frightened rabbit, with a sword in his hand, looking for his enemies, hysterically defying them to come into the open. Out from the marble hall, out under the blue arch of the sky where he would roar defiance to the gods themselves if need be!

He threw back his head, filled his lungs, and could not speak. To his terror-stricken gaze it appeared that the sky rolled back, like a slashed tent, and the gods were manifest.

He wanted to fall on his face, bury his head in dirt, deny this as he had denied — what ? Something terrible but not as fearful as this! He was paralysed. Whimpering, he had to look, and what he saw seemed to him to be the majesty of Zeus the Thundered, who raised his bolt of lightning and cast it down on the mortal who had presumed to usurp the divine right.

Pericles the Great became Pericles Phranakis. Pericles Phranakis woke like a child screaming from nightmares, and those who watched over his body pounced to stop him going back.

And Zeus the Thunderer, drained of all energy in a single terrific blast of mental mastery, fell headlong fainting to the floor.

“Do we know how he did it?” muttered Danny Waldemar, looking down with incredulous awe at the limp little body in the hospital bed.

The watchdog was too overcome to follow it exactly,” Singh answered. He ached for Howson to recover consciousness; he knew he could never express his gratitude for sparing Ilse the humiliation of death in defeat, but he wanted the cripple to see it in his mind, at least. “We got a little of it. It was the sheer power that worked in the end, naturally — he was able to take anything Phranakis offered and turn it into some hostile, hateful image. I think he was babbling about the Greek gods when he woke up — perhaps he saw them when Howson broke into his fantasy… Never mind; we’ll know soon.”

“What I don’t understand is what persuaded him to help,”

Waldemar said. “I haven’t contacted Ilse, of course — she’s still so weak… Do you know ?”

“Yes, she was awake long enough to tell me while they were detaching the prosthetics.” Singh paused and wiped his face.

“It seems that Howson’s father was Gerald Pond. Mean anything to you?”

“The — the terrorist? That one? Why, Ilse had to go and clear up after him while she was working for UN Pacification!”

“Exactly. And while she was probing wounded survivors for aggression data in a hospital there, she met Howson’s mother. He’d just been born a few hours earlier.

“He’s never been loved — do you know that ? His mother had him to try and blackmail Pond into marrying her, and never cared much about him otherwise. And people have always seen his face first, and been — disturbed. So he’s never been loved except once.”

“Ilse?”

“Yes. She never saw him with her own eyes, which is why she didn’t place him when he turned up here twenty-odd years later. But she saw him through his mother’s mind a short time after his birth, and ever since then he’s been a kind of symbol to her, summing up all the frustration she feels because she loves people she can’t all help. And she thought of him at what she expected to be the last moment.”

“He was watching,” Waldemar said. “We all were. When a telepathic force like Ilse’s is fully extended, you can’t avoid it. But I couldn’t follow her down towards the dark. So I missed that. I was so — miserable I had to take my mind away, in case I weakened her.”

“He not only stayed. He saved her.”

“Will she be able to work again ?”

“No. But she’s going to live for a while. I’m sure of that. She’s going to live long enough to teach Howson everything she knows.”

“It’s better than children,” Waldemar said. “For us, I mean.” He glanced at Singh.” Do you know that we envy you ?”

“Yes,” Singh murmured. “And we you.”

“Including Howson ?”

“No,” Singh said. “He’s never going to have it easy. He may find compensation in developing his talent, now he’s exploiting it in a way that’ll satisfy him. But he’ll always have to fight his resentment of people who can walk down the street without limping and look others straight in the face.”

Waldemar stared. Then he gave a chuckle. “I was going to tell you that,” he said. “But if you’ve worked it out already—well,—with you and Ilse to guide him, he’ll survive.”

“He’ll do much more than just survive,” answered Singh.