The Whole Man (12 page)

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.

XIII
xiii

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 Use 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 dribbling 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 gray 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 lifelong 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 muflled 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 toward 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 1 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 qs 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, marvelous 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 herqhero. 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 paralyzed. Whimpering, he had to look, and what he saw seemed to him to be the majesty of Zeus the Thunderer, 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 from 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, Use Ilse had to go and clear up after him when she was working for UN Pacification!”

“Exactly. And while she was probing wounded survivors for aggression data in a hospital there, she met How- son’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 can’t help all the people, she loves. 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 Use’s Ilse’s is fully extended, yoi you can’t avoid it. But I couldn’t follow her down toward 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.”