The Whole Man (9 page)

“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 cooperate,” 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, hm? 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 man in the copter that 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 sometime—whether we telep- athists have caused more bother than we’ve saved.”

 
He gave Singh a crooked grin and went out.

X
x

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 Use 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 his 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 nonviolent 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 graying 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. Afterward we discovered a malignant tumor in Use’s Ilse’s brain. If we’d caught it early enough, we could have extirpated it microsurgically; a little later, and we could have used ultrasound or focused electron beams. As it happened, 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 Use’s 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?” Hammikaini 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 it’s found in time. You have to break into the fantasy world and make it even less tolerable than reality. And Use 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 best 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.”