The Whole Man, Page 4

  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 blue 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. OK, take a cola or something. I’m buzzing 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, sometime 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, and 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 did he want? 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 rooming 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 valuable. 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 daylight, 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 Saturday night his glorious new world fell apart in shards.

  vi

  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 to earn 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 halfway 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—but 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 byproduct 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 was amusing. After a while it began to irritate him. He changed his mind about taking in the early-evening show at the movie theater of his choice—not his regular one, which was still playing the program 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 sign 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 theater … 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 nonetheless 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.

  Toward 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 gray 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 semidarkness, 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 gray 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- gray 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 hps 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!

  Wild
ly 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 lor 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.

  VIIvii

  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 with panic 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 a telepath, 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.