The Whole Man, Page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Out of this background of dirt, frustration and deprivation of affection, she had conceived a need which Howson understood instantly because it paralleled his own desire for importance. Even though it had blown up in his face, he still yearned. But the girl yearned for a key to the mystery of speech, the glass door shutting her off from everybody. In a frantic attempt to substitute some other link for this missing one, she had developed the habit of spending all her time helping, or working for, nearby families; a smile of thanks for minding a baby, or a small payment for running an errand simple enough to explain by signs, was her only emotional sustenance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And then:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  VIIIviii

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Hidden! How could he hide?

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

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

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

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

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

  Telepathist, why are you afraid?

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

  NO NO NO LEAVE ME ALONE!

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

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

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

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

  And then he felt the pain.

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

  You did thaithat.

  LEAVE ME ALONE!

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