The nurse opened the door again. “Dr. Howson! Message from Dr. van Osterbeck: you’re not to undo your work by making Dr. Choong overtired!”
Howson made an empty gesture and turned to limp away. Behind him Choong spoke up one final time.
‘“Just because an escape which suits me or someone else doesn’t suit you, Howson, doesn’t mean there isn’t one for you. You’re a unique individual. Find your own way. There’s bound to be one!”
Howson wasn’t quite sure whether Choong had physically spoken those last few words, or eased them telepathically into his mind with the practiced skill of a first-class psychiatrist implanting a suggestion in a patient. In a patient … that was funny! A few days before, Howson had been the doctor in charge; a moment had seen the roles reversed.
Except that Choong had never actually been the patient Howson had believed him to be.
He had already ordered his personal attendant to pack his bags. Now, outside Pandit Singh’s office, he found himself hesitating. Would he be able to make clear what he felt, what he wanted? Did he in fact know himself what he wanted?
He steeled himself and went in. Anything, surely, would be better than his present dilemma!
Singh didn’t raise his head from the mound of papers before him, merely waved at a chair. “Sit down, Gerry; won’t keep you a moment. Ah … there!” He scrawled a hasty signature on the topmost document and threw it into the out tray.
Leaning back, he said, “I agree, Gerry. You need a vacation.”
Not for the first time, not for the hundredth, Howson found he was wondering whether Singh had embryo telepathic faculties himself. Flushing, he said, “What …?”
“Oh, Gerry, for pity’s sake!” Singh rumbled a cheerful laugh. “I’ve been told about your bags being packed. When I heard, I calculated that it was six years since you last had a rest. It’s partly my fault: I’ve grown accustomed to leaning on you. But you haven’t seemed nearly as pleased as you should be with your success in Choong’s case, and my deduction is that you want a vacation. I’m glad you agree with me.”
Howson was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Pan, I’m afraid you’re wrong.”
“You’re not …?” The suspicion that Howson was planning a permanent departure leaped up in Singh’s appalled mind.
“Ohhhh!” In exasperation Howson cancelled the mistaken assumption with a telepathic correction, and went on aloud. “The Choong case wasn’t a success for me, Pan. He wanted to be brought back. If he hadn’t cooperated—or at least not resisted with any seriousness— I’d have been beaten.”
“Gerry, I don’t understand!”
“No? Nor did I, at first,” Howson agreed bitterly. “And Pak wouldn’t have told you, I guess, because I warned him not to unless I had a chance to get used to the idea. Listen! All the telepathists I’ve previously routed out of their dreams were the inadequate personalities we assumed them to be, broken by the harshness of the world. Them I can tackle. Choong in full command of his faculties, in a world of his own devising and operating at his own whim, could have brushed me off like an annoying fly.
“He didn’t. He had the sense to see that he was going to have to help whoever came after him, as a precaution against enjoying his absolute power too greatly. So he followed sets of easily deducible rules. In particular, when he incorporated magic into his private universe, he employed the basic James Frazer rules of like-to-like and part-to-whole. I took him by surprise when I suddenly realized this during the crucial encounter, and … well, never mind the details. Just say that’s the only thing I’m pleased with, and it doesn’t satisfy me because it was a lucky inspiration, not the result of planning and foresight.
“Pan, he’s punctured my confidence! I’ve had to admit something I’ve hidden for years from you, even from myself. I’m jealous of people who can escape into fugue! Why not? Look at me! And I’m scared because I’m jealous. There’s no one I know of who could come and get me back out of fantasy! Unless I do something to help myself, I’m apt to go into some patient’s universe and find it so much to my liking I don’t want to come back. I haven’t the guts to go into it the way Choong did. But I might well not have the guts to cut short a … a trip to some especially attractive fantasy.”
Singh was staring down at the top of his desk. He said, “Do I take it that you have in mind something you can do to help yourself?”
“I … I’m not sure.” Sweat was prickly on Howson’s face and hands now. “All I’ve decided so far is that I’m going away for a while. Alone. Not the way I used to go when I first came here, with someone to watch over me in case I cut myself or children mocked me, but alone. Maybe I can’t go rock-climbing in the Caucasus; maybe I can’t go surfing at Bondi Beach. But … damn it, Pan, I looked after myself, more or less, for twenty years before I was discovered and brought in. If I can relearn to do that much, I may be on the track of an answer to my problems.”
“I see.” Singh turned a pen over between his short, capable fingers. “You’re not going to do anything as stupid as throwing away your prothrombin, I take it?”
“Hardly! Independence has limits. But dependence has, too, I want to set some for myself, that’s all.”
“So what do you propose to do now?”
“Send for a cab, go to the airport, and take a plane somewhere. I’ll be back in—oh—a couple of months, I guess. You’ll see I get money?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then …” Howson felt at a loss. “Well, that seems to be all, doesn’t it?”
“I imagine so.” Singh rose and came around the desk, holding out his hand. “Good luck, Gerry. I hope you find what you want for yourself.”
Abruptly he wasn’t looking at Howson any longer. He was facing an olive-skinned man with a square black beard, standing taller than himself, wearing a peculiar barbaric costume mostly of leather studded with tarnished brass. A huge sword dangled from his belt. He was muscular, good-looking; he radiated health and contentment.
The stranger changed; melted; shrank until he was barely five feet tall and beardless and slightly deformed—until he was, in fact, Gerald Howson.
“That’s what I want,” said Howson in a thin voice. “That’s not what will be any good to me, though. Goodbye, Pan. And thank you.”
XXIxxi
At the airport he inquired about flights to the city where he had been born, and was almost shocked to recollect that it had once been his home.
Home! How long since he last thought of it as such? For years “home” had meant his apartment in the therapy center, with everything tailored to his special needs—even the sanitary fittings in the adjacent bathroom—so that the chair he kept for visitors, of normal size, seemed intrusive.
Yet some part of him had never caught up with that shift of perspective. Maybe this trip was really intended to look for what he had left behind.
Would people remember and recognize him? He hadn’t changed much, but he was well-dressed instead of shabby, well-fed instead of pinched and scrawny—enough change, maybe, to make people pucker their foreheads in search of a half-vanished memory.
A curious heady excitement began to take hold of him as his cab rolled through familiar streets toward the district where most of his childhood had been spent. On impulse, he told the hackie to stop and let him out. He had checked most of his bags at the airport, keeping only a light valise which he could handle easily, and he wanted to take this stage of the journey slowly, on foot, to let the impact of old associations seep into his mind.
The first major fact to register on him was that his old home had gone.
He stood on a street corner and looked at the towering stack of low-priced apartments which had taken the place of the plaster-peeling rabbit warren of a tenement he had known. The same kind of street gangs chased past him; the same wheezing old cars rolled by; the same crowded buses clanged and burped down the street. But the building wasn’t there.
An unexpected pang of nostalgia tou
ched him. He had never imagined he could regret the disappearance of a place which had brought him so little of pleasure to cherish. He changed hands on his valise and limped on. As he went, he found people staring at him: ; a small boy bravely threw a dirty word at him and dissolved into laughter. He knew, now, why such things were done, and felt no resentment.
A block or two north, he remembered, was a bar and grill where he had done odd jobs during his mother’s illness. The way to it would take him past the school he had attended. He turned northward, making mental comparisons as he went.
The atmosphere was different from what he recollected. He had a sense of something like tranquillity, contrasting with the frenzied modernity of Ulan Bator with its cosmopolitan influx of strangers. Maybe this was the ultimate effect of the crisis in whose shadow he had been born. The closest he could come to summing it up in a single word was “chastened.” But there was no regret apparent.
He found himself rather liking the sensation, and wishing he had been back earlier.
The bar and grill had changed in layout and decor, but it was still there. It seemed more prosperous than in the old days. There were high stools at the counter, but he went to a table, earning a grimace from the lounging counterman; he found it much too difficult to perch on a stool.
“What’ll it be?” the counterman called.
He was hungry after his journey, Howson found. “Small portion of steak and French fries, and a can of beer,” he responded.
While he was waiting for the food to come from the kitchen, the counterman eyed his visitor curiously. It was plain why, but Howson waited until he raised the question openly.
“Here y’are, shorty,” the young man said in a friendly enough manner, setting the plate and glass on Howson’s table. “Hey … I think I seen you around here some place, a long time back! Didn’t I?”
He would have been about twelve when Howson left, probably; it was quite possible he remembered. “You might have,” Howson agreed cautiously. “Does Charlie Birberger still run this place?”
“Mm-hm. You a friend of his?”
“I used to be.” Howson hesitated. “If he’s in, maybe he’d come and have a word with me.”
“I’ll ask,” said the counterman obligingly.
There was an exchange of shouts; then Birberger himself, older, fatter, but otherwise unchanged, came blink- into the bar. He caught sight of Howson and stopped dead, his mind a kaleidoscope of astonishment.
He recovered quickly, and waddled across the floor with a jovial air. “By God! Sarah Howson’s boy! Well, I never expected to see you in this place again after all we heard about you! Making out pretty well, hey?”
“Pretty well,” Howson said. “Won’t you sit down?”
“Uh? Oh, sure!” Birberger fumbled a chair away from the table and entrusted his bulk to it gingerly. He put both elbows on the table, leaning forward. “We see about you in the papers sometimes, y’know! Must be wonderful work you’re doing. Must admit, I never expected you to wind up where you are! Uh … been a pretty long time since you were here, hey? Ten years!”
“Eleven,” said Howson quietly.
“Long as that? Well, well!” Birberger rambled on. There was a faint quaver in his rotund voice, and Howson was suddenly struck by a strange realization: Damn it, the man’s scared!
“Uh … any special reason for coming back?” Birberger probed clumsily. “Or just looking up the old place?”
“Looking up old friends, more,” Howson corrected.
He took a sip of his beer. “You’re the first I’ve met since I flew in an hour or two back.”
“Well, it’s good of you to count me as an old friend,” Birberger said, brightening. “Y’know, I often think of the days when I useta let you help out in here. I remember you had quite an appetite for a—” He might have been going to say “runt,” but caught himself and finished with a change of mental gears: “Uh—young fella!”
He sat back. “Y’know, I like to think maybe I managed to give you a helping hand now and again. With your mother sick, and all …”
Howson could see the rose-colored filters going up in his memory. He hid a smile. Charlie Birberger had been an irritable, hard-to-get-on-with employer, given to bawling out his assistants mercilessly—especially Gerry Howson.
Well, no matter. He nodded as though in agreement, and Birberger’s original disquiet faded still further.
“Hey, tell you something!” the fat man said. “I still have all the cuttings from the papers about how they found you. I guess I could dig them out and show you. Hang on!”
He hoisted himself to his feet and disappeared into the back rooms. In a few minutes he returned with a dusty album, which he made ineffectual attempts to blow clean as he sat down again.
“There!” he said, opening it and turning it so that Howson could read the yellow cuttings it contained.
Howson laid down his knife and fork and leafed through the album curiously. He hadn’t realized that the discovery of a telepathist had created such a furor in the city. Here were front-page items from all the leading local papers, some of them with pictures of Danny Waldemar and other UN personnel.
He had come to the last page and was about to hand the book back with a word of thanks, when he hesitated. The final item seemed to be completely irrelevant; it was a single paragraph reporting the marriage of Miss Mary Hall and Mr. Stephen Wilhams, and the date was about two years after his departure.
“This one,” he said, putting a finger on it. “Is it connected with the rest?”
Birberger craned to study it. He frowned. “Now, what in—? If it’s there, sure as hell there’s a reason. Must have something to do with— Good God, I remember!” He stared in astonishment at Howson. “Don’t you know the name? I’d have thought you of all people …!”
Blankly, Howson returned the gaze. And then he had it.
He shut his eyes; the impact was almost physical. In a husky tone he said, “No … no, I never knew her name. She was deaf and dumb, you see, so she couldn’t tell me. And after she got her speech and hearing she only came to see me a few times.”
“She never wrote you?” Birberger was turning back the leaves of the album. “After all you did for her, too? I’m really surprised. Yes, here we are: ‘A plane from Ulan Bator today brought in eighteen-year-old Mary Hall, the deaf-and-dumb girl who befriended novice telepathist Gerry Howson. She told reporters at the city airport that the operation to give her artificial speech and hearing was completely successful, and now all she wanted was the chance to lead a quiet, normal life.’ Look!”
At first glance he must have missed it because he wanted to, Howson told himself. For the newspaper photo wasn’t a bad one. There she was, standing at the door of the plane: smartly dressed, true, and wearing make-up and with her hair properly styled, but recognizably the girl he had known.
“Is there any chance of finding out where she’s living?” He had uttered the question unplanned, but realized its inevitability while Birberger was still rubbing his chin and considering the problem.
“I’ll get the city directory!” he said, rather too eagerly, as though anxious to get Howson on his way.
There were several dozen Williamses, but only one Stephen Williams. Howson studied the address.
“West Walnut,” he said. “Where’s that?”
“New district since your time, I believe. Big development outside town. A Number Nineteen bus goes direct.” Birberger was hardly making any attempt to disguise his desire to see the back of his visitor now.
So Howson, dispirited, accommodated him, paying for his food and beer and gathering up his valise. Birberger stumped to the door with him and insisted on shaking his hand, treating it with care as if touching something rare and fragile. But his invitation to come back as soon as possible rang thin.
On impulse Howson asked him, “Say, Mr. Birberger! What’s your picture of the kind of work I do nowadays?”
Startled, the fat man improvised.
“Why, you—you sort of look into crazy people’s minds and tell what’s wrong with them. And straighten them out. Don’t you?”
“That’s right,” Howson said a little unkindly. “Don’t worry, though—I’m not looking into your mind. After all, you’re not crazy, are you?”
The seeds of the most peculiar kind of doubt were germinating in Birberger’s mind as Howson limped down the street toward the stop for a Nineteen bus.
Odd, people’s different reactions to telepathists …
Howson contemplated them as he sat in the single seat near the driver up front in the bus. He hadn’t examined that problem for years; at the WHO therapy center he was in isolation from it, because telepathists had become a completely accepted part of the regular staff.
Occasionally, though not as often as he would have liked, trainees came in, and he assisted with their development. Each was unique, and consequently each responded differently to knowledge of his talent. Some were like children with a new-found toy; others were like members of a family in Nazi Germany, who had just discovered that they had Jewish blood and were desperately pretending it made no difference.
It was getting easier to accept the gift, granted. The years of carefully devised propaganda had had some effect. But telepathists were so few they barely even constituted a minority group, and that, rather than conditioning of the public, had been their salvation—at least in Howson’s view. A tiny fraction of the population had actually met someone with the power; consequently, though most people had opinions (“I don’t doubt they do wonderful work, but I wouldn’t like someone poking around in my mind—I mean, it’s the ultimate invasion of privacy!”), few had formed lasting attitudes.