“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.”
“Did you really need to send for me, Ilse?” Singh spoke the words because he knew the thought had emerged too forcibly into consciousness to disguise it anyhow.
“Yes, Pan.” The words dropped like stones. “It’s getting worse. I need to economize on the use of my telepathy now; I tire quickly, and I get confused. It makes me feel very old.”
last, “You know, I’d have liked to marry, have children.
There was silence. Not looking at him, she went on at … I think I’d have tried it, in spite of everything, if I hadn’t seen from the inside what hell it is to be a non- telepathist child of telepathists. Remember Nola GriiningGrüning?”
“I do,” Singh muttered. Nola Griining Grüning had married—a telepathist, naturally; it was the only sane course—and had a child which didn’t inherit. And she had wound up in a catapathic grouping of children, her fantasies bright nursery images, from which Use Ilse had had to detach the reflective personalities one by one, leaving Nola hopelessly insane.
“So!” Use Ilse said with forced brightness. “So the autobiography. I can leave words behind, at least. Now tell me what it was that brought me into the pattern of your worry.”
Singh didn’t trouble to speak; he merely marshaled the facts in his mind for her to inspect.
She sighed. “You’re right, of course, Pan. I couldn’t face a situation that complex—not any more. It would break me into little pieces. It’s the frustration, you see. You tackle the big problem, and it leaves unsolved scores, maybe thousands of small problems, and every single one hurts. … I used to be able to resign myself. I—I’ve been forced now to resign period.”
She moved as though shrugging off a bad dream. “Still, people have gone blind, people have gone crazy, since the dawn of history. I’m still human, after all! Is Danny getting anywhere with his novice, by the way?”
“Not yet. That’s why I’ve been radiating worry, of course.”
“What a damned shame! Sometimes I think I was unbelievably lucky in spite of everything, Pan. At least I had intelligent parents, a healthy childhood, first-rate education. … Assuming the late appearance of the gift—never before seventeen, most often at twenty or over—is a kind of natural insurance against it destroying an immature personality, I reckon I was just about as well equipped as I could have been. But he’s a real mess, isn’t he? Orphaned, crippled, hemophiliac …”
“Have you any ideas that would help Danny?” Singh ventured.
“You’re late, Pan!” She gave a harsh laugh. “Danny asked me a week ago if I could help.”
“And can you?”
Her face went blank, as if a light behind it had been turned off. Stonily she said, “I daren’t, Pan. I’ve touched the fringes of his mind. I sheered off. In the old days I might have risked it—I’d have banked on my experience outweighing the naked power he possesses. I could have insured against him panicking. I’m too old to cope with him now, Pan—and too sick.”
“What’s going to become of him, then? Are we likely to lose him?” Singh spoke thickly.
“I can’t reach deep enough into his personality to tell you. Obviously, he has empathy waiting to be tapped; if it is, he’ll be my successor. You realize that, I hope? If it isn’t, he may hate himself into insanity. What we could do to tip the balance I just don’t know, Pan! I tell you, I daren’t look so far into his mind!”
XIxi
There came a time not long afterward when they started to leave Howson alone, and—as he was honest enough to admit when he took a firm grip on himself—that too became a source of resentment. The way he analyzed his feelings, his desire to be treated as important was still active in his subconscious; his mood of stubborn resistance to Singh’s pleading, Waldemar’s telepathic persuasion, was satisfying in a back-to-front fashion because it was a means of ensuring the continuation of their interest. Once he had yielded and begun to cooperate, most of his training would be done by himself. Another telepathist could only guide him away from blind alleys. Each was unique, and each had to teach himself.
Of course, that was only half of it. The other half looked at him out of the mirror.
So much was easy to understand. Other things puzzled Mm a little. The rather gingerly way in which Waldemar approached a contact with him was mystifying for a long while after his arrival in Ulan Bator; one day, however, Waldemar’s control over the explanation slipped, and the reason emerged into plain view. He was afraid that Howson might become insane, and the possibility of an insane telepathist with Howson’s power was bleakly fearful.
More appalling still was the discovery Howson made after the idea had germinated in his own mind: the idea of escape into madness had a horrid fascination, offering a chance to exercise unbridled power without the restraint imposed by causing suffering which he would in turn experience—as he had experienced the pain of the men in the crashed helicopter.
Before the incident which distracted everybody’s attention from him, he had allowed himself to be shown over the hospital, and had found it sufficiently interesting to want to limp down the corridors by himself occasionally, unchallenged by the staff, who had received instructions from Singh never to interfere wth him. He had felt recurrent pangs of envy, though, each time he considered a patient on the way to recovery, whether from a mental or a physical illness, and now he preferred to sit brooding in his room, letting his mind rove. That he could not resist; as he had learned when the gift first made its appearance, there was no way to close it off as simple as shutting one’s eyes.
When he opened up to maximum sensitivity, the hospital, and the city beyond, became a chaos of nonsense. He was developing his powers of selection, though, and proving for himself what he found he had subconsciously assumed: accuracy was a function not so much of range as of extraneous mental “noise,” and careful concentration would enable him to pick a single mind out of thousands in the same “way one can follow a single speaker amid the hubbub of a lively party.
Some personalities were very easy to pick out; they bloomed like fireballs against a black sky. The staff telepathists were naturally the easiest of all, but he was reluctant to make contact with them; he sensed a basic friendliness when he did so, yet it was discolored because to them it seemed so obvious that any telepathist would want the gift he had received, and they were puzzled and upset by Howson’s depression.
In any case, all but one of them were preoccupied with their work. The exception was the possessor of a mind that lighted the whole of one wing of the hospital with an invisible radiance so bright that it shielded the personality behind it. He had probed around the fringes of that radiance, and sensed an aura of confident power that gave him pause; then, unexpectedly, there had been a disturbance in the personality, and the aura darkened and almost faded away. If one could imagine a star overcome by weariness, one might comprehend what had happened. Howson found it beyond him; he preferred to turn his attention elsewhere.
He had asked whose this remarkable mind was, naturally, and the answer—that it was the half-legendary Use Ilse Kronstadt, on whom had been based a character in the movie he had watched along with the man in brown— made him even less inclined to pester her.
There were also the non-telepathists who stood out. Singh was th
e most striking. He had a mind as clear as standing water, into which one might plunge indefinitely without fathoming the limits of his compassion. Again, though, Howson preferred not to dip into Singh’s awareness. Too much of it was concerned with his own plight, and the patent impossibility of healing his deformity.
He chose rather to touch the minds that were more ordinary—staff and patients. At first he moved with utmost caution; then as he grew surer of his skill he grew bolder also, and spent long hours in contemplation that appealed to him the same way as movies and TV had formerly done. This was so much richer that the TV set standing in a corner of his room was not turned on after the first week of his stay.
The hospital held patients and staff of more than fifty nationalities. Their languages, customs, hopes and fears were endlessly fascinating to him, and it was only when he came back to reality, drunk with the delight of shared experience, after a voyage through a dozen minds, that he found himself seriously inclined to fall in with the wishes of Singh and Waldemar.
Yet he still hung back. There was one group of patients in the hospital whose minds he could not fail to be aware of, and who were sometimes responsible for his waking in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched, a victim of nameless terrors. They were the insane, lost in their private universes of illogic, and of course it was among them that the work of the staff telepathists lay.
Once, and only once, he “watched” a telepathic psychiatrist brace himself for a therapeutic session. The patient was a paranoid with an obsessive sexual jealousy, and the telepathist was attempting to locate the root experiences behind it. It was too big a job to be completed by telepathy, of course; once the experiences had been identified, there would be hypnosis, drug-abreaction and probably a regression in coma to bring the man to terms with his past. At the moment, though, his brain was a hell of irrational torments, and the telepathist had to pick his way through them like a man braving a jungle crammed with monsters.
Howson did not stay with the psychiatrist past that point. But he was more afraid than ever afterward.