And then the crisis broke, and Howson, uncooperative, was left on one side while frantic attempts were made at rescue.
His picture of what was really going on remained for a long time rather confused. He hadn’t bothered to look at a newspaper or switch on a TV news bulletin for weeks now; if he had done so he would have learned immediately that Hemmikaini’s “second best” hadn’t been good enough, and as a result the crisis in Southern Africa had turned into a dirty, bloc/ody, tangled mess.
While Makerakera, the expert on aggression, sweated frantically to weld together a scratch team of whoever could be spared to join him—Choong from Hong Kong, Jenny Pender from Indiana, Stanislaus Danquah from Accra, and some trainees—the little Greek Pericles Phra- nakis turned his back on the catastrophe and went away down a path of his own, to a land where success had crowned his efforts with a wreath of bay.
At Salisbury, Nairobi, Johannesburg, the troops came down from the sky; after them, the mobile hospitals, the transport copters, the cans and sacks and bales of basic food; after them, the jurists and the politicians (what do you do with a man in jail on a murder charge when the organs of the arraigning government collapse?). A great hollow silence succeeded the tumult, and it was broken by the sound of children crying.
Meantime, a Mach Five stratoplane carried the shell of Pericles Phranakis to Ulan Bator, and the computers were proved right: it would take Ilse Kronstadt to cope with the crisis, and if she couldn’t go to it, it would come to her.
Howson caught stray images from the fantasy Phranakis was enjoying, and shuddered. He was reminded strongly of his own daydreams, which—according to Danny Waldemar, at least—might finally have tempted him to enter a catapathic grouping with the deaf-and-dumb girl. Thinking of the first such, he remembered the dust on Vargas’ eyes, and almost moaned aloud.
A curious sense of isolation had resulted from the diversion of everyone’s thoughts to Phranakis, and in a panic because he was experiencing loneliness—worse by contrast with the month-long flow of concern about him that he had been basking in—he hastened to involve himself with the problems occupying the outstanding minds near him.
He did not immediately venture to intrude on the privacy of Ilse Kronstadt herself, but he sensed her anxiety like a bad odor. Dimly he grasped the fact that even if Phranakis had failed, he was still regarded as the nearest competitor she had in her original specialty, the elimination of aggression; facing the task of breaking open his fantasy, she quailed.
Embarrassed, he switched his attention elsewhere, and found Phranakis forming a paranoid obsession in the forefront of the staff’s collective mind. Like a flight of crows following a plowman, people who knew him were coming in, and the voices of the dead on paper and on record and on film spoke guidance to Ilse Kronstadt. When he was five years old, he did such-and-so; with his first girl, he liked to do this; during his training in telepathy, he had difficulty with that.
As a sculptor might take odds and ends of scrap metal and fuse them into a work of art, Ilse Kronstadt now selected from these data and created a mental image of Phranakis. Howson was fascinated; he was so absorbed that he never realized when he trespassed on her awareness for the first time. Either he did not notice that he was “watching” her, or she was too preoccupied to care. He thought the latter, and felt a stab of guilt at his unwillingness to exploit his own talent as she was exploiting hers.
Sitting still as stone in the special chair more comfortable than any he had ever used before, he absorbed the self-disciplining methods by which she built up her sagging confidence. There were glimpses of past successes, which had seemed equally daunting yet which ended in triumph; there were concepts of self-esteem, conceit almost, deliberately fostered to strengthen her determination.
Howson followed all this with jaw-cramping concentration. Even so, when he let his mind wander toward Phranakis, he was shaken. How could anyone—even the unprecedented Dr. Kronstadt—disturb the armored fantasy around the man’s ego now?
He forgot he was Gerald Howson. He forgot he was a cripple, a runt, a bleeder, an orphan. He remembered only that he was a telepathist, able to snatch facts from any mind he chose if the owner gave permission, and with desperate eagerness filled out his knowledge of what had led to this impasse.
Phranakis: this was how he felt to himself before he went into fugue; this was the face he saw daily in his mirror; this was the mother he remembered, the father, the brothers and sisters; this was the road that took him to Athens and the disappointments of early manhood, this was the room where he was first shocked into knowledge of his real identity. …
Southern Africa: this was the ulcer festering below the slick modern surface; this was the hatred of dark against light skin and this was the greed that burst into violence … He visualized the huge Polynesian, Makerakera, walking a sunny street and absorbing hate like a camera; he was one of the rare receptive telepathists with no projective “voice,” like the therapy watchdogs and lay analysts Howson had met here at the hospital. He knew images of long corridors, rooms where solemn men met to plan this first attempt to give meaning to the ancient platitude about the best time to stop a war. He sensed the reaction of Phranakis when he realized his work had failed: he saw it as nemesis, the reward of hubris, the illimitable conceit which offended the gods of his ancestors.
And he looked also into the minds and lives of those whom Phranakis had taken with him. Taken: that was the .really unique aspect of this case, and the one which frightened Ilse Kronstadt worst.
For such was Phranakis’ power that he had not had to wait on the willingness of the reflective personalities in his catapathic grouping. He had simply taken them over—four of his closest non-telepathic associates—and dragged them down with him into his unreal universe.
As awed and fascinated as a rabbit facing a snake, Howson traced the course of events around him. Far below, where the specialists and the high politicians and the families and friends were gathered, they were bringing Phranakis to the room where Ilse Kronstadt waited to do him battle. The hospital seemed to draw in on itself, to tauten till it sang apprehension like a fiddle string. Howson tautened with it, lost to the world, and scarcely dared to breathe.
xii
Down the streets of his brain a procession moved. As youths and maidens, garlanded with flowers, danced in his honor, the grave elders gathered at the shrine of Pallas Athene. There they made ready the wreath of bay with which to crown the champion. For all their boasts and cunning, the barbarians had gone down to defeat. The city was safe; civilization and freedom survived, while far away a tyrant cursed and ordered the execution of his generals.
There was a city, certainly. There were, in a sense, elders gathered to the presence of their champion. But Aesculapius was closer to their minds than Athene, and the crown they had prepared for his head was a light metal frame trailing leads to a complex encephalograph. There was no tyrant, apart from the demon of hate, but there were definitely barbarians, although they had passed for civilized until they were broken and demoralized. They had conquered Pericles Phranakis, and were still defying the forces sent against them. He had refused to face that knowledge, and now he had forgotten.
His swarthy face contented, he lay in what was basically a bed, but could become an extension of his body if required. Apart from the instruments monitoring every physical response—heartbeat, respiration, brain rhythms, blood pressure and a dozen more—there were elaborate prosthetics attached to him. At present he was being fed artificially, while the other devices remained inert. Should the shock of recovery prove as violent as the shock of collapse, he might relinquish all attempts to live. Then the heart masseur, the oxygenator, the artificial kidney would fight against vagal inhibition and maintain life in his body until he had painfully accepted the frustration of his planned escape from the world.
Nearby Ilse Kronstadt had composed herself amid a similar array of instruments. In a chair at her side was a young man with a pale, anxious face??
?a recently qualified receptive telepathist serving as her therapy watchdog. Once she had entered Phranakis’ self-glorifying world, she would be unable to communicate verbally with the nervous doctors supervising the process. By turns around the clock this young man and three others would “listen” to her struggles, and report anything the doctors needed to know.
One by one the technicians, the specialists, the telepathist nodded to Singh, who stood at the foot of Use Ilse Kronstadts bed remembering her past triumphs and trying not to pay too much attention to the mass of cancerous tissue spreading beneath her brain. She looked very small and old lying among the machinery of the, bed, and although she had not told him directly, he knew she was afraid.
“We’re ready, Ilse,” he said in the levelest tone he could manage.
Without opening her eyes, she answered, “Me, too. You can keep quiet now.”
Then, with no further warning, she let herself go. How it could be perceived, Singh had never been able to work out, but it was unmistakable: one second, she was conscious and aware of her body; the next, it was a shell, and she was in another universe.
He kept his aching eyes on the pale face of the watchdog, and was dismayed after only a couple of minutes to see a shock of surprise reflected there. In the same instant Ilse stirred.
“Strong …” she said in a faraway voice
The alarmed audience oozed tension almost tangibly. She licked her lips and went on, “I have the picture of his fantasy now. He’s the great hero, defender of Athens, darling of the gods and idol of the people. … I can’t break in, Pan! Not without making myself so obvious he’ll summon all his will to resist.”
“Take your time,” Singh said reassuringly. “There’s bound to be a chance to form a covering role in the fantasy. It may take time to develop, but it’ll come.”
“I know.” The voice was faint, almost ghostly. Singh wondered how much of it he was actually hearing, how much experiencing telepathically. The bloodless lips scarcely moved. “He has fabulous control, Pan. The schizoid secondaries are unbelievably contrasted. And he’s got them from the reflectives as well as from himself.”
Singh bit his lip. Only superb powers of self-deception could create the schizoid secondary personalities—individuals acting their part in the drama whose thoughts and reactions were only observable, not controllable, by the telepathist’s ego. Without seeming to pause, however, he uttered new comfort.
“That ought to make it easier, surely! He won’t be surprised at the appearance of an intruder.”
“He hasn’t left room for intruders!” The objection was a shrill cry. “It’s like a flower unfolding—it’s complete and all it has to do is spread out and be perfect!”
No matter how desperately he wanted to, Singh could find no reassuring counter to that. A fantasy so elaborate must have been Phranakis’ companion for years, nurtured in his subconscious, polished and perfected until he could unreel it like a movie film, without any of the hesitations or doubts which would afford an entry for the therapist, disguised as a mere mental pawn.
Thickly he said, “Well, have patience, Ilse. When the situation looks hopeful, we’ll disturb his brain rhythms and let you in.”
No answer. Why should there be? Other, lesser therapists had resorted to such crude devices; Ilse Kronstadt had never needed to. Already, even before the job was under way, there was a sour smell of defeat in the room.
Alice Through the Looking Glass: a path that always turned back on itself, no matter how you struggled to reach your goal.
A concept from relativity: the twisting of space itself.
An image from a science-fiction movie: a barrier of force glowing blue with brush discharges.
A fragment of legend: a wall of magic fire enclosing the place where an enchanted maiden slept away the centuries.
So frightened by the mystery of what was happening that he could not tear himself away from it, Howson snatched these and other mental pictures from the minds of those engaged in the attempt to cure Phranakis. They were clues, no more: they were the personal labels that had been hung on catapathic grouping by people who found unlabeled concepts intolerable. Previously he had accepted Waldemar’s explanation. He hadn’t thought that the reality would be so far beyond preconception, the sun beside the moon, the continent beside the map.
He had probed the minds of conscious telepathists. There he had found the familiar world mirrored: law ruled the passage of event, solid was solid, the senses murmured their news of the body’s condition. But Phranakis had closed and locked every door to the ordinary world, and although there were windows—of one-way glass facing inward, so to say—what went on behind them was insane.
Knowing it, Howson wished with all his might for the will to resist such temptation. He saw his own fantasies paralleled in Phranakis’—the hero concepts, the organization of everything around his whim, so that nothing disturbed, nothing upset, nothing offended the all-wise master. Here the human will to power, checked in conscious telepathists by the deterrent of other people suffering, could find ghastly outlet. Already the sado-masochistic impulses Phranakis had so long detested were creeping from shadow and coloring the fantasy.
They were casting down captives from the Acropolis, that the city’s savior might the more enjoy his triumph to the music of their screams—
Abruptly the smooth course of the action was shattered. It was like an earthquake; buildings shivered, people wavered, the sky darkened. It lasted only a moment, but the impact was staggering. Howson’s contact was broken, and it was several minutes before he could resume it.
“She’s in,” the therapy watchdog reported, his face drawn by the strain into an inhuman mask. “A captive condemned to death. Trying to get the attention of the hero-ego.”
Singh nodded thoughtfully. “That figures. Fits the data we have on his sexual preferences. Any idea what the long- -term plan is?”
“Fixed for a short distance,” the watchdog said. “Idea is: lure him to a sexual situation, rely on failing control to establish dominance. … Three main sequences envisaged—want them?”
“If nothing more interesting is developing.”
“No.” The watchdog had to pause and swallow hard. “The captives are still being thrown off the rock. Well, either she’ll establish a quasi-real knife—under cover of a banquet, maybe—and castrate him publicly, or she’ll get him into a drunken stupor and establish a fire in the temple, which is why she wanted the material on the destruction of the Parthenon, or she’ll start picking off the reflectives and stage a slave revolt.”
Singh closed his eyes. After all his years of work as a doctor, he was still capable of being sickened at the coldbloodedness of some of his and his colleagues’ methods. What the public castration would do to Phranakis, he dared not think—but it figured. If anything could blast him out of his fugue, that would. AH All the material on his sexual life pointed to the need to reassure himself about his masculinity. The real world had never threatened him with anything so horrible as what Ilse was preparing.
Howson was following developments better now. He had discovered the reason for the “earthquake”—some sort of electrical impulse had been applied to Phranakis’ organ of Funck, to make an opening for Ilse Kronstadt. Now it was much easier to eavesdrop; she made a link with normal consciousness. With fascinated disgust he came to comprehend her plans, and had to force himself to remember that unless something brutal jarred him out of his pleasant dream, Phranakis was as good as dead, and along with him four valuable, hard-working non-telepa- thists whose precious individuality he had trampled on. In a sense he deserved what was coming. But … could anyone really deserve it?
“She’s getting very tired,” the watchdog whispered, as though Use Ilse could overhear him. That was absurd: nothing could reach her now except the full violence of another telepathist. All her energy had been transmuted to will power as she altered, added to and undermined the pattern of Phranakis’ fantasy.
“Is th
e crisis close?” Singh muttered.
“She’s summoning up all her resources. Trying to distract him with sexual images while she fixes the knife— Oh, God!”
Everyone present, and Howson in his room high overhead, started at the moaning cry. Eyes rolling with terror, not seeing his surroundings but the fearful mental drama between Use Ilse and Phranakis, the watchdog gasped out the truth.
“She’s weakening! She’s losing control and he’s creating guards for himself—schizoids, an army of them! He’s made himself Cadmus and thrown down dragon’s teeth and soldiers are springing from the floor!”
“Bring her back!” Singh cried, and knew even as he spoke that it was ridiculous. Someone—he didn’t bother to notice who—put the fact into words.
“If you try and wake her now she’ll leave half of herself behind, Pan. And she’d rather be dead than crippled.”
So this was how it felt to lose. …
She was very tired. It was almost a relief to feel her imaginary self pinioned by the arms, unable to struggle any longer. There were soldiers all around her, huge men with swarthy faces and coarse beards, armored with bronze and leather. Like a forest they stretched away under the dim roof of the marble hall. There had been a banquet, and a thousand revelers—puppets, a human setting for the glory of the master she had attempted to overthrow.
Had there been a banquet? Already she was uncertain where illusion ended; there was actual pain from the brutal grasp on her arms, and that made it difficult to concentrate. The world wavered. She was—she was—a captive. Yes; a condemned enemy, spared by clemency, caught in treachery. And her sentence was fixed, without appeal, by her intended victim.
Death.
Justice! approved the roar of a thousand voices, making her skull ring like the echoing marble roof. Justice!