Rudolph J. Clausius
Proved universally
Chaos will show
Increase in processes
Thermodynamical.
Something that housekeepers
Already know.
JOURNEY’S END
—doctor bill & twinges in chest but must be all right maybe indigestion & dinner last night & wasn’t audrey giving me the glad eye & how the hell is a guy to know & maybe i can try and find out & what a fool i can look if she doesn’t—
—goddam idiot & they shouldn’t let some people drive & oh all right so the examiner was pretty lenient with me i haven’t had a bad accident yet & christ blood all over my blood let’s face it i’m scared to drive but the buses are no damn good & straight up three paces & man in a green hat & judas i ran that red light—
In fifteen years a man got used to it, more or less. He could walk down the street and hold his own thoughts to himself while the surf of unvoiced voices was a nearly ignored mumble in his brain. Now and then, of course, you got something very bad, it stood up in your skull and shrieked at you.
Norman Kane, who had come here because he was in love with a girl he had never seen, got to the corner of University and Shattuck just when the light turned against him. He paused, fetching out a cigarette with nicotine-yellowed fingers while traffic slithered in front of his eyes.
It was an unfavorable time, four-thirty in the afternoon, homeward rush of nervous systems jangled with weariness and hating everything else on feet or wheels. Maybe he should have stayed in the bar down on San Pablo. It had been pleasantly cool and dim, the bartender’s mind an amiable cud-chewing somnolence, and he could have suppressed awareness of the woman.
No, maybe not. When the city had scraped your nerves raw, they didn’t have much resistance to the slime in some heads.
Odd, he reflected how often the outwardly polite ones were the foully twisted inside. They wouldn’t dream of misbehaving in public, but just below the surface of consciousness… Better not think of it, better not remember. Berkeley was at least preferable to San Francisco or Oakland. The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone. New York was almost literally uninhabitable.
There was a young fellow waiting beside Kane. A girl came down the sidewalk, pretty, long yellow hair and a well-filled blouse. Kane focused idly on her: yes, she had an apartment of her own, which she had carefully picked for a tolerant superintendent. Lechery jumped in the young man’s nerves. His eyes followed the girl, Cobean-style, and she walked on… simple harmonic motion.
Too bad. They could have enjoyed each other. Kane chuckled to himself. He had nothing against honest lust, anyhow not in his liberated conscious mind; he couldn’t do much about a degree of subconscious puritanism. Lord, you can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.
—the trouble is, he thought, they hurt me. but i can’t tell them that. they’d rip me apart and dance on the pieces. the government/ the military/ wouldn’t like a man to be alive who could read secrets but their fear-inspired anger would be like a baby’s tantrum beside the red blind amok of the common man (thoughtful husband considerate father good honest worker earnest patriot) whose inward sins were known. you can talk to a priest or a psychiatrist because it is only talk & he does not live your failings with you—
The light changed and Kane started across. It was clear fall weather, not that this area had marked seasons, a cool sunny day with a small wind blowing up the street from the water. A few blocks ahead of him, the University campus was a splash of manicured green under brown hills.
—flayed & burningburningburning moldering rotted flesh & the bones the white hard clean bones coming out gwtjklfmx—
Kane stopped dead. Through the vertigo he felt how sweat was drenching into his shirt.
And it was such an ordinary-looking man!
«Hey, there, buster, wake up! Ya wanna get killed?»
Kane took a sharp hold on himself and finished the walk across the street. There was a bench at the bus stop and he sat down till the trembling was over.
Some thoughts were unendurable.
He had a trick of recovery. He went back to Father Schliemann. The priest’s mind had been like a well, a deep well under sun-speckled trees, its surface brightened with a few gold-colored autumn leaves… but there was nothing bland about the water, it had a sharp mineral tang, a smell of the living earth. He had often fled to Father Schliemann, in those days of puberty when the telepathic power had first wakened in him. He had found good minds since then, happy minds, but never one so serene, none with so much strength under the gentleness.
«I don’t want you hanging around that papist, boy, do you understand?» It was his father, the lean implacable man who always wore a black tie. «Next thing you know, you’ll be worshiping graven images just like him.»
«But they aren’t—»
His ears could still ring with the cuff. «Go up to your room! I don’t want to see you till tomorrow morning. And you’ll have two more chapters of Deuteronomy memorized by then. Maybe that’ll teach you the true Christian faith.»
Kane grinned wryly and lit another cigarette from the end of the previous one. He knew he smoked too much. And drank—but not heavily. Drunk, he was defenseless before the horrible tides of thinking.
He had had to run away from home at the age of fourteen. The only other possibility was conflict ending with reform school. It had meant running away from Father Schliemann too, but how in hell’s red fire could a sensitive adolescent dwell in the same house as his father’s brain? Were the psychologists now admitting the possibility of a sadistic masochist? Kane knew the type existed.
Give thanks for this much mercy, that the extreme telepathic range was only a few hundred yards. And a mind-reading boy was not altogether helpless; he could evade officialdom and the worst horrors of the underworld. He could find a decent elderly couple at the far end of the continent and talk himself into adoption.
Kane shook himself and got up again. He threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his heel. A thousand examples told him what obscure sexual symbolism was involved in that act, but what the deuce… it was also a practical thing. Guns are phallic too, but at times you need a gun.
Weapons: he could not help wincing as he recalled dodging the draft in 1949. He’d traveled enough to know this country was worth defending. But it hadn’t been any trick at all to hoodwink a psychiatrist and get himself marked hopelessly psychoneurotic—which he would be after two years penned with frustrated men. There had been no choice, but he could not escape a sense of dishonor.
—haven’t we all sinned/ everyone of us/ is there a single human creature on earth without his burden of shame?—
A man was coming out of the drugstore beside him. Idly, Kane probed his mind. You could go quite deeply into anyone’s self if you cared to, in fact you couldn’t help doing so. It was impossible merely to scan verbalized thinking: the organism is too closely integrated. Memory is not a passive filing cabinet, but a continuous process beneath the level of consciousness; in a way, you are always reliving your entire past. And the more emotionally charged the recollection is, the more powerfully it radiates.
The stranger’s name was—no matter. His personality was as much an unchangeable signature as his fingerprints. Kane had gotten into the habit of thinking of people as such-and-such a multidimensional symbolic topography; the name was an arbitrary gabble.