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 practised 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 leapt up in Singh’s appalled mind.
“Ohhh!” 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 co-operated — 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 until 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 re-learn 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. Good-bye, Pan. And thank you.”
21
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 centre, 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.