“Oh yes. Rudi’s for ever trying to deflate him. I imagine he needed some mental acrobatics to fit you into the pattern, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been introduced to him yet.”
“Well, if that isn’t Rudi all over! Damn it, Brian’s been here the better part of an hour… Oh, maybe he’ll remember and bring you together sooner or later. Do you mind? Or would you rather get it over and go ?”
Howson shook his head. “I’m enjoying this,” he affirmed.
Someone tapped his arm and held a bottle ovehis now empty glass; he covered it quickly with his palm to indicate a refusal, and then turned to put it on a handy table. For a while there was a companionable silence between them, while the party’s chatter and music circled around like the winds enclosing a hurricane’s eye.
25
Finally, since Clara showed no immediate desire to move on, he stirred and glanced at her.
“Who and what, exactly, is Rudi ?” he asked. He was rather more interested in Rudi than in the other two he had met in the bar this evening. He had not trespassed in the younger man’s mind, of course; a single telepathic sweep would have told him all he wanted to know, but he shrank from the notion as he shrank from invading anyone’s mental privacy without invitation or necessity. Even on the strength of externals, however, Rudi impressed him as having a deeper and more mature personality than his friends.
“Rudi?” Clara blew smoke through her nostrils. “Rudi Allef is his full name. He’s half-Israeli. He came here on a UN grant He was doing — well, I think he was doing — some good work. Unfortunately it wasn’t the work he was supposed to do to qualify for the grant he was getting. So they discontinued it. So Jay and Charma Home—”
“Jay and Charma Horne ? Brother and sister ?”
Clara stared at him. “Whatever gave you that extraordinary-idea ? They’re married.”
“Married?”
“Well — why shouldn’t they be ?”
Howson recovered himself and shrugged; he didn’t do it too well, for reasons connected with the curvature of his spine. “It was just the way they were rowing with each other when I first met them Sorry, go on.”
“Ah-h-h — yes. So Jay and Charma, being slightly crazy anyway as you might expect in view of their having got married under the circumstances, quit in sympathy and aren’t finding life any too easy. Still, you were asking about Rudi, not the Homes. Rudi is — well, a problem.”
“Odd you should say that,” Howson remarked, puzzled. “Obviously you know him better than I do, but I’d have said he seemed like a well-balanced and integrated person.”
“He gives that impression, certainly.” Clara looked across the room to where the object of their discussion sat on the floor near the concertina-player. “Maybe one of these days, if he keeps the act up long enough, he’ll convince himself that’s the way he really is. And a good thing too. Otherwise he’ll suffer a serious breakdown and not be much good to himself or anybody else for a long, long time.”
Momentarily unsure whether they were talking about the same person, Howson stared. “Does he show signs of cracking?” he demanded.
She seemed to draw her mind back from elsewhere, and shook herself very slightly. “Oh, if you know where to look… I ought to circulate and attend to my guests, I suppose. See you later.”
She had just risen to her feet when she checked. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But you seem to be a bit of a problem yourself. Are you ?”
Howson looked at her as hard in the eye as he could. “You claim to be good at spotting problems,” he answered. “Make up your own mind.”
She flushed. “I deserved that,” she admitted, and turned away.
After which, Howson realized, he still didn’t know much about Rudi Allef.
But at that moment Rudi himself remembered the bomb he had wanted to place under Brian’s sociological theory. He climbed to his feet, dragged Brian out of the argument he was involved in, and presented Howson to him. More than ever, as he looked at Rudi’s eager grin, Howson found himself tempted to take a quick peep — just one! — inside that well-shaped head.
And if he did, and proceeded inadvertently to display a knowledge of Rudi he couldn’t possibly have obtained ordinarily in the course of such a short acquaintance… ? How-son suddenly realized what it must be like for a mulatto “passing” in a place where such things counted, and the room grew cold.
He just hadn’t known this feeling before. He was an undersized cripple; all right, these people were defiantly taking so much for granted. But even here there might be those who would consider him alien. Maybe, when the time came for them to find out who he really was (and that time would inevitably come, whether he was still among them or not), they would shrug and maintain their open-mindedness. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t.
Perhaps, in sheer self-defence, he ought to find out their opinions before committing himself—? He could do it in a moment!
Then he realized he had failed to catch something that was said to him, and reflexively picked the words out of Rudi’s mind. He was half-way through his answer before he realized what he had done, and the room grew even colder. He was so used to being among people from whom his talent was no secret that he had acquired many automatic habits such as that. The shock made him stumble in his reply, but he recovered quickly enough to hide his alarm.
The one glimpse inside Rudi’s mind had made the idea of probing deeper still more tempting, but he told himself carefully : he’s not my patient, not a professional colleague. I may have gone too far already — no farther!
He forced himself to concentrate on the conversation. Brian, whom he didn’t like at all, was shaking off his harassed mood and returning to his old comfortable dogmas. “After all,” he was saying, “people like Dr. Howson here are bound to be exceptions wherever you try to fit them in. I mean, they’re like trying to predict the next atom due to disintegrate in a chunk of uranium. You know one of them is going to pop, but you can’t say which. Equally, you know that Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere, but you couldn’t predict where without a lot of other data…”
He droned on, while Howson’s mind took hold of one short phrase and worried it over and over.
“Dr. Howson has to fit in somewhere!”
It was very much later when Clara sat down near him again. The room was far less crowded; some people had gone home, and others had apparently decided to camp out on the stairs.
“Oh, that Rudi!” she said in a tone Which mingled annoyance with tolerant long-suffering. “He’s out in the kitchen being miserable. You’d never think it to look at him, of course. He’s giving imitations of the stuffed shirts on the university staff, with props, and about half a dozen idiots are laughing at him.”
“If you wouldn’t think it to look at him, how would you know?” said Howson bluntly. Then a possibility occurred to him, and he caught himself. “I’m sorry. Presumably you know him very well.”
“If you think he’s my — well, shall we be polite and say ‘intimate friend’ ? — you’re wrong,” Clara countered in a cool, slightly reproachful voice. “As a matter of fact, I hardly knew him except by sight until this thing of his grant being stopped came up a short while ago.”