She paused, looking puzzled. “Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t be so…”
Howson shared her puzzlement. He had jumped to the exact conclusion Clara had just disabused him of; even though it didn’t fit quite all the facts, it was the most obvious explanation. But if that wasn’t the truth, what the — ?
Several people came out of the kitchen, laughing heartily, surrounding Rudi and clapping him on the back. Howson scanned the dark, good-looking face. No, it betrayed no hint of the misery Clara claimed to detect.
While his companions took their leave, reducing the number of survivors to a mere dozen or so, Rudi helped himself from a handy bottle without seeming to care much what was in it, and went back into the kitchen. Howson assumed he had gone to rejoin somebody. He looked around the room, trying to ignore the girl and the man n in the red sweater, who had progressed far beyond conversation as a means of showing their interest in each other.
“You seem, as I said before,” Clara remarked as she came back to him after seeing off the departing guests, “to have — to be — a problem. Yes, I’ve made up my own mind on the point. What’s worse, I’ve had to discard all the nice simple reasons to account for it. After all, you can’t be too badly handicapped if you’re a doctor. Correct?”
Her green eyes were very penetrating. Howson felt a prickle on his nape, and it had nothing to do with her reference to his deformity. With an attempt at lightness he said, “Do you put all your guests through detailed interrogation ?”
“Only the uninvited ones who intrigue me,” she said, unperturbed. “Like you, for instance.”
Howson suspended his intention to answer for a few seconds. A possibility had struck him which seemed on the face of it so unlikely that he was literally afraid to formulate it even to himself. He was still debating it when—
The shock almost threw him forward to the floor. The intensity of it blinded him completely; it raged inside his skull like a fire. He knew what it was, of course. Even before he had fully regained his senses he found himself shouting. “In the kitchen! It’s Rudi!”
Everyone in the room looked around in blank astonishment. And Howson realized that there hadn’t been a sound.
Everyone in the room — except, it dawned on him, Clara. And Clara, white-faced, was already opening the kitchen door. She couldn’t have reached it so quickly in answer to his words of warning. She couldn’t have. And that meant—
Cursing his unresponsive body, Howson struggled to his feet. Already half a dozen astonished people were crowding with a babble of horrified cries through the kitchen door.
Their voices were incoherent, and their minds were clouded with shock. It didn’t matter. Howson knew perfectly well what had happened.
The voice of Brian, the would-be sociologist, rose authoritatively above the din. “Don’t touch him! Get the little guy in here — he’s a doctor. And someone phone for an ambulance. Clara, is there a phone ?”
“Down the basement,” the girl answered in a shaky but controlled voice.
Meantime, Howson was dragging himself through five seconds of time slowed to the duration of an hour. I’m a doctor, he was thinking. I know about lesions of the cerebellum. I know about maladjustment and psychosis from the inside. But what the hell good is that to a guy leaking his life away on a hard kitchen floor?
They stood aside to let him pass, and he looked down with physical sight for the first time at something already too familiar to him. Rudi had literally and precisely committed hara-kiri (why? A tantalizing hint of explanation hovered just beyond Howson’s mental reach) with a common carving knife from a nearby drawer.
Now he was unconscious the blinding pain-signal from his mind was easier to shut out. But the pain of his own helplessness remained. These people — these people! — were looking to him for advice and guidance…
He found his voice. “Anyone gone for an ambulance?”
A chorus assured him someone had.
“Good. Then get out of here and shut the door. Keep as quiet as you can. Better yet, get the hell out of the apartment — no, the police may want to — oh, Wast the police! Go home!”
Clara was moving to join the others, but he frowned and said nothing, and she heard him. Shyly she closed the door and came back to his side.
“Know anything about this sort of thing ?” he said grimly.
“N-no. But I’ll do anything you say. Is there anything we can do?”
“He’ll be dead in about five minutes unless we do something.” Howson laughed without humour. “And the joke is that I’m not a medical doctor. I’ve never so much as dressed a cut finger in my life — barring my own.”
26
At the end of an eternal silence lasting the space of three heartbeats, she absorbed the words and was able to react. To herself she said, colouring the concepts with grey despair: Oh, God — poor stupid Rudi! And aloud, more fiercely, she said, “Then why did you say you were a doctor if you aren’t one?”
“But I am, of a kind. And things aren’t quite as bad as you’re imagining. Do you know you’re a receptive telepathist ?”
“A what?” Coming on top of the shock of seeing Rudi weltering in his pool of blood and undigested liquor, the information was at first meaningless. Howson sensed a shield of incomprehension and subconscious denial, and hammered at it.
“I’m telling you, you can read people’s minds. And my doctorate happens to be in curative telepathy. Got that ? Good! Now there’s one person in this room who knows — perhaps—what Rudi Allef needs to heal him. And that’s Rudi Allef.”
She tried to interrupt, but he rushed on, abandoning the use of slow words. Instead, he slammed whole blocks of associated concepts into her mind directly.
Deep in Rudi’s brain, as in all ordinary people’s, there’s what we all call body image — a master plan the body uses lor its major repairs. I’m going after it. You’ll have to take instructions from me and carry them out because my hands are too clumsy for delicate work. Don’t try to think for yourself — let go.
And with that, he simultaneously reached deep into Rudi’s failing mind and took over control of Clara’s hands.
She struggled, but gamely tried to overcome her instinctive resistance, and within a minute he was able to make her lift back Rudi’s shoulders so they could see the gashed opening in his belly.
The sight shocked her so much Howson momentarily lost control; he spared a valuable few seconds to reassure her and then continued his exploration of Rudi’s body image.
So many of his nerves were reporting damage and pain that he could not at first distinguish between them. He decreased his sensitivity, but that only resulted in a vague blur.
He sat down on a chair and steeled himself. Then he began again.
This time it was as if the nerves were reporting their agony directly to himself, from his own body lying torn and ruined. But none of that must be relayed to Clara, for it would render her incapable of assisting him. He had to absorb and master the pain within himself…
All right, now. What first? Stop the leakage of blood before the activity of the brain wasted completely away. Something — clips? Hair-clips? Didn’t women usually have such things?
Clara had some in a bowl only a foot from her shoulder. She seized them and furiously began to clip the open ends of the major bloodvessels. The weakening of the brain diminished, remained steady at an irreducible trickle.