She made a helpless gesture. “All I could tell was that he was — well, living a lie, as they say. Doing it well, but…”
She gestured to complete the statement. “Gerry, what are you doing here, anyway? You’re from Ulan Bator, aren’t you?”
“Yes — now. But I was born here.”
“Are you looking up old acquaintances?”
“I looked up a couple. That was a failure. No, I’m after new rather than old acquaintances. It’s partly a vacation, partly a voyage of self-discovery___You’ll find out what I mean some day.”
She accepted the hint. “So — what should I do now, to get back to my own worries ?” She smiled faintly.
“Officially, you should drop by the local World Health headquarters and take the aptitude tests. Then they’d fly you to Ulan Bator or Canberra or perhaps Hong Kong for proper training. But I’d say, give yourself time to get used to the prospect before you report in.”
“You seem awfully sure I will report in — yet if I asked you not to tell anyone about me I think you’d agree.”
“Of course. Only after a while you’ll get dissatisfied with your own awkwardness. You’ll get frustrated with things you don’t know how to handle. And one day you’ll say, ‘Ah, the hell with it,’ and go and ask how to use your gift to the full. It wasn’t telepathists who worked out the techniques, you know — it was ordinary psychologists who could no more project an impression than ride a bicycle to the moon. And now I want you to do something for me. Go down to the phone and call the hospital where they took Rudi — it’s the Main General. He’ll probably still be under sedation. Ask if we can — I’m sorry. Are you busy this morning ?”
She shook her head.
“Then ask if we, if you want to come, can see him. Tell them I’m Gerald Howson, Psi.D., Ulan Bator. They’ll fall over themselves to let me come.”
“Then why bother to call up first?”
Howson looked at her steadily. “I want them to have a chance to learn that I’m a runt with a gammy leg instead of a husky superman,” he said calmly. “It hurts less that way.”
Clara bit her lip. “That was tactless of me,” she said. “Yes,” said Howson, and got up. “I’ll go and have a wash while you’re making that call.”
27
Rudi Allef lay in his hospital bed with a cradle to keep the bedding off his injured abdomen. He was not unconscious, but he was chiefly aware of pain. The sedatives he had been given had reduced it to a level like that of a raging headache, and enabled him for short periods to sidestep it within his mind and think coherently; however, most of the time the effort simply did not seem worth while.
When Howson came to him, he lay unmoving with his eyes tightly shut.
The atmosphere and appearance of this place was very much like what he was used to at Ulan Bator, Howson found. What kept reminding him that he was actually a stranger was the ostentatious deference with which he, as a Psi.D. Ulan Bator, was treated. About half the staff had attempted to accompany him to Rudi’s ward, but he had shown temper for the first time in a long while and refused to permit anyone to come with him bar the surgeon who had operated on Rudi and the senior ward nurse. And Clara, naturally.
He could tell she was uncomfortable. Now that she was aware of her gift she was more able to receive the impressions it brought her, and she had not yet learned when in a hospital to concentrate on the undercurrent of healing beneath the ever-present sensations of pain. In memory of his own beginnings he loaned her self-confidence with his mind.
They came into the ward. Screens were drawn around the bed where Rudi lay with a rubber pipe taped to his arm; the last of several transfusions to make up his loss of blood was just ending.
The nurse parted the screens, let the visitors through, and drew them dose again. There was a chair ready for Howson by the bed; awkwardly, because it was full-sized, he scrambled on to it and peered into Rudi’s mind.
Meantime he spoke in words to the surgeon, saying, “What sort of state was he in when you operated ?”
“Bad,” said the surgeon, a straight-bodied woman of forty. “He’d have been dead if it hadn’t been for the first aid you gave him. It was just as well you were there, Dr. Howson—though I didn’t know curative telepathists ever had a full-scale medical course.”
“I never did,” Howson answered. And repeated, “I’d never more than bandaged a cut finger before.”
He could feel resentment hardening in her as the words sank in; it meant, “Not only is this little cripple possessed of superior powers — he can do my job for me without training, without trouble, and boast about his success…”
“That’s hardly a fair thought,” Howson said mildly. “I’m sorry, but it’s not, you know!”
Clara, who had been listening with puzzlement, interrupted unexpectedly. “You should have seen what it cost him! The pain he must have—”
Clara! The single warning thought cut off her hasty words.
“All right,” he said aloud. “May I have silence, please ?”
Rudi…
The figure on the bed stirred very slightly. That was the only visible clue to his reaction. But inside his head he was answering.
What do you want, you interfering bastard?
I saved your life, Rudi.
For what? For pain like this? You condemned me to it when you interfered and stopped me doing what I meant to do.
Howson took a deep breath. He had said earlier to Clara that a projective telepathist could tell a lie convincingly; now he summoned up all his reserves to prove the corollary — that he could equally convincingly tell the truth.
I know, Rudi. I can feel that pain as sharply as you, remember! I’m fully aware of what I’ve done to you. Now I must give you something to compensate — happiness, or satisfaction, whatever you want that I can let you have. Otherwise how would my conscience treat me?
The whole mind was involved in this. Behind the verbalized projection, smoothly, automatically, Howson fed in a reflection of Rudi’s suffering, filtered through his own mind, impressed with his own personality.
A feeble flicker of disbelief: But you’re nothing to me. We’re strangers, and today we might have been a thousand miles apart.
Nobody is nothing to one of us. And behind that, because it was too complex to put into words, Howson made himself consciously feel what was usually so much a part of himself that he never gave it a thought — the shared quality of a telepathist’s existence, the need and hunger and yearning which were all the ordinary individual’s needs and hungers and yearnings a million fold multiplied, as if in a hall of mirrors by reflection redoubling and redoubling themselves away towards infinity.
This was why a telepathist became a peacemaker, or a psychiatrist, or a curative telepathist, or a disputes arbitrator — helping people to be happier or better off or more fulfilled. It was also why he had been eager to tell splendid glamorous telepathic stories to the deaf-and-dumb girl he now knew as Mary Williams, and why he had been so bitterly disappointed to learn that the pleasure had turned into a Greek gift.
It was also why (though ordinary people were always suspicions Of the assertion unless they had been shown its truth by someone like Howson) there had never been a telepathist who was antisocial, who became a master criminal or general of an army. No telepathist could stand in the place of Chaka Zulu and order his hordes to ravage a season’s journey in the direction in which he cast his spear; no telepathist could consign fellow-beings to a gas chamber, or annihilate them in atomic war. They were too human to have shed all desire for power, but to enjoy it they had to take the road into the isolation of madness; in the real world they suffered their victims” pain, and had no pleasure from cruelty.