"You seem awfully certain that I will report in—and yet I'm sure you wouldn’t announce my existence if I asked you not to."

  "Of course I wouldn't. Only after a while you’ll get dissatisfied with your own incompetence; you'll get frustrated by things you don't know how to handle. Then one day you'll say, ‘Ah, the hell with it‘, and go and ask to learn how to use your gift properly." He shrugged. “It wasn’t telepathists who worked out the techniques for using it, 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 me a favour. Go to phone and call the hospital where they took Rudi—it's the Main General, and he’ll be in Queen's Ward, probably under sedation still. 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 sec him. Give them my name, Gerald Howson, and tell them I'm Psi. D.. Ulan Bator. They'll fall over themselves to let us come" .

  “Then why bother to call them up first?"

  Howson looked at her steadily. "I want them to have a chance to learn that I'm a lame dwarf instead of a husky superman." he said calmly. “It—hurts me less that way.”

  Clara looked away. "That was tactless of me," she said.

  “Yes.” said Howson, and got up. “I’ll make myself smart while you go and call the hospital.”

  Rudi Allef lay in his hospital bed with a cradle keeping 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 the level of a raging headache, which enabled him for short periods to sidestep it inside his mind and think coherently, but most of the time the effort simply did not seem worthwhile.

  When Howson came to him, he lay unmoving with his eyes tightly shut.

  The hospital was very much the same as any other hospital, and Howson of course was used to these surroundings. The hardly veiled deference with which he. as a Psi D. Ulan Bator, was treated was the thing which most frequently reminded him that he was actually a stranger here. It seemed that about half the staff wanted to accompany him to the patient's bed. but he showed temper for the first time in many months, and refused to permit anyone but the surgeon who had operated and the nurse in charge to come with him. And Clara, naturally.

  Howson could tell she was uncomfortable; now that she knew of her gift, she was more able to receive the impressions it gave 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. Out of momentary sympathy, and in memory of his own beginnings, he loaned her self-confidence with his mind.

  They came into the ward, and screens were drawn around the bed where Rudi lay. A rubber pipe was taped to his aim; he would have been given several transfusions to build up his diminished blood supply.

  Howson stepped between the screens, and the nurse drew them close behind the party. There was a chair there already: awkwardly, because it was a full-sired chair, Howson 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?" “Bad,” said the surgeon, a straight-bodied woman of forty. “He would have been dead if it hadn't been for the first-aid he received. It was just as well you were there. Dr. Howson —though I didn't know curative telepathists ever had a full-scale medical course."

  ‘They don’t," said Howson. And repeated, "I'd never even so much as bandaged a cut finger before."

  He could feel the resentment hardening in her as the words sank in: it meant, “Not only is this little cripple possessed of powers superior to mine —he can do my job for me without training, without difficulty, and boast about his success .

  “That's hardly a fair thought," he said, not realising he had said it. “I'm sorry. But it's not. you know."

  Clara, who had been listening with puzzlement, interrupted unexpectedly. “You should have seen what it tost 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 all the others could see. Inside his mind, Rudi was saying, "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 wanted to do.

  I know. Howson had said last night to Clara that a projective telepathist could tell a lie convincingly; now he summoned up all his reserves to prove the corollary—that be could equally convincingly tell the truth.

  I know. Rudi. I can feel that pain as much aa you, you know. I’m fully aware of what I've caused you. Now I have to give you something in return—happiness, maybe, or satisfaction, whatever you want that / can

  let you have. Otherwise how would

  my conscience treat me?

  The whole mind was involved in this; behind the verbalised projection, smoothly, automatically in spite of Rudi's suffering, filtered through his own mind, impressed with his own personality.

  A feeble flicker of disbelief: Bur you’re nothing ro me. We’re strangers; we met by chance and might have been a thousand miles apart today if it hadn’t been for what / did.

  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 telepathists 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 reflections re-doubling and re-doubling themselves away towards infinity.

  That was why a telepathist became a peacemaker, or a psychiatrist, or a curative telepathist, or an industrial disputes arbitrator—all helping jobs, helping people to be happier or better off or more fulfilled. It was also why he had told splendid glamorous telepathic stories to the deaf-and-dumb girl he now knew as Mary Williams, and why he had been so bitterly disappointed when he learned that hit youthful fumbling attempt to give her happiness had turned into a Creek gift

  It was also why (though normal people could never quite accept that fact unless they had been shown by someone such as Howson) there would never be a telepathist who would be antisocial, who would be a master criminal or general of an army. No telepathist could ever have stood in the place of Chaka Zulu and ordered his hordes to ravage a sea-ion’s, journey in the direction he had cut his spear; no telepathist could ever have ordered his fellow-beings to Belsen; no telepathist could ever have dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

  It was also the naked truth.

  Rudi’s eyes flickered open, and ho looked at the vacant face masking the keen mind. Last night, when they first met, he had ignored the conventional reaction to Howson’s small stature, deformity, unprepossessing appearance—but because on principle be ignored the conventions which demanded the reactions. He was half-Israeli ; perhaps his people had a legacy of conventional prejudices enough to last them for eternity—all directed against them. So, by analogy, he would have leaned over backwards to avoid offending a Negro. So do and have long done millions of people; only most of them, if they fail to learn the logic of prejudice, learn the logic of self-interest and therefore conform. Rudi. now, would not.

  He yielded; it was easy to yield and go back Into his fog of pain. For Howson. it was very hard, but it had to be done—and he bad done it very often in the put.

  Why did you do if. Rudi?

  A complex picture of dissatisfaction with the work he had set himself to do: with the reception it had bad; with the inability of other people to understand what he was doing. Add to that; money troubles, because of the stopping of his grant: emotional problems on a personal level—he needed the affection and acceptance of a woman, any woman, but she must understand his needs—he was good-looking and pleasant, but that was not enough to secure him the right person. He had tried man; the last had been cruel. And the mask he had put up to protect himself against the scrutiny of the world had proved his undoing—people who could not penetrate it, and therefore had no idea of tha turmoil of sorrow boiling in his brain, had been tactless, unkind, re-opening old sores unknowingly.

  So he had picked up a knife, and thought how much he would like oblivion.

  But Howson could see behind the mask, and therefore would not be tactless and unkind: be understood Rudi’s needs, and could help and advise him. Money troubles—Howson dismissed them with s sudden gesture of annoyance, vividly pictured in his mind. In the same instant he went straight ahead to the factor which all through Rudi’s bitter survey of his reasons for suicide had taken the foremost place: his work.

  What work is this.

  Chaos, mingled with striving. Behind it all, very deep, was s need to create and bring forth—Howson found It amazingly feminine, much reminiscent of certain urges he had known in the deep unconscious of frustrated single women. From this sprang in unity several consequences; he saw them presented to him all at once, but had to verbalise them in sequence.

  Though feminine, this impulse was also essentially human. It had byproducts which be at once noticed and dismissed—ouch as that the reason for the agony in Rudi’s creative activity was that his deep unconscious saw it as a parturition, and that brings pain, and that the reason why he chose to attempt suicide by hara-kiri was because it represented a Caesarian delivery on the cross-reference identity level of his mind.

  But Rudi’s deep unconscious could only inform the probing, inquisitorial mind why he needed to create at all; it could not explain the nature of the creation and the way in which Rudi was tackling it. Howson. drew back, dizzying for a moment as be discovered his own body to be cramped and stiff. No matter he usually worked on a bed, attended by a

  Mint and watched ever as anxiously as the patient, for he was nearly oblivious of himself when he was probing deeply. Naturally he was uncomfortable here.

  ‘There’s too much pain,* he told the surgeon shortly. "Would it be safe for him to get a local In the stomach wall?"

  Then he focused his physical vision, and found that the nurse had already lifted up the bedclothes and was preparing an injection. He looked blank, and then, struck by a sudden thought, turned to Clara, who stood white-faced holding the bar at the foot of the bed.

  She read the question before he could utter it, and nodded. "You... you told me about therapy watchdogs. I’ve already asked for him to be given an anaesthetic."

  Howson felt a deep wave of appreciation and gratitude; he did not check it, but projected it as it stood, and Clara flushed with sudden embarrassment.

  How do you fee/.*

  Oh. Gerry—it’s magnificent, but it’s somehow absolutely terrifying at the same time!

  Howson hesitated for a moment, and then, as if confessing a serious error of judgment, he said in words, "You know, I might have been wrong last night. Maybe you won't have to report in and ask to be taught bow to use your gift properly."

  The nurse and the surgeon exchanged puzzled glances at this sudden illogical dialogue.

  “But"—Clara seemed just as astonished—"but you’re teaching me! You're teaching roe all the time!'’

  The nurse gently touched Rudi's bandaged abdomen; he did not wince or cry out. "The local's taken effect, Dr. Howson," she said quietly.

  “Fine."

  Rudi!

  Yes . ? A pure conscious note of interrogation, blended with assent and willingness to co-operate.

  And Howson settled down to find clarity and order in something that was not clear to Rudi himself.

  Springing from the fundamental creative urge were the reasons why this urge could not find an outlet in writing, painting, sculpture, or anything else where the creator was divorced from his audience. Rudi could never be satisfied to create something and leave other people, elsewhere, to appreciate it. That same appreciation fed and renewed his desire to create, as an actor feeds on a "good audience" and rises to new interpretative heights.

  And yet acting, again, would be inadequate for Rudi, because it was interpretative. So was ballet; so was almost every other form of art in which there was the direct audience contact Rudi craved—although he had been a first-class debater, conjuring up splendid impromptu speeches. (Howson had to sift through a dozen such qualifications and explanations before he arrived at a clear picture of what Rudi. actually was trying to do.)

  Essentially, though, It was music which attracted him most. And—

  And Howson found himself on the top of a dizzying slide, lost his footing, and went headlong skidding and slipping Into a vast uncharted jungle of interlocked sensory experiences.

  Rudi Allef's mind was almost as far from the normal as was Howson’s own, but in a different direction; somehow, Rudi*s sense-data cross-referred, interchangeably. Howson had trespassed in minds with a limited tort of audio-vision—those of people to whom musical sounds called up associated memories of colours or pictures—but compared to what went on in Rudi’s mind that was puerile.

  (Once, long before, Howson had seen a tattered and scratched print of Disney’s Fantasia; he had enjoyed it, and had wished that there had been more attempts to combine sound and virion in a similar way. Now he was finding out what the combination could be like on the highest level.)

  Like a swimmer struggling in a torrential river, Howson felt wildly for solidity in this roaring stream of memory. Images presented themselves: a voice/velvet/a kitten's claws scratching/purple/ripe fruit—a ship’s siren/fog/steel/yellowish-grey/cold/insecurity/sense of lose and emptiness—a common chord of C major struck on a piano/childhood/ wood/black and white overlaid with bright gold/security/hate/something burning/tightness about the fore-head/shame/stiffness in the wrists/ liquidity/roundness...

  There was virtually no end to that one. Howson drew back a little and tried again.

  He was walking through a forest of ferns a hundred feet high with gigantic animals browsing off their bark; he was rather tired, as if he had walked a long way, and the sun was extremely hot. But he came to a blue river and became an ice-floe bobbing on a gentle current, melting slowly into the water around. He/the water plunged over a precipice: the pain of striking rock after rock in the long descent was somehow satisfying and fulfilling, because he was standing back watching the white spray as he flowed down and there was solidity slowly being worn away as the water eroded the underlying rocks and the spray diffused out with vastness and blackness and far down below a sensation of warmth and redness not seen but imagined (infra-redness?) as though he was on an airless world with a red sun. a giant red sun, crawling over the horizon to turn him into something Muttering and four-legged on an endless black plain which was only a few feet across and around which giants, unheeding. went about their business with bass footsteps and bass voices—

  Only all the time he was listening to an orchestra.

  Howson felt very tired. Someone was slapping his face gently with a towel dipped in ice-water. He opened his eyes, and found he was still on the chair in the ward.

  "Are you all right?” said Clara, looking anxiously over the shoulder of the nurse who was holding the wet towel. "You—you were frightened—?"

  Howson waited to reply until he had got used to being back inside his own mind. "How long was I— away?” be said in a hoarse voice.

  "It's been nearly three hours," said the woman surgeon, glancing at her watch.

  "Less than I thought—still, you were right to pull me back, I suppose.” Howson got gingerly to his feet and took a step to ease the pins-and needles in his legs. He glanced at Clara.

  What did you get?

  I don’t quite know.... There was a lot of fear.

  Your own. Howson frowned. Something was puzzling him. Still, it would come clear soon enough—perhaps. He spoke aloud to the surgeon.

  "Thank you for letting me study the case. It’s very interesting. I'm afraid I may have put a strain on him —would you check how well be stood it. and let me know bow soon you think he'll be able to take full-scale therapy?"

  "Are you proposing to handle the case—here?” said the surgeon. She didn't know whether to be flattered that s curative telepathist of such renown should want to work in her hospital, or annoyed that an outsider should intrude on one of her cases. Flattery struggled hard, and won; Howson made gently certain of that.

  She checked Rudi thoroughly and swiftly. "Pulse strong." she muttered; "blood-pressure—we-ell, not too bad. Respiration fair..." She rolled bock ui eyelid and flashed- a torch into the pupil beneath. "Yea, Dr. Howson, he’s not suffered from what you did. He should be strong enough for you in—well, at a fair guess, a week or ten days.”

  Howson felt disappointed; there was something in Rudi’s mind which he needed. In any ease, he was fascinated by the resources he had discovered there. How to contain himself during the next week—?

  Well, that would have to take care of itself.

  He and Clara sat in a restaurant near the hospital, spending time over the lengthy conversation and a second cup of coffee. He had been sorting out his memories of Rudi’s mind, and putting them up clearly and in order so that she could appreciate his trouble. But the prolonged strain had misted her mind, so they had gone back to words.

  "Poor Rudi,” Clara said, absently stirring her empty cup. "No wonder he was so frustrated... How could he ever hope to communicate with an audience?"

  "Oh, he realises I think, that no one elec shares precisely his associations of one sensation with another. I mean, a telepathist is tha only conceivable Ideal audience for him. Consciously, he'd be satisfied if he could create an objectively—passable facsimile of his mental images, to which hie listeners could add their own associations. What he can’t realise, can’t reconcile himself to, is that hardly anyone else in the world can perform such feats of mental association as he can.

  "Let’s imagine a concrete example. You’ve mentioned hie refusal to cooperate with the university authorities. Presumably he was doing experimental composition

 

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