Brunner,John - Telepathist

Telepathist

By John Brunner

Scanned by BW-SciFi

First published in the USA by Ballantine Books 1964

First published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber 1965

Issued in Fontana Books 1978

Portions of this novel are based on material previously

Published in substantially different form in

Magazines, viz.:

American Publications Inc. for Fantastic Universe;

Ltd for Science Fantasy;

Publications Inc. for Fantastic Universe.

Made and printed in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

conditions of sale: This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall

not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise

circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or

cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem et

magno se corpore miscet.

vergil: Aeneid, VI 726-7

Part One: Molem

1

After the birth they put her in a bed, a large woman wasted by worry

and hunger, so that it was not only over her emptied belly that her skin

hung old-clothes-fashion. In spite of her wide pelvic girdle she had had a

difficult labor; the tired-faced doctor had judged her a few per cent

worse off than those others who competed for space in the hospital

ward, so she had been allotted the bed. She showed no sign of

appreciation. She would have shown no sign of resentment, either, if she

had been treated the same as most other women passed through the

delivery room that day, and taken to an arm-chair to rest for a mere

couple of hours while they scrubbed down the floor with a solution of

caustic soda, for lack of disinfectant, burned the craft paper off the

delivery table and put on fresh, for lack of laundry facilities.

The crisis had been gestating just about as long as the child. It had

culminated a week or two ahead of him. There were two panes out from

the window next to her bed, and the gaps had been covered with

newspaper and adhesive tape. The woman in the bed on the right had a

gunshot wound and lay with puzzled eyes staring at the ceiling. In one

corner of that ceiling was the trace left by a licking tongue of greasy

smoke, exactly the same shade of black edged with grey as would have

been left by a candle, but two feet wide.

From the street noise came, unfamiliar, disturbing. Last month there

would have been the drone of traffic, a buzz of people wandering in

sunlight, a predictable, comforting background with commonplace

associations. Now there was the occasional hoarse shout, grossly

amplified, but blurred by the direction of the portable loudhailer so that it

was impossible to tell more than that orders were being given. Also there

was the growl-rumble-clank of a heavy tracked vehicle; the acid bite of

police whistles; stamping of unison feet. Automatically the mind tensed,

wondering whether there would follow the stammer of guns.

An hour or so after the birth a woman in olive-green battle-dress

came to the door of the ward. Her hair was cut man-short and there was

a belt with a shiny brown holster strapped around her waist. She looked

about her curiously and went away.

Another hour, and an old man came pushing a squeaky trolley with

two urns on it, one containing watery soup and one containing watery

coffee. There was also bread. A nurse hurried in directly after and

distributed bowls and mugs to those patients who could eat.

And a little later still another nurse came, her face drawn and her

mouth down-turned, with the doctor who had supervised the delivery.

Every available bed was in use; only the fact that there weren't more

beds had ensured the floor-space was left between patient and patient.

Awkwardly, sometimes having to sidle, the nurse and doctor came to the

new mother.

'You - uh -' The doctor changed his mind about putting it that way,

cleared his throat, tried again. 'You haven't seen your baby yet, Mrs -?'

'Miss,' said the woman in the bed. Her eyelids rolled down like blinds

over her lack-luster eyes. Her hair tangled untidily on the pillow, dark and

greasy. 'Miss Sarah Howson.'

'I see.' The doctor wasn't sure if he did or didn't, but the remark filled

a silence even though the silence was subjective, already occupied in

reality by the clanging of empty tin bowls as they were collected up after

the patients' meal.

The nurse whispered something to the doctor, showing him a

roneotyped form: square grey lines on grey paper. He nodded.

'I'm sorry about the delay, Miss Howson,' he said. 'But things are

difficult at the moment ... Have you chosen a name for him yet?' And,

catching himself because he was never sure under present

circumstances how far the normal routine had actually deteriorated: 'You

were told you have a boy, weren't you?'

'I guess so. Yes, somebody did say.' The woman rolled her heavy

head from side to side as though seeking an impossible position of

comfort.

'If you've chosen a name, we can enter it on the record of the birth,'

the doctor prompted.

'I -' She rubbed her forehead. 'I guess... Say, are you the doctor who

was there?' Her eyes opened again, searched his face. 'Yes, you're the

one. Doc, it was bad, wasn't it?'

'Yes, it was pretty bad,' the doctor agreed.

'Did it - ? I mean, is there permanent - ?'

'Oh no, there's no permanent damage!' the doctor cut in, hoping to

sound reassuring in spite of his splitting headache and gut-souring

exhaustion. He wasn't sure of anything any more, it seemed - no one

was, currently - but it was a habit to be reassuring.

Where had it all gone? How? The safe calm world of a few weeks

back had split apart, and they said 'crisis' without explaining anything. To

most people it meant nothing of itself; it was just that a bus didn't show at

your regular stop, and the electricity failed in the middle of cooking

dinner, and there was a slogan half-finished, smeared letters of red paint,

on the sidewalk, and a monument to a dead hero had tilted crazily on its

shattered plinth, and the prices of food had soared, and the radio groaned

old records and said every fifteen minutes that people should be calm.

Also to the doctor it meant probing hideous wounds for bits of stone

and splinters of glass; it meant shortages of disinfectants, antibiotics and

even blankets; it meant concussion, shot-wounds and home-made

incendiary bombs thrown through the windows.

Now there were the strange uniformed men speaking a dozen

languages, on street-corners with their guns easily slung; there were

officers who came asking questions about needed supplies and surplus

bed space if any; there were food-ration stands at big intersections and

measured handouts of basic nourishment, followed by the stamping of the

left hand with a one-day indelible ink to prevent you calling back until

tomorrow - all as though the population had been turned at a blow into a

blend of criminals and charity patients.

'Oh, damn...' said the mother, head rolling anew. 'I hoped never to go

through that again. And I still could, huh?'

The nurse gave a sour glance at the doctor, who forced himself back

to the present. The idea was to get the name fixed in the woman's mind,

to displace the simple idea 'baby', to offer some sort of handle to her

when she was compelled to grasp the facts.

'Have you chosen a name for your son?' the doctor demanded loudly.

'Name? Well - Gerald, I guess. After his father.' Beginning to reveal

puzzlement, the woman gazed directly at the doctor and frowned.

'What's this all about, anyway? Why didn't you bring him to me long ago?

Is something wrong?'

The hell with soft-pedaling. The hell with finesse. The doctor said

shortly, 'Yes, I'm sorry to tell you there is.'

'Such as what? No arms, no legs?'

'No, nothing so bad, fortunately. There's a - a generalized deformity.

It may well be possible to put it right, in time, of course; it's too soon to

say, though.'

The woman stared for a long moment. Then she gave a harsh

chuckle.

'Well, God damn! Isn't that just like the bastard? He wouldn't marry

me - said there wasn't anything certain enough about the world to make

plans for life... So then when I'd been through it I was telling myself at

least I'd have a son for my old age - heh-heh - and here's a cripple. I

have to support him instead of...' The chuckling returned, and ran

together into a dull shuddering moan.

'How about the father?' the doctor said, swallowing against nausea.

Call this a part of the crisis, too: it didn't help.

'Him? He was killed. I thought that was how he'd end up, you know -

once it came down to fighting. Oh God, oh God.'

'We'll bring you your son now, Miss Howson,' the nurse said.

When the doctor got back to the ward office there was the

short-haired woman waiting for him. She had taken off the jacket of her

battledress and hung it on a peg while she went through the records of

admission. The national flash on the shoulder said israel.

The doctor thought irrelevantly that she didn't look like a Jewess with

her scalpel-thin nose and piercing blue eyes.

'A woman called Howson,' she said, looking up. 'We had a dossier on

a man named Gerald Pond, whose body was found near the reservoir

they dynamited right at the start of the rising. He's supposed to have had

a woman-friend called Howson.'

'That could be right,' the doctor said. He dropped limp into a chair. 'I

just delivered her of a son. Crippled.'

'Badly?'

'One shoulder higher than the other, one leg shorter than the other,

spinal deformity - pretty much of a mess.' The doctor hesitated. 'You're

not thinking of taking her in for questioning, for heaven's sake! She had a

hell of a time on the delivery table, and now she has to face the shock of

the kid - it's monstrous!'

'Don't jump to conclusions,' said the Israeli woman. 'Where is she?'

' In the ward. Fourth bed from the end.'

'I'd like to take a look at her.'

She rose. The doctor made no move to accompany her. He waited till

she was out of the room, and then went behind the desk at which she

had been sitting and took out from a drawer the last cigarette in the last

pack he had. He had lit it and returned to his chair before she came back.

'Are you arresting her?' he asked sourly.

'No.' The Israeli woman sat down briskly and made a note on the

carbon copy of a list she was consulting. 'No, she's not involved with the

terrorists. She's about as a-political as one can get and still talk

coherently. She was afraid of being left alone - she must be what?

Forty? - and she didn't believe that this man Pond meant exactly what he

said: he regarded sex as a necessary act and her as a routine provision.

She kidded herself into thinking she could break through his obsession

with revolution and sabotage and reduce him to - wedding-bells, furniture

on credit, all that...' She gave a wry smile. 'Sad, isn't it?'

'You have a dossier on her too, presumably,' said the doctor in a

sarcastic tone. 'You didn't get details like that on the spur of the moment.'

'Hmmm? No, we have no dossier on her, and it won't be worth the

trouble of putting one together, to my mind.'

'Oh, marvelous!' the doctor said. 'I'm glad to know you draw the line

occasionally.'

'We don't make the messes, you know,' the Israeli woman said. 'They

just call us in to clear them up.'

'Well, hell! If all you have to do is - is walk in that ward and look at

someone and say there's trouble, yes or no, it's a pity you don't do it

before the mess happens instead of afterwards!' The doctor was very

tired, and moreover very resentful of these polyglot strangers with the

authority of world opinion at their back; he scarcely knew what he was

saying.

He also scarcely knew what the Israeli woman meant when she

answered, 'There aren't enough of us yet, doctor. Not yet.'

2

After three days they sent Sarah Howson home from the hospital

with the child, and also with papers: a nursing mother's emergency ration

card, a medical supply voucher, a medical inspection voucher, a booklet

of baby-food coupons and a diaper-service voucher.

She came back to the narrow, long street with its double row of

identical three-storey houses, facades covered in cracked yellow plaster,

garbage piled up in the gutters because 'the crisis' had stopped municipal

clearance services. The day after her return, a pair of huge trucks

painted the same drab green as the soldiers' battledress came growling

down the street: one ate the garbage with a maw above which a

roller-brush turned like a dirty moustache; the other hosed the pavement

with a smelly germicide. Water was still being sold from carts; it would

take months to repair the reservoir Gerald Pond and his companions had

so efficiently dynamited, and there was little rain at this time of year.

She spent the first evening back at home clearing her two rooms of

everything that might remind her of Gerald Pond -old clothes, shoes,

letters, books on political subjects. She kept the novels, not to read but

because they might be saleable. If the baby hadn't been quiet, she would

cheerfully have thrown him out with the rest, and Gerald Howson would

unknowing have left the unknowing world.

But he was a passive child, then and always. Hunger might bring a

thin crying; the noise didn't last, and he accepted discomfort as a fact of

existence, because his distorted body was uncomfortable simply to live in.

The evening little Gerald achieved his first week of individual

existence the soldiers came down the street in an open truck: four of

them, and an officer, and a driver. The driver stopped alongside the

entrance of the house where Sarah Howson lodged, pulling into a gap

between two parked cars but not making any serious attempt to get to

the kerb. 'The crisis' had also interrupted gasoline distribution; the cars

here had mostly not moved for a fortnight, and already kids had begun to

treat them as abandoned wrecks, slashing the tires, opening the filler

caps, scratching names and obscene words on the paintwork with knives

or nails.

The people on the street, the people looking from their cautiously

curtained windows, saw the soldiers arrive and felt a stir of nameless

alarm. A few of them knew for sure they had done something illegal; a

black market had followed the crisis with blurring speed. Many more,

adrift on the unfamiliar sea of circumstance, were afraid that they might

have infringed some regulation imposed by the pacifying forces, or

unwittingly have aided the terrorists. The fact of pacification was

scarcely new, but it had been an elsewhere thing - it was reported in the

papers and on TV, and it affected people with dark skins in distant

countries with jungles and deserts.

Two of the soldiers waited, lounging, by the house door. Their

shoulder-flashes said pakistan and they were tall, good-looking, swarthy,

with bright wide smiles as they exchanged casual comments. But they

also carried slung guns.

The other two soldiers and the officer banged on the door until they

were admitted. With the frightened landlord they went upstairs, to the

top, to Sarah Howson's two rooms. They knocked again there.

When she opened to them, the deflated woman with her big rayon

house-dress belted to a wide overlap around her waist, the officer was

polite, and saluted parade-stiffly. He said, 'Miss Sarah Howson?'

'Yes. What is it?' The dark dull eyes searched the military exterior,

seeming to plead for clues to an inward humanity.

'I believe you were formerly an - ah - an intimate friend of Gerald

Pond. Is that correct?'

'Yes.' She seemed to sag still more, but there was no protestation in

the tone with which she uttered the rest of what she had to say. 'But he's

dead now. And anyway I never mixed in these political things.'

The officer made no comment. He said only, 'Well, I must ask you to

come with us, please. It is necessary to ask you some questions.'

'All right.' She stood back apathetically from the door. 'Come in and

wait while I get changed. Is it going to take long?'

'That depends on you, I'm afraid,' the officer shrugged.

'It's the kid, you see.' She scuffed at the floor with bare feet. 'Do I

take him along or try and get someone to mind him for awhile?'

The officer frowned and consulted a paper from his pocket. 'Oh,

that's right,' he said after a pause. 'Well, you'd better bring him with you,

I guess.'

They went to police headquarters. There had been blood on the

handsome white stone steps, but that was gone now; there were still

shrapnel-scars and bullet-pocks, however, and some smashed windows

were still out. The police were no longer in charge. Uniformed or not,

they had to show passes on entering, and the armed men guarding the

door had shoulder-flashes saying denmark. Sarah Howson looked at

them, and not for the first time since Pond's death wondered how he had

convinced himself that he and his companions would win out when the

world stood ready to act against them.

In the lobby of the building the officer spotted and called to a

uniformed woman whose blouse bore white discs with a red cross

instead of the national identification marks. She was pleasant-voiced and

smiling, and Sarah Howson let her take the shawl-wrapped bundle of her

son.

The smile vanished the instant hands discerned, through the thin cloth,

the twisted spine and lopsided shoulders.

'Your baby will be well looked after until you leave,' the officer said.

'This way, please.' He pointed down a door-flanked corridor. 'It may be

necessary to wait a while, I'm afraid.'

They went to an office overlooking the square in front of the building.

The evening sun lit it, orange and gold over the pale grey walls and

brown and dark-green furniture.

'Sit down, please,' the officer said, and went to the desk to pick up the

handset of the internal phone. He dialed a three-digit code, waited.

Then: 'Miss Kronstadt, please.'

And after a further pause: 'Oh, Miss Kronstadt! We have rather an

interesting visitor. One of our bright young sanitary experts was down at

the municipal incinerators yesterday, getting them back in regular

operation, and he happened to spot a name on a letter when it blew out

of the truck being unloaded. The name was Gerald Pond. We had him

listed for dead, of course, so we didn't follow up until this afternoon when

we found out he had a mistress still living at the same address -'

He checked, and looked at the phone as though it had bitten him.

Rather slowly, he said, 'You mean I just send her home? Are you sure

she wasn't - ?... Damn! I'm sorry, I should have checked with you first,

but I never thought you'd have reached her so quickly. Okay, I'll have

her taken home... What?'

He listened. Sarah Howson felt a stir of interest disperse the cloud of

her apathy, and found that if she paid attention she could just catch the

words from the phone.

'No, keep her there a few minutes. I'll drop in as soon as I can. I

would like to have another chance to see her, though I doubt if we can

use more information on Pond than we have already - there's a

two-hundred-page dossier here now.'

The officer cradled the phone with a shrug and opened the pocket of

his jacket to extract a pack of curious cigarettes with paper striped in

pale grey and white. He gave one to Sarah Howson and lit it for her with

a zippo lighter made from an expended shell-case.

The door opened and the woman came in briskly: the one with

man-short hair and Israeli shoulder-flashes. Sarah Howson crushed out

her cigarette and looked at her.

'I've seen you before,' she said.

'That's right.' A quick smile. 'I'm Ilse Kronstadt. You were in the city

hospital when I called there the other day.' She perched on the edge of

the desk, one leg swinging. 'How's the baby?'

Sarah Howson shrugged.

'You're being looked after all right? I mean - you're provided with

proper rations, proper services for the kid?'

'I guess so. Not that -' She broke off.

'Not that diaper-service and baby-food coupons help much with the

real problem,' Ilse Kronstadt murmured. 'Isn't that what you were going

to say?'

Sarah How son nodded. Distractedly, she played with the dead butt of

her cigarette. Watching her, Ilse Kronstadt began to frown.

'Is it right - about your grandfather, I mean?' she said suddenly.

'What?' Startled, Sarah Howson jerked her head back. 'My

grandfather - what about him?'

Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had

been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.

'That was bad,' she said. 'You weren't any shy virgin, were you?

And you knew you shouldn't have children, with your family history! To

use a pregnancy as blackmail - especially on a man like Pond, who didn't

give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power -

Ach!' Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire,

and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from

one to the other of them.

'No, it's not true!' stammered Sarah Howson. 'I didn't - I-!'

'Well, it's done now,' Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. 'I guess

all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may

be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be okay - there's

first-rate material on the Pond side, and you're not stupid. Lazy-minded

Brunner, John - Telepathist

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