“She’s getting on well,” Howson said. She was; she was becoming used to the impulses given off by the trembler coils deft surgeons had inserted in her ears, and the bio-activated plastic vocal cords that had replaced her own. There was promise that she would stumble into possession of a musical, if hesitant, speaking voice once she had completed training.
Howson slapped down envy at her childish joy, and added the question to which he already sensed the answer.
“And how about me?’
Singh looked at him steadily. He said, “You know I have bad news for you. I couldn’t conceivably hide the fact.”
“Spell it out,” Howson said stubbornly.
“Very well,” Singh sighed. He gestured to Christine Bakwa, and she gave him a folder of papers from a portfolio she was carrying. Selecting the topmost enclosure, he continued, “To begin with, Gerry, there’s the question of your grandfather — your mother’s father.”
“He died long before I was born,” Howson muttered.
“That’s right. Were you ever told why he died so young?”
Howson shook his head. “I guess I knew my mother didn’t like talking about it, so I never pushed the point to an answer.”
“Well, she must have known. He was what they call a hemophiliac — in other words, a bleeder, whose normal supply of thrombic enzyme was absent. He ought never to have had children. But he did, and through your mother you inherited the condition.”
“I told you this,” Danny Waldemar put in. “When we were taking you aboard the helicopter — remember? I told you we’d given you prothrombin, which is an artificial clotting agent. Your scratches and bruises have always taken a long time to heal, haven’t they? A serious hemorrhage — a nose-bleed, say — would have put you in hospital for a month, and quite possibly would have killed you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Am I? Howson kept the counter on the telepathic level, but it was so bitter Waldemar flinched visibly.
Aloud, Howson objected, “So what? Prothrombin works on me — the cuts I got when you picked me up healed fast enough once the scabs had formed.”
Singh exchanged a glance with his companions. Before he could speak again, Howson had caught on to what was in the big Indian’s mind.
‘No?” he whispered.
“No. I’m sorry, Gerry. Those cuts in fact healed at barely half the rate you’d expect in a healthy person. And anything much more serious than a cut — say a broken bone — will probably never heal at all. Yet paradoxically this is what has made you the most promising novice telepathist to come to our notice since Ilse Kronstadt. Let me make that clear.”
He held up the paper from the file so that Howson could see it. It was a large black-and-white schematic representation of a human brain. At the base of the cortex, a small red arrow had been inked in.
“You’ve probably picked up most of what I have to tell you,” he said. “As Danny pointed out when you first met, you need never again fail to understand what’s being done to you and why. But I’ll go over it, if you don’t mind — not being a telepathist myself, I organize words better than universalized concepts.”
Howson nodded, staring with aching misery at the drawing.
“Information is stored in the brain rather casually,” Singh went on. “There’s so much spare capacity, you see. But there are certain areas where particular data are normally concentrated, and what we call ‘body image’ — a sort of reference standard of the condition of the body — is kept where that arrow’s marked. A great deal of the data required for healing is right down on the cellular level, naturally, but in your case that mechanism’s faulty — witness your hemophilia. One could get around that with the aid of artificial stimulation of your body image centre, but for this paradox I mentioned.”
He changed the drawing for another, showing the brain from below, also bearing a red arrow.
“Now here’s a typical average brain — like mine or Christine’s. The red arrow points to a group of cells called the organ of Funck. It’s so small its very existence was overlooked until the first telepathists were discovered. In my brain, for instance, it consists of about a hundred cells, not much different from their neighbors. You’ll note its location!’
Again he extracted a fresh item from the folder. This one was a large X-ray transparency, the whitish outline of a skull with jaw and neck vertebrae.
“You’ll remember we took X-rays of your head, Gerry, after giving you a radio-opaque substance which selectively — ah — ‘stains’ cells in the organ of Funck. Take a look at the result.”
Howson gazed numbly at the picture.
“That whitish mass at the base of the brain,” Singh said. “It’s your organ of Funck. It’s the largest, by almost twenty per cent, that I’ve ever seen. Potentially you have the most powerful telepathic faculty in the world, because that’s the organ which resonates with impulses in other nervous systems. You are capable of coping with an amount of information that staggers the mind.”
“And it’s made me a cripple,” Howson said.
“Yes.” Slowly, Singh put the picture away. “Yes, Gerry. It’s taken over the space normally occupied by body image, and as a result we can do nothing to mend your body. Any operation big enough to help you would also be big enough to kill you.”
“Well, Danny?” said Singh when they had returned to his office. The telepathist, whose specialty was the discovery and training of new members of his kind, slowly shook his head.
“He has no reason to co-operate,” he said. “My God, do you blame him? Think about his plight! His face, every time he looks in the mirror — like an idiot child about to vomit! What compensation is it after twenty years of that to become a telepathist? I’ve picked out things from his mind…” He paused, swallowing hard.
“Consider! He was first overheard from orbit, by a space communicator, so potentially his ‘voice’ is the loudest in history. But his real voice has never broken — he has this silly castrato pipe! He never lost his milk-teeth, for God’s sake—just as well, in view of his hemophilia, but think what that did to his psyche. It takes him three months to grow enough hair to visit the barber. He’s never even begun to have a beard. As to sexuality, he’s acquired superficial attitudes and never experienced the emotions; what that’ll do to him the first time he contacts someone with a bad sexual problem, God knows.”
“Can we tackle that?” Singh suggested.
“Out of the question!” Waldemar snapped. “You can’t seriously want to make his condition worse — and believe me, you would, if you made him sexually competent with hormones and left him in this malformed body. Mark you, I’m not sure you’d succeed; his body image is so far from normal I daren’t guess whether he can respond to hormones or not.”
“What I was thinking was—” put in Christine Bakwa, and broke off. Waldemar glanced at her.
“You were wondering if I could take his mind apart and put it together again, him? To clear out this terrible jealousy he’s conceived for his girl-friend?’
“Yes, I was.” The neurologist made a vague gesture. “I see why he’s so resentful — I mean, fitting her up with speech and hearing was so easy he must subconsciously disbelieve that helping him is impossible, and the very fact that he made it a condition of coming with you suggests that he’s got high empathy.”
“Granted,” Waldemar agreed. “Only-he’s powerful.”
“I thought you managed to control him when you first located him.”
“Briefly. I’d never have got in at all but that he was suffering terribly from the knowledge that he’d caused the pain of the men in the “copter which crashed. And he broke my hold eventually. No, in cold blood he could resist any attempt made to interfere with his mind, and I’m not sure the telepathist who attempted it would retain his sanity.”