His breathing grew easier. The temptation to turn his attention back to the glowing fantasies projected by the unknown receded, as though he had mastered the urge to probe a rotten tooth and make it ache. When he judged he was capable of movement, he got awkwardly off the bed and reached for his clothes, preparing to go in search of his anonymous enemy.
15
From the elevator he limped slowly down the main lobby of the hospital, passing the waiting emergency apparatus: oxygen cylinders on angular trolleys, like praying mantises, their shadows gawky on the cream-painted wall; wheeled stretchers with blankets neatly folded at the ends; a machine called a heart, a machine called a lung, a machine called a kidney, as though one could take them, patch them together, and make a man.
With whose brain? Mine? I’d almost rather…
But the door had swung back, whispering with the rubber lip that kissed the rubber floor, and Pandit Singh was there in black sweater and grey pants, the light resting on his shock of hair like an aura.
“Gerry! What’s this about a catapathic grouping ? Brought in without notice ? Where from ? And what are you doing here, anyway ? Isn’t Ludwig Schacht on duty ?”
The frost of fierceness on the words no more bespoke anger than the frost of grey on his bushy eyebrows bespoke age. He seemed changelessly young — on the inside, where it mattered. Promotion from his old post as head of therapy A to director in chief of the hospital hadn’t altered him a jot. Howson had liked him on first meeting; now, after their long years together, he loved him as he would have wanted to love his father.
Once he had wished that his gift could be taken from him, to be abolished. The wish recurred occasionally, but now he would not have wanted to see it go from the world completely. Rather, he would have given it to Pandit Singh, as a man fit to wield such power.
Why me? Why me, the weakling?
He was dreadfully tired. But his thin voice was steady enough as he corrected Singh’s mistaken assumptions.
“You must have come straight out without stopping to ask Ludwig for details. Pan. It’s not that a grouping has been brought in. There’s one out in the city. The Nepalese girl picked up some stray images in her sleep — it just happens that the setting of the fantasy corresponds to her own background — and I was woken by her instinctive fear.”
“I see!” Singh stroked his beard. “Can you locate them for us, or do we have to search ?”
“Oh, I can track them down,” Howson confirmed sourly. “That’s why I got dressed.”
Singh studied him for long seconds. Then, with one of his blinding bursts of insight, he said, “Gerry, it’s not just that you haven’t had your sleep. Is this an especially bad one?”
Miserably, Howson nodded. “It feels wrong. Pan. It hasn’t got the right overtones of — of weakness, or escape. I get an impression… What the hell would you call it? Sardonic! Tough! Premeditated!”
Singh’s mental reaction was grave. Yet it was somehow comforting, too; put into words, it might have gone: If he’s worried, he has good reason, so I can’t contradict him. But he’s the greatest — I know what he can do.
Howson essayed a wry smile. The door of the lobby opened again, and Deirdre van Osterbeck came striding in, Singh’s successor as head of therapy A — voluminous as a thundercloud in a great blue-black cloak, her face above it round and pale “as the full moon. Ludwig Schacht emerged from the night office looking irritable, to announce that the car and the ambulance were on their way.
“Will one be enough, do you think?” he added, with a glance at Singh.
The automatic answer rose to Singh’s lips: that there had never been a catapathic grouping consisting of more than eight persons, so one large ambulance and the estate car would suffice. Howson checked him, with a silent mental gesture.
“Make it two, Ludwig,” he said. “I’m afraid that this man is breaking all the rules.”
And to himself only, he repeated: I’m afraid….
Fragmentary images tormented Howson as the car sped down the broad highway towards the heart of the city. They showed him bright impossible events which — if he let them—could displace reality for ever. The hushing of their vehicle, the dark fronts of the buildings, the street-lights, even the presence of other people near him would be blotted out, having no violence. Who could the unknown be? The submergence of real memory was so nearly total that Howson feared he might have to plunge deep, deep into the mental whirlpool before he found a clue…
“Gerry!” Singh exclaimed. Howson caught himself. Without realizing, he had let himself drift.
“I’m sorry,” he said thickly. “It’s so strong… I have to keep turning my attention on the source because I’m trying to locate it, and whenever I think in that direction I — I — Tell the driver to turn right, anyway. It’s quite close now.”
The car swung into a broad boulevard flanked by multistorey buildings. Signs on their façades — red, green, blue—identified most of them as hotels.
“In one of these hotels, you think ?” Singh suggested.
“Very likely,” Howson murmured, the words drab with weariness.
“Then take your mind off the subject!” Singh snapped. “We can go from one to the next checking recent registrations. A few minutes” delay won’t make any difference now.”
“I can find them!” Howson protested. “Just a little—”
“I said take your mind off the subject! You’re considerably too valuable to use as a bloodhound, hear?” Deliberately Singh visualized a large, slobber-chopped, snuffling dog with its ears trailing so far along the ground that its front paws kept treading on them. Howson caught the image and had to smile.
You win.
The car pulled up at the kerb. Singh opened the door, and Howson made to follow him out.
“No need for you to come, Gerry!” Singh objected.
“If I don’t have something to distract me, I’m apt to — uh — revert to the subject,” Howson countered. “I’m coming with you.”
There followed half an hour of tramping along the sidewalk from hotel lobby to hotel lobby. Marble walls and plaques of artificial gems, mock animal skins rigged like a vast yurt and illuminated tanks of green-dyed water witnessed a succession of sleepy night-clerks raise their heads to stare in surprise at the intrusion of Howson and Singh, hesitate over displaying their registration lists, examine Singh’s catch-all WHO authorization card, and yield reluctantly.
Six hotels, and nothing to guide them. As they emerged from the latest of them and signified no progress to the anxious watchers in the car and ambulance at the roadside, Singh gave Howson a keen glance.
“Still keeping off the subject, Gerry ?”
Howson gave an almost guilty grin. “How well you know me, Pan !” he replied with forced lightness.
“Well, stop it!” Singh said roughly. “If our man wasn’t damned close you’d never have let me stop the car, and I can’t think of a likelier place than a top hotel for an out-of-town telepathist to be found in. We’ll probably get him at the next one we try.”
The next one was decorated in a flamboyant Chinese rococo, with huge twisted brass pillars and red and black dragons lacquered on the walls. The night-clerk was a stout middle-aged woman who kept one hand on an alarm button all the time she was talking to them; she was terrified of rape, and the concept flamed beacon-bright in her mind. Howson had to stifle a pang of disgust at the masochism which underlay her conscious terror.
Singh persuaded her to produce the file of registration cards, and riffled through a dozen or so before stopping, an exclamation rising to his lips. He snapped the important card from its holder and mutely showed it to Howson. In bold letters the name was inscribed: Hugh Choong.