“You’re not—?” The suspicion that Howson was planning a permanent departure leapt up in Singh’s appalled mind.

“Ohhh!” In exasperation Howson cancelled the mistaken assumption with a telepathic correction, and went on aloud. “The Choong case wasn’t a success for me, Pan. He wanted to be brought back. If he hadn’t co-operated — or at least not resisted with any seriousness — I’d have been beaten.”

“Gerry, I don’t understand!”

“No? Nor did I, at first,” Howson agreed bitterly. “And Pak wouldn’t have told you, I guess, because I warned him not to until I had a chance to get used to the idea. Listen! All the telepathists I’ve previously routed out of their dreams were the inadequate personalities we assumed them to be, broken by the harshness of the world. Them I can tackle. Choong in full command of his faculties, in a world of his own devising and operating at his own whim, could have brushed me off like an annoying fly.

“He didn’t. He had the sense to see that he was going to have to help whoever came after him, as a precaution against enjoying his absolute power too greatly. So he followed sets of easily deducible rules. In particular, when he incorporated magic into his private universe, he employed the basic James Frazer rules of like-to-like and part-to-whole. I took him by surprise when I suddenly realized this during the crucial encounter, and — well, never mind the details. Just say that’s the only thing I’m pleased with, and it doesn’t satisfy me, because it was a lucky inspiration, not the result of planning and foresight.

“Pan, he’s punctured my confidence! I’ve had to admit something I’ve hidden for years from you, even from myself. I’m jealous of people who can escape into fugue! Why not? Look at me! And I’m scared because I’m jealous. There’s no one I know of who could come and get me back out of fantasy! Unless I do something to help myself, I’m apt to go into some patient’s universe and find it so much to my liking I don’t want to come back. I haven’t the guts to go into it the way Choong did. But I might well not have the guts to cut short a — a trip to some especially attractive fantasy.”

Singh was staring down at the top of his desk. He said, “Do I take it that you have in mind something you can do to help yourself?”

“I — I’m not sure.” Sweat was prickly on Howson’s face and hands now. “All I’ve decided so far is that I’m going away for a while. Alone. Not the way I used to go when I first came here, with someone to watch over me in case I cut myself or children mocked me, but alone. Maybe I can’t go rock-climbing in the Caucasus; maybe I can’t go surfing at Bondi Beach. But — damn it, Pan, I looked after myself, more or less, for twenty years before I was discovered and brought in. If I can re-learn to do that much, I may be on the track of an answer to my problems.”

“I see.” Singh turned a pen over between his short, capable fingers. “You’re not going to do anything as stupid as throwing away your prothrombin, I take it ?”

“Hardly! Independence has limits. But dependence has, too. I want to set some for myself, that’s all.”

“So what do you propose to do now ?”

“Send for a cab, go to the airport, and take a plane somewhere. I’ll be back in — oh — a couple of months, I guess. You’ll see I get money ?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then — Howson felt at a loss. “Well, that seems to be all, doesn’t it?”

“I imagine so.” Singh rose and came around the desk, holding out his hand. “Good luck, Gerry. I hope you find what you want for yourself.”

Abruptly he wasn’t looking at Howson any longer. He was facing an olive-skinned man with a square black beard, standing taller than himself, wearing a peculiar barbaric costume mostly of leather studded with tarnished brass. A huge sword dangled from his belt. He was muscular, good-looking; he radiated health and contentment.

The stranger changed; melted; shrank until he was barely five feet tall and beardless and slightly deformed — until he was, in fact, Gerald Howson.

“That’s what I want,” said Howson in a thin voice. “That’s not what will be any good to me, though. Good-bye, Pan. And thank you.”

21

At the airport he inquired about flights to the city where he had been born, and was almost shocked to recollect that it had once been his home.

Home! How long since he last thought of it as such? For years “home” had meant his apartment in the therapy centre, with everything tailored to his special needs — even the sanitary fittings in the adjacent bathroom — so that the chair he kept for visitors, of normal size, seemed intrusive.

Yet some part of him had never caught up with that shift of perspective. Maybe this trip was really intended to look for what he had left behind.

Would people remember and recognize him? He hadn’t changed much, but he was well dressed instead of shabby, well fed instead of pinched and scrawny — enough change maybe, to make people pucker their foreheads in search of a half-vanished memory.

A curious heady excitement began to take hold of him as his cab rolled through familiar streets towards the district where most of his childhood had been spent. On impulse, he told the hackie to stop and let him out. He had checked most of his bags at the airport, keeping only a light valise which he could easily handle, and he wanted to take this stage of the journey slowly, on foot, to let the impact of old associations seep into his mind.

The first major fact to register on him was that his old home had gone.

He stood on a street-corner and looked at the towering stack of low-priced apartments which had taken the place of the plaster-peeling rabbit-warren of a tenement he had known.

The same kind of street gangs chased past him; the same wheezing old cars rolled by; the same crowded buses clanged and burped down the street. But the building wasn’t there.

An unexpected pang of nostalgia touched him. He had never imagined he could regret the disappearance of a place which had brought him so little of pleasure to cherish. He changed hands on his valise and limped on. As he went, he found people staring at him; a small boy bravely threw a dirty word at him and dissolved into laughter. He knew, now, why such things were done, and felt no resentment.

A block or two north, he remembered, was a bar and grill where he had done odd jobs during his mother’s illness. The way to it would take him past the school he had attended. He turned northward, making mental comparisons as he went.

The atmosphere was different from what he recollected. He had a sense of something like tranquillity, contrasting with the frenzied modernity of Ulan Bator with its cosmopolitan influx of strangers. Maybe this was the ultimate effect of the crisis in whose shadow he had been born. The closest he could come to summing it up in a single word was “chastened’. But there was no regret apparent.

He found himself rather liking the sensation, and wishing he had been back earlier.

The bar and grill had changed in layout and décor, but it was still there. It seemed more prosperous than in the old days. There were high stools at the counter, but he went to a table, earning a grimace from the lounging counterhand; he found it much too difficult to perch on a stool.

“What’ll it be ?” the counterhand called.

He was hungry after his journey, Howson found. “Small portion of steak and French fries, and a can of beer,” he responded.

While he was waiting for the food to come from the kitchen, the counterhand eyed his visitor curiously. It was plain why, but Howson waited until he raised the question openly.

“Here y’are, shorty,” the young man said in a friendly enough manner, setting the plate and glass on Howson’s table.