Free The Whole Man by John Brunner Page A

agent. Your scratches and bruises have always taken a long time to heal, haven’t they? A serious hemorrhage—a nosebleed, say—would have put you in the 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 companion. 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 unverbalized 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 center, 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. YouH 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.
    “YouH 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