Free The Whole Man by John Brunner Page B

head.
    “He has no reason to cooperate,” 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, hm? 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 man in the copter that 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.”
    There was a hollow silence. It was broken by a soft buzz from a phone on Singh’s desk. Heavily he moved to depress the attention switch.
    “Yes?”
    “Mr. Hemmikaini is here for you, Dr. Singh,” a voice reported.
    “Oh! Oh, very well. Send him up.” Singh let go the switch and glanced at his companions. “That’s one of the Special Assistants to the UN Secretary General coming in. I guess I have to worry about what he wants rather than spending all my time thinking of Howson. But with the potential Howson represents …”
    Getting to his feet, Waldemar finished the sentence for him. “One could wish,” he muttered, “that the rest of the damned world would stop nagging at us for a few days and let us get through the wall of his resentment! Somebody ought to work it out sometime—whether we telep- athists have caused more bother than we’ve saved.”
      He gave Singh a crooked grin and went out.
     
     

 
     
     
    X x
     
     
     
     
     
    Hemmikaini was a large, round-faced man with fair hair cut extremely short, and very pink skin. He looked like what he was—a successful and dedicated executive. It was only the nature of his duties that was unusual.
    After giving Singh a plump-fingered hand and setting his black portfolio on the corner of the desk, he dropped into a chair and leaned back.
    “Well, you know why I’m here, Dr. Singh. You also know that time is running short, so I’ll waste none of it on fiddling courtesies. We have a problem. We have computer solutions to indicate that we need