The Whole Man by John Brunner Read Free Book Online

were fixed on him. There was no one in the place where he looked by reflex; he was staring at a closed door. While he was still bewildered, the door opened and a girl came out, pausing and glancing back to say something to a person inside the house.
    From that moment on the sensation pounded at his skull. Dizzily he kept moving, and tried to evade the concept which had crawled from a dark corner of his brain to leer at him. He failed. It took form in sluggish words.
    I’m going insane. I must be going insane.
     
    He turned the corner of his own street, and put his hand on the rough concrete wall to steady himself and gulp air. And then he knew.
    Ahead of him, standing at his own door, was a large white car, its roof decorated with a flashing beacon, its nose with a sign saying police. A driver leaned his elbow casually on his lowered window; two uniformed officers were bending together to speak to him.
    He could hear them. They were fifty yards away; they were talking barely above a whisper, and he knew every word that passed because they were discussing him.
    “ Out right now … Goes to movies mostly … Might be doing something for The Snake. … Unlikely; new on his payroll, the story is … Must have gone to The Snake first; The Snake doesn’t go shopping for help …”
     
    Mortal terror welled up in Howson’s mind. A car jolted around the corner, and before the turn was complete he had fled, with the impossible voices in pursuit, like ghosts.
    “ Ask at the neighborhood movie theater … Not worth the trouble, is it? Unless someone warned him off, he’ll be back eventually. Wait in his room, or pick him up in the small hours …”
     
    Aimed at him—aimed at me, Gerald Howson: as the forces of all the world had been leveled at this city the day of my birth!
     
    But that was only half the reason for his terror. The other and worse half was knowing what he had become. He could not have heard what the policemen were saying so far away. Yet the words had reached him, and they had been colored by what was not exactly a tone of voice but was nonetheless individual: a tone of thought. One tone was ugly; the thinker had a streak of brutality, and liked the power his uniform implied. He envisaged beating. They said cripple; so what? He’d been responsible for a death, for a gang fight, for crime. So beat him into talking.
    Howson couldn’t face the shock in simple terms: I am a telepathist. It came to him in the form he had conceived when watching the movie about telepathists: I am abnormal mentally as well as physically.
    Had he even overheard what the man in brown was telling his seat neighbor? Or had he then, already, picked up thought?
    He couldn’t tackle that question. He was in flight, hobbling into the hoped-for anonymity of a crowd, wanting to go as far and as fast as he could, not capable of halting for a bus because to stand still when he was hunted was intolerable. His eyes blurred, his legs hurt, his lungs pumped, straining volumes of air, and he lost all contact with deliberate planning. Merely to move was the maximum he could manage.
    Toward what future was he stumbling now? Every looming building seemed to tower infinitely high above his head, making unclimbable canyons out of the familiar streets; every lamp-eyed car seemed to growl at him like a tracking hound; every intersection presaged a collision with doom, so that he was sickened by relief when he saw that there were not roadblocks around each successive corner. His ears rang, his muscles screamed—and he kept on.
    His direction was random; he followed as nearly as possible the straight line dictated by his home street. It took him through a maze of grimy residential roads, then through a district of warehouses and light industry where signs reported paper-cup-making and tailoring and plastic-furniture-making. Late trucks, nosed down those streets, and he knew the drivers noticed him and was afraid, but could do nothing to escape their