The Whole Man by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page B

her hands were muddy from the ground.
    “Who are you?” Howson said thickly. “What do you want?”
    She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached quickly to one side and picked up a paper bag, turning it so that he could see through the mouth of it. Inside there were crusts of bread, a chunk of cheese, two bruised apples. Puzzled, Howson looked from the food to her face, wondering why she was gesturing to him, moving her thick hps lips in a pantomime of eating but not saying anything.
    Then, as though in despair, she uttered a thick bubbling sound, and he understood.
    Oh, God! You’re deaf and dumb!
     
    Wildly she dropped the bag of food and jumped to her feet, her brain seething with disbelief. She had sensed his thought, projected by his untrained telepathic “voice,” and the total strangeness of the feeling had rocked her already ill-balanced mind on its foundations. Once more the sickening odor of fear colored Howson’s awareness, but this time he knew what was happening, and his uncontrolled wave of pity for such another as himself, crippled in a heedless world, reached her also.
    Incontinently she dropped to her knees again, this time letting her head fall forward and starting to sob. Uncertainly he put out his hand. She clutched it violently, and a tear splashed, warm and wet, on his fingers.
    He registered another first time in his life now. As best he could, he formulated a deliberate message, and let it pass the incomprehensible channel newly opened in his mind. He tried to say Don’t be afraid, and then Thank you lor for helping me, and then You’ll get used to me talking to you.
    Waiting to see if she understood, he stared at the crown of her head as though he could picture there the strange and dreadful future to which he was condemned.
     
     
     

 
     
     
    VII vii
     
     
     
     
     
    When he thought it over later, he saw that that first simple attempt at communication had by itself implied his future. His instinctive reaction stemmed from his disastrous and unique essay in making himself significant; he had snatched with panic at the chance of passing on news to The Snake, with no more thought of consequences than a starving man falling on a moldy crust. Arriving simultaneously with his recognition that he was a telepath, the shock of realizing that he had made himself by definition a criminal—an accessory to murder, to be precise—had swung the compass needle of his intentions through a semicircle. He wanted nothing so much as to escape back to obscurity, and the idea of being a telepathist appalled him. Challenged during his terror-stricken flight down darkened streets, he would have sworn that he wanted never to use the gift.
    As well declare the intention to be deaf forever! Eyes might be kept shut by an effort of will, but this thing which had come to him was neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch; it was incomparable, and inevitable.
    The sensation was giddying at first. It drew from memory forgotten phrases, in which he sought guidance and reassurance: from a long-ago class in school, something about “men as trees walking”—that was curiously meaningful. His problem was multiplied tenfold by the puzzling, abnormal world in which the girl had spent her life, and paradoxically it was also simplified, because the more he learned about the handicap she labored under, the more he came to consider himself lucky. Faced with Howon as a cripple, people might still come to see there was a person inside the awkward shell. But the deaf-and- dumb girl had never been able to convey more than basic wants, using finger code, so people regarded her as an animal.
    Her brain was entire; the lack was in the nerves connecting ears and brain, and in the form of her vocal cords, which were so positioned that they could never vibrate correctly, but only slap loosely together to give a bubbling grunt. Yet it seemed to Howson she should have been helped. He knew of special training schemes reported in