The Whole Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

water. Howson shut his ears to the syrupy wisecracking commentator. He made his own commentary, as though he could shift personalities like shifting gears, choosing a hard-boiled masculine frame of mind for admiring the next-to-nude girls at Bondi, a worried near-feminine attitude for the ski-jumpers—thoughts of pain on failure, bruises, broken bones. … He shied away from the recollection of a tree he had fallen out of.
    So all through. But the cars lingered longest. To be on the Sahara Highway, knife-cut-straight for two hundred miles at a stretch, where there was no limping; the photo-reactive glass of the roof automatically darkened against the harsh sun, the counter of the turbine steady at its two hundred thousand revs, the gangs of dark-skinned men at work with the sand-sweeps, one every ten miles, the glimpses of artificial oases islanded by sand, where with water and tough grass and mutated conifers men struggled to reclaim once-fertile land—that was a dream to cherish.
    Advertisements. Coming attractions. His mind wandered, and his attention centered briefly on the man in brown, who was checking his watch again and gazing around as though expecting someone. Girl friend? Somehow not. Howson let the problem slide as the main titles of the big feature sprang into red life on the screen.
     
    Howson knew little about his father; he had learned tact early because it was the complement, as it were, of the treatment he received at school, so scraps of information put together had to take the place of direct questioning of his mother. He still knew scarcely anything about the political crisis that had gestated along with him, and its worst after effects were over by the time he became aware of such things as news and international affairs.
    Even so, he sensed something special about movies of this kind. He couldn’t analyze what led to the reaction of audiences watching them, but he knew he liked the feeling; everyone seemed to be cautiously self-conscious, as though he were testing out a leg fresh from surgical splints, and establishing by the absence of expected pain that it would take his full weight.
    In a way, that parallel was exact. The trauma of the “crisis” had subsided to such a degree that it would soon be possible to teach children about it, treating it as history. Experience had persuaded those who recalled it clearly that it wasn’t the end of everything: here was life going on, and the country was prosperous, and children were growing up happy, and worry had proved needless.
    So now the movie theaters were full when there was a picture like this one playing—and there were lots like this one, and Howson had seen several. Absurd, spectacular, violent, melodramatic, they always centered on terrorism or war-prevention in some colorful corner of the world, and their heroes were the mysterious, half-understood agents of the UN who read minds—the honorable spies, the telepathists.
    Here now the story was a romance. Clean-cut, tall, good-looking mind-reading agent encounters blond, tall, beautiful, sadly misled mind-reading girl maintained under hypnosis by fanatical group bent on blowing up a nuclear-power station in the furtherance of their greed for conquest. The older members of the audience squirmed a little under the impact of too-familiar images: olive-green trucks thundering down a moonlit road, soldiers deploying unhurriedly around the main intersections of a big city, an abandoned child weeping as it wandered through silent alleys.
    There were obvious attempts to parallel reality at certain points, but not many. There was, for instance, a motherly Jewish woman telepathist intended to resemble the legendary Ilse Kronstadt; in the front rows of the audience, teenage girls who had let their boys’ hands wander too intimately across their breasts squirmed under the horrible but delicious idea that real mothers should read this memory from them later—horrible for the expected row to follow,