The Whole Man Read Online Free PDF

delicious for the hope that parents were indeed ultimately dependable.
    And the boys wondered about being telepathic, and thought of knowing for sure whether the girls would or wouldn’t—and power, and money.
     
    Meantime, Howson. It didn’t seem to him especially insightful to realize that it couldn’t actually happen this way; for him, this fictionalization was on the same footing as a camera trick, something to be taken on its own terms, with its own artificial logic. His fantasies and his real environment were too unalike to become confused in his mind.
    His genetic handicap had at least spared him any obsession with sexuality, and he was diffusely grateful that he had no intolerable yearnings which his appearance would bar from fulfillment. But he did hunger for acceptance, and made the most of such crumbs of conversation as were thrown to him.
    Accordingly he thought about these telepathists from a different standpoint: as persons set apart by a mental, rather than a physical, abnormality. He was sufficiently cynical to have realized that the admiration for telepathists provoked by this movie, by others like it, by official news stories, was artificial. Telepathists were elsewhere people, remote, wonderful, like snow on distant mountains. The thought of being able to pry secrets from other people’s minds appealed to this audience around him, no matter how carefully the dialogue and action skirted the point, the instant the corollary presented itself—the idea of having your mind invaded—there was a violent revulsion. The ambivalence was omnipresent: consciously one could know that telepathists were saving life, saving sanity, guiding countries (like this one) away from war—and yet it made no difference to the instinctual alarm.
    Their existence had been eased into public consciousness with shoehorn care: rumors purposely allowed to run wild to the point of absurdity had been deflated by calm official announcements rendered believable by sheer contrast; quiet ceremonies made small items for news bulletins—such-and-such a telepathist working for the UN was today decorated with the highest order of such-and-such a country recently saved from civil war. For the real people behind the public image one might hunt indefinitely, and end up with no more than a few names, a few blurred photographs, and some inexact second-hand information.
    There was a policy behind even such far-out melodrama as this movie, Howson was sure. And for that reason, he was envious. He knew beyond doubt that the uncushioned impact of their abnormality on ordinary people would have culminated in persecution, maybe pogroms. But because the telepathists were important, the impact was cushioned—the world’s resources were marshalled to help them.
    He felt achingly the desire to be at least a little important, so that his deformity—no more extraordinary than a telepathist’s mental peculiarities—would seem less catastrophic.
    His mind wandered from the screen and was caught by the man in brown, who was no longer alone. His head was bent toward another man, who had sat down, without Howson realizing it, in the seat over which the man in brown had first thrown his topcoat. Searching back in memory, Howson realized he had seen the door of the men’s room swing twice within the past few minutes.
    He listened out of curiosity, and was suddenly sweating. He caught mumbled phrases, and pieced the rest together.
    “ Boat on the river … two a.m. at Black Wharf … Cudgels has a personal stake in this lot … worth a good half-million, I’d say … little diversion for The Snake, keep his men busy other side of town … no problem with fuzz, bought the sergeant off …”
     
    The men grinned at each other. The latecomer got up and went back into the men’s room; before he returned and headed to his former seat elsewhere in the theater, the man in brown had put his topcoat over his arm and headed for the exit. Howson sat frozen, the