The Whole Man by John Brunner

absorbing hate like a camera; he was one of the rare receptive telepathists with no projective “voice,” like the therapy watchdogs and lay analysts Howson had met here at the hospital. He knew images of long corridors, rooms where solemn men met to plan this first attempt to give meaning to the ancient platitude about the best time to stop a war. He sensed the reaction of Phranakis when he realized his work had failed: he saw it as nemesis, the reward of hubris, the illimitable conceit which offended the gods of his ancestors.
    And he looked also into the minds and lives of those whom Phranakis had taken with him. Taken: that was the .really unique aspect of this case, and the one which frightened Ilse Kronstadt worst.
    For such was Phranakis’ power that he had not had to wait on the willingness of the reflective personalities in his catapathic grouping. He had simply taken them over—four of his closest non-telepathic associates—and dragged them down with him into his unreal universe.
    As awed and fascinated as a rabbit facing a snake, Howson traced the course of events around him. Far below, where the specialists and the high politicians and the families and friends were gathered, they were bringing Phranakis to the room where Ilse Kronstadt waited to do him battle. The hospital seemed to draw in on itself, to tauten till it sang apprehension like a fiddle string. Howson tautened with it, lost to the world, and scarcely dared to breathe.
     
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    Down the streets of his brain a procession moved. As youths and maidens, garlanded with flowers, danced in his honor, the grave elders gathered at the shrine of Pallas Athene. There they made ready the wreath of bay with which to crown the champion. For all their boasts and cunning, the barbarians had gone down to defeat. The city was safe; civilization and freedom survived, while far away a tyrant cursed and ordered the execution of his generals.
    There was a city, certainly. There were, in a sense, elders gathered to the presence of their champion. But Aesculapius was closer to their minds than Athene, and the crown they had prepared for his head was a light metal frame trailing leads to a complex encephalograph. There was no tyrant, apart from the demon of hate, but there were definitely barbarians, although they had passed for civilized until they were broken and demoralized. They had conquered Pericles Phranakis, and were still defying the forces sent against them. He had refused to face that knowledge, and now he had forgotten.
    His swarthy face contented, he lay in what was basically a bed, but could become an extension of his body if required. Apart from the instruments monitoring every physical response—heartbeat, respiration, brain rhythms, blood pressure and a dozen more—there were elaborate prosthetics attached to him. At present he was being fed artificially, while the other devices remained inert. Should the shock of recovery prove as violent as the shock of collapse, he might relinquish all attempts to live. Then the heart masseur, the oxygenator, the artificial kidney would fight against vagal inhibition and maintain life in his body until he had painfully accepted the frustration of his planned escape from the world.
    Nearby Ilse Kronstadt had composed herself amid a similar array of instruments. In a chair at her side was a young man with a pale, anxious face—a recently qualified receptive telepathist serving as her therapy watchdog. Once she had entered Phranakis’ self-glorifying world, she would be unable to communicate verbally with the nervous doctors supervising the process. By turns around the clock this young man and three others would “listen” to her struggles, and report anything the doctors needed to know.
    One by one the technicians, the specialists, the telepathist nodded to Singh, who stood at the foot of Use Ilse Kronstadts bed remembering her past triumphs and trying not to pay too much attention to the mass of