The Whole Man by John Brunner Page B

familiar world mirrored: law ruled the passage of event, solid was solid, the senses murmured their news of the body’s condition. But Phranakis had closed and locked every door to the ordinary world, and although there were windows—of one-way glass facing inward, so to say—what went on behind them was insane.
    Knowing it, Howson wished with all his might for the will to resist such temptation. He saw his own fantasies paralleled in Phranakis’—the hero concepts, the organization of everything around his whim, so that nothing disturbed, nothing upset, nothing offended the all-wise master. Here the human will to power, checked in conscious telepathists by the deterrent of other people suffering, could find ghastly outlet. Already the sado-masochistic impulses Phranakis had so long detested were creeping from shadow and coloring the fantasy.
    They were casting down captives from the Acropolis, that the city’s savior might the more enjoy his triumph to the music of their screams—
    Abruptly the smooth course of the action was shattered. It was like an earthquake; buildings shivered, people wavered, the sky darkened. It lasted only a moment, but the impact was staggering. Howson’s contact was broken, and it was several minutes before he could resume it.
     
    “She’s in,” the therapy watchdog reported, his face drawn by the strain into an inhuman mask. “A captive condemned to death. Trying to get the attention of the hero-ego.”
    Singh nodded thoughtfully. “That figures. Fits the data we have on his sexual preferences. Any idea what the long- -term plan is?”
    “Fixed for a short distance,” the watchdog said. “Idea is: lure him to a sexual situation, rely on failing control to establish dominance. … Three main sequences envisaged—want them?”
    “If nothing more interesting is developing.”
    “No.” The watchdog had to pause and swallow hard. “The captives are still being thrown off the rock. Well, either she’ll establish a quasi-real knife—under cover of a banquet, maybe—and castrate him publicly, or she’ll get him into a drunken stupor and establish a fire in the temple, which is why she wanted the material on the destruction of the Parthenon, or she’ll start picking off the reflectives and stage a slave revolt.”
    Singh closed his eyes. After all his years of work as a doctor, he was still capable of being sickened at the coldbloodedness of some of his and his colleagues’ methods. What the public castration would do to Phranakis, he dared not think—but it figured. If anything could blast him out of his fugue, that would. AH All the material on his sexual life pointed to the need to reassure himself about his masculinity. The real world had never threatened him with anything so horrible as what Ilse was preparing.
     
    Howson was following developments better now. He had discovered the reason for the “earthquake”—some sort of electrical impulse had been applied to Phranakis’ organ of Funck, to make an opening for Ilse Kronstadt. Now it was much easier to eavesdrop; she made a link with normal consciousness. With fascinated disgust he came to comprehend her plans, and had to force himself to remember that unless something brutal jarred him out of his pleasant dream, Phranakis was as good as dead, and along with him four valuable, hard-working non-telepa- thists whose precious individuality he had trampled on. In a sense he deserved what was coming. But … could anyone really deserve it?
     
    “She’s getting very tired,” the watchdog whispered, as though Use Ilse could overhear him. That was absurd: nothing could reach her now except the full violence of another telepathist. All her energy had been transmuted to will power as she altered, added to and undermined the pattern of Phranakis’ fantasy.
    “Is the crisis close?” Singh muttered.
    “She’s summoning up all her resources. Trying to distract him with sexual images while she fixes the knife— Oh, God!