The Whole Man by John Brunner

someone with talents of the order possessed by Use Ilse Kronstadt. Ergo, we need her—she’s unique. Yet our request for the release of her services, made to the director in chief here, was countered by the suggestion that somebody should come and talk to you. Why?”
    Singh placed his elbows on the desk, looked down at his hands, and meticulously put the tips of the fingers together. Without raising his head, he said, “In effect, what you want to know is what Ilse Kronstadt can possibly be doing here that we regard as more important than a UN pacification operation.”
    Hemmikaini blinked. After a pause he nodded. “Since you put it so bluntly, I’ll agree to that.”
    Singh made a musing sound. He said, “It’s Southern Africa again, I suppose?”
    ‘“A fair guess, if you’ve been reading newspapers. But I’ll make one correction.” Hemmikaini leaned forward impressively. “It’s not just ‘Southern Africa again,’ in that tone of voice! Ever since the Black Trek, when half the South African labor force walked out of the country, it’s been a thorn in our flesh—was previously, for pity’s sake! We’ve gone back and back to tidy up after each successive burst of terrorism and violence, and we thought we’d finally solved the problem. We haven’t … quite. But this time we want to do what we’ve been hoping to do ever since we first had telepathists to help us.”
    “You want to stop it before it happens,” Singh murmured.
    “Correct. We have nearly enough data now. Makerakera has been there for three months, with all the staff we can spare. But the deadline is too close. We need Ilse Kronstadt, to beat it.”
    Singh got up from the desk abruptly and strode to the window. Thumbing the switch to “full transparency,” he gazed out over Ulan Bator. His back to Hemmikaini, he said, “You can’t have her, I’m afraid.”
    “What?” Hemmikaini bridled. “Now look here, Dr. Singh—!” He checked, realizing the brusqueness of his tone, and went on more politely, “Is that Dr. Kronstadt’s answer?”
    “I have no idea. The request hasn’t even been put to her.”
    “Then what in hell’s name do you mean?” Hemmikaini made no attempt to remain calm this time.
    “You must presumably have wondered,” Singh said, “why Ilse left the UN Pacification Agency, where she virtually pioneered the techniques of nonviolent control that have subsequently become standard practice.”
    “Yes, of course I have,” Hemmikaini snapped.
    “And?”
    “Well … well, I guess I assumed she wanted a change. She worked herself to exhaustion often enough, for pity’s sake!”
    “Further than exhaustion, Mr. Hemmikaini.” Singh turned now, and the light from the window caught the graying tips of his hair and beard. “Ilse Kronstadt is the next best thing to a dead woman.”
    Hemmikaini’s bright-pink lips parted. No sound emerged.
    “Customarily,” Singh went on inexorably, “someone as indispensable as Ilse is watched by doctors, psychologists, a horde of experts. There was a succession of crises a few years ago—India, Indonesia, Portugal, Latvia, Guiana, in a stream—and these precautions were temporarily let slide. Afterward we discovered a malignant tumor in Use’s Ilse’s brain. If we’d caught it early enough, we could have extirpated it microsurgically; a little later, and we could have used ultrasound or focused electron beams. As it happened, there is now no way of removing it short of major surgery from below the cortex.”
    “Oh, my God,” said Hemmikaini. He wasn’t looking at Singh. Probably he couldn’t. “You mean you’d have to cut through her telepathic organ to get to it.”
    “Precisely.”
    “Does she know?”
    “Have you ever tried to keep a secret from a telepathist? Only another telepathist can manage it, and in Use’s Ilse’s case I’m not sure anyone else has been born who could keep her out if she was really determined. She’s capable of handling the total