The New Minds

The ending to this really rang hollow.

Our villain, Victor, is an incredibly powerful psychic, someone with genetic abnormalities that would have killed him in the womb. He lived, because with his incredible psychic ability, he was able to force his mother's body to continue the pregnancy. After birth, he used psychic domination to coerce her into nurturing him, despite the cost to her (a homeless prostitute) and his hideous deformities. With today's eyes, we might immediately have concerns about the portrayal of the disabled, but it was written in the 1960s, so perhaps let's move on from that.

Victor has a plan to escape his crippled body by taking control of another psychic. Along the way, he drowns a man by taking control of his body and walking him into the ocean, and he sends a pair of psychic twins into a coma. Then, he takes an attempted suicide, a woman with psychic powers budding after that attempt, and dominates her into escaping a mental facility, erases some of her memories, implants a devotion to himself, and twists her memories of past acquaintances, before sending her back into the world some months later to fetch him a suitable host for his bid to transfer his mind. When she snares one, he drains the man to a husk, and very nearly succeeds in the attempt to transfer, except that the psychic twins have recovered and gained god-like powers and arrive on stage just in time to slap him on the wrist.

So, Victor has a bit of a rap sheet.

After his failed transfer, Victor lies dying—he was too busy with his gambit to maintain his psychic control over his malformed body, and his organs have failed entirely. In the same room is a psychic researcher, who, in a cruel twist of fate, is physically whole but is (unknowingly) psychically crippled. The twins, with the consent of both Victor and the researcher, help the two of them merge into two consciousnesses sharing the one intact body, with Victor's psychic power.

And everyone else accepts them.

That's the part that gets me. Yes, there's an understanding that Victor is motivated by bitterness and the cruel twist of fate that gave him such severe genetic flaws that he would not have even been born, if not for his psychic power. But nowhere is there an accounting for the terrible things he did, and attempted. Nowhere is there any mention of justice for the drowned man. He's just headmates with the researcher, respected and accepted into their new clique of psychics. And then... the pair of them choose to step back from that group, so that the researcher can make amends with his bitter, childish wife?

The setup was simply okay, the villain dated at best, and the character motivations in the last several pages are completely alien.