More Than Human

The novel is divided into three parts, each tracing the emergence of Homo Gestalt, a composite organism made up of people with extraordinary psychic abilities who function as a single being.

Part One, "The Fabulous Idiot," introduces Lone, a nearly mute twenty-five-year-old who lives like an animal in the wilderness. His strange, compelling eyes cause anyone who meets his gaze to obey him without understanding why. Though he unknowingly absorbs the psychic transmissions of infants, one day he senses a far more powerful call. It draws him to the estate of Mr. Kew, a fanatical recluse who has raised his two daughters in total seclusion. The older, Alicia, has been taught an elaborate system of sexual shame, including the belief that men's touch is poisonous. The younger, Evelyn, has been kept ignorant of the world. Overwhelmed by spring, Evelyn sits alone by a pond, and her unnamed longing is the source of the call. Lone breaks through a gap in the iron fence and reaches her. They share a profound, wordless psychic communion. Mr. Kew discovers them, whips Lone, and strikes Evelyn with the loaded whip handle, crushing her skull. Lone escapes. Mr. Kew, his mind shattered, shoots himself in front of Alicia. Evelyn dies by the pool, asking Alicia to live freely in her place.

A farmer named Prodd finds Lone badly injured and brings him home. Over months, Prodd and his wife nurse him back to health. He slowly learns to speak, taking the name "Lone" from his attempt to say "all alone." He lives with the Prodds for years until Mrs. Prodd becomes pregnant and Prodd gently suggests he move on. Lone recognizes he was never truly part of their family and walks into the woods, aware for the first time of his fundamental isolation.

The narrative introduces other future members of the gestalt. Janie is a fearless child who can move objects with her mind. Neglected by her mother Wima, she discovers Bonnie and Beanie, identical Black toddlers who can teleport, vanishing and reappearing at will. The three form a deep bond. When Janie's father dies in the war and Wima drunkenly celebrates, Janie leaves home. She nearly dies of cold, but the twins find and hold her.

Lone builds a shelter in the woods and eventually takes in the starving children. He returns to the Prodd farm and finds it in ruin, Mrs. Prodd gone. Their baby has Down syndrome (the text uses the now-outdated term "mongoloid"). Prodd, half-mad with grief, cannot express what he needs, but Lone reads his unspoken wishes and takes the baby. Janie discovers that Baby, despite his disabilities, functions as a prodigious living computer, combining any facts fed to him and producing answers. Lone builds an antigravity device based on Baby's computations to keep Prodd's truck from sinking in mud. When he returns to install it, Prodd has left forever to find his wife. Devastated, Lone asks Baby about belonging and identity. Baby defines them: Baby is the computing brain, Janie the body, the twins the arms and legs, and Lone the head. Together, they form a single being, but with Lone as head, the gestalt is functionally an idiot.

Part Two, "Baby Is Three," shifts to first-person narration by Gerry Thompson, a hostile fifteen-year-old visiting a psychotherapist named Stern. Through guided abreaction, a process of vividly reliving past experiences, Gerry recovers his history. At eight, freezing and starving after fleeing a state orphanage, he was found by Lone and brought to the shelter. He lived with the group for three years, learning to "blesh," Janie's term for the gestalt state in which all members function as a unified organism.

When Lone dies in a storm, he leaves instructions: The children must go to Alicia Kew. Years earlier, Lone had used his compelling gaze to extract knowledge about gestalt theory from Alicia and to implant a compulsion in her to help him if needed. Gerry, now eleven, forces his way into Alicia's mansion and holds her to this obligation. Miss Kew and her maid Miriam spend three years civilizing the children. When Miss Kew secretly sends Baby to an institution, the children unleash telekinetic havoc until she brings him back. Over time, she softens and genuinely cares for them. But Gerry kills her. He explains in anguish: Under her care, the children stop bleshing. They adopt other people's thoughts, and Baby stops communicating. The gestalt is being dismantled through the imposition of normalcy.

The deepest blocked memory centers on the phrase "Baby is three." When Miss Kew spoke those words, her entire suppressed inner life burst into Gerry's mind in a telepathic flash. Within those memories, Gerry discovers what he is: the central ganglion of Homo Gestalt. Stern warns that Gerry needs morality, but Gerry dismisses this. He summons one of the twins to erase the session tape, uses his eye power to wipe Stern's memory, and leaves.

Part Three, "Morality," opens years later with Janie, now grown, visiting a jail to see Hip Barrows, a former Air Force lieutenant now reduced to a filthy, unresponsive prisoner. She pays his fine, installs him in a rented room, and patiently nurses him back to health without asking questions. A psychological block prevents Hip from perceiving certain memories until his recovery reaches far enough back.

Hip's history returns in fragments. He was a brilliant Air Force lieutenant who discovered an area on an anti-aircraft range where proximity fuses consistently failed. He traced the anomaly to a buried truck and found Lone's antigravity device still attached. A private first class (Pfc) helping him pulled the device's lever, and the truck shot into the sky. Hip's career was destroyed: His files vanished, the Pfc could not be found, and the psychiatrist sent to evaluate him looked exactly like the missing soldier. He spent years tracking the device before the same figure found him and implanted a post-hypnotic command to give up.

Janie reveals the truth: The Pfc, the psychiatrist, and the force behind Hip's destruction are all Gerry, who feared the device would lead to the discovery of the gestalt. Janie had helped with the sabotage, though she had not grasped Gerry's full plan. She takes Hip to the gestalt's home to confront Gerry, carrying a poison capsule as leverage: She is Gerry's only link to Baby, and her death would sever it.

Waiting in an anteroom, Hip works through a crucial insight. He defines morals as society's code for individual survival and ethics as an individual's code for society's survival. Homo Gestalt has no society of its kind, but it can have an ethos: a reverence for humanity as its source and for future gestalts as its posterity. When Gerry tries to use his eye power, Bonnie leaps onto him and covers his eyes, and Hip punches him unconscious. Hip ties Gerry to a chair and, when Gerry wakes, invites him to read his mind. The thought Hip offers is a gift: their parallel histories of abandonment, and the argument that helping humanity is self-interest because humanity will produce more gestalts. Gerry reads it and, for the first time, feels ashamed.

Alone afterward, Gerry receives a telepathic welcome from other gestalt beings, older composite organisms that have existed throughout history, guiding humanity. They waited for Gerry to develop an ethical sense before making contact, revealing that gestalt organisms are not gods but guardians, "a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins" (186). In the anteroom, Janie tells Hip he is now part of the gestalt, its conscience. He accepts.