The Pritcher Mass

  He spun around to the window, cursing himself. Their lighted room would stand out like a beacon. He recognized then one of the things he had glanced at and ignored before, thinking it to be no more than a chance roll of cloth above the win­dow. It was a curtain, hung on nails. He stepped to it now and unrolled a blackout shade consisting of several layers of dark cloth backed by a sheet of opaque, gray plastic.

  He arranged it over the window, and turned back to do a thorough job of exploring the room. As he moved slowly about it, checking ev­erything he found, he was astonished at how much in the way of useful equipment was contained within its four walls. Much of it was makeshift, like the old-fashioned milk can that held their water supply. But much of it also showed the result of ingenuity and work—a great deal of work for a man who could hardly have survived the Rot for more than a couple of months while he was setting up this place.

  There was food, fuel, weapons, ammunition, spare clothing, soap, a few medicines ranging from aspirin to capsules of a general antiviral agent—even, tucked in one corner, a box of what seemed to be home-brewed beer. Having completed his survey, Chaz turned to the most immediately important matter of get­ting some heat into the room. It was possibly his imagination, but the temperature seemed to be dropping very fast.

  He covered Eileen with the avail­able bedclothes, and this time she did not throw them off, though her head was still very hot. He gave her another drink of water and turned to the stove. There was paper, kindling and wood chunks piled beside it. Us­ing the incense lighter, he got a fire going; and much faster than he would have expected, the stove was throwing out heat.

  He went to the window and pulled the edge of the blackout curtain aside a fraction. Outside, the per­manently clouded night was full-fallen; and the darkness was as complete as that mind-darkness he had encountered on the Mass when he had tried to make verbal contact with Eileen. The similarity triggered an inspiration in him. What was the use of having achieved his partner­ship with a psychic force like the Mass, if he did not put it to use? Maybe the Mass could help Eileen.

  How?

  The immediate question that popped into his mind was like a brick wall suddenly thrown up in his way. He replaced the blackout cur­tain and stood by the window, look­ing across at Eileen under the covers of the bed, and thinking. Wild possi­bilities chased themselves through his head. Maybe the Mass could be used to transport Eileen back in time to a point where she had not yet in­haled any of the Rot spores—to a time, when she was still safely inside the protection of the domes and air locks of the sterile areas. Maybe the Mass could alter the facts of the situ­ation so that she had never been in­fected with spores at all. Maybe...

  His thoughts lit up with a new en­thusiasm. Maybe the Mass could be used to remove the spores already in her lungs—to rid her body com­pletely of all physical elements of the Rot? Certainly the Mass was able to transport physical objects like his body from the Mass to here...

  His enthusiasm faded. Considered coldly, even this began to look like a wild hope.

  However, it would not hurt to tie the Mass in to both Eileen and him­self under the general command to aid and assist them. He reached out with his mind for contact with the massive psychic construct, willing himself to imagine it and his con­nection with it as he had experienced it and pictured it back above the platform ...

  . . . And touched nothing.

  The same wall of blackness he had not been able to push aside when he had last tried to contact Eileen ver­bally, now barred him from the Mass itself. He struggled to get through the barrier but it was no use. In her delirium, Eileen was still blocking her immediate area from the plat­form and the Mass, where she thought he still was.

  He gave up and returned his atten­tion to the room, looking across it to where she lay on the bed. She was apparently asleep, if restive with fe­ver; but evidently sleep and sickness together did not interfere with un­conscious use of her paranormal tal­ents. Until her fever went down enough for her to recognize him, there was no hope of his reaching her to inform her of the changed sit­uation.

  Well, he told himself, there was no use getting worked up about it. On the bed Eileen stirred restlessly and licked her lips again. He took her an­other drink, and lifted her head while she drank thirstily.

  "Eileen?" he said. "It's me—Chaz. Chaz."

  But her eyes stared past him. Gently, he laid her head back on the pillow; and she shifted it immedi­ately away from the spot where he laid it down, as if the pillow bothered her. He reached to plump it up for her, and felt something hard be­neath it.

  He lifted one end of the pillow, caught a glimpse of something dark, and drew it out. It was a thick black notebook with a sheaf of folded pa­pers, larger than the pages in the notebook, pushed between its front cover and the pages.

  He took it over to the table where the oil lamp burned smellily, and pulled up the chair. Seating himself, he opened the book and took out the sheaf of papers. They were folded lengthwise, in a bunch. He unfolded them. The writing at the top of the first sheet was printed in large letters: LAST WILL AND TESTA­MENT.

  He looked down at what was writ­ten below.

  "I, Harvey Olkin, being of sound mind and body except for dying of the Rot, hereby bequeath this place and everything in it to whoever finds it af­ter I'm gone; just as it was bequeathed to me by the man who was here before I was. And the only thing I ask of whoever takes my place, is that he or she bury me down in the yard, like I buried the man before me and he buried the man before him, and so on. It's not much to ask, considering what you're getting and how it's been passed on down by four people al­ready. We're giving you the chance to die comfortable, which almost nobody shoved outside gets; and all any of us ever asked is that you take good care of the stuff while you still can, and finish the job by burying whoever took care of it before you—in this case, me.

  The whole story is in the diary, which you ought to keep up, like the rest of us did. If you play fair, maybe the next one will bury you, too, when the time comes. Maybe you don't want to think about that just yet; but take it from me, when the breathing begins to get hard toward the end, you take a lot of comfort out of knowing you'll be put down in the earth right, the way people ought.

  Anyway, that's how it is. The other papers under this one will give you what you need to know to run things and keep the Rovers and scavengers away; and the rest of the story's in the diary. This is about as much as I've got strength to write now.

  Harvey Olkin

  In fact, the handwriting had be­come more and more illegible toward the end of the message and the signature was a scrawl. Chaz would not have been able to deci­pher it at all if Harvey Olkin had not written his name more plainly at the beginning of the will.

  Chaz checked through the rest of the loose papers. They were sketches, descriptions and lists deal­ing with the house, its supplies and defenses, in careful detail. Plainly, each new owner of the house had added to its strength and comforts in various ways. Chaz put the loose pa­pers aside and began to read through the diary. It commenced with entries by the first man to hole up in the house, a nephew of the family that had owned it before the coming of the Rot; a man who had deliberately sought this place out when he was exiled from the sterile areas for some unmentioned civil crime.

  It was two hours before Chaz reached the blank pages in the book where the record ended. When it was done, he sat in the light of the gutter­ing oil lamp, already several times refilled, feeling closer to these four dead men than he had to anyone in his life, with the exception of Eileen. There was something right here—something that chimed in with his own feelings—about the way these four had spent their last days under the, shadow of a certain death. Just as there was something wrong about a whole race of people bottling them­selves up in small enclaves of sterile environment and waiting passively for an inevitable end. He could not believe that they were so passively waiting. Something, his instincts said, was wrong about that notion. It
was the same sort of wrongness that had driven him to try for work on the Mass rather than yield to the same defeatism. If only he could find some evidence of others troubled by, or rejecting such defeatism, he had thought once. Well, here were four others who had seemed to reject it, at least in part.

  Perhaps though, he thought, that was the trouble. They had not re­jected it fully, as they should. They had not rejected it quite enough.

  He chewed his lower lip. Some­how, there must be a logic-chain that would fit it all together to his satis­faction. All of it—the Rot, the sterile areas, the Mass, these four . . . But the connections he sought seemed to slip away from him just as his mind grasped them. Perhaps the puzzle was not complete. There could be parts missing ...

  He gave up, wrapped himself in a blanket, settled himself in his chair, and slept.

  When morning came, Eileen was still delirious with fever and still did not recognize him. In between mo­ments of caring for her, he investi­gated the place they were in and the loose sheets of paper from the diary in his hand. What he found amazed him all over again.

  To begin with, all four buildings in the group—the store up in front of the house, the barn, a sort of garage-like building beside the house toward its back, and the house itself—were connected by tunnels. Each one had an observation point near the peak of its roof, from which he could get a quick view of the sur­rounding area. The garage-like building held the remains of two an­cient cars and a remarkable array of metal and woodworking tools. In the basement of the house itself, the power pump unit with its dead fu­sion pack had been disconnected from a wellhead, and a hand-pump fitted onto the pipe to bring up wa­ter. Extra supplies of firewood and a veritable mountain of canned goods were stored in the same basement.

  Chaz discovered that once he had covered some five meters of distance in the open from the back door of the house, he was in an area where the house, the barn, and the garage structure shielded him on all sides. It was here that the three previous graves had been dug; and it was here that, on that same afternoon, Chaz fulfilled his duty of burying the body of Harvey Olkin.

  He took one of the rifles along with him on the task. He had never fired one; but the drawings and in­structions on the loose sheets of pa­per were explicit. When he was done, he took the rifle back upstairs to the room where Eileen was and left it there, leaning against the wall, while he searched the fields about them with the binoculars from win­dows on all four sides of the house.

  He saw nothing; and he was just putting the binoculars away, back on their nail beside the plastic-covered window, when a movement out in the field caught his eye. He dropped the glasses, snatched up the rifle, pointed it and pulled the trigger—all without thinking.

  There was a shell in the chamber of the weapon; but the hammer merely clicked harmlessly on it. A dud. The diary had warned that the ammunition for the guns was getting old and unreliable.

  A little sheepishly, Chaz lowered the rifle. If it had gone off, he would have fired through the plastic sheet­ing doing service as a windowpane. A waste of good material. The mo­mentary check had given him time to think. The movement he had seen was still a good fifty yards from the house. Anyone crawling through the weeds at that distance was in no dan­ger of rushing them suddenly.

  Chaz put the gun down again and once more picked up the binoculars. He had to wait until he saw the weed-tops sway unnaturally before he could locate what had caught his eye in the first place. But when they did, he was able to focus the glasses in on it, and the figure of a man in a red sweater and the lower half of a jumpsuit became easily visible. He was crawling toward the house, drag­ging something long and metallic-looking with him.

  Carefully keeping his attention on the spot, Chaz put down the binocu­lars, loosened and folded back a cor­ner of the plastic window-covering and took aim with the rifle through the opening. Now that he knew where the man was, he could make him out fairly easily, even with the naked eye. He lined up the sights on the back of the red sweater . . . then found he could not do it.

  It might be one thing to shoot the man if he was coming up the stairs at them, but to put a bullet in him while he was still just crawling through the field in their direction was something Chaz was not yet up to doing. Carefully, Chaz aimed well wide of the crawling figure, and pulled the trigger. The rifle clicked. Another bad round. The third time Chaz tried, however, sound exploded in the room and the gun walloped his shoulder. He saw a puff of dust out in the grass a good five meters to the left of the figure.

  The next thing that happened was unexpected.

  There was a sharp crack above his head, and a smell of burning. Chaz looked up, startled, to see a smolder­ing hole in the wall above the win­dow and another, blackish hole in the plaster of the room's ceiling. Chaz felt cold. He knew next to nothing about firearms, but he knew more than a little—even if the knowl­edge was essentially theoretical—about laser guns.

  "All right in there!" a voice cried from the field. "Now you know. I can play rough, too—but I don't want to. I just want to talk to you. All right? I'm willing to come in if you're willing to come out!"

  Chaz stood, thinking.

  "How about it?" called the voice from outside.

  "Hang on to your teeth, Red Ro­ver!" Chaz shouted back. "I'll tell you in a minute."

  "I'll come into the yard, no weap­ons. You come out of the back door, no weapons. I just want to talk. Make up your mind in there."

  Chaz came to a decision. Snatch­ing up the rifle he had used before and an extra handful of shells, he ran out of the room, downstairs to the basement and through the tunnel that connected with the garage. The garage had a service door opening inward on the yard, screened by barn and house from the fields around. He opened the door softly, reached out and leaned the rifle against the side of the building, then ran back through the tunnel and upstairs once more to the room where Eileen lay.

  "What about it?" the voice was calling from outside. "I'm not going to wait all day."

  Chaz struggled to get his breath back, leaning against the wall. After a moment, he managed to call an an­swer.

  "All right. Be right down. I'll step out the back door. You stand up at the edge of the yard. Suit you?"

  "Suits me!" the answer floated back.

  Chaz turned and went out again and down the stairs toward the same back door by which he had entered the house the day before. He went slowly, making sure he got his breath all the way back before he reached the door. When he did, he opened it cautiously. There was no one in sight. The weeds hid the other man, if indeed he was where he had prom­ised to be.

  "You there?" called Chaz through the door.

  "I'm here!" The answer came from approximately where it should in the weed tangle.

  "I'm going to count to three," Chaz called. "When I say 'three', I'll step out the door and you stand up. All right?"

  "Hell, yes!" The answer was al­most contemptuous. "I keep telling you I only want to talk. If I wanted something else, I could burn that place down around your ears before dark."

  "Don't try it!" said Chaz. "One . . . two . . . three!"

  With the last word, he stepped out on the back step. The man he had expected to see, the man he had viewed in the binoculars and seen apparently dead at the train wreck, stood up at the edge of the yard. He did not wait for Chaz to speak or move, but calmly started walking forward, empty-handed.

  Chaz broke and ran, at a slant toward the garage building. In ten long strides, the garage itself cut him off from the sight of the advancing man. Chaz snatched up the rifle and turned around with it aimed.

  "Take it easy," he heard the voice of Red Rover saying as he ap­proached the corner of the garage. "I told you talk, and I meant talk—"

  He stepped into view around the corner of the house, saw Chaz with the rifle, and stopped abruptly, but without obvious alarm. Whatever else might be true of him, he had courage.

  "That's pretty dirty pool you play," he said. He waggled the ha
nds at his sides. "I said I'd come unarmed, and I did."

  "And there's no dirty pool in bringing a whole gang against this one place?" Chaz answered, still keeping the rifle on him. "I don't know about you. I'm out to stay alive."

  "Who says I want you dead?" Red Rover's eyes flickered over toward the graves, and his face grew shrewd as he stared at the one Chaz had dug so recently. "Girl die?"

  "What girl?" demanded Chaz.

  "You know what girl. She's the one I wanted to speak to you about. If she's dead already, that's an end to it."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," said Chaz.

  "You're a headache," Red Rover said. "You can't seem to get it through your skull I'm not against you. Hell. I've been keeping the Ro­ver packs off your back for two years now. You didn't think you were doing it all alone, did you?"

  He stared at Chaz challengingly. "Go ahead," Chaz said. "You're doing all the talking."

  "That's all there is to it. If the girl's dead, there's no problem. If not, I have to stay next to her until she is. The only thing is, I have to know for sure that she's dead. If it's her you've got buried there," he nodded at the recent grave, "you're going to have to dig her up so I can see her."

  On the verge of telling him in plain Anglo-Saxon what he could do with himself, Chaz checked. There was some kind of mystery involved in all this; and he was more likely to get answers if he sounded halfway agreeable.

  "No," he said, briefly.

  Red Rover gazed shrewdly at him once more.

  "Who was she?" Rover asked. "Some relative? She had to know the place was here. They put her out of a Gary, Indiana air lock; and she came straight here. Over sixty klicks, ­forty-three miles according to the old road system, only she went straight across country. Sorry about that; but I've got to see her dead, if you want to be left alone."