The Pritcher Mass

  Chaz made a decision. After all, he still had the rifle and Red Rover was unarmed.

  "She's not dead," he answered. "I'll show her to you." He gestured with the rifle barrel at the back door of the house. "In that way."

  Rover turned and headed for the door. Chaz followed, carrying the rifle along his right leg and side, shielded from whoever might be in the fields watching. They went through the rooms and upstairs into the room where Eileen still lay in her fever. Red Rover looked dis­passionately down at her, stepped to the side of the bed and peeled back one of her eyelids, then examined the inflamed spots on her neck and upper chest area.

  "She's on her way," he said, step­ping back from the bed and looking at Chaz. "Maybe she's got four months yet, maybe only ten days more. But she's caught it. Lucky the worst is over—except for the choking at the end. She'll be coming out of that fever any time now. But I sup­pose you know that as well as I do. She's as good as dead."

  "No," said Chaz. "She won't die." He had not expected to speak with such intensity; and the suddenly deep, harsh tone of his voice startled even him. Apparently it startled Red Rover even more, however; for the other man shied like a startled horse, taking half a step back from Chaz.

  "What do you mean?" Rover snapped. "You don't mean she's an­other? You don't mean it runs in families?"

  "Families? What runs in fam­ilies?" Chaz demanded.

  "What do you think I'm talking about?" retorted Red Rover. "The same thing you and I've got in com­mon. The reason I've helped keep the scavengers off your back these last two years—though you don't seem to have appreciated it much. Don't you realize we've got to stick together, us immunes?"

  XII

  "So that's it," said Chaz. "You're immune to the Rot."

  "Didn't I say so? Just like you—" Red Rover broke off. "Wait a minute, friend. You have been living here the last two years, haven't you?"

  His face changed, swiftly. Just as swiftly, Chaz brought up the muzzle of the rifle, which had sagged floorward during the conversation.

  "Easy. I'm immune. So's she," said Chaz. "But no, I haven't lived here for two years. You've got a lot to learn, Red Rover. But so have I. Let's talk it over like sensible people. I'll give you my promise we're on the same side."

  "Are we?" Rover's face was still tight. He looked over at Eileen. "How come she's sick then, come to think of it? I never did get sick." His hand went to the ulcer-appearing spots on his throat. "I got so I painted these on in self-protection." He looked back at Chaz.

  "She's sick because she thinks she ought to be," Chaz said.

  "Ought to be?" Red Rover stared. "How do you know that?" "Because that's the way the logic-chain runs," said Chaz. The other's features kept their expression. "Don't you know about Heisenbergian chain-perception—the Pritcher Mass?"

  Red Rover's face relaxed. "Sure, I've heard all about that para­psychological crazy-business. You're not trying to tell me there's some­thing to it?"

  "Of course," said Chaz. "Why shouldn't there be?"

  "Why," said Rover, "because it's just another one of those Govern­ment boondoggles. They're all alike. A bunch of politicians have to justify their jobs; so they dream up some­thing to spend the product of the working citizen. The thing they dream up is always some of that rarefied junk that never had a chance of working; but it keeps people's minds occupied for a few years until they have to scrap it and dream up something new."

  Chaz stared at the other man. It was hard to believe that the igno­rance Red Rover was professing could be honest. On the other hand, if it actually was honest—Chaz felt a silent explosion of understanding, in his mind. If it was honest, it could lead to an explanation of why this man had survived while the four who had occupied this house had died of the Rot.

  ". . . But you're trying to tell me it works?" Rover was saying.

  "Look," Chaz said. "Take the chair, there. I'll sit down on the side of the bed, and we'll start from the beginning."

  They sat down.

  "All right," said Chaz. "Werner Heisenberg was a physicist. He stated you could know either the po­sition or the velocity of a particle ex­actly, but not both exactly, at the same time."

  "Why not?"

  "Wait, please," said Chaz. "I'm not a physicist, myself. Let's not get tan­gled up in explanations right at the start. Heisenberg produced this Prin­ciple of Uncertainty. From that, sometime in the 1960's, came the no­tion that alternate universes might actually exist."

  "Alternate whats?"

  "I flip a coin or a token," Chaz said, "it lands tails. I win a bet from you because of that. Things go on to happen as a result of that bet. That's one universe of possible results. But what if it landed heads? Then you'd win. Different things would go on to happen from that. That'd be another possible universe."

  "I don't—"

  "Never mind," said Chaz. "Just on listening. Suppose every time there was an either-or, two-way choice, the universe split into two universes, with one chain of things happening as a result to make things one way, say from the coin coming up heads; and one to make them an­other, from it coming up tails. Each chain would be a chain of logical re­sults—what we call a logic-chain. Do you follow me there?"

  "No," said Red Rover.

  "Do you know the poem," Chaz asked, "that goes, 'For want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost. For want of a horseshoe, a horse was lost—'"

  "Sure—

  For want of a horse a rider was lost,

  For want of a rider a message was lost,

  For want of a message a battle was lost.

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!'

  "I see," said Red Rover. "In one universe they lose a nail and pretty soon they lose a kingdom. In the other, they have the nail and they get to keep the same kingdom. So that's a logic-chain, is it?"

  "Right," said Chaz. "Now, since there're two-way choices like that happening all the time, somebody who could look ahead and see which way each split-off chain might go on each choice he made, could pick and choose just the right choices he needed to get him the final result he wanted. Follow?"

  "Go on," said Red Rover. "Right, then. Now, this world of ours is sick and getting sicker. Regu­lar physical sciences are up against impossibilities in the way of time and distance, in finding a new world for people to escape to so they can survive. But nonphysical science can maybe ignore those impossibilities, to build us something to find a world and get us there. So suppose we de­cide to use chain-perception to build the nonphysical help we need. We start with knowing what we want—a something to get a clean, fresh world for us—and with that end in mind, we start picking and choosing, first among immediate either-or choices; then among the choices that result from that picking and choosing. And so on. A man named James Pritcher sat down to do that, just as an aca­demic exercise, fifteen years ago; and what he came up with was that somewhere out beyond Pluto we needed to begin trying to create a nonphysical device, a psychic ma­chine that we could use to find a way to the sort of world we wanted and a way to get us all to it."

  He paused to draw a breath.

  "And that's it," he wound up. "That's what the Pritcher Mass is, a psychic machine; and it's already mostly built. I just came from there. I can use chain-perception. That's why I tell you I'm not going to catch the Rot; and Eileen's just suffering from an imaginary case of it."

  There was a long silence after he finished. Red Rover stared back at him for a while, then looked at Ei­leen, then back at him.

  "So," Rover said, "her name's Ei­leen, is it? They never did tell me her name."

  "Who's they?" Chaz demanded.

  "The Citadel people." Red Rover stood up and Chaz snatched for the rifle. "Put it down. You're right. We've got a lot to talk about; but I'm going to have to go back outside now and do a little talking on my own, or you'll have all fourteen of my Rovers on your neck to rescue me from you." He looked around the room.

  "You've got some way of making a light here at night, haven't you?"
he asked.

  Chaz nodded.

  "All right then, I'll come back just at dark and we can talk at night when none of them know I'm spending time with you. Leave that door downstairs open for me about sunset."

  He went out; and Chaz heard his boots clattering down the stairs. For a while after the sound of them had ceased, Chaz continued to sit where he was, thinking. Eileen was immune to the Rot because she was a witch—that is, because she had paranormal abilities. If he, himself, was immune to the Rot, as the logic-chains he considered seemed to show, he could swear it was because he had proved to himself he also had paranormal abilities. But here was Rover, who was also immune, and didn't even believe in paranormal abilities, let alone having any. Or did he?

  It would be interesting, thought Chaz, to find out.

  That afternoon, as Chaz was bus­ily marking x's, o's, and squares with a graphite lubricating pencil from the garage, on one side of a stack of small pieces of paper he had made by tearing up a blank sheet from the diary, he heard his name called.

  "Chaz? . . . Chaz?"

  It was a very weak voice calling, but it was Eileen's voice. He got up hastily and went over to the bed. She looked up at him with eyes that rec­ognized him; and when he put his hand on her forehead, the forehead was cool and damp.

  "What are you doing here, Chaz?" The words were barely more than whispered. Her eyes roamed around the stained plaster of the ceiling above her. "Where are we?"

  "Outside," he told her, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside her.

  "Outside? I thought perhaps I was back in the Citadel, somewhere, and they'd brought you back too—Chaz! When did you get back from the Mass?"

  "A couple of days ago," he said. "Don't worry about that now."

  "But you said we were outside!" She tried to lift her head, but he pushed her gently back down again. "I remember now, they put me out. I remember . . . I caught the Rot. Chaz—now you'll catch it."

  "Easy," he told her. "I'm not going to catch anything. And as for you, you aren't either—and you haven't."

  "But I remember. The fever that starts it . . ."

  "Just about anybody," said Chaz, "can whip up a pretty good fever if they're thoroughly convinced they ought to be having one. Hospitals in the old days used to be full of people running unexplained fevers. Feel your throat."

  She reached up slowly with one hand and ran her fingers over the surface of her neck.

  "There are no ulcers," she said, wonderingly. "But I did have sore spots . . ."

  "Not only sore," Chaz said, "they were inflamed, too. But you couldn't quite push them over the edge into real ulcers."

  "Why," her voice was still weak, but it was beginning to be indignant, "do you keep talking like that? Do you think I wanted to catch the Rot?"

  "No, but you thought you would anyway, because you'd lost your witch-immunity."

  She stared at him with eyes that seemed half again as large as usual in the aftermath of her sickness.

  "I hadn't?"

  "Think about it," he said. "Just lie there and take your time. Think about it."

  She lay still. After a second she pushed a hand in his direction. He took it and held it; then looked down at it in a mild sort of surprise at himself for understanding so immediately that that was what she wanted. They sat for a little while. It had been chilly again; and with Red Rover already having visited here, secrecy seemed pointless. So he was running a fire in the stove to warm the room. Only the soft noises as the burning wood fell apart broke the si­lence around them until Eileen spoke again.

  "It was a psychological block," she said, "my thinking I'd lost my para­normal talents because I'd fallen in love the way a witch isn't supposed to do. I knew it was just a block; but1 couldn't seem to do anything about it. But then they put me outside; and in spite of the block, the witch-immunity saved me. It doesn't make sense."

  "Sure it does," he said. "I've had the chance lately to make sense out of a lot of things. The instinct to survive is back in the old, primitive machinery of your brain, way behind all that fancy modern wiring that has to do with conscious belief and psychologi­cal blocks. What the survival instinct said when you landed outside was, 'To hell with what's haywire up front. We'll deal with the Rot the way we know how; keep her alive and let her figure it all out afterwards.' "

  She did not answer him for a mo­ment. Then she spoke.

  "Have you got a candle?" she asked. "Anything to make a single, open flame?"

  "I've got a lamp," he said.

  "Would you light it?" she said. "Leave it where it is. Just light it."

  He got up and went to the lamp, which was sitting on the table where he had been working, back in a cor­ner—out of line with the window, just in case. He got the incense lighter and sparked the lamp wick aflame. Such was the dullness of the day outside and the shadows of the corner where the table sat, that a vis­ible brightness was added to that part of the room.

  "Come back here now," Eileen said. He came back and sat down on the bed with her, again. "Hold my hand again."

  He took it in his own. She lifted her free hand slightly from the blan­ket and pointed a slim forefinger at the burning lamp, speaking softly:

  "Tiny oil flame, little light,

  Wax and grow; make pictures bright . . ."

  Watching the burning lamp with her, Chaz for a moment saw no difference about it. Then he became aware that its flame was lengthening, stretching up toward the plaster ceil­ing. It stretched amazingly, broad­ening and becoming more blue, less yellow as it did.

  It seemed no brighter to look at; but it was doing tricky things to the shad­ows in that corner of the room. They seemed to shift and mold themselves into forms, even while a sort of gen­eral illumination sprang up around them, painting out the familiar di­mensions of the corner itself. Unex­pectedly—Chaz could not tell when the shift actually occurred—he was no longer looking at the corner of the room at all, but at some sort of trop­ical beach where two people were running along side by side on white, hard-packed sand, just beyond the reach of the curling waves. The two people were Eileen and himself.

  "Be a monkey's uncle!" muttered Chaz.

  "It's true." Eileen sighed with sat­isfaction beside him. "I've got it all back. That's a scene out of our fu­ture, darling; and it's going to be all right."

  Chaz reached out mentally for the Mass, suddenly realizing he was no longer blocked off from it, and with its aid opened his mind to the more extended logic-chains that might reach to the future scene Eileen said she was picturing with the candle­light. But he could not find that par­ticular scene, himself. Maybe it was somewhere way up there, lost in the unimaginable number of possible fu­tures; but he could not find it. Of course, hadn't she always said her talents were greater than his? And for that matter, hadn't she proved it by blocking him off, first from her­self and then from the Mass?

  On the other hand, wasn't there the possibility that what she was evoking was not a true picture of the future, but a picture of what she hoped the future would be like?

  "It's one of the first things little witch-girls learn," she was saying now, "to charm a candle flame and make it show pictures."

  "Yes," he said.

  Later on, just as the day dwindled to its dull close with the pasty face of the clouds glowing bloodshot for a moment on the horizon, a voice called unexpectedly from just below them, in the lower story of the house.

  "Red Rover!" it shouted. "It's me, on my way up. Don't shoot."

  There were the sounds of boots on the stairs again, ascending this time; and Red Rover walked in, to drop uninvited into the room's single large chair.

  "All right," he began. "I—"

  He broke off, looking at Eileen, who, was sitting up in bed. He bounced to his feet to cross over to her, peered down into her eyes and looked at her neck.

  "Well, you were right," he said, glancing at Chaz. He looked back at Eileen. "You're immune."

  "I always was," she said.

>   "Don't act so flip," Rover said, deep in his throat. "There're lots of poor people who prayed to be spared once they were outside here, and weren't."

  "Maybe they could have been, though," Chaz said.

  "What do you mean?" Rover turned on him.

  "I'll show you. Pull your chair up to the table here." Chaz beckoned him into the corner where the table sat. Rover obeyed. "I've fixed you these."

  Rover looked at the pieces of pa­per with the x's, o's, and squares drawn on them. Chaz began to turn them over so that they were blank side up.

  "What about them?" Rover asked.

  "I want you to try to pick out all the ones with one kind of symbol from the rest," Chaz said.

  "Oh, that rhine-stuff," Rover said. "In my neighborhood there were a lot of games like that around. I was never any good at them."

  "You hadn't been exposed to the Rot then," said Chaz. "When you were, something like this stopped being a game. Your life was at stake. Since then, things have changed for you. Try it now."

  Rover grunted, but bent over the slips of paper—now all blank side up. He fingered around among them; and after a minute had twelve slips pulled off to one side.

  "By the way," he said, looking up at Chaz. "How many did you say there are of each kind?"

  "I didn't say," Chaz answered. "Does it matter?"

  Rover shook his head.

  "Not if I'm right," he said. "Take a look. I ought to have all the circles. Funny . . ."

  Chaz turned over the slips that Rover had pulled aside. They were all marked with the o. He turned up the rest of the slips. There was not an o among the symbols marked on them.

  "It's funny, all right," said Rover, frowning at the slips. "I was never any good at those games—never, at all."

  "Because you didn't expect to be then," Chaz said. "Just like the four men who stayed in this house before us. They expected the Rot to kill them, and it did; just like you expected to lose, and did."

  "Why don't I lose now?"

  "Because now your survival in­stinct has found out you can do something if you want to," Chaz said. "When you were first put out, you must have wanted revenge on whoever or whatever put you out so badly that you didn't spend any time worrying about dying from the Rot."