The Pritcher Mass

  That was no use, either. He needed the catalyst, if only for a few seconds. He tried to imagine the stony feel of it in his hand. Imagine, he told himself. Imagine it.

  He concentrated. He could al­most feel the rock fitting into his grip. It was about the size of a small orange, he remembered. Its surface was rough. One small lump on its surface nestled almost com­fortably between the bases of his index and second finger when his hand was closed around the rock. The surface the little finger had rested on was almost planar. A graininess irritated the heel of his hand as he tightened his grip on it. It was just this heavy …

  He could feel it.

  He could feel it there in his right hand now, as real as it had ever felt in his grasp.

  . . And he was no longer sliding down the endless river in darkness. He was back, afloat or whatever once more in the isolation chamber, as he had been when he first awoke.

  The warm flood of a tremendous feeling of triumph washed through him. He had his catalyst. He could do anything now. He held it. He could feel it. Why shouldn't he be able to see it as well?

  He lifted his right hand toward his face. There was no way of telling whether he actually held it before his eyes or not; but he felt more strongly every second that he did. It was there. If it was there, he could see it. He stared into the darkness.

  Naturally, he told himself, he would not just suddenly see it, all at once. But perhaps gradually . . . he stared into blackness and thought he saw a faint pin-prick of light, such as the Snail and the Mantis had made when they had first appeared, and just before disappearing. He concen­trated on it, willing it to come nearer as they had come nearer. Slowly, painfully, it grew in brightness and size. It came closer ...

  It came to him. He held the catalyst before his face and saw it plainly, every slant and angle and color in it. As he stared at it, it blurred and changed form.

  He looked down a maze of alter­nate choices, like the edges of cards in a deck slightly spread out. Plainly, he read the message in them. Of course! Whoever had put him in this had not intended to leave him here forever; only until his sanity was suf­ficiently softened or dissolved. Someone would be coming to take him out, eventually. Until that time, he and the catalyst would find his mind some sanity-saving work to do. Of course. He almost chuckled to himself. In the infinity of darkness they could even create and build themselves a Pritcher Mass of their own, right here on Earth as it had been in his dream.

  They went to work ... and a Prit­cher Mass began to take form ... Like an explosion, light blared suddenly against Chaz' closed eye­lids, and the nearly completed Prit­cher Mass was swept away, back into a corner of his mind. He lay limply with eyes still closed; and felt hands moving about him, heard the splash of liquid and the sound of buckles being unbuckled. There were faint pulls on his arms and legs.

  "Right," a man's voice said dis­tantly. "Lift, now."

  Chaz felt himself raised by hands gripping his shoulders and legs, moved through a small arc of dis­tance and laid on a surface which, after the isolation chamber and its lack of physical sensation, seemed shockingly hard. He kept his eyes closed. Hands moved about him, stripping some kind of helmet off his head and pulling off him tight-fit­ting, elastic clothing.

  With the clothing off, warm air wrapped his whole body. After the silence of the chamber, every sound that was made seemed to roar in his ears. He heard the two that were working on him breathing like ele­phants. He heard the scrape of their feet on the floor as they turned and walked away from him, to begin sloshing and clanking noises back where he had been.

  He opened his eyes and turned his head.

  He lay on a white-sheeted bed in what appeared to he a hospital room with a blue curtain drawn across its transparent front wall. Two men. both in white coats, were standing with their back to him, working on a black, rectangular box the size of two coffins placed one on top of the other. For a second the light dazzled Chaz' eyes; and then his vision set­tled down.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up and took one step toward the two men. They did not hear him coming.

  He hit one at the base of the skull with what Chaz thought was the catalyst rock—until he realized that his fist had been empty. Even with­out the rock it was a crushing blow with a sudden, almost berserk fury in Chaz powering it. The man he had hit went to his knees and fell over sideways. The other man began to turn with an astonished look on his face; and Chaz leaped on him, knocking him to the floor, beating away at him with fists and knees as he fell, in a silent frenzy of attack.

  It was a few seconds before Chaz realized that the second man was not moving either, before he could make himself stop. When he did stop and scrambled to his feet his fury ebbed, leaving him feeling sick and helpless. His stomach heaved, but there was nothing in it to come up. He clung gratefully to the side of the isolation chamber to keep from falling, as his trembling legs threatened to give way.

  The nausea and the trembling passed. The two on the floor still had not stirred. He could not bring him­self to look at either man's face. Luckily, the first one he had attacked lay face down. Without turning him over, Chaz managed to strip off the other's clothes, including the white coat, and put them on his own naked body. He turned to the curtain, pulled it aside and located the door of the hospital room.

  Opening the door a crack. he peered out.

  What he saw was an ordinary cir­cular hospital ward with two nurses inside the round desk-area that occu­pied the ward's center point. Both of them had their heads bent over some paperwork at the moment. Holding his breath. Chaz opened the door a little further, stepped through, closed it behind him, and walked casually toward the entrance to the ward a quarter of the way around the circle of rooms.

  Neither of the two nurses looked up. A second later he was in a wide corridor, busy with hospital person­nel and visitors alike. Three minutes later he was alone in a four-seater PRT car leaving the basement of the hospital for the Central Terminal, courtesy of the credit card in a pocket of the man whose clothes he had taken.

  As the car hurtled through the tun­nelways, Chaz glanced over the sta­tions listed on the car's directory and saw that he was in the Chicago area, evidently up around Evanston. Chi­cago had been too big to seal as a single sterile unit; and to this day it was a number of connected domes and underground areas. It was this ramshackle character of the big city that had given him hope that he could manage to evade capture in it long enough to see Waka again and pass the test for work on the Pritcher Mass. Now, with someone else's credit card, his chances were even better.

  Of course, the man from whom he had taken the clothes and the card might report the card stolen—al­though, if he was really a member of the Citadel, he might not want to tell the police how he had lost it. But even if the card was reported lost. Chicago was so large that by the time the Central Computer got po­lice sent to the last place he had used it, he could be miles away. In twenty-four hours, of course, all automated units of the Chicago area could be programmed to refuse that particular card when it was sub­mitted to a computer outlet for credit or purchase. But in twenty-four hours he ought to be able to see Waka, pass the test, and get officially accepted for work on the Mass. Once he was accepted, all Earth's police could do would be to keep him un­der room arrest until time for him to ship out to the Mass.

  Things were looking up. Chaz re­laxed and even grinned a little to himself, remembering the astonished look on the face of the first man he had jumped, back in the hospital room. Plainly, the last thing they had expected was that their sensorially ­deprived patient would have as much energy left in him as Chaz had shown.

  But then he sobered. He might he free now, but in addition to the po­lice, the Citadel would be after him—and why should they have been in­terested in him in the first place? He had never had anything to do with the criminal element of the sterile world. He did not even know much, if anything, about it beyond what he, like everyone else, heard on the news or rea
d in the magfax.

  He tried to marshal what meager knowledge he had, so that he could get some idea of what he might be up against. But there was little even in the attic section of his mind to go on. In a cashless society, of course, the criminal element operated by markedly different tactics than they had in the bad old days when credit was expressed in pieces of paper you carried about and traded with other people. Now, credit was hardly more than a convenience. What really paid off was power. Power to control the credit ratings and the class of the cards that were computer-issued to you or your associates. Power to compel people to provide goods or services that could not ordinarily be bought, or which were out-and-out illegal. Power to tap the wide, un­sterile areas for things that might not be available within the limited space of the sterile ones.

  Of course, it was that last reported power of the Citadel that led the strong belief that it, unlike any other element of society, had contacts out­side the sterile areas. Though who these contacts could he with, since anyone who stayed outside could hardly last more than a month or two before dying of Job's-berry rot, was a question. What could you of­fer a dying person to buy his or her services? Comforts? Drugs? Luxu­ries?

  Not being a Neopuritan, Chaz paid no attention to the legend that there were rare people outside who had survived the rot. That was non­sense. The rot was not a chemical or viral thing that sickened the body. Its effect was purely mechanical. The spores in the air sooner or later found their way into the lungs of anyone unshielded. There they sprouted and grew, until eventually the lungs were too choked to func­tion. Immunity did not enter into the situation; any more than the Neo­puritanic belief that the rot, and its parent the Job's-berry, were a judg­ment upon Man for his sins in pol­luting and despoiling the world.

  No, there was no need to get scriptural about it. Planetwide pollu­tion had led to plant mutations; and plant mutations had led to the Job's-berry. The Job's-berry would lead to the end of the human race. There was nothing the remnant of human­ity existing in the shielded, sterile areas could do now to exterminate the plant and clean the world's air. All they could hope for was to fight a losing battle; long enough for the Pritcher Mass workers to find an­other habitable world, to which a se­lect handful of the race could emigrate, so that the race itself could survive and make a fresh start.

  Chaz reined in his thoughts with a jerk. The little PRT car was almost to the Central Terminal destination he had punched at random when he got into the vehicle. He consulted the directory again and repunched for the location of Waka's office. The directory clicked, and showed the change in its destination window.

  He sat back, his mind now off on another topic. What had happened to Eileen? She had seemed perfectly sure of herself up to the point where she had tried to use her witchcraft to discipline the Gray Man; and the Gray Man had laughed at her. What happened to a witch who lost her abilities? Chaz ransacked his mental attic without turning up any infor­mation on that point. For the first time he considered the possibility that she might be in the hands of the Citadel, just as he had been; and a cold hand seemed to take a firm grip on his stomach.

  Of course, she had been helping him; and since it was this that had got her into trouble, if she was in trouble, it was not surprising to find himself concerned about her. But aside from that, it was still surprising that, with the little time they had been together, she should have gotten so firmly caught in the gears of his emotions. He had always thought of himself as a loner with a cynical view of his fellow men and women; the last man in the world likely to find himself feeling undue affection for anyone on short notice. Unless . . . they had somehow gotten to know each other unusually well that night of the condominium party. He wished he could remember more clearly what had gone on. In fact, once he had a moment, he should sit down and dig those memories out. Nothing in the mental attic could hide from him if he went after it de­terminedly enough.

  The PRT car slid on through tun­nels and docked finally in the base­ment of the building in which Waka had his office, and possibly his living quarters as well. Chaz got out, more awkwardly and creakily than he had expected. His sudden explosion of activity after lying in that coffin-like isolation chamber for an unguess­able number of hours had appar­ently strained muscles. He felt as stiff as a football player the day after a game.

  He walked up and down, swinging his arms in the privacy of the mo­mentarily empty PRT dock. The ex­ercise loosened him up and got his blood flowing again. He turned toward the elevator tubes; and then remembered that he was still wear­ing the white hospital jacket. He took it off and stuffed it into a re­cycle-tube slot at one end of the dock. This left him dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. Not exactly a jumpsuit—but not odd enough to attract undue attention ei­ther.

  He took the tube up to Waka's of­fice: but found the door to it locked. He walked down the corridor of the floor he was on until he came to a rank of phones. Sticking his credit card into the slot of the first one he came to, he punched for Central Lo­cating and asked it to see if Mr. Al­exander Waka could be found and communicated with.

  There was a small wait, while CL worked. Then a chime sounded from the phone grille and the screen lit up with a miniature image of Waka's head and bare shoulders.

  "I'm at home." said Waka. "Is this an emergency? Oh—so it's you. Mr. Sant."

  "It's an emergency," Chaz said. "I need to be tested immediately."

  "Immediately?" Waka looked doubtful. "I don't think I can do that."

  "Isn't it your duty to take any Pritcher Mass candidate at any hour?" Chaz said. "Sorry, Mr. Waka. But it is an emergency. Emergency enough so that I'm ready to com­plain to the authorities, if I have to, to get a test right away. A complaint like that could cost an examiner his license."

  The examiner smiled. A small, hard smile.

  "You might be interested to know, Mr. Sant," he said, "I've had a call from Police Central about you. Are you sure you're ready to contact the authorities yourself, just to complain about me?"

  Chaz looked back at him for a sec­ond.

  "So much for that commitment to the Pritcher Mass you were telling me about last time I saw you," he said.

  Waka stayed where he was, frown­ing.

  "All right." he answered, abruptly. "Apartment 4646B, the same tower you're in. Come on up."

  He cut contact and the screen went blank.

  Chaz punched off the phone at his end. For a second he leaned against the phone stand in relief. It was all over but the test now; and the test should be no problem. It was true he no longer had the catalyst: but in the isolation chamber imagining that he held it worked just as well.

  Still leaning against the phone, he half-closed his eyes and made an ef­fort to feel the rock once more in his hand. It was about the size of an or­ange. A little roughness on it fitted almost comfortably between his first two fingers ...

  He stood there, making the effort to imagine it. Evidently, however, conceiving something like this was much easier inside an isolation chamber than outside one. Slowly it grew on him that now, just standing here, as he was, he did not seem to be able to convince himself that the catalyst was really with him.

  VI

  He stayed where he was by the phones for a good ten minutes, working with his imagination in an attempt to visualize the catalyst in the real sense in which he had visualized it while he had been in the iso­lation chamber. But he could not convince himself that he was suc­ceeding—and, worse, he could not feel the confidence he had felt in the isolation chamber, or earlier at the train wreck, when the catalyst had been physically in his hand.

  Still, he kept trying. He only gave up after he had been stared at sev­eral times by people going and com­ing from offices along the corridor: and he began to fear that he was be­coming conspicuous.

  Waka would not wait forever. Chaz headed toward the elevator tubes, still working to make his imagination build the feel of a rock in his hand, the confidence of a catalyst in his min
d.

  Chaz was on the twelfth level of the building he was in. It was normal for offices to be on the lower levels, apartments on the upper. Anything over thirty stories was somewhat un­usual, but Chicago went back to the days of tall buildings. He stepped aboard an up-floating disc and let it carry him skyward.

  At the forty-sixth level he got off and went down a much narrower hallway than the one he had left be­low, until he came to a doorway of imitation walnut, with the figures 4646B glowing on it. He knocked, and the door opened immediately—as if Waka had been standing wait­ing behind it.

  The examiner grunted, seeing Chaz; and then, sticking his head out into the corridor, looked up and down swiftly. Dressed now in a blue sleeping robe, he was not the Waka whom Chaz was used to seeing dur­ing office hours. This man was harder of manner, and at the same time furtive. He pulled his head back in, beckoned Chaz curtly inside the apartment and closed the door.

  Inside, the apartment was more luxurious than any Chaz had seen since his childhood. There was a kitchenette at one end of the room he entered and, at the room's other end, was an open door which gave a glimpse of an unusual extra cham­ber, apparently furnished for noth­ing but sleeping.

  "What took you so long?" Waka demanded. His phone chimed. "Wait here."

  He turned and went into the sleep­ing room, closing the door behind him. Chaz could hear him answering the phone from in there. The mur­mur of his voice was audible, but it was not possible to make out the words.

  Chaz was left standing in the midst of the main room of the luxury apartment. It was the sort of place that would have made a fine large home for a couple with a pre-school child or two. For some reason, Ei­leen returned to his thoughts with a poignancy he could hardly bear. She had deserved better than what he had brought her. Somewhere, there could be no doubt about it, she was in trouble—whether in the hands of the Citadel or the police.