GORDON R. DICKSON

The Pritcher Mass

Conclusion.

The basic idea of the Pritcher Mass was to use human extrasensory powers to make an escape to the stars. But that turned out to be only one possible use for the Mass. The real power of the human mind was capable of much, much more!

SYNOPSIS

Chaz (Charles) Roumi Sant, making the evening commuter run by sealed train from Chicago to his apartment in the Wisconsin Dells, is grimly angry with himself because for the sixth time he has failed to pass a test of his talent for chain-perception, an extrasensory ability that is required for work on the Pritcher Mass. The Pritcher Mass is a psychic construct, a nonmaterial "tool" being built out beyond the orbit of Pluto to enable humanity to locate and examine habitable worlds, to which a seed community of selected men and women can emigrate, to ensure survival of the human race. Humanity on the Earth itself is doomed within generations. Planetwide pollution has culminated in the development of a plant mutation called the Job's-berry Rot, the wind-borne spores of which, once inhaled, take root in the moist environment of human lungs and grow until the afflicted person literally chokes to death. There is no known cure. On Earth, what is left of socially ordered mankind live in sealed cities; anyone suspected of being infected by the Job's-berry spore is immediately exiled to the open planetary surface before he or she can exhale spores and infect others. Once outside the sealed environment, death from the Rot comes in a matter of months.

The only safe place away from the Job's-berry is the Pritcher Mass Project. Chaz has been determined to qualify for work on it; but every time he takes the chain perception test, something seems to frustrate him in demonstrating the talent he is sure he possesses.

Meanwhile, his train is blown off the tracks, and the car Chaz is in is split open, exposing all within to the Rot. Infected or not, by law all those within must be exiled; but Chaz uses a nonsterile rock he picks up from the railroad ballast as a "catalyst" to release his talent for chain-perception and works out a way to smuggle himself back in among the still-sterile commuters being rescued from other cars.

At the Dells, Chaz returns to his locked apartment to discover there, Eileen Mortvain, a girl he had met only once before at a dimly remembered condominium party. She has been praying and meditating at his apartment's sterile Earth altar for his safety. As they are talking, they are interrupted by the reappearance of a woman Chaz had saved from the train. The woman tries to blackmail Chaz, threatening to tell the authorities about the unsterile "catalyst" rock Chaz has brought home with him.

The woman leaves and Chaz passes out. He has a strange dream about conversing with two aliens—one a giant snail, the other a large praying mantis. When he comes to, he hears Eileen singing an odd song to him. Eileen offers to help Chaz hide until he can qualify for work on the Pritcher Mass, which would give him immunity to any Earthside persecution. They go to her apartment, where she picks up a wolverine named Tillicum. With the help of the wolverine, she gets them all into the service tunnels connecting the basements of buildings. They ride a delivery belt toward an unknown destination; and Chaz, adding up a number of clues, accuses her of being a Satanist, one of a cult group said to have connections with the Citadel—as the organized crime world of their time is called.

She denies Satanism; but she does admit to being a witch. Witches are now recognized simply as men and women with paranormal talents who have for centuries formed an underground group of their own. Eileen takes Chaz to a "Witches' Hole" and there he meets a male witch known simply as the Gray Man, who is the coven's business link with the criminal organization, the Citadel. Eileen has no fear of the Gray Man because her paranormal powers as a witch are greater than his—in fact, greater than most. However, the Gray Man accuses her of having lost her powers, for the oldest of witch-legend reasons. She has fallen in love—with Chaz Sant.

Eileen is forced to try her powers against the Gray Man; and finds he is correct—at least for the moment, she is helpless. That is the last Chaz remembers, as the Gray Man "takes" him, and he falls unconscious.

He wakes in a place of no sound, light, or sensation. After a bit he reasons out that this is a sense-deprivation chamber, a modern version of the older device used in brainwashing. This illegal device confirms his suspicion that for some reason the Citadel wants him out of the way and now has him in its grasp. Chaz fights the sensory vacuum by using chain-perception to build an imaginary universe—and once more dreams of the snail and the mantis. He wakes this time to find himself being taken out of the chamber by two men in hospital coats, who evidently consider him reduced to helplessness. He overcomes them both, puts on the white uniform of one of them, and goes in search of Alex Waka, the Pritcher Mass examiner who has been testing him for chain-perception. He persuades Waka to give the test once more—and this time qualifies for the Mass, thus gaining immunity until the shuttle for his spaceship leaves.

Waka, in a sweat to get rid of him because he fears the Citadel, advises Chaz to take sanctuary with the Pritcher Mass authorities. Instead, Chaz goes in search of Eileen. When he finds her apartment empty, he phones a fellow apartment-dweller who says that Eileen is with her. Chaz is about to go there when the wolverine Tillicum materializes in the dim apartment hallway and warns him that the phone message is a trap. Tillicum tells Chaz that he must not try to find Eileen, and further, that he can save Eileen by going to the Mass.

Chaz obeys the message brought by the wolverine, goes to the Pritcher Mass Earth headquarters, and twenty days later, he is landed on the Mass. A tall, strikingly handsome, slim man meets him in the air lock entrance to the metal platform on which the nonmaterial Mass is being constructed. He gives Chaz one last chance to decide against working on the Mass. When Chaz does not turn back, the slim man accepts him as one of the Mass personnel, and introduces him to a legend carved over the door leading to the platform's interior:

"ALL EARTH ABANDON, YOU WHO JOIN US HERE."

The tall man is Jai Losser, Assistant Director on the Mass. He takes Chaz in to meet Lebdell Marti, Director of the Mass, and an extremely beautiful black-haired girl named Ethrya, Marti's assistant.

Marti reminds Chaz that the Mass is an attempt to make real what had been only a speculation on the part of James Pritcher (now dead), a psychologist involved in parapsychical studies. Pritcher had theorized that a group of paranormally talented humans could create a psychic construct that would operate unhampered by the normal physical laws of the universe: the Mass. But because the paranormal abilities of the human individuals building it are responsive to their subconscious as well as their conscious desires, there is no way of knowing what, really, they are building.

The Mass is intended to form a mental bridge between its platform and some possibly inhabitable world to which the seed community from Earth may emigrate, to begin life for the race again. But even if the Mass functions as it is supposed to, they still will not know what it actually is. It could be that they are building a psychic device that is only incidentally capable of doing what they want—as if they were constructing a jet airliner to pull a plow across a field.

Marti dismisses Chaz and Jai; and Jai takes Chaz up on the platform to experience the Mass. A sudden awareness of the Mass all around him moves in on Chaz like an inexorable force. Instinctively, he thinks of Eileen . . . and without warning, just as he collapses under the psychic pressure, he hears her voice answering his murmur of her name.

Chaz is several days recovering from his initial experience with the Mass. He awakens on the morning of the fifth day, to find Ethrya sitting on his bed. She explains that Chaz' first experience with the Mass was a "hallucination" and invites Chaz to go up to the Mass with her on one of her work shifts with it, to learn to control ("meter") the effect of the Mass. No one, says Ethrya, can take the full effect without self-protection.

They go up to the Mass. But then, abruptly, Ethrya is called back inside by Marti. Chaz, so far untouched by the Mass this time, says he will stay. Ethrya warns him to be on guard against another Mass-induced hallucination.

No sooner has she left, however, than he feels a strange coolness inside the right elbow of his suit, as of a hypodermic spray. A second later and a hallucination begins to hit—but it is a drug-induced hallucination. In panic, Chaz calls on Eileen again as the universe seems to go to pieces around him. She begs him to hang on to contact with her, but he starts to lose it in spite of himself. In desperation, he turns to the Mass—and the Mass responds.

It comes, completely uncontrolled, like some inconceivably great wind scattering everything in its path, including the drug effect. Rescued from that now, but helpless in the tornadic psychic storm of the Mass-force, Chaz for a while is mentally tossed about; but he begins to learn how to ride the force. Gradually, he gets control and is once more able to contact Eileen. She tells him then that she is being held by the Citadel, but the Citadel people have promised to turn her loose soon. However, she has learned that the Citadel considers Chaz unusually potential both in use, and in danger to itself; not because he is particularly powerful psychically, but because of the capability of his extremely powerful independence of spirit to influence the Mass. The Citadel plans that the seed community that escapes from Earth is to be composed of its own people only; and Chaz might threaten this.

At that moment they are interrupted by Chaz' suit phone and a call from Marti, ordering him back inside the platform.

Chaz is accused by Marti of having another hallucination (which was the intention of whoever drugged him) and is forbidden further excursions to the Mass until he has been thoroughly checked out. For eight days Chaz is kept inside the platform; but finally Marti agrees to give him one more chance to prove that he did not hallucinate, but did—as he claims—gain contact and control over the Mass. If he fails, he is through for good.

Chaz reaches for the Mass, and contacts it. It is his intention to show Marti a contact with the dream world of the imaginary Snail and the Mantis he has envisioned twice previously. Using the Mass, he reaches out; and finds the two creatures to be actually real and alive on the world of their existence. Once more he speaks to them; but the Mantis tells him bluntly this time that they cannot and will not let themselves be used to help him, and that all doors among the stars are closed to his race. He is the only human they have ever told of this, says the Mantis, because he is the only one who has come and found them.

Chaz retorts that he first found them when he was still on Earth, millions of miles from the Mass. The answer to that is a blockbuster.

"The Mass," replies the Mantis, "is on Earth."

Abruptly, this statement opens up great universes of linked cause-and-effect, to Chaz' ability of chain-perception. He follows what he perceives; and it leads him away from the alien world, in search once more of Eileen, on Earth.

He contacts her, and she tells him that the Citadel has let her go. But she goes on to say that the Earth is special to all witches, which is why none of them have seemed to want to qualify for the Mass. She would never leave Earth and he is not coming back; it is best that they break contact permanently ...

A furious suspicion is building in him as she talks. Something is wrong. With an effort he uses the Mass to bring forth a picture of where she is; and suddenly he visualizes her. She is stumbling along a grassy hillside, in the open.

"You're outside!" he explodes. "Why didn't you tell me they'd put you out of the sterile areas to die?"

At this, Eileen breaks contact; successfully shutting him out completely, because her paranormal powers are so much stronger than his. Grimly, he determines to go back to Earth in person to find and save her—and to make the Mass move him there. He no longer has Eileen as a target to aim at; but he concentrates on the hillside where he last saw her and successfully makes the transition. He appears on the hillside in his physical body; but Eileen is now no longer there. He follows the route he thinks she must be taking; and this leads him to a combination country-store/farmhouse, booby-trapped and rigged with automatic defenses. He gets past the defenses safely, however, and follows his nose upstairs in the farmhouse—to the decaying body of a man, dead several days, and to Eileen, unconscious.

Chaz drags the dead body out and goes back upstairs, taking the steps two at a time to Eileen. She is awake, but she does not recognize him. A high fever makes the skin of her forehead burningly hot; and on her neck he finds small, reddish, inflamed patches of skin—the first signs of infestation by the Rot.

Part 3

XI

His first thought was to get her some water. Looking around the dim room he caught sight of a five-gallon milk can not far from the stove. He went to it and lifted it. It was heavy and sloshed with contained liquid. He worked off the tight, heavy cover and saw a colorless liquid within.

Cautiously, he tasted it. It was certainly water—how clean and how pure, there was no way of telling. On the other hand, this was no situation in which he could pick and choose. A small aluminum pan with a bent handle hung from a nail in the wall nearby. He half-filled the pan with water and, taking it back to the bed, managed to lift Eileen's head and get her to drink. When she realized there was water at her lips, she drank thirstily, but without coming out of the delirium of her fever.

He took the empty pan back to its nail and set about examining the room they were in. The removal of the dead body and the door he had left open had improved the air considerably; but the coolness of the place was now beginning to be noticeable. It could be frigid in here before dawn.

A distant, crying voice halted him like the sudden pressure of a gun muzzle against his ribs.

"Rover, Oh, Rover ... Red Rover . . ."

The cry came from outside somewhere. But, if his ears were right, not from the same quarter of the open fields as the earlier voice, which had sounded behind him. A moment later his hearing was vindicated, as the voice he had first heard called again, this time plainly from the same direction as before.

"Rover. Red Rover . . ."

It had barely finished before two other voices sounded, each from yet another direction. He stepped quickly to the window and looked out.

He saw nothing. He squinted against the feeble glare of the red-stained clouds behind which the sun must be almost on the horizon; but he still saw nothing. Looking back into the room, he let his eyes adjust and glanced around. If the dead man he had just gotten rid of had been holed up here, he might have had some means of observation—

He found what he was looking for: a pair of heavy binoculars hung by their strap almost beside the window. He had stared right at them earlier, without recognizing the purpose in their position. He reached for them now and held them to his eyes.

They were powerful—possibly even 7x10—and for a long moment as the light faded, he could not hold them steady enough to sweep a hilltop area a few hundred meters away. Then he got one elbow braced against the window frame on one side, and began to look along the hilltop.

He saw nothing, and was just about to put the glasses away again when a figure rose to its feet as casually as if it was on a street back in one of the sterile areas. Chaz had already lowered the binoculars and he saw the figure without their aid. He jerked the binoculars back to his eyes and hunted for the shape he had just seen, sweeping past it twice before he could hold it steady in his field of amplified vision.

It was a man wearing a bulky red sweater and the lower half of a jumpsuit. In the binoculars, he seemed to leap forward at Chaz—it was like looking at him from an actual distance of less than a dozen meters. Chaz blinked—for he had seen the face before. It was the face of the man he had seen sprawled, apparently dead, beside the wrecked railway motor cart and spilled cartons, when the train in which Chaz had been wrecked was halted by an apparent sabotage attempt miles before the real thing stopped it.

Chaz continued to stare at the face he recognized. This man was not dead—in fact, he was looking damned healthy considering the ulcer spots Chaz had seen on his neck before the train wreck and which were still there now. As Chaz looked, the man cupped his hands on either side of his mouth and shouted in the direction of the buildings.

"Rover! Red Rover! Red Rover, come over . . ."

The cry seemed to linger under the darkening sky and the red-streaked clouds behind the man. Then he took one quick step backward, as if he stepped down below the brow of the hill, and disappeared.

As if his going had been a signal, the red streaks began to fade, the little glare dwindled from the clouds; and the light began to fade with a rapidity that woke Chaz suddenly to an awareness of his situation.

He hung the binoculars hastily on their nail and turned. Somewhere in here, there must be some means of making a light. He looked instinctively toward the stove and saw nothing useful there. He looked about the room, and actually looked past—before he had the sense to bring his eye back to it—an antique oil lamp. Its appearance was a cross between that of a gravy boat and a pointed-toe slipper, badly modeled in cheap crockery, standing on the table in the room.

It was, in fact, an imitation of an ancient lamp from the Mediterranean area. He had seen the same sort of thing advertised as an aid to meditation. He pounced on it, found it half-filled with liquid and with a rag of porous towel-plastic stuck in its spout-end for a wick. There was a quite modern fusion incense lighter on the table beside the lamp, and a second later he had the wick lit. A wavery illumination from the bare flame lit up the room.

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 hands 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."

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."

Red Rover nodded slowly. For a moment his face shifted and became faintly savage, then smoothed out, again.

"Yes," he said, "that was about it." He looked up at Chaz. "But that still doesn't explain the how of this . . ." He waved at the slips of paper.

"There was a way open your mind could use to keep you alive, if it wanted to," Chaz said. "As I was telling Eileen earlier, the survival instinct's a pretty primitive mechanism. It doesn't much care about attitudes, or ideas, or really about anything at all, except not dying. When your mind saw a way to keep alive, the survival instinct made it take that way."

"Which was what?"

"You had to believe that you had the paranormal power to defy the Rot," said Chaz. "That's what used to puzzle me. The Rot's not like a microbe or a virus. It's simply a mechanical thing. The spore finds human lungs a good place to flourish; and it keeps growing until it strangles the person it's inside. Of course, there couldn't be any kind of natural resistance to being choked to death. The Rot had to mean one hundred percent deaths following spore inhalation—there couldn't be any immunes."

"But there are," said Red Rover.

Chaz nodded. "Myself, the witches—there'd probably be others around in the sterile areas who'd show they were immune if they were ever exposed to the Rot—but they take care not to be, just like everyone else, because they don't know yet that they're immune," Chaz said. "The point is, though, both the witches and myself know we've got paranormal powers. The four buried downstairs didn't, or didn't believe they had. But obviously you must have, whether you knew it or not. The paranormal powers must have a way of killing or destroying any spores inhaled. You were probably concentrating pretty hard on killing somebody, I'd guess, that first year or so you were outside."

"Yes," said Red Rover. He took a deep breath and sat back in his chair. "But now that we know about me and those powers, where do we go from here?"

"We'll get to that," said Chaz. "But first you've got a few things to tell us. To start off with, how did you happen to come here hunting Eileen?"

"I was working for the Citadel," said Rover. "I didn't know she was an immune, of course, or I'd never have taken the job—either that, or I'd have let her know right away what I was doing. But they hired me to tail her until she was dead, then come back and tell them about it."

He looked over at Eileen.

"Sorry . . . Eileen, isn't it?" he said. "But one of the ways I've made a go of it out here has been doing jobs for the Citadel. If you knew—"

"It happens I do know about working for them," said Eileen. "Don't apologize."

"Just how have you been making a go of it?" Chaz asked. "And how much of a go was it?"

Rover told them. He had been a member of a trade rare in present times—a high-rise construction worker. As a result, he had been required to work outside of the sterile areas on those rare occasions when construction or repair was being done in the Chicago area. When he had come back inside from work one day, a routine check had shown his sterile suit to have a leak in it. He had not even been allowed back through the inner air lock to gather his possessions. He had simply been turned loose as he was.

He had been filled with fury at the people who had locked him out. For a year he had lived any way he could outside, with only one thing on his mind—getting back in and getting his hands on the inspector who had ordered him left outside. At the end of that year, he had suddenly realized that he knew nobody else who had survived the Rot more than a few months once they had been exiled.

At that time, there were other exiles who had some idea of how long he had been outside; since he had never made any particular secret of it. He got word that some of these were beginning to wonder about him. There were rumors that he was a spy from inside, who had some secret drug to keep him safe from the Rot. He learned there was talk of torturing him until he shared the drug and its secret with the rest of them.

He slipped away and holed up, kept out of sight of anyone else for three months to make sure all who knew him were dead. Then he painted himself with imitation neck-ulcers and began to mingle with the new crop of exiles that had grown up.

There were no further questions about him; until one day when he ran into a pack of Rovers—as the loose associations of exiles were called—those who banded together to make easier the search for food and shelter until the Rot got them. The leader of this particular pack, however, was a man Red Rover recognized from a year before—and who recognized him in return. They got together privately and there was a grim moment in which Red Rover thought it was a case of kill or be killed. But he learned then that while immunes were rare, they were not unknown—to other immunes, that was. Only, it was unwise for them to band together, for fear of being identified by the other exiles for what they were. Also, there was an advantage in each leading his own Rover pack and getting the best of what the pack could provide.

Nonetheless, the immunes kept in touch with each other. It was through the others that Red Rover had learned that the Citadel had jobs for exiles willing to work for it, and would pay for that work in food or comforts impossible to find outside. Most of the work involved transporting stolen or illegal goods by outside routes from one sterile area to another. Nearly all the exiles working for the Citadel at any one time, Red Rover told Chaz and Eileen, were immunes—although the Citadel was never allowed to find this out. The immune exiles were bitter about all the people still safely in the sterile areas—but most of all they hated the Citadel representatives, who treated them like men and women already dead.

"All right," said Red Rover, winding up his story. "What about you two?"

Chaz told him. It took the better part of an hour to cover the whole story with explanations, from the day of the train wreck until now. Chaz wound up by showing the other the diary of the four dead men. When he had skimmed through it, Red Rover sat for a moment with his legs still outstretched, then gave a long whistle and got to his feet.

"So. Four ordinary dead, instead of one immune; and I helped keep the place untouched for whoever came next. Well, so long friends," he said. "The best of luck to you both."

"You're leaving?" cried Eileen.

"Right!" said Red Rover. "You people are in too deep with too many large-sized enemies for me. I just want to keep alive—I don't even hate that inspector that put me outside, anymore."

"Just walking out isn't going to cut you free of us now," Chaz said.

"Hm-m-m," said Rover. "Maybe you're right. I'm sorry, friends—" His hand slipped in underneath his sweater at his waist and came out holding a hand laser, pointed at Chaz. "If it's got to be a choice between you or me, maybe I better just turn your bodies in."

Chaz' spine prickled; but he kept his voice steady and did not move from where he sat.

"Don't throw away the best chance you've had in years," he said. "You need us a lot worse than we need you. Don't tell me you like living outside that much. I'm ready to bet you'd do just about anything for the chance to get back and be part of human society again."

Rover stood holding the gun, but he did not move his finger on the firing button.

"All right," he answered. "Tell me how I can do that. But it's going to have to be something good. As I see it, you're both right up against the Citadel; and the Citadel's the most powerful thing there is, nowadays."

"No, it isn't," Chaz said. "The Pritcher Mass is. Whoever controls that, controls everything."

"Thought you told me the Citadel already has control of the Mass?"

"It does," Chaz said. "That's why the Citadel's got to go."

"Go? There's nothing that can touch the Citadel," said Rover.

"Yes, there is," replied Chaz. "The same thing that can always touch whoever's in power, and bring them down."

"Oh?" Red Rover looked at him sardonically.

"People," explained Chaz. "Lots of people. All or most of the people, in fact. Tell me something, Red Rover. Suppose the people in the sterile areas of just the Chicago district were given a choice—face the outside and the Rot, or get rid of the Citadel. Which do you think they'd take?"

Red Rover put his laser away.

"Man," he said to Chaz, "you pushed the right buttons. If you're talking about what I think you're talking about—which is facing all those meditating, prayer-pushing fat hypocrites in the sealed areas with the same sort of thing I've been facing for five years—you've made your point. I want to see that happen no matter what comes, if I have to die for it."

XIII

Red Rover came back and sat down.

"All right, then," he said. "Now tell me how you're going to shove a choice like that on the insiders—and that better be good, too. Because if anyone else out here knew how to do it, it would have been done by now."

"That's one of the things I'm counting on," Chaz said. "Do you think you could round up enough Rover packs to give us a couple of hundred men who feel the same way you do about the people inside?"

"Depends what you want them for," Rover said. "Anyway, they wouldn't all be led by immunes. There aren't that many of us."

"They don't all have to have immune leaders," Chaz said. "Just so they're willing to do some fighting if they have to."

"You aren't going to be able to raid the sterile areas, and scare the people there into choosing between the Citadel and the outside, with two hundred men," Rover said. "Even if two hundred men could handle about three thousand police—which is about what they've got, inside."

"I don't want most of the two hundred inside at all," said Chaz. `They're just to guard things outside while the action inside is going on."

"Just guard? What about weapons?"

"We'll get them," said Chaz. "Any that are needed."

"You will, will you? You seem pretty sure of yourself," said Red Rover. "All right, if most of the Rover packs are just going to guard, what are you going to use to scare insiders into dumping the Citadel?"

"Explosives," said Chaz. He turned and went over to the table for a sheet of paper which he brought back and handed to Rover. "I'm no artist, but that's a rough sketch of the sealed areas of Chicago as I know them. It looks to me as if eight large holes blown in the walls and tunnels I've marked would open up better than half the city to the outside and the Rot spores."

"It might," said Rover, studying the sheet. "But you've got to be talking about big holes. Holes you could walk a whole marching band through. And that's going to take something like you've never seen in the way of explosives. The few sticks of old dynamite or blasting powder we can scrounge up here on the outside won't begin to open even one of your holes."

"Don't worry," Chaz said. "We'll get the explosives from inside. All we need, just like with the weapons."

"From where?"

Chaz nodded at Eileen.

"The covens will help."

"Covens?" Rover echoed, looking at her.

"Witches get together in covens," Eileen said from the bed. She was beginning to get some normal color back in her face, after the drawn look that the fever had given her. "Something like Rovers get together in packs. I'm a witch."

"Witch?" said Rover. He blinked at her. "You don't mean…witch?"

"Why not?" said Eileen, smiling a little wickedly at him. "You're a witch, too—or as good as. Remember what you did with those pieces of paper just now? Otherwise you'd never have been immune to the Rot. Why? You aren't prejudiced against witches, are you?"

"Well . . . of course not," said Rover. "I was just thinking, that's all. It's the other Immunes. What I mean is, maybe we better not rush them. Suppose I just start talking about some people inside who're against putting out every poor wonker who might have breathed unsterile air for a minute." He became brisk. "Now, how do you plan to do this?"

He turned his back to Chaz.

"Eileen knows where the Citadel people are—in a building actually called the Embry Tower," said Chaz. "Some of us attack that at the same time as one hole is blown in a single sterile area, as a warning. Meanwhile, another bunch—the witches, maybe—have gotten their hands on the city's emergency channel on the viz-phones. They cut in on the general alert following the explosion, and broadcast a warning that the rest of Chicago gets opened up unless the Citadel people are handed over to the outsiders. Then they switch to phoning pictures of us taking over the Citadel building and also to filming the mobs that form to help us."

"And what," said Red Rover, "will the Chicago District Government and police be doing while all this is going on?"

"You ought to know better than that," Eileen put in from the bed. "The Citadel owns the Chicago District Government. The District Director, the General of Police, and nearly everyone else that counts, are Citadel members—just like with every other large city district in the world. In fact it's not just Chicago. The whole world, more or less, is run from that Citadel building."

Red Rover grunted, as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

"Want to back out?" Chaz asked, watching him closely.

Rover shook his head.

"I guess you want our Rover packs to guard the explosive positions outside the walls and tunnels then," he said.

"That's right," Chaz said. "And set them off only when ordered—if ordered—by you. We can't trust anyone else outside."

"That's true enough." Without actually moving, Rover gave the impression of shaking himself off, like someone coming up into the air after a deep dive underwater. "Now what?"

"Next," Chaz said, "we get together with the covens. Eileen contacted one of the witches in her own coven, this afternoon. The whole coven will get us inside and meet with us, as soon as we can come in. What's the closest air lock to the Chicago District?"

"About five miles east," Rover said. `There is a trash disposal lock. We can walk it in a couple of hours. Night's the safe time to move around—if Eileen there's up to it. I've got a portable limpet light."

"I'm up to it," said Eileen.

It was actually closer to four hours before they all sat together in a witches' hole in the sterile areas with those members of Eileen's coven who could be gathered together on such short notice. Noticeably among the missing were the Gray Man and one or two others not trusted by the coven.

Chaz introduced Red Rover and once more explained his plan.

"You know," said a white-haired man among the witches, "we're not fighters; and we've got a responsibility to protect the sisterhood and the brotherhood. But we could get your Rovers anything they need—it's our people, not the Citadel's, who control the supply tunnels. And we can probably dig up some of us who know something about the use of explosives for demolition and things like that."

"How about people to man the phones and get what we're doing on the viz-screens?" Chaz asked. The white-haired man hesitated.

"Maybe some of the younger ones might want to take an active part in that end of it," he said. "We'll know after we check with the other Chicago covens. That'll take several days. Now, about payment for our part in this—"

"Payment!" said Red Rover. The word came out of him with the abrupt, brutal sound of an obscenity.

"I'm sorry," said the witch, looking from Rover to Chaz. "But as I say we've got to protect ourselves and the next generations of witches. That's been our rule down the centuries."

"Damn you," said Red Rover. "This isn't the Middle Ages anymore. You're some sort of psychological types it says in the textbooks, not bogeymen."

"I'm sorry," the white-haired man said again. "But we can't suddenly scrap the rules that we've lived by this long." He kept his gaze on Chaz. "When the Citadel's influence is cleaned out of the Pritcher Mass, we want the witches to take over control of it. I don't mean control out on the Mass itself; I mean the Earth end of it, the policy and decision-making authority back here. We can't risk having the Mass used against us."

"You sure you can speak for all your friends?" demanded Rover, before Chaz could answer.

"Sure enough so that I know there's no use going to them for help unless you can promise what I'm asking," the witch answered without taking his eyes off Chaz. "Well?"

"Well . . ." said Chaz, slowly. "I'll agree—provided one thing. No one with paranormal talents is to be excluded from the witch group that gets control of the Earth end of the Mass."

"That's reasonable enough," said the witch. "All right. We'll get busy." Arrangements were made for delivery of explosives and other supplies to the Rovers by the witches; and the meeting broke up. Chaz, Eileen and Red Rover were let back outside by the same way they had entered, through the service air lock by a waste-disposal outlet. With dawn only a few hours away, they headed back to the house.

"What makes you think you can deliver control of the Mass to anyone, once this is over?" Red Rover asked Chaz bluntly. Chaz looked at him in the illumination from the limpet light the other man was carrying.

"Do you trust me?" Chaz asked. "Or don't you?"

"Oh, I trust you," Rover said. "I'll also look you up afterwards and kill you, if it turns out trusting you was the wrong thing to do."

It took better than a week—both inside and outside the sterile areas of Chicago—to set things up. In the meantime, Red Rover left a note just outside the air lock that was his contact point with the Citadel, saying that Eileen had died of the Rot. Two days later, checking the point from under cover, he saw the red piece of cloth lying on the ground that was the signal that he was wanted. He waited until after dark, went in without a light and found an answering note. He took it a safe distance away over a hill to use a light on it, and read that he was to produce Eileen's body and bring word of the location of a man answering Chaz' description. Dousing his light, he carefully took the note back and left it where he had found it, by the red cloth. From then on he stayed clear of the contact point.

Meanwhile, however, the covens had picked up word that the top people in the Citadel organization were returning from around the world, and even from the Mass, to meet at the Citadel building in Chicago. An unhappy and fearful male witch slipped outside the sterile areas to bring the news to Chaz, personally.

"I expected it," Chaz told the man. "They've got the Mass and, as Eileen herself reminded me once, people with paranormal talents and computers. They can follow logic-chains well enough to see that I'm going to try something against them. Naturally they're getting together to plan strategy."

"If they know that much," said the witch, "they may know just what we're planning to do. They can be waiting for us."

"They don't know," Chaz said. "They can't predict correctly without having all relevant facts. And they don't."

"What don't they know?"

"Certain things," said Chaz. "For one, that there are immunes among the exiles; and that these immunes owe their lives to paranormal powers they didn’t even suspect they had."

The witch stared at him.

"What else don't they know?" he asked at last.

"Some things," Chaz said. "I'll tell you what your people can do, though. You can pull out of this if you want to. Only, if we lose, the Citadel is going to trace those supplies back to help from your covens; and if we win, you won't get the authority over the Pritcher Mass you wanted."

The witch left. But there was no talk from the covens of withdrawing their assistance in the few days that remained.

The attack on the Citadel had been planned for a Sunday afternoon. At three that afternoon, Chaz, Eileen, Red Rover and a dozen of the Rovers, about half of them immunes, were waiting in the supply tunnel that connected with the Citadel building. Chaz was carrying a portable phone to the cable in the tunnel wall; and he had it keyed to show the southern face of the building and the sky over the western section of the Lower Loop sterile area of Chicago. The view was from the pickup of a public phone booth of a square before the south side of the building, which was listed in the District Directory simply as the Embry Tower. It was one of the eighty-story towers raised in that part of Chicago in the 1990's, shortly before the Rot had appeared. It poked its top thirty stories through the upper protective dome over the sterile area like a stick through a bubble; and its outer glass facing reflected the gray clouds overhead with a matching grayness of its own. There were only a few casual pedestrians crossing through the square at the moment. Half a dozen non-uniformed guards could also be seen playing the part of casual idlers, within the transparent walls of the street-level lobby of the tower.

"There!" said Chaz; and the rest of those with him crowded closer to the small phone screen for a look. A black plume of smoke was rising toward the clouds off to the west beyond the tops of the area's buildings, in that direction. A second later, the tunnel about them shuddered slightly with a shock wave.

The scene on the phone screen was suddenly replaced by the picture of a middle-aged, heavy-featured woman wearing a green police uniform. The sharp warning whistle of the emergency signal sounded. If Chaz' phone had not already been in use, that signal would have activated it.

"Citizens of the Lower Loop area," said the woman on the screen. "Emergency. I repeat, this is an emergency broadcast under the pollution warning system. All citizens of the Lower Loop area, please pay special attention. All citizens of the nineteen sterile areas of the main Chicago District, pay close attention. An as-yet-unexplained explosion has breached the seal in the western extremity of the Lower Loop area. All available pollution-fighting equipment has been called in from all nineteen areas; and a chemical barrier is being thrown up while a temporary seal is under construction behind the exposed area.

"All citizens are warned to stay where they are, if possible, and preserve local sterile conditions. Please, those of you who may have relatives or friends in the area of the explosion, stay away. Repeat, stay away! Crowding the access routes to the area will only increase the danger of polluting the whole Lower Loop. All care will be taken to insure that those not exposed will not be left beyond the temporary seal when it is locked in place. I repeat, do not crowd the area. All care will be taken—"

The image of the woman in the uniform was suddenly wiped off the screen, to be replaced by a figure of an ordinary gray jumpsuit wearing a flexmask—and it was impossible to tell from the screen whether it was a man or woman. The accompanying voice was similarly disguised by a filter, so that the anonymity of its sex was complete. It was one of the witches, Chaz guessed; but which one, probably even Eileen would never know.

"Attention, citizens of all Chicago sterile areas," said the figure. "Attention, all Chicago citizens. The explosion just announced by pollution control authorities was not an accident. I repeat, not an accident. The security of the Lower Loop areas has been deliberately breached as a warning to Chicago citizens. All other areas in the main Chicago district will be similarly breached, and the citizens now in them exposed to the Rot spores, if the members of the criminal organization known as the Citadel, who are now occupying the Embry Tower in the Lower Loop, are not immediately removed from that building and put outside the sterile areas.

"I repeat. The members of the Citadel now in the Embry Tower must be removed and placed outside the sterile areas. They must be put out at the spot where the Lower Loop was just breached, before sunset, or the other areas of the main Chicago district will be breached in a similar manner. We, the Committee for the Purification of Chicago, call on all citizens to assist in securing these criminals and seeing that they are put outside.

"I will repeat again what I have said. The breach of the Lower Loop area was not an accident. Other areas will be breached unless the criminals of the Citadel are removed from the Embry Tower and placed outside by sunset. We, the Committee for the Purification of Chicago, call on all citizens to assist in securing these criminals . . ."

"Let’s go," said Chaz, turning from the phone to the door nearby, leading into the basement of the Embry Tower. He fitted a vibration key to the lock plate and the heavy door swung open. Inside, in a small room at the foot of the concrete staircase, were three uniformed guards—all sound asleep in chairs.

Chaz grinned at Eileen. The tension of the moment already had the body adrenaline singing in his blood.

"Beautiful, honey," he said. "I had to see it to believe in it—a spell cast through a cased steel door."

"You ought to know physical barriers don't—" Eileen broke off, glancing up the empty stairs. "Chaz!"

"What's wrong?" He swung about to stare at the harmless-looking stairs.

"Power," Eileen said, unhappily. "Someone with a terrible lot of power, up there somewhere. Can't you feel it?"

Chaz tried, felt nothing, reached for help from the Mass, tried again and still felt nothing. He shook his head.

"You mean somebody knows we're coming?"

"I . . . don't think so," said Eileen. "But whoever it is, he's the most powerful person I've ever felt."

"He?"

"I don't know. It just feels male, somehow . . ."

Chaz shook his head.

"Forget it. We can't fiddle around now." He spoke over his shoulder to the rest of them. "Come on."

He led the way up the staircase. At the fire door of the street-level landing, Red Rover snapped to the men just behind him: "Seal that!"

Several Rovers stopped and began to melt the edges of the door into its heavy metal frame with their hand lasers. Chaz continued up the stairs.

At each landing, Red Rover left men at work sealing the fire doors. But four landings up, the staircase itself ended, abruptly and in violation of all fire ordinances. A solid concrete wall barred their way.

"The elevators," Chaz said.

He went through the nearby fire door into what seemed to be a fourth-floor landing. There were some doors opening on the landing, all ajar, all showing small, empty offices. The elevator tubes were there also, but they were halted, their floating disks hanging frozen in the transparent tubes.

"Think they expected us, after all?" Red Rover asked.

"Maybe," said Chaz. "Maybe just an automatic protective reaction switched them off when the emergency phone broadcast came on, or the guards down in the lobby found out we were here."

Below them, from the stairwell, they could hear a crackling noise as the lobby guards, alerted by the heat radiating from the half-melted edges of the sealed fire door at that level, were now trying to cut through the door from their own side. Luckily it was easier to seal a door with a laser than to open it with such a weapon after it was sealed.

"What then?" Rover said.

"I thought of something like this," Chaz said. "Eileen's been held in this building before. She's got a memory of the room she was kept in. If she and I can transfer to that room, maybe we can get the elevators going for the rest of you. Give me the recorder and the suit bag."

He reached out; and the Rover with the portable phone recorder, slung like a satchel from one shoulder, lifted it off and passed it to him. Chaz slung the strap over his own right shoulder and turned to Eileen. He took the suit bag another Rover passed him and produced a pair of airsuits, handing one to Eileen.

"What's that for?" Red Rover asked. Chaz did not take time to answer until he and Eileen were both suited up. He watched Eileen close her faceplate, then turned to Rover before sealing his own.

"I'll try taking her out to the Mass and back in again," he said. "It worked in rehearsal, but then we both knew where we wanted to come back to. If it doesn't work this time, take your Rovers back out and mingle with whatever crowd shows up in the square. Give us five minutes, then leave. But keep your portable phone open for any word from me. All right?"

"Right enough," said Red Rover.

Chaz reached with his gloved hand for Eileen's. He winked at her through his faceplate, in signal. These particular airsuits had no phones.

The landing around them blinked out. There was a glimpse of starlight and the Mass platform apparently standing up vertically alongside them to their right, then they were in what looked like an ordinary, condominium one-room apartment.

Chaz looked at Eileen. She was nodding and smiling through her faceplate as she unsealed it so that he could hear her speak. He reached up and unsealed his own.

As he pulled it open to the room air, a sudden dizziness took him. He opened his mouth to shout a warning at Eileen; but saw her with her own suit unsealed and already falling. A moment of disorientation took him and . . .

He opened his eyes to find himself out of the airsuit entirely and seated in a chair.

Eileen was seated in a chair alongside him. They were under the dome of a roof garden—almost certainly on the top floor of the Embry Tower. Facing them were several tables pushed together to make one long surface; and behind this sat a small handful of people, among whom Chaz recognized Waka, Ethrya, and Jai.

Beside Chaz, Eileen made a small, choking noise. He looked quickly at her, and saw her staring at Jai in either fascination or terror.

"You?" she said, in a strangled voice. "You're the one I felt downstairs?"

"Yes," said Jai. "And thank you, sister. I take the recognition as a compliment. You seem to have more than an ordinary share of the talent, yourself."

XIV

Chaz throttled back the dismay and fury that rose inside him. It was strangely easy to do.

"You're one of the Citadel crew too, then," he said calmly to Jai, "or maybe you're their head man?"

"No one in the Citadel is head man," answered Jai. "We're like any other business, an organization. You might compare me to a chairman of the board, if you want to make a comparison. Ethrya, here, would be president of the company, perhaps." The tall man's voice was as gentle as ever. Chaz shook his head a little.

"What could an outfit like this offer someone like you?" he said. "Particularly if you've got the paranormal abilities Eileen says you have."

"Freedom," said Jai, gently. "Some people find freedom by getting well away from others. I find it by being well in control of others." He looked at Chaz almost sadly. "That's always been your one flaw, Chaz. You don't have the drive to control others; but at the same time you refuse to let others have any control over you. That's why I've finally voted against you; even if I was for your coming out to the Mass, originally."

He glanced to his right at Waka.

"Not everybody agreed with me about that," he said. "Poor old Alex, here, was caught in the middle."

"Why take chances?" Ethrya said. "It was a real chance you took when you had Waka qualify him for the Mass. If we'd killed him in the first place the way I said, he wouldn't have been around to cause us even the trouble he's causing us now."

"Investment theory," said Jai. "The whole theory of investment assumes some risk-taking in order to get the chance of making a greater profit. Chaz might have paid off for us very well. Besides, the present situation is under control."

He looked away from Ethrya, over to one side where a couple of men were setting up two antennae, each about three meters tall, and two meters apart. For a moment they stood there unenergized, like silvery wands; and then a two-dimensional image sprang into being between them. It was a view of the square before the south side of the Tower, apparently picked up by a camera high on the building's side, but telescopically enlarged to give close-ups from what seemed to be a few feet above the heads of those in the square.

Meanwhile, people behind the long table section were changing seats. Ethrya was giving up her chair beside Jai to a heavy-set man in his fifties with a bulldog face; a man who looked vaguely familiar. Chaz stared at him for a moment before it registered on him that he was looking at the City Director for the Chicago District. Eileen had been right about the Citadel's involvement with government officials.

Chaz looked back at the scene in the square below. Think, he commanded himself. The square was beginning to fill up with a crowd that was clearly disturbed and unfriendly in its attitude toward the Embry Tower. Chaz glimpsed several of the Rovers he recognized, wearing ordinary jumpsuits, circulating among the crowd and clearly talking its emotions up. He did not, however, recognize Red Rover anywhere; and the absence of the immune leader brought him a small, unimportant feeling of relief. He remembered Eileen, and looked over at her.

She was sitting in a chair just like his, not more than three meters from him. She smiled a little palely, as their eyes met. Like him, she was not tied in the chair or restrained in any way; although, looking beyond her, out by the far end of the long table surface he saw a thin young man covering them both with a hand laser.

Chaz turned his head back to the table.

"Jai?" he said.

The tall man broke off a low-voiced conversation with the Chicago City Director and a short, white-haired man standing behind them. The white-haired man turned and went off to take a chair several seats down the table to Jai's right. Jai looked at Chaz. Chaz had to think for a second. Then he remembered why he had called the tall man.

"Eileen," said Chaz. "You don't need her here."

Jai shook his head.

"To tell the truth, I'd like to do without her myself," he said. "After all, I'm a witch, too—or was. And hurting any kind of people is a bad practice. It builds up calluses on the sensitivity areas. But in this case we have to make a case against you, Chaz; and we need her for that. A shame—" he glanced at Eileen for a moment. "You really do have an unusual talent, sister."

"Don't call me sister," said Eileen emotionlessly. "You don't deserve the name of witch, if you ever did. Dark see you, dark blind you, grave take you, curse bind you."

"I'm sorry," said Jai, very gently indeed. "I understand how you feel. But you ought to know better than to think you can hurt me in any way with the Craft. In all my life I never found anyone who could approach me at its use; much less one able to attack me with it."

He turned back to talking with the mayor. In the screen, the square was now showing itself packed with people; and to the west the dark stain of smoke from fires following the explosion still hung like a dirty finger-smudge on the sky above the city's buildings and transparent domes. It was getting on toward four o'clock, Chaz guessed; and the gray-clouded winter day, as it always did at this hour, had become dull-lighted and heavy with a chilling dreariness. Something inside him was telling him that the battle was already lost. Lost and forgotten...

A bit from a poem floated out of the back of Chaz' attic memory into the front of his mind. What was it from? Oh, yes . . . "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," by John Keats:

"Ah, what can ail thee, knight at arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing! . . ."

And then, the last line:

". . . La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall."

Only it was not La Belle Dame, but Le Beau Jai, that had Eileen and himself in thrall...

Faintly, from a sound receiver somewhere, he heard a chanting. He looked at the image of the square below, and saw the crowd swaying back and forth as one person. Obviously, it was the source of the chanting, which was directed against the Embry Tower; but the receiver was set at such low volume he could not make out what words were being chanted. The sound and swaying stopped then, almost abruptly; and the camera view swung around to look awkwardly down at a narrow angle on the lower front of the building itself. On the lower building-side there was now showing an image of the long table and those seated behind it; with the central focus on the face of the Chicago District Director. He began to speak. Someone turned the volume up on the receiver and it echoed his words as they also reached Chaz' ears from directly across the little distance between Chaz and the long table.

. . . realize that it is unusual for myself, as District Director, to address you all over an emergency phone broadcast this way. However, we are presently faced with a situation in which the utmost in self-restraint and control will be needed from all our citizens. As most of you already know, saboteurs from outside the sterile areas have succeeded in blowing a hole in the protection of the Lower Loop. As anyone might expect, we neither judge nor condemn these sick-minded exiles from among those who have had to be removed from the sterile community for the greater good of all. But for that same greater good, we must now take defensive measures to protect our healthy populace. In order that all Chicago citizens should understand the need for such defensive measures, I have felt it needful to acquaint you not only with a plot that has already resulted in one explosion, plus the threat of others that would indeed pose a danger to us all, but also to acquaint you with the chief saboteurs and events leading up to this criminal act."

He paused, glancing at the image of the square below. Chaz also looked. Judging from the reaction of the crowd, most of them were paying attention. It was a good bet, thought Chaz absently, that all through the Chicago areas, most of the others there were listening as well.

"These saboteurs," the Director went on, "have attempted to blackmail you all into exiling some perfectly innocent and valuable members of the sterile community. Their aim in this was to cripple a scientific project which is dear to the spiritual and ethical hopes of all our people; in that it offers hope—not to us, but to some chosen few of our children—who with its help may one day find a new Earth on a clean, untouched world; and by avoiding the mistakes of our profligate ancestors, set the human race once more on its upward road.

"But before I say any more, let me take a moment to reassure everyone that our police, acting on information supplied by citizens who were approached by the saboteurs but who took their information immediately to the authorities, have located all four of the other explosion sites prepared by the saboteurs—"

"That can't be right," said Chaz out loud, without thinking. "No one inside the sterile areas knew the number or location of the other sites; and only one man outside, besides myself, knew until three hours ago."

"I will now give you Police Headquarters on remote for a report by the Police General himself," said the Director hastily, and sat back in his chair, turning to Jai. "Did they hear him?"

Jai looked past Chaz. Chaz, turning, saw a red-haired, bulky man at a small table bearing commercial-sized broadcast recorders. The bulky man shook his head, and walked up, past Chaz, to the table.

"No chance," he told Jai and the Director. "I've got his chair in a dead zone. I can feed him into the screen with a directional pickup any time you want; but outside of that, he's simply not here to the rest of the equipment."

"How long are you giving the Police General?" asked the Director, looking at his watch.

"Four minutes," said the bulky man. "Then we return to you and you do the introduction to the Assistant Director from the Mass, here." He nodded at Jai. "While we've got a moment, though, Mr. Director, if you'd move your chair a little closer to the Assistant Director's, it'd help in the reaction shots. We want to close in on your face, looking concerned, when he makes his more important points. He'll hold up one forefinger to signal us; then I'll signal you, Mr. Director, and you listen for the line you want to react to . . ."

Chaz let his attention drift from the conversation at the table. He looked at Eileen and smiled; and once more she managed a smile in return. The thin young man covering them with the laser continued alert.

Chaz' mind had been working slowly with the situation, trying to lay out logic-chains on the possibilities. But he found himself unable to hold the chains in his mind. It was hard to concentrate in the face of the realization that everything was all over. For himself, he thought, it hardly mattered. Nobody would mourn him after he was dead; and as for the dying itself, that hardly mattered more to him than his death would to anyone else. He had been something like a cornered rat in his reactions all his life; and in a way he had always been prepared for the time when the rest of the world would turn on him and destroy him. He knew that whenever his own time came he would go out in a red rage, which was not the worst way to die, no matter what was being done to you at the time. But of course, there was Eileen. Jai was clearly planning that she should share whatever conclusion was in store for Chaz; and she would not find dying such an indifferent matter as he did—especially if it was some kind of prolonged death.

He looked at the man with the laser and put his hand on the edge of the chairseat, under him. Maybe by throwing the chair at the thin young man he could distract the gunman long enough to reach him and get the weapon away. Then he might be able to live long enough to shoot Eileen. She would not be expecting it and from him; it would be mercifully swift. She would never know what hit her.

". . . Now that you have all heard what the General of Police has had to say," the City Director was talking again, "I want to introduce you to a man some of you may already have recognized in the group shots of this table—Jai Losser, Assistant Director on the Pritcher Mass. To those of you who are surprised to find the Assistant Director of the Mass back here on Earth, I should explain something that has been a closely guarded official secret, and which is revealed now only because of the seriousness of the situation. This building, the Embry Tower, which the saboteurs would have had you believe contained the chief members of the reputed criminal organization popularly named the Citadel, is actually the confidential headquarters on Earth for work with the Pritcher Mass. Assistant Director Losser is now going to speak to you because the chief saboteur, whom we have under arrest here, together with the woman who was his first assistant, was himself a worker on the Mass. Mr. Losser."

Jai leaned forward, smiling softly, as the City Director sat back in his chair.

"I'm honored to speak to the citizens of Chicago District," he said pleasantly, "although I wish the occasion was a happier one. The chief saboteur the City Director mentioned is a man named Charles Roumi Sant, formerly employed in this District. A man whom I regret to say I once liked, and of whom I had a very high opinion."

He gestured with one hand toward Chaz. Chaz, watching the image between the two upright antennae, saw his own face appear many times life-size on the south face of the Embry Tower. It showed there only a minute, then was replaced by a brief close-up of the District Director, showing concern on his features, followed by a return to a head-and-shoulder shot of Jai.

"Even now," Jai said. "I hate to condemn this man. Although tests show him to be completely sane and responsible, it is hard to believe that any sane man could plan on exposing hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents to the Rot, simply to gain a position on the Pritcher Mass that would insure his being one of those that would emigrate to a new world—once such a world had been found."

He waved again at Chaz. Once more, Chaz saw his own face flashed on the building. The sound of the crowd voices mounted. Jai's features replaced those of Chaz.

"The details are somewhat technical," Jai said. "Briefly, however, Sant tried to gain a position of authority on the Mass by creating an illusion that he had contacted not only a habitable world, but one with intelligent aliens on it. This hoax was exposed when I went out with him during a shift of work on the Mass, and made mental contact with the illusion myself. While it first seemed to have some validity, a closer examination showed nothing really new or alien about the world or its so-called alien inhabitants. Working with an artist, I have managed to produce actual-size representations of those aliens as Sant imagined them. I have those representations here; and you will be shown them. Notice how they are nothing but a common Earth insect, and an equally common Earth mollusk, enlarged."

He waved his hand to the left side of the table, where Chaz saw two large two-dimensional cut-out sort of figures. One was very much like the Mantis and the other was very much like the large Snail from the cartoon world. He looked back at Jai.

"I didn't know you were with me," he said to Jai. "You actually are good, aren't you? But why drag that part in—wait, I understand. You've got to find some way of justifying what happens to me to the non-Citadel people back on the Mass. You've got to have some reason for shutting off contact with the cartoon world I added to the Mass."

Jai did not answer. He had paused to let his viewers look at the representations. Now, he went on to his audience.

"When I told Sant I knew this was a hoax," Jai said, "he admitted it; but he begged to be kept on the Mass. I was forced to refuse. He came back to Earth. Back here, he went outside the Chicago District and gathered a crew of saboteurs with the idea of blackmailing the citizens of Chicago into creating a threat to this building and its workers. It was his hope that he could use that threat in turn to blackmail us here into putting him back on the Mass in a position of authority."

Jai paused and smiled across the table at Chaz. For a second Chaz saw his own face, looking oddly unconcerned, imaged on the building in the screen between the antennae. Then Jai was back on the screen.

"But we," said Jai, "trusting in the good common sense of our Chicago citizens, decided to call his bluff; with the result that, as the Police General has explained, we have now nullified all his attempts at sabotage; and he, with the woman who abetted him, is now in custody."

Another flash of Chaz' face on the side of the building below. The volume of sound from outside was turned up; and the voice of the crowd was an ugly voice, becoming uglier at the sight of Chaz' image.

"Sant and the woman will now be sent under police escort from this building through the streets to Police Headquarters," Jai said. "You may all return to your homes, satisfied that everything is secure and justice will be done. Please, I beg you, any of you who have strong feelings about what Sant might have succeeded in doing, take my word for it that in our courts justice will indeed be done. Do not be tempted to take it into your own hands . . . "

The crowd roared like a senseless beast.

"I trust you," said Jai, with a sad smile, "your General of Police and your District Director trust you, to allow these criminals and the two police officers who will be escorting them, to proceed in an orderly manner from here to Police Headquarters—"

Chaz rose with a great effort, and threw his chair at the young man with the laser, knocking him down. Following the chair as fast as he could—but it was almost as if he moved in slow motion—Chaz was on top of the gunman before he could recover and had his hands literally on the weapon. But before he could get to his feet a number of people were holding him. He was pushed to his knees and the laser wrested easily out of his grasp. He was hauled to his feet again by two men in police uniforms. They marched him back to his chair, shoved him down into it and let him go. He sagged there, feeling too heavy to move.

"Not Eileen . . ." he said to Jai, in dull protest. The sound of his voice roared back at him from the screen; and he realized that he had probably been imaged there ever since he had picked up his chair to throw it at the man with the laser.

Jai came around the table. The handsome face bent down to him; and Jai's voice also echoed from the screen, speaking not merely to Chaz, but to the crowd below as well.

"I'm afraid so, Sant," said Jai, sadly. "Your accomplice, like you, will have to face justice for the way both of you have threatened innocent lives."

Jai smiled gently, regretfully. One of the lines from Keats' poem came floating back into Chaz' mind, with changes: "Le Beau Jai Sans Merci hath thee in . . ."

With that, at last, understanding broke through the thick pressure clouding Chaz' mind. Abruptly he realized what was happening; and on the heels of that realization came immediate reaction.

So it was that the red fury he had expected at the end finally exploded within Chaz. It was then, in the ultimate moment, that he went berserk.

XV

But not by the simple, physical route alone. His causes had been larger than that.

They were all he had suffered under, erupting within him at once. The sad hypocrisy of his aunt and cousins, the stifling closeness of domed streets and sealed buildings, the oppression of a race that seemed to sit with folded hands, waiting for its end. All this, plus his own loneliness, his own rebellion, his one gain of someone who actually loved him, in Eileen—whom Jai had been planning to include in Chaz' destruction at the hands of a deluded mob, while Chaz sat by, bewitched out of courage and sense.

Chaz reached for the Mass-on-Earth, as he had found it when he had hung above the platform beyond Pluto, wanting to return to Eileen, on Earth. Once more he touched it and drew strength from it. With that strength, he threw off the dead weight of hopelessness that Jai's Craft had laid on him; as easily as a passing touch of drowsiness could be thrown off when there was work needing to be done. Almost, he had been ready to go to the mob like a lamb to the butchers.

His head woke. It went light and clear; and suddenly things seemed very obvious and very easy to do. Ignoring the thin individual who was again holding the laser on him, he got up once more from his chair—but this time it was everybody else who seemed to be in slow motion as they reacted to his moving—turned, and went back to the table with the camera and recording equipment. He brushed the bulky man there easily aside and spoke directly into the equipment.

"Red Rover!" he said. "Blow the other explosive charges. Blow them all, now. Every one."

He heard his voice thunder from the image between the antennae; and caught sight of the man with the laser coming at him, shoving the weapon almost in his face.

"Don't be foolish," he said. "I know you've got orders not to shoot. They want the crowd to get me."

He shoved the thin man away and turned back to the equipment.

"Sorry, people," he said to the people of Chicago District. "But you'd have to face up to the Rot, sooner or later. There are more exiles outside all the time. How long do you think it would have been before they began sabotaging the sterile areas on their own?"

He turned away from the equipment and went back to the long table. It was full of people ignoring him; all talking on the phone, ordering buildings to be sealed, rooms to be sealed, hovercraft to pick them up and carry them away from Chicago. Only Jai was not talking. He was watching the others instead, with a sad, dry smile. But he dropped the smile and turned to face Chaz as Chaz came up to him.

"Why?" he said to Chaz. "What good did it do you? Once those other holes are blown in Chicago's sterile defenses nobody will be able to save you from the people, even if anyone wants to."

"Never mind me," said Chaz. "Don't you understand it's all over? It'll never be business as usual for your group again. Didn't you realize how it was? I could lose; but there was no way your Citadel could win?"

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

"The Pritcher Mass," Chaz answered. "It can't do you any good, no matter what happens to me. If you were there with me mentally when I went from the Mass to the cartoon world, you have to remember they told us that."

"They?"

Chaz threw his arm out to point at the cut-out figures of the Snail and the Mantis.

"Those?" Jai made a dismissing gesture. "We'll find some other world."

"You'll find—" Chaz stared at him; and understanding, even of Jai, woke suddenly in him. "I'll be damned! You're self-brainwashed, too. In spite of all that paranormal talent and intelligence, you've been burying your head in the sand like the rest!"

Jai looked back down at him with a closed face.

"Let me show you something," said Chaz. He reached for the Mass beyond Pluto—and found the way blocked by Jai's mind and paranormal strength. "All right. We can do it right from here."

Chaz turned his mind once more to the Mass-on-Earth, found it, and reached out through it to the cartoon world, to the Mantis itself and the Snail. He found them, feeling Jai's mind with him, watching.

"They don't want to believe it," Chaz said, at once out loud to Jai and through his mind to the Mantis on the cartoon world. "Can I call on you once more to tell them yourselves that the road to any other world is closed? That there's no place we can escape to?"

"This once more," said the Mantis.

The Mass-on-Earth stirred and shifted under the transparent bubble roofing over the top floor of the Embry Tower; and all over Chicago, reality changed. Not for Chaz and Jai alone, but for everyone there. It was a little change, and at the same time, a big change—as if an extra physical dimension had been added, so that there was no longer merely length, width, height and duration; but also away, binding Earth and the cartoon world together.

The Mantis and a Snail appeared over the city along the "away" dimension. In one sense they were the cardboard cut-out figures of themselves, now become solid and alive. In another sense they were enormous, standing in mid-air between building tops and heavy cloud layer, visible to all of Chicago's sterile areas. But in a final sense they were even more than this, because they also stretched from Earth clear back across the unbelievable distance of light-years to their own world, where in actuality they still were. And yet, these three things they seemed to be, were really only one. Topologically, in the "away" dimension, all three manifestations were only aspects of single unity—like three views of a torus, the angle of viewing made them look to be one thing, rather than another.

"It's quite true," said the Mantis to everyone in the Chicago District, while the Snail beside him, without moving, slid endlessly over a thin surface of eternally flowing liquid. "There are other worlds; but not for your race, until you can show your right to them."

"You can't stop us," said Jai—and it was a brave statement. With the "away" dimension now visible around them, Jai's talent glowed visibly, like a small sun among the feeble lamps of the other human beings around him. But that glowing was a tiny thing compared to the burning greatness of the Mantis and the Snail.

"We do not stop you," said the Mantis. "We neither aid you nor hinder you. You do it all to yourselves. Think of yourselves for a moment, not as individuals, but as one creature called 'Human' made up of billions of little individual parts. This creature told itself it would build a bridge to the stars; but it lied to itself. What its hands were building, all the time it talked of a new world, was something else it wanted much more."

"What's that?" demanded Jai.

"How do we know?" answered the Mantis. "We are not Human; you are. But we can tell you what you have built is not a way to another world. When the time comes that another planet is what you really want—what you want more than anything else—you will undoubtedly find it. And as we neither helped nor hindered now, we will not help or hinder then. We would not even be talking to you now, if one of those tiny parts who knows what Human wants, had not reached us through what you all built, and put upon us the ethical duty to answer him."

The Mantis looked at Chaz and disappeared. It and the Snail were gone. Away was no longer perceptible; and the cut-out figures were only cut-out figures again.

Jai looked at Chaz. In that moment, a dull sound was heard, far off across the city, and a faint shock jarred the floor under their feet.

"There goes one of the explosion points," Chaz said. "Tell me, how many did you really find?"

"None," said Jai. "But you've just killed several million people in this district. I won't die; and the other witches won't—and at a guess there'll be some others who'll live. We've suspected there were some exiles that had turned out to be immune.

But what about the four million in Chicago district who aren't? At least the Citadel would have gone on keeping them alive."

"You call this living?" Chaz said. "Anyway, you're wrong. No one ought to die unless almost everybody goes on refusing to face up to what's happened. The Mantis was right—the Pritcher Mass never was something to take us to a new world."

"Then what was it?" Jai said.

Chaz shook his head, slowly.

"You're blind, Jai," he said softly. "Self-blinded. How could you live completely inside glass, plastic, and concrete, and never know at all what was outside those things? 'The Earth is the Lord's,' Paul the Apostle wrote to the Corinthians. 'Late on the third day,' Albert Schweitzer wrote in 1949, 'at the very moment when we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase "Reverence for Life" .. . Now I had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side; now I knew that the ethical acceptance of the world and of life, together with the ideals of civilization contained in this concept, has a foundation in thought . . ."

Another faint thud reached their ears and another shudder of the building to a shock wave through the earth below. Jai frowned at him.

"I don't follow you," Jai said. "Are you preaching a set of universal ethics? Because if you are, you really are insane. There's no such thing."

"Yes, there is; and there always has been," answered Chaz. "A set of universal ethics have been with us from the beginning, whether we believed in them or not. Certain responses in living creatures, and particularly in intelligent ones, are as hard and firm as physical laws. Why do you think the Mantis and the Snail answered me when I called? They see more laws than we see, and obey more. But we have to obey the ones we can see if we want to survive. If we try to ignore them, we'll become extinct. The responsibility not to foul your own nest is a primitive law. We ignored it; and the Rot came."

There was a third sound of explosion.

"We could have beaten the Rot by getting away from Earth," said Jai.

"No. If we'd managed that, we'd have simply blundered again and created another way to destroy ourselves," Chaz said. "Earth's more than just a place to walk on. Back before houses and fire, and even speech, we found food and shelter and survival in the Earth; and the older part of us remembers it. That part has been fighting all this time for just one thing: to get outside again. Because that—nothing else—is the road to survival."

"I can't believe it," Jai muttered, almost to himself. "We built the Pritcher Mass. We aimed it for new worlds."

"You built it?" said Chaz. "You and people like you only oversaw its building. Everyone on Earth built the Mass—creating it out of the basic, instinctive urge to make something that would destroy the Rot, and save Earth, and themselves. You were with me when we met the Mantis and the Snail before; and you heard what the Mantis said. Also, you saw how I reached them just 'now. The Pritcher Mass isn't out on the platform, beyond Pluto. It's here, on Earth."

Jai stared at him.

"It can't be," the tall man said.

"Why not? You ought to remember the Mantis telling me it was here. What's distance and position to the Mass?" said Chaz. "It's here on Earth, where it always belonged, with the people who made it."

"What sort of nonsense is this about the people back here building the Mass? Not one in three hundred thousand has talent."

"Of course they have," said Chaz. "Every human being's got it. Every animal and plant. Fifty years ago they were proving that plants reacted before they were burned or cut. Why do you think the plants and animals aren't touched by the Rot?"

"Next," said Jai, contemptuously, "you'll be telling me the Rot was created by the mass unconscious of the plants and animals striking back at the one species that was threatening their common world."

"Perhaps," said Chaz. "But that part doesn't matter, yet. The point is that paranormal talent isn't something 'sophisticated. It's something primitive and universal. Only humans had forgotten they had it. They made a point of not believing in it. Only those who could believe, like the witches and the ones outside who found themselves immune, used it—because belief can kill as well as save a life."

"Even if you're right," said Jai. "These back here who didn't believe had no part in building the Mass."

"Yes, they did," said Chaz. "The primitive part of their minds worked in spite of them, to survive. They just couldn't use what they built, until they believed they could."

"So you say," Jai answered. "But if you're wrong, you're going to be killing them by slow suffocation when the Rot comes in through those holes you've made, and strangles them."

"Only I'm not wrong," said Chaz. "All they have to do is face the Rot and believe, to conquer it."

He turned and walked back to the table with the camera and recording equipment. The bulky man came forward to bar his path.

"Let him talk," Jai said behind him. The bulky man moved aside. Chaz reached the equipment.

"Only, you don't really know for sure, do you?" continued the voice of Jai.

"I believe," said Chaz. "That's all I ask anyone else to do."

He faced the equipment.

"All right, people of Chicago District," he said into it. "Here we go. Whether we win or lose, here we go; because there's no other direction left for us. Reach out with your minds, join me, and end the Rot."

He reached for the Mass-on-Earth once more. But this time, as he did so, he carried in his mind an image of himself as a seed crystal lowered into a nutrient solution that was the as-yet-unaware minds of the four million people of the Chicago District.

"Come on, damn you!" he said, suddenly furious at them. "Join me, or sit where you are and die when the Rot gets to you. It's up to you. You built the Mass—use it!"

He stood, waiting. For a long moment it seemed nothing was going to happen; and then, slowly at first, he felt himself being joined. He felt himself growing in otherness and strength . . . knowledge of the Mass waking to consciousness in the innumerable minds about him. The mental seed crystal that was himself was joined by the crystal of other minds, solidifying out of the nutrient subconscious, and their unity was growing . . . faster . . . and faster ...

"Watch," he said to all of them over the equipment, pointing up through the transparent dome overhead at the sullen cloud layer, darkening now toward night and already streaked and stained with red in the west. "This is how we begin to kill off the Rot."

He reached for the power of the Mass. But now he was many times multiplied by the minds waking up around him; and the Mass-force responded as something much greater than it had ever been. It came at his summons.

It came as it had come before; and there was nothing that could stand before it. It came like the first man striding upright across the face of his, world. It came like the will of a people who would not die, breaking out of the trap into which they had fallen. Chaz had imagined it once as a great, dark mountain of wind—and as a great wind it came.

It blew across the buildings and domes of a sealed city; and the spores of the Rot that were touched by it died instantly, as they had died within the lungs of witches and the immune exiles. It gathered strength and roared like a storm. It spun into a vortex, stretching up toward the lowering clouds overhead as the horn of a tornado stretches down toward the Earth. It touched the cloud layer and tore it to tatters, spinning the gray vapor into stuff like thin smoke, then into nothingness.

It ripped apart the sky, moving toward the west, destroying clouds and the Rot as it went. A long split opened in the thick cover above the city, stretching westward, like the thunder of ice going out when spring comes to a long-frozen land; and in that split the sun suddenly blazed clear in a cloudless space above a free horizon.

Below the top floor of the Embry Tower, the mind of Chaz was now wrapped in the crystalline unity that was the consciousness of some millions of other minds, just-wakened and waking to their ancient abilities. About him, Chicago breathed newly breeze-stirred air with four million breaths. Not merely Eileen, not merely the witches, or the immunes from outside like Red Rover, or even Jai and the Citadel Mass workers—but all those who lived and were human were now beginning to join the unity, striking back with the nonphysical tool they had created when all purely physical tools failed them, at the enemy that had threatened to choke them to death or seal them in air-conditioned tombs.

The last clouds went. The sunset spread across the sky like a cloth of gold. And in the east like sequins along its fringe, where the gold deepened in color towards the night, glittered and burned the first few beacon lights of the stars, unobscured once more—and now, in real terms, waiting.