The Pritcher Mass Read online

  He looked in the other direction and forgot her. Suddenly, everything he saw lost its reasonless, separate identity and made sense. The dark shape hanging over him was the rail­way car he had been in. It had fallen half on its side and broken open, spilling out him and some of the other commuters.

  He crawled clear of the overhang and sat up. A broken part of his har­ness still circled his chest. He un­buckled it and let it fall. His head felt hot. The shape of a rock from the railroad ballast was cold under his left hand. He lifted it and laid its coolness against his forehead. The little relief of that touch brought his mind all the way hack into reality.

  He was outside, and it was night. The saboteur—or another—had in­deed set a second trap for the train, far­ther down the track. If this was in fact the work of the saboteur they had en­countered earlier, then his head-on drive at the first car had probably been to reassure the train commander that there was nothing else to fear farther up the line. But how or why the train was wrecked did not matter so much, now. What mattered was that the car Chas was in had broken open.

  He was outside.

  He was exposed to the rot, poten­tially infected. According to law, nei­ther he nor any of the other commuters in that particular car could be allowed back into a sterile area again.

  Oh yes, he would.

  The grim refusal to accept what had happened to him exploded in­stinctively inside him. He was bound for the Pritcher Mass, not doomed to wander a desolated world until he died of starvation or choked on the feathery white fungus growing inside his lungs. In this one case—his own—the inevitable must not be allowed to happen.

  He took the rock from his fore­head, about to toss it aside—then something stayed his hand. In the flickering light that he now saw come from the burning engine section of the first car, which lay on its side, he looked at the rock; and a word came into his mind.

  Catalyst.

  This was his chance, if he wanted to take it. A Heisenbergian catalyst, reportedly, was most often some­thing just like this. A piece of wood or stone, not different from any other—illegal only because it was from an unsterilized area as this was. But it was the unsterilized catalysts that were supposed to be the only really effective ones.

  Was his talent now telling him that what he held was such a catalyst—the catalyst he needed to demonstrate the talent?

  His fingers clamped on the stone. He half-closed his eyes against the light of the flames forty feet away and forced his mind into channels of choice.

  Chain-perception—a linked series of optimal choices among the alter­nates immediately available, leading to a desired end or result. His present desired end or result was simply to get back into a sealed sec­tion of the train without anyone finding out that he had been exposed to the rot-infested outer world. He held the rock tightly, searching about in his mind for the next immediate action that would feel as if it would lead him eventually to a safe return to the train.

  He stared at the flames. A heavy-cargo rescue copter was already on the scene, down on the ground a dozen yards from the tipped-over first car. Figures in bulky sterile suits were attaching wide, pipe-like sec­tions together into a sterile escape tunnel between the copter and the rooftop airlock on the first car; the only lock available now that the car was on its side. Each of two suited figures carried a section between them. As Chaz watched, another cargo copter settled to the ground by the third car and escape tunnel sec­tions began to emerge there. It was only the second car, then, which had lost its seal; and only its passengers who would be left to starve or rot.

  He felt the rough outlines of the rock biting into his palm and his fin­gers quivered about it. Hold on and make it work, he told himself. Hold . . . he reached out his other hand, out to his left, and his fingers brushed against something soft and cloth-like, warm and in some way comforting . . . the sleeve of the woman who had been in the harness beside him.

  Abruptly, like a shudder passing through him, came his memory of how she had feared the rot—of how she had feared exactly what had just happened here. She had been exag­gerating, of course. The odds were that she, or he, or any of them, would have to spend some days in the open before they would actually inhale rot spores. But probably she would not even try to make use of what little life remained to her. She would simply sit waiting for death, from what he knew of people like her.

  The terrible double feeling of dis­gust and pity came back over him; but pity this time was stronger. He could not leave her here to die, just like that. If the catalyst and chain-perception could get him safely back into sterile surroundings without it being suspected he had been outside, it could do as much for her and him, together.

  Immediately he had made the de­cision, it felt right in terms of the logic-chain-perception. Two was for some reason a good number. He leaned toward the woman and closed his hand on the slack of her sleeve.

  He pulled, gently. Her murmur­ing, which had been going on contin­ually all this time, broke off. For a second nothing happened, then she came toward him. Hardly thinking beyond only what seemed to be the reflexes and feelings prompting him, he moved further away from the car, getting to his feet and drawing her after him.

  She came like someone in a trance. They stood, both on their feet and together in the night, a little way from the broken second car, with its sounds of despairing and injured people.

  Still gripping the stone in one hand and her sleeve in the other, he looked again at the sterile-suited fig­ures outlined by the flames of the first car. The figures carried the sections by two's, one section between each pair of them. He turned and looked at the suited, figures starting to emerge from the 'copter opposite the last car. They also carried sec­tions, two figures to a section.

  Two—of course! That was why this series had begun with him first touching, then holding, the woman. He needed someone to help him in this chain of actions.

  A feeling of certainty warmed within him. He seemed to feel the linked alternate choices that would bring both of them back to safety. He imagined these choices visible like the edges of a slightly spread deck of cards. The optimal choices of an infinite series of alternates, leading to an inevitable conclusion.

  “Come on," he said to the woman. He moved off, towing her after him; and she followed like a young child after a parent.

  II

  He led her toward the flames and the first car. Now that he had perceived the direction in which his actions tended, he thought he would have preferred to have tried to get into the last car where there was no fire to light the scene. However, evidently his perceptions knew bet­ter. Keyed to a high emotional pitch now, he felt clearly that it was the first car rather than the last to which they should go.

  Hidden in the further dark he came closer to a pair of figures positioning one of the sections. It was this particular pair to which his perceptions had drawn him; and a mo­ment later the perceptions justified their choice, as the two figures moved close together to seal one end of their section to the next—and this in a moment when the two working on the next section had already fin­ished their work and headed back toward the copier.

  Chaz let go of the woman and moved softly behind the two figures. For a second, standing just behind them, he hesitated. They were hu­man beings like himself, also human beings on a rescue mission. Then he remembered that these two would consider it their duty to shoot him on sight—and would, with the weapons belted to their suits now for that pur­pose—if they suspected him of hav­ing been one of those exposed to the unsterilized outer environment. It was hard to think like an outlaw. But an outlaw he was now, as much as the saboteur who had wrecked the train.

  He stood behind the two and swung the rock overhand, twice. It gave him a hollow feeling inside to see how easily the figures folded to the ground. One by one he dragged them away from the tube and the light of the flames, to where the woman still stood.

  She was stirring now, coming out of her shock. It was too dark to see her face e
xcept as a gray blur; but she spoke to him.

  "What is it . . . ?" she said. "How . .. ?"

  Chaz bent over one of the figures and with fumbling haste began to unseal the closure down the front of the suit.

  "Get into one of these!" he told her. She hesitated. "Get moving! Do you want to see the Dells again, or don't you?"

  The magic effect of the last phrase seemed to reach her. She bent over the other figure and Chaz heard the faint rasp of the seal on its suit being peeled open.

  He forgot her for a moment and merely concentrated on getting into the suit of the limp body at his own feet. He got it off and struggled into it, tucking his catalyst stone into a pocket of his jumpsuit first. Luckily, these sterile suits were all-sized—ex­pandable and contractable, variable in arm and leg-length. Standing with it on at last, and resealing the closure, he looked once more at the woman and saw she was just step­ping into her own suit.

  He waited impatiently until she was in and sealed. Then, by gestures, he had her help him drag the two still-unmoving forms back toward the tube. The tube was completed now, and one suited figure was standing farther down by the airlock entrance in its middle section, check­ing in the other figures who were lined up ready to enter. Leaving the two they had deprived of their suits, Chaz took the arm of the woman and led her circuitously through darkness. They joined the line. It moved slowly forward; and a minute later they, too, filed through the tube airlock. Behind them, the suited fig­ure who had been checking the oth­ers in entered, and sealed the inner airlock door.

  The other figures were now head­ing down the tube toward the first railway car. Chaz pushed the woman in her suit ahead of him and fol­lowed them. Around them, there was the hissing sound of sterilizing gas being pumped in. It would clean not only the interior of the tube, but the exteriors of their suits—in fact, de­stroying any rot spores they had not actually inhaled. The hissing ceased before they caught up with the other figures at the end of the tube.

  The other figures were standing, waiting, by the roof airlock of the railway car. After a second, there was the distant whir of fans sucking out the gas, then the lighting tubes in the ceiling of the tunnel blinked twice. Two figures next to the airlock began working with it; and to the creak of metal hinges not recently used, it was swung open.

  The inner airlock door took a mo­ment longer to open. Then it too yawned wide and the figures began to disappear into the dark interior of the car.

  Within, the lights of the car were out. It was a horizontal pit of dark­ness, filled with moans and crying. The suited figures turned on the headlamps of their helmets.

  "Limpet lights!" roared a powerful voice abruptly in Chaz' ears. He started, before realizing that it was the suit intercom he was hearing. There was a pause, hut the darkness persisted. The voice came again. "For God's sake, didn't anyone think to bring limpets? First team back bring half a dozen and stick them around the walls in here. We need lights! All right, let the ones who can walk find their own way out, look for whoever's pinned, hurt, or can't walk."

  The woman had turned her head­lamp on in automatic reflex to seeing the lamps go on around her. Chaz reached up to his own helmet, fum­bled with thick-gloved fingers, found a toggle by the lamp lens and pushed it. It moved sideways and a beam of light revealed a tangle of harnesses and bodies before him. He reached out, took the glove of the woman again, and started pushing through the tangle toward the rear of the car with her in tow.

  They moved until, turning his head, he saw that they were safely screened by the passengers around them from the other suited figures. Then Chaz looked about, playing his helmet fight on the crying, struggling mass of passengers.

  "All right, all right! Get them mov­ing!" boomed the voice over the in­tercom on his eardrums.

  A small man, apparently unhurt and free of his harness, was among those worming their way toward the open airlock behind Chaz and the woman. Chaz barred his way.

  "Lie down," Chaz said; and then realized that even if his voice was somehow coming through the suit's outside speaker, it could not have been heard by the man in this bed­lam.

  Chaz made motions to the other man and moved around him, taking him by the shoulders. He waved to the woman to take the man's feet. The woman's bulky-suited figure only stood staring at him. Angrily, Chaz gestured; and at last she stooped and picked up the feet. To­gether, clumsily, they carried the man from the car into the tube.

  He had struggled slightly at first on being picked up, then quieted and hung limp and heavy in their grasp. They sweated with him through the crowd to the airlock and into the tube. It was surprisingly empty. The injured near the airlock were blocking the way for those fur­ther back who could have walked out under their own power.

  Chaz and the woman carried the man down the tube. As they ap­proached the airlock through which they had entered, Chaz stopped and motioned to the woman to put the feet of their burden down.

  It took her a moment to under­stand him, as it had taken her a mo­ment to understand that she was to help pick the man up. Then, she obeyed. Chaz lifted the man upright and gave him a push toward the copter end of the tube. He did not seem to understand at first, any more than the woman had. He stared at them for a second, then tottered off in the direction Chaz had indicated.

  The tube about them was empty except for one limping, older man who hardly looked at them as he passed. Chaz let him by, then opened the inner door of the tube airlock and stepped into the lock it­self. He motioned the woman in be­hind him, then closed the inner door on them both.

  He took hold of the top end of the seal to his suit and started to take it off; but his fingers hesitated. There was a feeling inside him. Not a per­ceptive feeling of the sort that had brought him this far, but simply an emotional reluctance to leave the two men he had struck outside, to rot and die as he might have rotted and died.

  He let go of the seal strip, waved back the woman when she started to accompany him, and opened the outer door of the airlock. The two he had hit were not hard to find. One was now sitting up, dazed, the other was evidently still unconscious.

  Chaz helped the dazed one to his feet, took him back through the air­lock and pushed him into the corri­dor, aiming him toward the copter end of the tube. The man stumbled off like a zombie. Chaz went back and dragged the other's limp figure into the lock. With the woman's help, he shoved it into the tube dur­ing a moment when no one else was about, then closed the inner door again and began taking off his suit.

  The woman imitated him. As soon as they were out of their suits, Chaz once more opened the inner door of the lock a crack and peered out. The man they had carried in from out­side was gone.

  There were no suited figures in view, but the tube was now full of walking refugees from the first car. None of them paid any attention to Chaz and the woman. Boldly, Chaz led the way out into the crowd that now thronged the tube, and turned to seal the airlock inner door behind them. They followed the others about them into the copter, where attendants were ushering those unhurt through a room with cots into an­other filled with regular airbus seats, four abreast on either side of an aisle, where the walking refugees from the train were being seated and strapped in.

  Chaz stepped back from the woman, pushing her away when she tried automatically to follow him.

  "Forget you ever saw me!" he whispered harshly to her, and faded back into the crowd. As he was being strapped into a seat, he saw her ush­ered to one some three rows ahead of him, on the opposite side of the aisle.

  Moments later, a white-suited at­tendant came by with a clipboard. Chaz slipped his hand into the pocket holding the stone and grasped it tightly.

  "Name?" the attendant asked. Chaz had to clear his throat before he could speak.

  "Charles Roumi Sant," he said.

  "Address?"

  "Wisconsin Dells, Upper Dells 4J537, Bayfors Condominium 131, apartment 1909."

  "Good," the attendant noted it. "Was anyone with you on the train?" Ch
az shook his head.

  "Do you see anyone here you rec­ognize from the car you were in?"

  Chaz' heart beat heavily but stead­ily. He hesitated, gripping the stone in his pocket. Silence was bad. A negative answer was even more dan­gerous in case of a later checkup on the rescued passengers.

  'There, I think," he said, nodding toward the woman. "That lady there, three up and two to the left."

  "Right." The attendant wrote and passed on. Later, Chaz saw him talk­ing to the woman and her head turn slightly, directing the attendant's gaze hack toward him. The attendant looked at him, glanced at his clip­board and told her something, then moved ahead.

  Chaz sank back into his seat. Clearly, she had also had the sense to identify him as someone she had seen in the first car, thereby con­firming his own story. With luck . . .he rubbed his fingers over the stone. . . there would be no more check­ing; and his name and hers would be buried in the list of those from the first car. But even in the case of a checkup, there was now a report he had been seen in the first car. Even if that car had been completely filled, as the second had been, dead bodies were never removed; and a head count of survivors should not show any extra passengers.

  "Hot chocolate, sir?"

  Attendants were going up and down the aisle now, offering hot drinks. Like most of those about him Chaz accepted one. It was an unusu­ally rich, real-tasting drink that might have been made with actual chocolate. He sat sipping it, letting relief flow through him with the warmth of the liquid. The stone bulked hard in his pocket and a little fire of triumph burned inside him. The woman dared not talk and nei­ther of the suited workers had had a chance to see the faces of either the woman or himself. After a while the copter took off and about that time, unexpectedly, he fell asleep.