The Pritcher Mass

by Gordon R. Dickson

"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.