The Pritcher Mass

by Gordon R. Dickson

  And, unbelievably, Tillicum was in fact gone. Chaz blinked at the spot by the wall where the wolverine had been. For just a moment his sight had blurred; and when it cleared again, the spot was empty.

  In his head, out of his attic memory, Eileen's voice sang again, as he had heard it in his apartment.

  "Gaest thou down tae Chicago, sae fair.

  Harp at ye, carp at ye, water and wine.

  . . . Think'st thou my name but once thou art there,

  So shalt thou be a true love o' mine . ."

  He had indeed thought her name in Chicago, after he had escaped from the hospital; and now—he faced it finally—he was a true love of hers. Or perhaps he had been in love with her even before that, following that unclear evening in the party rooms. At any rate he cared for her now, as he had never cared for any­one else, and if he had to believe anyone, he would choose to believe her wolverine and its message.

  He turned and left the con­dominium; and returned safely to Chicago, to the Pritcher Mass office there. Ten and a half hours later, he was being lifted into orbit by a ram­jet, to rendezvous with an inter­planetary ship bound for the Mass with supplies. He was spaceborn af­ter that for twenty days of one-grav­ity thrust and retro-thrust. At the end of that time and four billion miles from Earth, he was delivered, naked as a newborn babe and still damp from the decontamination shower he had been through, into a passage-tunnel leading from the ship to the entrance of the massive metal plat­form beyond Pluto on which the Pritcher Mass was being built. A tall, slim, dark man in blue coveralls met him and led him to the heavy airlock doors of the entrance itself, now open on the interior darkness of the Mass platform. He was about to pro­ceed into that darkness, when the tall man checked him with a hand on his arm.

  "Your last chance," the tall man said. "Stop and think. You can still turn around now, get back on the ship and ride home to Earth."

  Chaz looked at him.

  "I wouldn't turn back now, even if I wanted to," he answered.

  The tall man smiled.

  "They all say something like that," he said. "Take notice of the warning, then. You know the line from Dante's Inferno, that was supposed to be writ­ten over the entrance to Hell?

  "`. . . Ye who enter here.' Canto the Third, isn't it?" said Chaz, delv­ing into the attic to find the line. "Yes, I know it. Why?"

  "We've paraphrased it for our own use," said the tall man. "A very im­portant warning for newcomers. Look."

  He pointed over the airlock en­trance; and Chaz now noticed that there were letters incised in the metal above it. He moved closer un­til he could read them.

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

  VII

  Chaz stared at the words, then turned to the slim man.

  "What does it mean?" he asked.

  "That's something it'll take you a few months here to fully under­stand," said the other. "You'll be getting a brief version of the answer in a few minutes. Come inside now."

  He led Chaz through the doorway. The heavy outer lock door slid to be­hind them with a shivering crash of metal; and lights flashed on to show

  Chaz that they stood in the lock, itself a space at least the size of Waka's apartment with the two rooms of it thrown into one. A sudden tug of nearly one G on his body surprised him; and then he remembered that the Mass had space to spare—even enough to provide a room for the generators necessary to generate a continuous gravity field. Airsuits hung on a rack along one wall to Chaz' left. Along the wall to his right was another rack, holding blue cov­eralls. Between both walls, at the far end, was the inner lock door, which was now beginning to open.

  "Get dressed," said the slim man, waving at the rack of coveralls. Chaz obeyed, and when he finished found the other ready with a hand out­stretched to him. "By the way, I'm Jai Losser, the Assistant Director on the Mass. Sorry, but our rule is we don't even give our names outside that door."

  Chaz shook hands.

  "Charles Roumi Sant," he said.

  "Oh, I know your name," Jai laughed. He had a pleasant laugh and his thin face lit up with the good humor of it. "We've got a heavy dos­sier on you, phoned over from the supply ship with other mail and in­formation when she was docking. I'm going to take you now to meet the Director, Lebdell Marti. He'll give you your initial briefing. Know where you are right now, on the Mass?"

  "I've seen diagrams," answered Chaz.

  In fact, those diagrams had been in his mind more than once on the twenty-day trip here. They had shown the Pritcher Mass as a unit made up of three parts. One part was an asteroid-like chunk of granitic rock about twelve-by-eight miles, roughly the shape of an egg with one bulging end. Covering half of the surface of this rock was a huge steel deck, some fourteen stories thick. From the upper surface of this deck rose what looked like an ill-assorted forest of antennae; steel masts of heights varying from a hundred me­ters to over a kilometer. Between the masts, steel cables were looped at in­tervals; and small power lifts or cable cars moved Mass workers up the masts or across the cables.

  Surrounding and extending be­yond the masts and cables was some­thing that did not show to the human eye or to any physical instruments—the Mass itself. In the diagrams Chaz had seen, the illustrators had ren­dered it transparently in the shape of an enormous shadowy construction crane—although no one was sup­posed to take this as a serious rendering of its actual form, any more than anyone could seriously imagine a physical crane that could swing its shovel across light-years of distance to touch the surface of a distant planet.

  "Third level, west end, aren't we?" Chaz asked. "West" was, of course, a convenience term. For purposes of direction on the Mass itself, one end of the platform had been arbitrarily labeled "west," the other "east." "Up" would be in the direction of the deck surface overhead.

  "That's right," said Jai. He had a soft bass voice. "And we go in to Centerpoint to the Director's office."

  He led the way out of the lock into a somewhat larger room, half-filled with forklift trucks and other ma­chinery for transferring cargo. Some of these were already trundling toward the lock on automatic as the two men left it.

  "It'll take thirty hours or so to get all the supplies off, and the ship ready to leave again," said Jai, as they went through swinging metal doors at the far end of the machinery room, into a wide corridor with a double moving belt walkway both going and coming along its floor. Jai led the way onto the belt and it car­ried them off down the brightly lighted, metal-walled corridor. "This is our storage area. First level."

  "Living and work levels are above us?" Chaz said, as they passed an open doorway and he looked in to see a warehouse-like space stacked with large cartons on pallets.

  "Levels four to six and eight to fourteen are quarters and work areas," answered Jai. "Seventh level is all office—administrative. Origi­nally, living quarters for the administrative people—the nontalented ­was to be on seven, too; but it was felt after a while that this made for an emotional division among the people here. So now the adminis­trators have apartments with the rest of us."

  "Us?" Chaz looked sideways at the other man. "I thought you said you were the Assistant Director?"

  "I am," Jai said. "But I'm also a worker on the Mass. The workers have to be represented among the administrative staff, too. Leb, the Di­rector, is a nonworker." He smiled a little at Chaz. "We tend to talk about people here as divided into workers and nonworkers, rather than talented and nontalented. It is a little more courteous to those who don't have the ability to work on the Mass."

  Chaz nodded. There was a curious emotional stirring inside him. He had thought about working on the Mass for so long that he had be­lieved he took it for granted. He had not expected to find himself unusu­ally excited simply by actually being here. But he found he was; in fact, remarkably so. And it was hard to believe that this geared-up sensation in him was only self-excitement.

  "I feel hyped-up," he said to Jai, on impulse. He did not usually talk about himsel
f; but Jai had an aura about him that encouraged friend­ship and confidences. "Funny feel­ing—like being too close to a static generator and having my hair stand on end. Only it's my nerves, not my hair, that's standing up straight and quivering."

  Jai nodded, soberly.

  "You'll get used to it," he said. "That's one reason we know the Mass is there, even if we can't see it, touch it, or measure it—that feeling you mention. Even the nonworkers feel it. In spite of the fact that they aren't sensitive to anything else about it."

  "You mean people with no talent can feel the Mass, up there?" Chaz glanced ceilingward. "That's sort of a contradiction in terms, isn't it?"

  Jai shrugged again.

  "Nobody can explain it," he said. "But then, just about everything we're doing here is done on blind faith, anyway. We try something and it works. Did you ever stop to think that the Mass we're building here may be a piece of psychic machinery that was never intended to do the thing we're building it for?"

  "You mean it might not work?"

  "I mean," said Jai, "it might work, but only as a side issue. As if we were building an aircraft so that we could plow a field by taxiing up and down with a plow blade dragged be­hind our tail section. Remember, no one really knows what the Mass is. All we have is Jim Pritcher's theory that it's a means of surveying distant worlds, and Pritcher died before work out here was even started."

  "I know," said Chaz. He glanced appraisingly at the Assistant Direc­tor. What Jai had just been talking about was a strange sort of idea to throw at a newcomer who had just arrived for work on the Mass. Unless the other had been fishing for some unusual, unguarded response from Chaz.

  They went on down the corridor and took an elevator tube upward to the seventh level. Getting off at the seventh level, they went east a short distance down another corridor and turned in through an opaque door into a small outer office where a tiny, but startlingly beautiful, black-haired girl, looking like a marble and ebony figurine, sat at a communications board talking with someone who seemed to be the cargo officer aboard the supply ship Chaz had just left.

  ". . . thirty-five hundred units, K74941," she was saying as they came in. She looked up and gave them a wave before going back to her board. "Check. To Bay M, pallet A 4—go right in Jai. He's waiting for you both—nineteen hundred units J44, sleeved. To Bay 3, pallets N3 and N4 . . ."

  Jai led Chaz on past her through another door. They came into a somewhat larger room, brown-car­peted, dominated by a large desk complex of communicating and computer reference equipment. Seated in the midst of the complex was a large, middle-aged, gray-skinned man full of brisk and ner­vous movements.

  "Oh, Jai—Mr. Sant. Come in—pull up some chairs." Lebdell Marti had a hard baritone voice, with a faint French accent. "Be with you in a moment . . . Ethrya?"

  He had spoken into the grille of his communicating equipment. The voice of the living figurine in the outer office answered.

  "Yes, Leb?"

  "Give me about ten or fifteen minutes of noninterruption? No more, though, or I'll never get caught up."

  "Right. I'll call you in fifteen min­utes, then."

  "Thanks." Lebdell Marti sat back in his chair, the spring back creaking briefly as it gave to his weight. Then he got to his feet and offered his hand to Chaz, who shook it. "Wel­come."

  They all sat down, and Marti rum­maged among his equipment to come up with a thick stack of yellow message sheets.

  "Your dossier," he said, holding the stack up briefly for Chaz to see, then dropping it back down on the desk surface of his complex. "No great surprises in it, as far as I can see. All our workers on the Mass are strong individualists, and I see you're no exception. How do you feel about being here at last?"

  "Good," said Chaz.

  Marti nodded.

  "That's the answer we expect," he said. His chair creaked again as he settled back. "Jai pointed out to you the message over the air lock on the way in? Good. Because we take those words very seriously here, for a number of reasons. You'll be learn­ing more about that as you get set­tled in here; but basically it adds up to the fact that work with a psychic piece of machinery like the Mass re­quires an essentially artistic sort of commitment. The Mass has to be ev­erything to each one of us. Every­thing. And that means any com­mitment to Earth has got to be pushed out of our heads completely. Now . . . how much do you know about the Mass?"

  "I've read what's in the libraries back on Earth about it."

  "Yes," Marti said. "Well, there's a sort of standard briefing that I give to every new worker who joins us here. Most of it you've probably read or heard already; but we like to make sure that any misconceptions on the part of our incoming people are cleared up at the start. Just what do you know already?"

  "The Mass was James Pritcher's idea," said Chaz, "according to what I learned—although it was just a the­oretical notion to him. As I under­stand it, he died without thinking anyone would ever actually try to build it."

  Marti nodded. "Go on," he said.

  "Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Chaz said. "Pritcher was a re­search psychologist studying in the paranormal and extrasensory fields. He postulated that while no paranormal talent was ever completely dependable, a number of people who had demonstrated abilities of that kind, working together, might be able to create a psychic con­struct—in essence, a piece of nonma­terial machinery. And possibly that kind of machinery could do what material machinery couldn't, be­cause of the physical limitations on material substances. For example, maybe we could build a piece of psy­chic machinery that could search out and actually contact the surfaces of worlds light-years from the solar sys­tem—which is exactly what the Mass is being built to do."

  "Exactly," murmured Jai. Chaz glanced at the tall man, remember­ing Jai's words about the Mass possi­bly being something other than it was intended to be.

  "That's right—or is it, exactly?" echoed Marti, behind the complex. "Because the truth is, Charles—"

  "Chaz, I'm usually called," Chaz said.

  "Chaz, when we get right down to it, we really don't know what we're building here. The Mass is nonmate­rial, but it's also something else. It's subjective. It's like a work of art, a piece of music, a painting, a novel—the abilities in our workers that create it are more responsive to their subconscious than to their conscious. We may be building here something that only seems to be what our con­scious minds desire: a means of dis­covering and reaching some new world our race can emigrate to. Ac­tually it may turn out to be some­thing entirely different that we de­sire—with a desire that's been buried in the deep back of our heads, all along."

  "The Mass may not work, then, you mean?" Chaz said.

  "That's right," said Marti. "It might not work. Or it might work wrong. We only know that we're building anything at all because of the feedback—the feel of the pres­ence of the Mass. You've already sensed that, yourself?"

  Chaz nodded.

  "So, maybe we're just in the posi­tion of a group of clever savages," Marti said, "fitting together parts of a machine we don't understand on a sort of jigsaw puzzle basis, a machine that may end up doing nothing, or blowing up in our faces. Of course, we've come a long way in the last fifty years. We realize nowadays that paranormal or psychic—whatever you want to call them—abilities do exist in certain people; even if they can't be measured, dealt with, or used according to any rules we know. But a lot of that distance we've come has also been downhill. For one thing—the most important thing—we managed to foul our nest back on Earth, until now it's un­livable. Not only that, but we went right on making it unlivable even back when there was still time to save it, in spite of the fact that we knew better. The people still on Earth may last another fifty, or an­other five hundred, years; but they're headed for extinction eventually by processes our great-grandparents in­stigated. In short, as we all know, hu­manity on Earth is under a death sentence. And a race under death sentence could have some pretty twisted, and powerful
, subconscious drives in its individuals; even in indi­viduals with psychic talents building something like the Pritcher Mass."

  Marti stopped speaking; and sat staring at Chaz. Chaz waited, and when the other still sat silent, spoke up himself.

  "You want me to say something to that?" he asked.

  "I do," replied Marti.

  "All right," said Chaz. "Even if what you say is true, I don't see how it matters a damn. The Mass is the only thing we've come up with. We're go­ing to build it anyway. So why worry about it? Since we've got no choice but to plug ahead and build it any­way, let's get on with that, and not worry about the details."

  "All right," said Marti. "But what if the subconscious details in one worker's mind can mess us all up? What if something like that keeps the Mass from coming out the way it should, or working when it's done?"

  "Is there any real evidence that could happen?" Chaz asked.

  "Some," said Marti, dryly. "We've had some odd reactions here and there among the workers themselves. You may run across some in yourself in the next minutes—or the next few months, so I won't describe them to you. The fact remains, as I kept try­ing to impress on you, that we really don't know what we're creating; and in any case we have no experience in this type of psychic creation. All we can do, as you say, is keep on build­ing. But we can take one pre­caution."

  Chaz lifted his eyebrows question­ingly.

  "We can try to get the greatest possible concentration by our work­ers on the conscious aim we have for the Mass," Marti said. "That's why the legend was over the air lock when you came in. That's why I'm talking to you now about this. What­ever memories or associations you have in your mind about Earth, forget them. Now, put them out of your mind in every way you can. If they crop up unexpectedly, cut them down utterly and quickly. Concen­trate on the Mass, on this place here, on your co-workers and on the world we hope to find. Forget Earth and everyone on it. They're already dead as far as you're concerned. You may not be one of those who'll emigrate to the new world when we find it—in fact the odds are against any of us here being that lucky—but you're never going back to Earth again. We won't even send your body back, if you die. Keep that in mind, and meditate on it."