Necromancer

Chapter 13

"You've handled explosives before?" asked the lean instructor with the sun-leathered face above the open collar. He was holding a package of plastic, adhesive blasting jelly with a three-minute pinch fuse.

"Yes," said Paul.

Paul stood on one cliff-edge of a remarkably realistic simulation of a mountain gorge some five hundred feet wide, across which had been thrown the thin long web of a temporary snap-to arch bridge of magnesium-alloy sections. The bridge-end by which Paul and the instructor stood, just the two of them, had been anchored in a local timber cradle, or box, filled with loose rock. And the cradle extended its wooden underarms in support about fifteen feet out from the lip of the cliff.

"This amount of jelly," said the instructor, hefting it, "can be carried inconspicuously in a brief case and still leave room for enough other material to make it look as if the brief case is full. It's powerful enough to cut two or three of those timbers or one or two of the metal members you see there. How would you go about completely knocking out this bridge with it?"

Paul looked again at the bridge. In the past nine days since his first class he had been put through a number of sessions - that was the only word to describe them. They appeared to be classes, on a strange variety of subjects, some of which appeared to bear no relation to the

Chantry Guild. The longest of them had lasted not much more than twenty minutes, and the information imparted by each of them had been obscure. In fact, it had not been quite clear whether the intent of the sessions had been to inform or to test the journeyman audience, which seemed to consist of different individuals from session to session. Paul was privately of the opinion that the intent had been both to inform and test - and probably, as well, to stimulate and confuse. Some of the journeymen, he was sure, were ringers. Some of the sessions had been nonsense.

And this session - himself alone with the instructor, the explosive, and the simulated bridge in the mountains on Earth. Was it instruction, test, nonsense - or something else?

The simulation was a magnificent job. For the scene it pretended to show was clearly an impossibility, here deep under the surface of Mercury's rocky hide. What Paul's eyes saw was a gorge at least eight hundred feet in depth, up from which came the distant sound of a narrow mountain river in its gallop to lower levels. The air was the thin, dry air of high altitudes. The sky was cloudless.

The question was, How much was real and how much false? For if the blasting-jelly block was real, and it was to be set off in the reality of a small underground room of the size Paul had had his sessions in lately, then it would take Alternate Laws indeed to show cause why Paul and the instructor should survive the explosion. Paul laid his hand on the timber cradle and looked over the cliff edge. His gaze plunged away into spray-misted depths. There was distance down there, by any test of his feelings. Just how much, he could not be sure. But it felt deep below the cliff. On the other hand, under his hand the materials of the bridge felt solid but deceitful.

"Well," said Paul, "I'm no expert on bridges. But I imagine the trick would be to break this end loose, so that it falls. If this end goes down, it'll tear the other end loose and it'll all drop into the gorge."

"Good enough," said the instructor. "How'd you go about breaking this end loose?"

"I think," said Paul, pointing to where the end of the cradle met a magnesium I-beam, fifteen feet out above the gorge's depth, "if we blew it loose just there, cutting that stringer, or whatever the proper term is, that runs along the left side of the travel-surface of the bridge, the weight of the rest of it would cause it to sag and twist, and tear the other stringer loose. Then this whole end would drop."

"All right." The instructor handed the block of jelly to Paul. "Let's see you do it."

Paul looked at the bridge again. Then he stuffed the block of jelly inside the waistband of his slacks and began to climb out along the timbers of the cradle. The lack of a second arm hampered him but not so much as Paul thought it might have seemed to the instructor. The strength of his remaining arm was such as to lift the weight of his body from angles clearly impossible to an ordinary climber. When he got to the end of the stone enclosing the timbers, Paul paused, ostensibly to rest, but actually to reach some sort of conclusion.

The bridge still felt deceitful. He quietly loosed a splinter from the timber on which he rested, and dropped it. It floated down until he lost sight of it some thirty or forty feet below. So, that much of distance under him at least was real. He looked once more at the spot where he would stick the explosive.

It was at a point just above the single final timber of the supporting cradle. He would have to stand on that timber and place the jelly above the upright at the timber's end, where that upright met the magnesium I-beam. He began to move again. He climbed on up to the I-beam and out onto it until he was above the timber. Hanging to the I-beam, he cautiously let his feet down until they rested on the timber.

Then, as unobtrusively as possible, he increased his hold on the I-beam and pressed down with both feet on the timber.

There was a sudden screech of tearing wood. The timber ripped away from beneath him, and he dropped suddenly to the length of his arm, and hung there sustained only by his grip on the I-beam. Below him he saw the falling timber on which he would have stood tumbling and shrinking until it vanished suddenly fifty or sixty feet below him. Still hanging, he looked across to the point where the underfoot timber had been joined to the upright by a metal collar held by four thick magnesium rivets.

There were no rivet-hole marks or broken rivet ends in the wood of the upright at all. What was visible was the snapped end of a quarter-inch-diameter wooden dowel rod.

Paul pulled himself easily back up on the I-beam. The bridge stood firm and secure - it had been balanced, evidently, somewhat differently than it appeared to be, on its supports. He climbed back to the instructor, on solid ground, and handed the jelly block back to the man.

"Now what?" Paul said.

"Well," said the instructor, "we'll go up to the front offices. I don't know what your master will say, and of course it's up to him. But as far as I'm concerned, I'd say you've graduated."

They left the simulated scene in the mountains and went out into the Station proper, and took an elevator up a good number of levels. Paul had the impression that they were almost to, if not right at, the surface. And this impression was justified a second or two later when they entered a large lounge-office with, not a vision tank, but an actual window looking out on the yellow twilight and the witches' garden of Mercury's surface around the Station.

Jase was there, along with Heber, the white-mustached unlisted member, and a couple of men Paul did not recognize. The instructor had Paul wait while he went over and talked to the three for a few minutes in a voice too low for Paul to hear. Then Jase came over alone, and the instructor, with the other two men, went over to one of the desks at the other end of the room and began going over what, judging from their quite audible conversation, were the files of journeymen currently undergoing tests.

"Come on over to the window," said Jase. Paul followed him. The slim, dark young man was as relaxed as Paul had ever seen him, though he still walked with the prowling balance of a cat. "Sit down."

Paul sat, in a low, comfortably overstuffed chair. Jase took one opposite.

"To all intents and purposes," said Jase, and his deep-set, clear brown eyes watched Paul closely, "you're a Chantry Guild member now. Before you first came to me, you'd gotten the psychiatric viewpoint on yourself and your missing arm. Now, I'll tell you the true situation from the point of someone like myself who is acquainted with the Alternate Laws."

He stopped.

"You were going to say something," he said.

"No," said Paul.

"All right," said Jase, "here it is, then. You have an ability under the Alternate Laws which is probably parapsychological in nature. I told you when I first met you - and I've an ability myself where it comes to judging character - something to the effect that your arrogance was astounding."

Paul frowned. He had all but put aside the memory of the Necromancer calling him arrogant. It was the one thing he could not accept about himself.

"I understand now better why you should be so arrogant," Jase was saying. "I've no idea, none of us have in the regular membership, about the possibilities or limitations of your ability. But we've no doubt about its essential nature. Your ability is to make use of the Alternate Laws for purposes of almost total defense. We've done everything but try to kill you outright and without reservation. You've come through beautifully. Tell me, do you think you could explain to me in words just how you came to suspect that bridge timber just a little while ago? I'm not asking you to explain, I'm asking you if you think you could explain it to me."

"No," said Paul, slowly. "No, I don't think so."

"We thought as much. Well, what you want to do with your ability from here on out is up to you. I myself think that the reason a grafted arm won't take on your left side there, is because this defensive ability of yours sees some danger to you in an arm graft. If you find what that danger is, maybe you can discover another counter to it, and the next arm you have attached to you will live instead of dying. But, as I say, that's up to you. However, there's something else."

He stopped. There seemed to be almost a touch of indecision in his manner, for the first time since Paul had met him.

"As I say," said Jase, not quite as quickly as he usually spoke, "in all but name now, you're a member. We haven't only been active with you up here, but we've been active for you back down on Earth. If you go back, you'll have to stand police investigation in connection with the death of Kevin Malorn, that man in the Koh-i-Nor you took the drug to."

"I was wondering about that," said Paul.

"You needn't wonder any longer," said Jase. "The purchase desk in the music section of the library at Chicago Complex Directory now has among its records one showing that you purchased a song tape there at the same tune that Malorn was being killed. You will simply have to show up and add your testimony to the evidence of the record. Since the records are machine-made and regarded as untamperable, you'll be clear of any connection with Malorn's death an hour or so after arriving back in Chicago."

"I see." Paul nodded. "The song tape - it isn't one of Kantele singing something about 'in apple comfort time,' is it?"

Jase frowned.

"Yes," he said. "As a matter of fact it is. Why?"

"Nothing," said Paul. "I've heard it, but not all the way through."

"It's a natural choice," said Jase. "The record shows my credit number - you were buying it at my request. That's reasonable enough, since Kantele and I are old friends and the song was written for her by Blunt."

"Blunt?"

"Why yes." Jase smiled a little at him. "You didn't know the Guildmaster wrote music?"

"No."

"He does a great many things," said Jase, a little dryly. "However, the point is you can go back to Earth as free as you ever were. Except that as a Guild member you'll be required to take orders from the masters, like myself."

"I see," said Paul, a little grimly.

"Do you?" replied Jase. He sighed. "I don't think you do. Not by a damn sight Would you listen with an open mind for about five minutes?"

"Of course," said Paul.

"All right," said Jase. "Modern man got his motor to taming over with the Renaissance. At that time two things were initiated. One was the attitude of enlightened inquiry that began people on the road to a technological society and civilization. The road that sought to build a man a home and keep him well fed and happy within it by use of the machine."

"Which was bad?" said Paul.

"No, no," said Jase. "There's nothing wrong with a prosthetic appliance if nothing else is available. But you'd rather have a flesh-and-blood arm just like your own grafted on, wouldn't you?"

"Go on," said Paul.

"However, the original role of the machine started to get perverted around the time of the industrial revelation. It came to be regarded not as a means to a desired end, but as part of the end in itself. The process accelerated in the nineteenth century, and exploded in the twentieth. Man kept demanding more in the way of service from his technology, and the technology kept giving it - but always at the price of a little more of man's individual self-contained powers. In the end - in our time - our technology has become second thing to a religion. Now we're trapped in it. And we're so enfeebled by our entrapment that we tell ourselves it's the only possible way to live. That no other way exists."

"I..." began Paul, and checked himself.

"Yes, 'I,' " said Jase. "The arrogant 'I,' with the built-in survival qualities. But other people aren't like you."

"That wasn't what I was going to say," observed Paul.

"It doesn't matter," said Jase. "The point isn't you, but the world, which is at the mercy of an ever-growing technological system."

"Which the Chantry Guild wishes to attack."

"Attack?" said Jase. "The Chantry Guild was formed by Walt Blunt to protect its members against the attack of the technological system."

"What you're saying," Paul said, "is that your members grew up out of something other than the technological system."

"That's quite right," said Jase calmly. "They did. And so did you."

Paul looked searchingly at the Necromancer, but the dark face was as full of honesty as Paul had ever seen it.

"I said, two things were initiated at the time of the Renaissance," said Jase. "One was the roots of the single system that has given us our technological civilization, that says there is only one way for Man to live, and that's swaddled by the machine. And the other was all other systems - the principle of freedom which lies at the base of the Alternate Laws. The first would make

Man an inferior, the second acknowledges his superiority."

He looked at Paul as if expecting a protest.

"I'm not in disagreement with the idea of superiority," said Paul.

"Side by side, but not noticed except by a few," said Jase, "while everybody and his Uncle Charlie was engaged in making a god out of the machine, a few talented people were proving that Man had already reached that level of deity and wasn't even started yet. Genius was at work in every generation - and genius works with the Alternate Laws. Only, after a while the machine got enough muscles so that it started crowding genius - and that brings it down to our time, Paul."

"We do seem to end there, all the time," said Paul, and could not stop himself from smiling a little.

"I thought you promised me an open mind," said Jase.

"I'm sorry."

"All right, then," said Jase. "Answer me something. Suppose you're a person in any generation up to about fifty years ago whose abilities and inclinations make him inclined to have something more or something different than what's available to the mass of people in his time. What happens?"

"I'm listening," said Paul, "with an open mind."

"He can go under to the general attitude and be essentially destroyed by denying his own possibilities. Or he can rise above the general attitude and keep afloat by sheer dint of extra ability-muscle. Agreed?"

Paul nodded.

"In other words, he can lose or win his own personal battle with the mass-opinion of his time. In either case he's resolved his problem." Jase looked at Paul. Paul nodded again.

"But in our time," said Jase, "such a person isn't up against the opinions and attitudes of his fellows. He's up against an attitude brought to life and resolved into a mechanical monster that can't be reasoned with, and can't be adjusted to. He can't win for the same reason he can't outwrestle a bulldozer with his bare hands. And he can't submit because the bulldozer doesn't understand submission. It only understands a complete job."

Jase leaned forward with his hands on both of his knees. The emotion in the man came at Paul as sharp as an arrow.

"Don't you understand?" asked the Necromancer. "The Chantry Guild was established because the technological system of our own tune was trying to kill these people who belong to the Guild - each and every one of them, and any more like them - kill them off." His eyes blazed at Paul. "Just as it's been trying to kill you!"

Paul looked back at him for a long moment.

"Me?" he asked, at last.

"The weather warning you didn't get when you were out sailing," said Jase. "The temporal disorientation that caused you to be caught by the starting ore cars in the shaft of the mine. The misdirection of the subway car that stranded you in the middle of a street cleared for use by a marching society. Yes," he added, as Paul's eyebrows raised slightly, "we had a tracer on you from the time you first left my place. That's usual." He looked a little thin-lipped for a moment. "It's part of the war between us and it."

"I see," said Paul, his mind running back over a number of things.

"You're in it, on the side of the Guild, whether you like it or not. We'd like your active, working co-operation. If your ability under the Alternate Laws is what it seems to be, you'll be more valuable to your fellow Guild members than anyone else could be."

"Why?" asked Paul.

Jase shrugged a little angrily.

"I won't tell you that - now, of course," he said. "How could I? You've got to commit yourself to the Guild - that is, try for the rank of Necromancer, a master in the Guild. We'll put you to the test. If you come through all right, then some time in the future you'll learn what you can do for the Guild. You'll hear it from the only man who can give you commands once you're a master - the Guildmaster himself, Walt Blunt."

"Blunt!"

Paul felt the name slide into place with the events here on Mercury at Springboard. He felt a rage of passion remembered, and a lonely sorrow, and then the hard, driving core of his determination to bring this man Blunt face to face.

"Of course," Jase was saying. "Who else could there be to give orders to the master rank? Blunt's our general."

"I'm committed," said Paul, quietly. "What do I do?"

"Well," said Jase, taking his hands off his knees and sitting up straight, "I told you it's this ability of yours we want to determine. I said we'd done everything but try to kill you outright and without reservation. We'd like to take that last step now - make a serious effort with the resources of the Guild behind it and no safety hatch - and see if you survive."