Rider is?"

Malloy paused. Then, "No, I don't."

"I thought not. Shall I tell you?"

"I imagine you were planning to."

The Commissioner braced his fists on the work surface of the desk and lifted his bulk halfway from the chair. "The Riders are a disease. Like rabies."

Malloy cleared his throat. "That's one way to look at them."

"Don't be servilely civil to me. That is an accurate, clinical description of the Riders—they are a cerebral infection."

"You mean their powers of emergency telepathy and precognition, their seeming secondary personality—all that's a hallucination?"

Malloy was fevered as he asked it. It was at last some confirmation of his own theory. The whole world was sick, except him.

"That is exactly what I don't mean," the Commissioner said contemptuously. "The Riders are real entities, capable of real miracles so far as we are concerned. But they aren't mammals, or insects, or pure energy forms—they are viruses."

"Viruses that can think?" Malloy asked, aghast.

"No. No one unit of the strain can think, but chains of them can. Together they form different combinations and responses, like analog components or brain synapses. Objectively, they are an infection that can enter the body anywhere but that always spread to the prefrontal lobes—like rabies. Only they don't destroy tissue; the Riders are benign parasites."

"That's one word for them," Malloy admitted. "But if they are a virus, there must be antibodies—is that the word?—for them?"

The fat man snorted unpleasantly. "You can't fight an infection that is smart enough to consciously change its shape and fight back. Natural adaptation and mutation are tough enough. Besides, nobody would stand for being cured of his Rider, any more than you would let me 'cure' you of having eyes."

"Then what was your point in telling me the nature of the Riders? You weren't merely conducting an adult education class."

"True." 

 Prev. P 13/19 next