Vulcan's Hammer (7 page)

He said, “Rachel Pitt.”

Glancing at him, Rachel said, “I have something to sell. A piece of news that could determine your future.” Her voice was hard and thin, as brittle as glass. “But I have to have something back; I need something in exchange.”

“I don’t want to do any business with you,” he said. “I didn’t come here to see you.”

“I know,” she said. “I tried to get hold of you at your office; they stalled me every time. I knew right away that you had given orders to that effect.”

Barris said nothing. This is really bad, he thought. That this demented woman should manage to locate me, here, at this time.

“You’re not interested,” Rachel said, “and I know why not; all you can think of is how successfully you’re going to deal with Jason Dill. But you see, you won’t be able to deal with him at all.”

“Why not?” he said, trying to keep any emotions he might be feeling out of his voice.

Rachel said, “I’ve been under arrest for a couple of days, now. They had me picked up and brought here.”

“I wondered what you were doing here,” he said.

“A loyal Unity wife,” she said. “Devoted to the organization. Whose husband was killed only a few—” She broke off. “But you don’t care about that, either.” At the fence she halted, facing him. “You can either go directly to the Unity Control Building, or you can take half an hour and spend it with me. I advise the latter. If you decide to go on and see Dill now, without hearing me out . . .” She shrugged. “I can’t stop you. Go ahead.” Her black eyes glowed unwinkingly as she waited.

This woman is really out of her mind, Barris thought. The rigid, fanatical expression . . . But even so, could he afford to ignore her?

“Do you think I’m trying to seduce you?” she said.

Startled, he said, “I—”

“I mean, seduce you away from your high purpose.” For the first time she smiled and seemed to relax. “Mr. Barris,” she said with a shudder. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve been under intensive examination for two days, now. You can suppose who by. But it doesn’t matter. Why should I care? After what’s happened to me . . .” Her voice trailed off, then resumed. “Do you think I escaped? That they’re after me?” A mocking, bantering irony danced in her eyes. “Hell no. They let me go. They gave me compulsive psychotherapy for two days, and then they told me I could go home; they shoved me out the door.”

A group of people passed by on their way to a ship; Barris and Rachel were both silent for a time.

“Why did they haul you in?” he asked finally.

Rachel said, “Oh, I was supposed to have written some kind of a poison-pen letter, accusing someone high up in Unity. I managed to convince them I was innocent—or rather, their analysis of the contents of my mind convinced them; all I did was sit. They took my mind out, took it apart, studied it, put the pieces back together and stuffed them back in my head.” Reaching up, she slid aside the bandanna for a moment; he saw, with grim aversion, the neat white scar slightly before her hairline. “It’s all back,” she said. “At least, I hope it is.”

With compassion, he said, “That’s really terrible. A real abuse of human beings. It should be stopped.”

“If you get to be Managing Director, maybe you can stop it,” she said. “Who knows? You might someday be—after all, you’re bright and hardworking and ambitious. All you have to do is defeat all those other bright, hardworking, ambitious Directors. Like Taubmann.”

“Is he the one you’re supposed to have accused?” Barris said.

“No,” she said, in a faint voice. “It’s you, William Barris. Isn’t that interesting? Anyhow, now I’ve given you my news—free. There’s a letter in Jason Dill’s file accusing you of being in the pay of the Healers; they showed it to me. Someone is trying to get you, and Dill is interested. Isn’t that worth your knowing, before you go in there and lock horns with him?”

Barris said, “How do you know I’m here to do that?”

Her dark eyes flickered. “Why else would you be here?” But her voice had a faltering tone now.

Reaching out, he took hold of her arm. With firmness, he guided her along the walk to the street side of the field. “I will take the time to talk to you,” he said. He racked his mind, trying to think of a place to take her. Already they had come to the public taxi stand; a robot cab had spotted them and was rolling in their direction.

The door of the cab opened. The mechanical voice said, “May I be of service, please?”

Barris slid into the cab and drew the woman in beside him. Still holding firmly onto her, he said to the cab, “Say listen, can you find us a hotel, not too conspicuous—you know.” He could hear the receptor mechanism of the cab whirring as it responded. “For us to get a load off our feet,” he said. “My girl and me. You know.”

Presently the cab said, “Yes, sir.” It began to move along the busy Geneva streets. “Out-of-the-way hotel where you will find the privacy you desire.” It added, “The Hotel Bond, sir.”

Rachel Pitt said nothing; she stared sightlessly ahead.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In his pockets, Jason Dill carried the two reels of tape; they never left him, night and day. He had them with him now as he walked slowly along the brightly lit corridor. Once again, involuntarily, he lifted his hand and rubbed the bulge which the tapes made. Like a magic charm, he thought to himself with irony. And we accuse the masses of being superstitious!

Ahead of him, lights switched on. Behind him, enormous reinforced doors slid shut to fill in the chamber’s single entrance. The huge calculator rose in front of him, the immense tower of receptor banks and indicators. He was alone with it—alone with Vulcan 3.

Very little of the computer was visible; its bulk disappeared into regions which he had never seen, which in fact no human had ever seen. During the course of its existence it had expanded certain portions of itself. To do so it had cleared away the granite and shale earth; it had, for a long time now, been conducting excavation operations in the vicinity. Sometimes Jason Dill could hear that sound going on like a far-off, incredibly high-pitched dentist’s drill. Now and then he had listened and tried to guess where the operations were taking place. It was only a guess. Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface, to be carted off, and the variety, amount, and nature of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.

Now, as Jason Dill stood facing the thing, he saw that it had put forth a new reel of supply requisitions; it was there for him to pick up and fill. As if, he thought, I’m some errand boy.

I do its shopping, he realized. It’s stuck here, so I go out and come back with the week’s groceries. Only in its case we don’t supply food; we supply just about everything else but.

The financial cost of supporting Vulcan 3 was immense. Part of the taxation program conducted by Unity on a worldwide basis existed to maintain the computer. At the latest estimate, Vulcan 3’s share of the taxes came to about forty-three percent.

And the rest, Dill thought idly, goes to schools, for roads, hospitals, fire departments, police—the lesser order of human needs.

Beneath his feet the floor vibrated. This was the deepest level which the engineers had constructed, and yet something was constantly going on below. He had felt the vibrations before. What lay down there? No black earth; not the inert ground. Energy, tubes and pipes, wiring, transformers, self-contained machinery . . . He had a mental image of relentless activity going on: carts carrying supplies in, wastes out; lights blinking on and off; relays closing; switches cooling and reheating; worn-out parts replaced; new parts invented; superior designs replacing obsolete designs. And how far had it spread? Miles? Were there even more levels beneath the one transmitting up through the soles of his shoes? Did it go down, down,
forever?

Vulcan 3 was aware of him. Across the vast impersonal face of metal an acknowledgment gleamed, a ribbon of fluid letters that appeared briefly and then vanished. Jason Dill had to catch the words at once or not at all; no latitude for human dullness was given.

Is the educational bias survey complete?

“Almost,” Dill said. “A few more days.” As always, in dealing with Vulcan 3, he felt a deep, inertial reluctance; it slowed his responses and hung over his mind, his faculties, like a dead weight. In the presence of the computer he found himself becoming stupid. He always gave the shortest answers; it was easier. And as soon as the first words lit up in the air above his head, he had a desire to leave; already, he wanted to go.

But this was his job, this being cloistered here with Vulcan 3. Someone had to do it. Some human being had to stand in this spot.

He had never had this feeling in the presence of Vulcan 2.

Now, new words formed, like lightning flashing blue-white in the damp air.

I need it at once.

“It’ll be along as soon as the feed-teams can turn it into data forms.”

Vulcan 3 was—well, he thought, the only word was
agitated
. Power lines glowed red—the origin of the series’ name. The rumblings and dull flashes of red had reminded Nathaniel Greenstreet of the ancient god’s forge, the lame god who had created the thunderbolts for Jupiter, in an age long past.

There is some element misfunctioning. A significant shift in
the orientation of certain social strata which cannot be explained
in terms of data already available to me. A realignment of the
social pyramid is forming in response to historic-dynamic factors
unfamiliar to me. I must know more if I am to deal with this.

A faint tendril of alarm moved through Jason Dill. What did Vulcan 3 suspect? “All data is made available to you as soon as possible.”

A decided bifurcation of society seems in the making. Be certain your report on educational bias is complete. I will need all the
relevant facts.

After a pause, Vulcan 3 added:
I sense a rapidly approaching
crisis.

“What kind of crisis?” Dill demanded nervously.

Ideological. A new orientation appears to be on the verge of
verbalization. A Gestalt derived from the experience of the lowest
classes. Reflecting their dissatisfaction.

“Dissatisfaction? With what?”

Essentially, the masses reject the concept of stability. In the
main, those without sufficient property to be firmly rooted are
more concerned with gain than with security. To them, society is
an arena of adventure. A structure in which they hope to rise to a
superior power status.

“I see,” Dill said dutifully.

A rationally controlled, stable society such as ours defeats their
desires. In a rapidly altering, unstable society the lowest classes
would stand a good chance of seizing power. Basically, the lowest
classes are adventurers, conceiving life as a gamble, a game rather
than a task, with social power as the stakes.

“Interesting,” Dill said. “So for them the concept of luck plays a major role. Those on top have had good luck. Those—” But Vulcan 3 was not interested in his contribution; it had already continued.

The dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of ineffectuality. Not an increased standard
of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal. Because
of their emotional orientation, they arise and act when a powerful
leader-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than
a chaotic mass of unformed elements.

Dill had no reply to that. It was evident that Vulcan 3 had sifted the information available, and had come up with uncomfortably close inferences. That, of course, was the machine’s forte; basically it was a device par excellence for performing the processes of deductive and inductive reasoning. It ruthlessly passed from one step to the next and arrived at the correct inference, whatever it was.

Without direct knowledge of any kind, Vulcan 3 was able to deduce, from general historic principles, the social conflicts developing in the contemporary world. It had manufactured a picture of the situation which faced the average human being as he woke up in the morning and reluctantly greeted the day. Stuck down here, Vulcan 3 had, through indirect and incomplete evidence,
imagined
things as they actually were.

Sweat came out on Dill’s forehead. He was dealing with a mind greater than any one man’s or any group of men’s. This proof of the prowess of the computer—this verification of Greenstreet’s notion that a machine was not limited merely to doing what man could do, but doing it faster . . . Vulcan 3 was patently doing what a man could
not
do no matter how much time he had available to him.

Down here, buried underground in the dark, in this constant isolation, a human being would go mad; he would lose all contact with the world, all ideas of what was going on. As time progressed he would develop a less and less accurate picture of reality; he would become progressively more hallucinated. Vulcan 3, however, moved continually in the opposite direction; it was, in a sense, moving by degrees toward inevitable
sanity,
or at least maturity—if, by that, was meant a clear, accurate, and full picture of things as they really were. A picture, Jason Dill realized, that no human being has ever had or will ever have. All humans are partial. And this giant is not!

“I’ll put a rush on the educational survey,” he murmured. “Is there anything else you need?”

The statistical report on rural linguistics has not come in. Why is
that? It was under the personal supervision of your subcoordinator,
Arthur Graveson Pitt.

Dill cursed silently. Good lord! Vulcan 3 never mislaid or lost or mistook a single datum among the billions that it ingested and stored away. “Pitt was injured,” Dill said aloud, his mind racing desperately. “His car overturned on a winding mountain road in Colorado. Or at least that’s the way I recall it. I’d have to check to be sure, but—”

Have his report completed by someone else. I require it. Is his
injury serious?

Dill hesitated. “As a matter of fact, they don’t think he’ll live. They say—”

Why have so many T-class persons been killed in the past year?
I want more information on this. According to my statistics only
one-fifth of that number should have died of natural causes. Some
vital factor is missing. I must have more data.

“All right,” Dill muttered. “We’ll get you more data; anything you want.”

I am considering calling a special meeting of the Control Council. I am on the verge of deciding to question the staff of eleven
Regional Directors personally.

At that Dill was stunned; he tried to speak, but for a time he could not. He could only stare fixedly at the ribbon of words. The ribbon moved inexorably on.

I am not satisfied with the way data is supplied. I may demand
your removal and an entirely new system of feeding.

Dill’s mouth opened and closed. Aware that he was shaking visibly, he backed away from the computer. “Unless you want something else,” he managed, “I have business. In Geneva.” All he wanted to do was get out of the situation, away from the chamber.

Nothing more. You may go.

As quickly as possible, Dill left the chamber, ascending by express lift to the surface level. Around him, in a blur, guards checked him over; he was scarcely aware of them.

What a going-over, he thought. What an ordeal. Talk about the Atlanta psychologists—they’re nothing compared with what I have to face, day after day.

God, how I hate that machine, he thought. He was still trembling, his heart palpitating; he could not breathe, and for a time he sat on a leather-covered couch in the outer lounge, recovering.

To one of the attendants he said, “I’d like a glass of some stimulant. Anything you have.”

Presently it was in his hand, a tall green glass; he gulped it down and felt a trifle better. The attendant was waiting around to be paid, he realized; the man had a tray and a bill.

“Seventy-five cents, sir,” the attendant said.

To Dill it was the final blow. His position as Managing Director did not exempt him from these annoyances; he had to fish around in his pocket for change. And meanwhile, he thought, the future of our society rests with me. While I dig up seventyfive cents for this idiot.

I ought to let them all get blown to bits.
I ought to give up.

William Barris felt a little more relaxed as the cab carried him and Rachel Pitt into the dark, overpopulated, older section of the city. On the sidewalks clumps of elderly men in seedy garments and battered hats stood inertly. Teenagers lounged by store windows. Most of the store windows, Barris noticed, had metal bars or gratings protecting their displays from theft. Rubbish lay piled up in alleyways.

“Do you mind coming here?” he asked the woman beside him. “Or is it too depressing?”

Rachel had taken off her coat and put it across her lap. She wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, probably the one she had had on when the police arrested her; it looked to him like something more suited for house use. And, he saw, her throat was streaked with what appeared to be dust. She had a tired, wan expression and she sat listlessly.

“You know, I like the city,” she said, after a time.

“Even this part?”

“I’ve been staying in this section,” she said. “Since they let me go.”

Barris said, “Did they give you time to pack? Were you able to take any clothes with you?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“What about money?”

“They were very kind.” Her voice had weary irony in it. “No, they didn’t let me take any money; they simply bundled me into a police ship and took off for Europe. But before they let me go they permitted me to draw enough money from my husband’s pension payment to take care of getting me back home.” Turning her head she finished, “Because of all the red tape, it will be several months before the regular payments will be forthcoming. This was a favor they did me.”

To that, Barris could say nothing.

“Do you think,” Rachel said, “that I resent the way Unity has treated me?”

“Yes,” he said.

Rachel said, “You’re right.”

Now the cab had begun to coast up to the entrance of an ancient brick hotel with a tattered awning. Feeling somewhat dismayed by the appearance of the Bond Hotel, Barris said, “Will this be all right, this place?”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “In fact, this is where I would have had the cab take us. I had intended to bring you here.”

The cab halted and its door swung open. As Barris paid it, he thought, Maybe I shouldn’t have let it decide for me. Maybe I ought to get back in and have it drive on. Turning, he glanced up at the hotel.