Philip Dick - Vulcan's Hammer

Barris said, "You keep on with that. But keep me in­formed."

Ten minutes later he was aboard a small emergency ship that belonged to his office, speeding across the United States toward Colorado. I wonder if she will be there, he asked himself. He had a fatalistic dread. They'll have sent her on. Probably to New Mexico, to some health farm there. And when I get there, they'll have transferred her to New Orleans, the rim-city of Taubmann's domain. And from there, an easy, effortless bureaucratic step to Atlanta.

But at the Denver hospital the doctor who met him said, "Yes, Director. We have Mrs. Pitt with us. At present she's out on the solarium." He pointed the way. "Taking things easy," the doctor said, accompanying him part way. "She's responded quite well to our techniques. I think she'll be up and on her feet, back to normal, in a few days."

Out on the glass-walled balcony, Barris found her. She was lying curled up on a redwood lawn bench, her knees pulled up tightly against her, her arms wrapped around her calves, her head resting to one side. She wore a short blue outfit which he recognized as hospital convalescent issue. Her feet were bare.

"Looks like you're getting along fine." he said awk­wardly.

For a time she said nothing. Then she stirred and said, "Hi. When did you get here?"

"Just now," he said, regarding her with apprehension; he felt himself stiffen. Something was still wrong.

Rachel said, "Look over there." She pointed, and he saw a plastic shipping carton lying open, its top off. "It was addressed to both of us," she said, "but they gave it to me. Someone put it on the ship at a stop somewhere. Probably one of those men who clean up. A lot of them are Healers."

Grabbing at the carton, he saw inside it the charred metal cylinder, the half-destroyed gleaming eyes. As he gazed down he saw the eyes respond; they recorded his presence.

"He repaired it," Rachel said in a flat, emotionless voice. "I've been sitting here listening to it."

"Listening to it?"

"It talks," Rachel said. "That's all it does; that's all he could fix. It never stops talking. But I can't understand anything it says. You try. It isn't talking to us." She added, "Father fixed it so it isn't harmful. It won't go anywhere or do anything."

Now he heard it. A high-pitched blearing, constant and yet altering each second. A continual signal emitted by the thing. And Rachel was right. It was not directed at them.

"Father thought you would know what it is," she said. "There's a note with it. He says he can't figure it out. He can't figure out who it's talking to." She picked up a piece of paper and held it out. Curiously, she said, "Do you know who it's talking to?"

"Yes," Barris said, staring down at the crippled, blighted metal thing deliberately imprisoned in its carton; Father Fields had taken care to hobble it thoroughly. "I guess I do."

The leader of the New York repair crew contacted Bar­ris early the following month. "First report on reconstruc­tion work, Director," Smith reported.

"Any results?" Neither Barris nor his chief repairman uttered the name Vulcan 2 aloud; this was a closed-cir­cuit vid-channel they were using, but with the burgeoning of the Healers' Movement absolute secrecy had to be maintained in every area. Already, a number of infiltrators had been exposed, and several of them had been employed in the communications media. The vid-service was a natu­ral place. All Unity business sooner or later was put over the lines.

Smith said, "Not much yet. Most of the components were beyond salvage. Only a fraction of the memory store still exists intact."

Becoming tense, Barris said, "Find anything relevant?"

On the vidscreen, Smith's sweat-streaked, grimy face was expressionless. "A few things, I think. If you want to drop over, we'll show you what we've done."

As soon as he could wind up pressing business, Barris drove across New York to the Unity work labs. He was checked by the guards and passed through into the re­stricted inner area, the functioning portion of the labs. There he found Wade Smith and his subordinates stand­ing around a complex tangle of pulsing machinery.

"There it is," Smith said.

"Looks different," Barris said. He saw in it almost noth­ing familiar; all the visible parts appeared to be new, not from the old computer.

"We've done our best to activate the undamaged elements." With obvious pride, Smith indicated a particularly elaborate mass of gleaming wiring, dials, meters, and power cables. "The wheeling valves are now scanned di­rectly, without reference to any overall structure, and the impulses are sorted and fed into an audio system. Scanning has to be virtually at random, under such adverse circum­stances. We've done all we can to unscramble-especially to get out the noise. Remember, the computer maintained its own organizing principle, which is gone, of course. We have to take the surviving memory digits as they come." Smith clicked on the largest of the wall-mounted speak­ers. A hoarse roar filled the room, an indistinguishable blur of static and sound. He adjusted several of the con­trol settings.

"Hard to make out," Barris said, after straining in vain. "Impossible at first. It takes awhile. After you've lis­tened to it as much as we have-"

Barris nodded in disappointment. "I thought maybe we'd wind up with better results. But I know you did everything possible."

"We're working on a wholly new sorting mechanism. Given three or four more weeks, we'll possibly have some­thing far superior to this."

"Too long," Barris said instantly. Far too long. The up­rising at Chicago, far from being reversed by Unity police, had spread into adjoining states and was now nearing a union with a similar Movement action in the area around St. Louis. "In four weeks," he said to the repairmen gath­ered around, "we'll probably be wearing coarse brown robes. And instead of trying to patch up this stuff-" he indicated the vast gleaming structure containing the extant elements of Vulcan 2-"we'll more likely be tearing it down."

It was a grim joke, and none of the repairmen smiled. Barris said, "I'd like to listen to this noise." He indi­cated the roar from the wall speaker. "Why don't you all clear out for a little while, so I can see what I can pick up."

At that point Smith and his crew departed. Barris took up a position in front of the speaker and prepared himself for a long session.

Somewhere, lost in the fog of random and meaningless sound, were faint traces of words. Computations-the vague unwinding of the memory elements as the newly-constructed scanner moved over the old remains. Barris clasped his hands together, tensing himself in an effort to hear.

"....progressive bifurcation..."

One phrase; he had picked out something, small as it was, one jot from the chaos.

"... social elements according to new patterns previ­ously developed..."

Now he was getting longer chains of words, but they signified nothing; they were incomplete.

"... exhaustion of mineral formations no longer pose the problem that was faced earlier during the ..." The words faded out into sheer noise; he lost the thread.

Vulcan 2 was in no sense functioning; there were no new computations. These were rising up, frozen and dead, formation from out of the past, from the many years that the computer had operated.

".... certain problems of identity previously matters of conjecture and nothing more... vital necessity of under­standing the integral factors involved in the transformation from mere cognition to full..."

As he listened, Barris lit a cigarette. Time passed. He heard more and more of the disjointed phrases; they be­came, in his mind, an almost dreamlike ocean of sound, flecks appearing on the surface of the ceaseless roar, ap­pearing and then sinking back. Like particles of animate matter, differentiated for an instant and then once more absorbed.