Philip Dick - Vulcan's Hammer

"But he kills people." Marion Fields said. "You said so; you said he has those hammer things he sends out."

"The Healers kill people too," Barris said.

"That's different." Her young, smooth face had on it an absolute certitude. "It's because they have to. He wants to. Don't you see the difference?"

Barris thought, I was wrong. There is one thing, one institution, that she accepts without question. Her father. She had been doing for years what great numbers of peo­ple are now learning to do: follow Father Fields blindly, wherever he leads them.

"Where is your father?" he asked the girl. "I talked to him once; I'd like to talk to him again. You're in touch with him, aren't you?"

"No," she said.

"But you know where he could be found. You could get to him, if you wanted. For instance, if I let you go, you'd find your way to him. Isn't that so?" He could see by her evasive restlessness that he was right. He was making her very uncomfortable.

"What do you want to see him for?" Marion said.

"I have a proposal to make to him."

Her eyes widened, and then shone with slyness. "You're going to join the Movement, is that it? And you want him to promise that you'll be somebody important in it. Like he did-" She clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at him stricken. "Like he did," she finished, "with that other Director."

"Taubmann," Barris said. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking, facing the girl. It was peaceful down here be­neath the ground, away from the frenzy and destruction going on above. And yet, he thought, I have to go back to it, as soon as possible. I'm here so I can do that. A sort of paradox. In this peaceful child's room I expect to find the solution to the most arduous task of all.

"You'll let me go if I take you to him?" Marion asked. "I can go free? I won't even have to go back to that school?"

"Of course. There's no reason to keep you."

"Mr. Dill kept me here."

Barris said, "Mr. Dill is dead."

"Oh," she said. She nodded slowly, somberly. "I see. That's too bad."

"I had the same feeling about him," Barris said. "At first I had no trust in what he said. He seemed to be mak­ing up a story to fool everyone. But oddly-" He broke off. Oddly, the man's story had not been spurious. Truth­fulness did not seem to go naturally with a man like Jason Dill; he seemed to be created to tell-as Marion said- long public lies, while smiling constantly. Involved dog­matic accounts for the purpose of concealing the actual situation. And yet, when everything was out in the open, Jason Dill did not look so bad; he had not been so dis­honest an official. Certainly, he had been trying to do his job. He had been loyal to the theoretical ideals of Unity... perhaps more so than anyone else.

Marion Fields said, "Those awful metal birds he's been making-those things he sends out that he kills people with. Can he make a lot of them?" She eyed him uneasily.

"Evidently there's no particular limit to what Vulcan 3 can produce. There's no restriction on raw materials avail­able to him." Him. He, too, was saying that now. "And he has the technical know-how. He has more information available to him than any purely human agency in the world. And he's not limited by any ethical considerations."

In fact, he realized, Vulcan 3 is in an ideal position; his goal is dictated by logic, by relentless correct reasoning. It is no emotional bias or projection that motivates him to act as he does. So he will never suffer a change of heart, a con­version; he will never turn from a conqueror into a benev­olent ruler.

"The techniques that Vulcan 3 will employ," Barris said to the child gazing up at him, "will be brought into play according to the need. They'll vary in direct proportion to the problem facing him; if he has ten people opposed to him, he will probably employ some minor weapon, such as the original hammers equipped with heat beams. We've seen him use hammers of greater magnitude, equipped with chemical bombs; that's because the magnitude of his opposition has turned out to be that much greater. He meets whatever challenge exists."

Marion said, "So the stronger the Movement gets, the larger he'll grow. The stronger he'll become."

"Yes," Barris said. "And there's no point at which he'll have to stop; there's no known limit to his theoretical power and size."

"If the whole world was against him-"

"Then he'd have to grow and produce and organize to combat the whole world."

"Why?" she demanded.

"Because that's his job."

"He wants to?"

"No," Barris said. "He has to."

All at once, without any warning, the girl said, 'I'll take you to him, Mr. Barris. My father, I mean."

Silently, Barris breathed a prayer of relief.

"But you have to come alone," she added instantly. "No guards or anybody with guns." Studying him she said, "You promise? On your word of honor?"

"I promise," Barris said.

Uncertainly, she said, "How'll we get there? He's in North America."

"By police cruiser. We have three of them up on the roof of the building. They used to belong to Jason Dill. When there's a lull in the attack, we'll take off."

"Can we get by the hammer birds?" she said, with a mixture of doubt and excitement.

"I hope so," Barris said.

As the Unity police cruiser passed low over New York City, Barris had an opportunity to see first-hand the dam­age which the Healers had done.

Much of the outlying business ring was in ruins. His own building was gone; only a heap of smoking rubble remained. Fires still burned out of control in the vast, sprawling rabbit warren that was-or had been-the resi­dential section. Most of the streets were hopelessly blocked. Stores, he observed, had been broken into and looted.

But the fighting was over. The city was quiet. People roamed vaguely through the debris, picking about for valu­ables. Here and there brown-clad Healers organized repair and reclamation. At the sound of the jets of his police cruiser, the people below scattered for shelter. On the roof of an undestroyed factory building a blaster boomed at them inexpertly.

"Which way?" Barns said to the solemn child beside him.

"Keep going straight. We can land soon. They'll take us to him on foot." Frowning with worry, she murmured, "I hope they haven't changed it too much. I was at that school so long, and he was in that awful place, that At­lanta ..."

Barris flew on. The open countryside did not show the same extensive injury that the big cities did; below him, the farms and even the small rural towns seemed about as they always had. In fact, there was more order in the hin­terlands now than there had been before; the collapse of the rural Unity offices had brought about stability, rather than chaos. Local people, already committed to support of the Movement, had eagerly assumed the tasks of leader­ship.

"That big river," Marion said, straining to sec. "There's a bridge. I see it." She shivered triumphantly. "Go by the bridge, and you'll see a road. When there's a junction with another road, put your ship down there." She gave him a radiant smile.

Several minutes later he was landing the police cruiser in an open field at the edge of a small Pennsylvania town. Before the jets were off, a truck had come rattling across the dirt and weeds, directly toward them.

This is it, Barris said to himself. It's too late to back out now.

The truck halted. Four men in overalls jumped down and came cautiously up to the cruiser. One of them waved a pellet-rifle. "Who are you?"

"Let me get out," Marion said to Barris. "Let me talk to them."

He touched the stud on the instrument panel which re­leased the port; it slid open, and Marion at once scrambled out and hopped down to the dusty ground.

Barris, still in the ship, waited tensely while she con­ferred with the four men. Far up in the sky, to the north, a flock of hammers rushed inland, intent on business of their own. A few moments later bright fission flashes lit up the horizon. Vulcan 3 had apparently begun equipping his extensions with atomic tactical bombs.