Vulcan's Hammer (10 page)

“I wouldn’t be alarmed,” Allison said, after Barris had made his concern clear. “This Illinois uprising is being put down by our police crews. And in addition it’s part of a worldwide pattern. They seem to be active almost everywhere, now. When you get back here I’ll show you the classified reports; most of the Directors have been keeping the activity out of the newspapers. If it weren’t for Taubmann and Henderson, this business in Illinois might have been kept quiet. As I get it, there’ve been similar strikes in Lisbon and Berlin and Stalingrad. If we could get some kind of decision from Vulcan 3—”

“Maybe we will, fairly soon,” Barris said.

“You made out satisfactorily in Geneva? You’re coming back with definite word from it?”

“I’ll discuss it with you later,” Barris said, and broke the connection.

Later, as the ship flew low over New York, he saw the familiar signs of hyperactivity there, too. A procession of brown-clad Healers moved along a side street in the Bowery, solemn and dignified in their coarse garments. Crowds watched in respectful admiration. There was a demolished Unity auto—destroyed by a mob, not more than a mile from his offices. When the ship began its landing maneuver, he managed to catch sight of chalked slogans on building walls. Posters. So much more in the open, he realized. Blatant. They had progressively less to fear.

He had beaten the commercial transport carrying the remains of Vulcan 2 by almost an hour. After he had checked in at his offices and signed the formal papers regaining administrative authority from Allison, he asked about Rachel.

Allison said, “You’re referring to the widow of that Unity man slain in South America?” Leafing through an armload of papers and reports and forms, the man at last came up with one. “So much has been going on since you were last here,” he explained. “It seems as if everything broke over us at once.” He turned a page. “Here it is. Mrs. Arthur Pitt arrived here yesterday at 2:30 A.M. New York time and was signed over to us by the personnel responsible for her safe transit from Europe. We then arranged to have her taken at once to the mental health institute in Denver.”

Human lives, Barris thought. Marks on forms.

“I think I’ll go to Denver,” he said. “For a few hours. A big transport will be coming in here from Unity Control any time now; make sure it’s fully guarded at all times and don’t let anyone pry into it or start uncrating the stuff inside. I want to be present during most of the process.”

“Shall I continue to deal with the Illinois situation?” Allison asked, following after him. “It’s my impression that I’ve been relatively successful there; if you have time to examine the—”

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 that 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.”

CHAPTER TEN

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 vidchannel 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 vidservice 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 a while. 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, formations 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.

On and on the sound droned, endlessly.

It was not until four days later that he heard the first useful sequence. Four days of wearisome listening, consuming all his time, keeping him from the urgent matters that demanded his attention back at his office. But when he got the sequence, he knew that he had done right; the effort, the time, were justified.

He was sitting before the speaker in a semidoze, his eyes shut, his thoughts wandering—and then suddenly he was on his feet, wide awake.

“ . . . this process is greatly accelerated in
3
. . . if the tendencies
noted in
1
and
2
are continued and allowed to develop it would be
necessary to withdraw certain data for the possible . . .”

The words faded out. Holding his breath, his heart hammering, Barris stood rigid. After a moment the words rushed back, swelling up and deafening him.

. . . Movement would activate too many subliminal proclivities . . . doubtful if
3
is yet aware of this process . . . information
on the Movement at this point would undoubtedly create a critical
situation in which
3
might begin to . . .”

Barris cursed. The words were gone again. Furiously, he ground out his cigarette and waited impatiently; unable to sit still he roamed about the room. Jason Dill had been telling the truth, then. That much was certain. Again he settled down before the speaker, struggling to force from the noise a meaningful pattern of verbal units.

“ . . . the appearance of cognitive faculties operating on a value
level demonstrates the widening of personality surpassing the
strictly logical . . .
3
differs essentially in manipulation of nonrational values of an ultimate kind . . . construction included reinforced and cumulative dynamic factors permitting
3
to make
decisions primarily associated with nonmechanical or . . . it would
be impossible for
3
to function in this capacity without a creative
rather than an analytical faculty . . . such judgments cannot be
rendered on a strictly logical level . . . the enlarging of
3
into
dynamic levels creates an essentially new entity not explained by
previous terms known to . . .”

For a moment the vague words drifted off, as Barris strained tensely to hear. Then they returned with a roar, as if some basic reinforced memory element had been touched. The vast sound made him flinch; involuntarily he put his hands up to protect his ears.

“ . . . level of operation can be conceived in no other fashion . . . for all intents and purposes . . . if such as
3
’s actual construction . . . then
3
is in essence alive . . .”

Alive!

Barris leaped to his feet. More words, diminishing, now. Drifting away into random noise.

“ . . . with the positive will of goal-oriented living creatures . . . therefore
3
like any other living creature is basically concerned with survival . . . knowledge of the Movement might create
a situation in which the necessity of survival would cause
3
to . . . the result might be catastrophic . . . to be avoided at . . .
unless more can . . . a critcial . . .
3
. . . if . . .”

Silence.

It was so, then. The verification had come.

Barris hurried out of the room, past Smith and the repair crew. “Seal it off. Don’t let anybody in; throw up an armed guard right away. Better install a fail-safe barrier—one that will demolish everything in there rather than admitting unauthorized persons.” He paused meaningfully. “You understand?”

Nodding, Smith said, “Yes, sir.”

As he left them, they stood staring after him. And then, one by one, they started into activity, to do as he had instructed.

He grabbed the first Unity surface car in sight and sped back across New York to his office. Should he contact Dill by vidscreen? he asked himself. Or wait until they could confer face-to-face? It was a calculated risk to use the communication channels, even the closed-circuit ones. But he couldn’t delay; he had to act.

Snapping on the car’s vidset he raised the New York monitor. “Get me Managing Director Dill,” he ordered. “This is an emergency.”

They had held back data from Vulcan 3 for nothing, he said to himself. Because Vulcan 3 is primarily a data-analyzing machine, and in order to analyze it must have all the relevant data. And so, he realized, in order to do its job it had to go out and get the data. If data were not being brought to it, if Vulcan 3 deduced that relevant data were not in its possession, it would have no choice; it would have to construct some system for more successful data-collecting. The logic of its very nature would force it to.

No choice would be involved. The great computer would not have to decide to go out and seek data.

Dill failed, he realized. True, he succeeded in withholding the data themselves; he never permitted his feed-teams to pass on any mention to Vulcan 3 of the Healers’ Movement. But he failed to keep the inferential knowledge from Vulcan 3 that he
was
withholding data.

The computer had not known what it was missing, but it had set to work to find out.

And, he thought, what did it have to do to find out? To what lengths did it have to go to assemble the missing data? And there were people actively withholding data from it—what would be its reaction to discovering that? Not merely that the feed-teams had been ineffective, but that there was, in the world above ground, a positive effort going on to dupe it . . . how would its purely logical structure react to that?

Did the original builders anticipate that?

No wonder it had destroyed Vulcan 2.

It had to, in order to fulfill its purpose.

And what would it do when it found out that a Movement existed with the sole purpose of destroying
it
?

But Vulcan 3 already knew. Its mobile data-collecting units had been circulating for some time now. How long, he did not know. And how much they had been able to pick up—he did not know that, either. But, he realized, we must act with the most pessimistic premise in mind; we must assume that Vulcan 3 has been able to complete the picture. That there is nothing relevant denied it now; it knows as much as we do, and there is nothing we can do to restore the wall of silence.

It had known Father Fields to be its enemy. Just as it had known Vulcan 2 to be its enemy, a little earlier. But Father Fields had not been chained down, helpless in one spot, as had been Vulcan 2; he had managed to escape. At least one other person had not been as lucky nor as skillful as he; Dill had mentioned some murdered woman teacher. And there could be others. Deaths written off as natural, or as caused by human agents. By the Healers, for instance.

He thought, Possibly Arthur Pitt. Rachel’s dead husband.

Those mobile extensions can talk, he remembered. I wonder, can they also write letters?

Madness, he thought. The ultimate horror for our paranoid culture: vicious unseen mechanical entities that flit at the edges of our vision, that can go anywhere, that are in our very midst. And there may be an unlimited number of them. One of them following each of us, like some ghastly vengeful agent of evil. Pursuing us, tracking us down, killing us one by one—but only when we get in their way. Like wasps. You have to come between them and their hives, he thought. Otherwise they will leave you alone; they are not interested. These things do not hunt us down because they want to, or even because they have been told to; they do it because we are there.

As far as Vulcan 3 is concerned, we are objects, not people.

A machine knows nothing about people.

And yet, Vulcan 2, by using its careful processes of reasoning, had come to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes Vulcan 3 was alive; it could be expected to act
as
a living creature. To behave in a way perhaps only analogous—but that was sufficient. What more was needed? Some metaphysical essence?

With almost uncontrollable impatience, he jiggled the switch of the vidsender. “What’s the delay?” he demanded. “Why hasn’t my call to Geneva gone through?”

After a moment the mild, aloof features of the monitor reappeared. “We are trying to locate Managing Director Dill, sir. Please be patient.”

Red tape, Barris thought. Even now.
Especially
now. Unity will devour itself, because in this supreme crisis, when it is challenged both from above and below, it will be paralyzed by its own devices. A kind of unintentional suicide, he thought.

“My call has to be put through,” he said. “Over everything else. I’m the Northern Director of this continent; you have to obey me. Get hold of Dill.”

The monitor looked at him and said, “You can go to hell!”