Vulcan's Hammer (3 page)

“What game is that?” Dill said finally. “Where they mark with the chalk.” He pointed.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking over his shoulder.

At that, Dill was dumbfounded. “You mean you let them play unorganized games? Games of their own devising?”

“No,” she said. “I mean I’m not in charge of playground teaching; it’s Miss Smollet who handles that. See her down there?”

When the custody transfer had been made out, Dill took it from her and departed. Presently she saw, through the window, the man and his staff crossing the playground. She watched as he waved genially to the children, and she saw him stop several times to bend down to speak to some individual child.

How incredible, she thought. That he could take the time for ordinary persons like us.

At Dill’s car she saw the Fields girl. The small shape, wearing a coat, the bright red hair shimmering in the sun . . . and then an official of Dill’s staff had boosted the child into the back of the car. Dill got in too, and the doors slammed. The car drove off. On the playground, a group of children had gathered by the high wire fence to wave.

Still trembling, Mrs. Parker made her way back up the corridor to her classroom. Is my job safe? she asked herself. Will I be investigated, or can I believe him? After all, he did give me his absolute assurance, and no one can contradict him. I know my record is clear, she thought desperately. I’ve never done anything subversive; I asked not to have that child in my class, and I never discuss current events in the classroom; I’ve never slipped once. But suppose—

Suddenly, at the corner of her eye, something moved.

She halted rigid where she was. A flicker of motion. Now gone. What was it? A deep, intuitive dread filled her; something had been there, near her, unobserved. Now swiftly vanished— she had caught only the most indistinct glimpse.

Spying on her! Some mechanism overhearing her. She was being watched. Not just the children, she thought in terror. But us, too. They have us watched, and I never knew for sure; I only guessed.

Could it read my thoughts? she asked herself. No, nothing can read thoughts. And I wasn’t saying anything aloud. She looked up and down the corridor, striving to make out what it had been.

Who does it report to? she wondered. The police? Will they come and get me, take me to Atlanta or some place like that?

Gasping with fear, she managed to open the door of her classroom and enter.

CHAPTER THREE

The Unity Control Building filled virtually the whole business area of Geneva, a great imposing square of white concrete and steel. Its endless rows of windows glittered in the late afternoon sun; lawns and shrubs surrounded the structure on all sides; gray-clad men and women hurried up the wide marble steps and through the doors.

Jason Dill’s car pulled up at the guarded Director’s entrance. He stepped quickly out and held the door open. “Come along,” he said.

For a moment Marion Fields remained in the car, unwilling to leave. The leather seats had given her a sense of security, and she sat looking out at the man standing on the sidewalk, trying to control her fear of him. The man smiled at her, but she had no confidence in the smile; she had seen it too many times on the public television. It was too much a part of the world that she had been taught to distrust.

“Why?” she said. “What are you going to do?” But at last she slid slowly from the car onto the pavement. She was not sure where she was; the rapid trip had confused her.

“I’m sorry you had to leave your possessions behind,” Dill said to her. He took hold of her hand and led her firmly up the steps of the great building. “We’ll replace them,” he said. “And we’ll see that you have a pleasant time here with us; I promise you, on my word of honor.” He glanced down to see how she was taking it.

The long echoing hall stretched out ahead of them, lit by recessed lights. Distant figures, tiny human shapes, scampered back and forth from one office to another. To the girl, it was like an even larger school; it was everything she had been subjected to but on a much larger scale.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“This way,” Dill said in a cheerful voice, as he guided her along. “You won’t be lonely because there are a lot of nice people who work here who have children of their own, girls of their own. And they’ll be glad to bring their children by so you can have someone to play with. Won’t that be nice?”

“You can tell them,” she said.

“Tell them what?” Dill said, as he turned down a side passage.

“To bring the children. And they will. Because you’re the boss.” She gazed up at him, and saw, for an instant, his composure depart. But almost at once he was smiling again. “Why do you always smile?” she said. “Aren’t things ever bad, or aren’t you able to admit it when they’re bad? On the television you always say things are fine. Why don’t you tell the truth?” She asked these questions with curiosity; it did not make sense to her. Surely he knew that he never told the truth.

“You know what I think’s wrong with you, young woman?” Dill said. “I don’t really think you’re such a troublemaker as you pretend.” He opened the door to an office. “I think you just worry too much.” As he ushered her inside he said, “You should be like other children. Play more healthy outdoor games. Don’t do so much thinking off by yourself. Isn’t that what you do? Go off by yourself somewhere and brood?”

She had to nod in agreement. It was true.

Dill patted her on the shoulder. “You and I are going to get along fine,” he said. “You know, I have two children of my own—a good bit older than you, though.”

“I know,” she said. “One’s a boy and he’s in the police youth, and your girl Joan is in the girls’ army school in Boston. I read about it in a magazine they give us at school to read.”

“Oh, yes,” Dill murmured. “
World Today.
Do you like to read it?”

“No,” she said. “It tells more lies even than you.”

After that, the man said nothing; he concerned himself with papers on his desk, and left her to stand by herself.

“I’m sorry you don’t like our magazine,” he said finally, in a preoccupied voice. “Unity goes to a great deal of trouble to put it out. By the way, who told you to say that about Unity? Who taught you?”

“Nobody taught me.”

“Not even your father?”

She said, “Do you know you’re shorter than you look on television? Do they do that on purpose? Try to make you look bigger to impress people?”

To that, Dill said nothing. At his desk he had turned on a little machine; she saw lights flash.

“That’s recording,” she said.

Dill said, “Have you had a visit from your dad since his escape from Atlanta?”

“No,” she said.

“Do you know what sort of place Atlanta is?”

“No,” she said. But she did know. He stared at her, trying to see if she was lying, but she returned his stare. “It’s a prison,” she said at last. “Where they send men who speak their mind.”

“No,” Dill said. “It’s a hospital. For mentally unbalanced people. It’s a place where they get well.”

In a low, steady voice, she said, “You’re a liar.”

“It’s a psychological therapy place,” Dill said. “Your father was—upset. He imagined all sorts of things that weren’t so. There evidently were pressures on him too strong for him to bear, and so like a lot of perfectly normal people he cracked under the pressure.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

Dill admitted, “No. But I have his record here.” He showed her a great mass of documents that lay before him.

“They cured him at that place?” Marion asked.

“Yes,” Dill said. But then he frowned. “No, I beg your pardon. He was too ill to be given therapy. And I see he managed to keep himself ill the entire two months he was there.”

“So he isn’t cured,” she said. “He’s still upset, isn’t he?”

Dill said, “The Healers. What’s your father’s relationship to them?”

“I don’t know.”

Dill seated himself and leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “Isn’t it a little silly, those things you said? Overthrowing God . . . somebody has told you we were better off in the old days, before Unity, when we had war every twenty years.” He pondered. “I wonder how the Healers got their name. Do you know?”

“No,” she said.

“Didn’t your father tell you?”

“No.”

“Maybe I can tell you; I’ll be a sort of substitute father, for a while. A ‘healer’ is a person who comes along with no degree or professional medical training and declares he can cure you by some odd means when the licensed medical profession has given you up. He’s a quack, a crank, either an out-and-out nut or a cynical fake who wants to make some easy money and doesn’t care how he goes about it. Like the cancer quacks— but you’re too young; you wouldn’t remember them.” Leaning forward, he said, “But you may have heard of the radiation-sickness quacks. Do you remember ever seeing a man come by in an old car, with perhaps a sign mounted on top of it, selling bottles of medicine guaranteed to cure terrible radiation burns?”

She tried to recall. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I know I’ve seen men on television selling things that are supposed to cure all the ills of society.”

Dill said, “No child would talk as you’re talking. You’ve been trained to say this.” His voice rose. “Haven’t you?”

“Why are you so upset?” she said, genuinely surprised. “I didn’t say it was any Unity salesman.”

“But you meant us,” Dill said, still flushed. “You meant our informational discussions, our public relations programs.”

She said, “You’re so suspicious. You see things that aren’t there.” That was something her father had said; she remembered that. He had said,
They’re paranoids. Suspicious even of each
other. Any opposition is the work of the devil.

“The Healers,” Dill was saying, “take advantage of the superstitions of the masses. The masses are ignorant, you see. They believe in crazy things: magic, gods and miracles, healing, the Touch. This cynical cult is playing on basic emotional hysterias familiar to all our sociologists, manipulating the masses like sheep, exploiting them to gain power.”

“You have the power,” she said. “All of it. My father says you’ve got a monopoly on it.”

“The masses have a desire for religious certainty, the comforting balm of faith. You grasp what I’m saying, don’t you? You seem to be a bright child.”

She nodded faintly.

“They don’t live by reason. They can’t; they haven’t the courage and discipline. They demand the metaphysical absolutes that started to go out as early as 1700. But war keeps bringing it back—the whole pack of frauds.”

“Do you believe that?” she said. “That it’s all frauds?”

Dill said, “I know that a man who says he has the Truth is a fraud. A man who peddles snake oil, like your—” He broke off. “A man,” he said finally, “like your father. A spellbinder who fans up the flames of hate, inflames a mob until it kills.”

To that she said nothing.

Jason Dill slid a piece of paper before her eyes. “Read this. It’s about a man named Pitt—not a very important man, but it was worth your father’s while to have him brutally murdered. Ever hear of him?”

“No,” she said.

“Read it!” Dill said.

She took the report and examined it, her lips moving slowly.

“The mob,” Dill said, “led by your father, pulled the man from his car and tore him to bits. What do you think of that?”

Marion pushed the paper back to him, saying nothing.

Leaning toward her, Dill yelled, “Why? What are they after? Do they want to bring back the old days? The war and hatred and international violence? These madmen are sweeping us back into the chaos and darkness of the past! And who gains? Nobody, except these spellbinders; they gain power. Is it worth it? Is it worth killing off half of mankind, wrecking cities—”

She interrupted, “That’s not so. My father never said he was going to do anything like that.” She felt herself become rigid with anger. “You’re lying again, like you always do.”

“Then what does he want? You tell me.”

“They want Vulcan 3.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He scowled at her. “They’re wasting their time. It repairs and maintains itself; we merely feed it data and the parts and supplies it wants. Nobody knows exactly where it is. Pitt didn’t know.”

“
You
know.”

“Yes, I know.” He studied her with such ferocity that she could not meet his gaze. “The worst thing that’s happened to the world,” he said at last, “in the time that you’ve been alive, is your father’s escape from the Atlanta Psych Labs. A warped, psychopathic, deranged madman . . .” His voice sank to a mutter.

“If you met him,” she said, “you’d like him.”

Dill stared at her. And then, abruptly, he began to laugh. “Anyhow,” he said when he had ceased laughing, “you’ll stay here in the Unity offices. I’ll be talking to you again from time to time. If we don’t get results we can send you to Atlanta. But I’d rather not.”

He stabbed a button on his desk and two armed Unity guards appeared at the office door. “Take this girl down to the third subsurface level; don’t let anything happen that might harm her.” Out of her earshot, he gave the guards instructions; she tried to hear but she could not.

I’ll bet he was lying when he said there’d be other kids for me to play with, she thought. She had not seen another child yet, in this vast, forbidding building.

Tears came to her eyes, but she forced them back. Pretending to be examining the big dictionary in the corner of Director Dill’s office, she waited for the guards to start ordering her into motion.

As Jason Dill sat moodily at his desk, a speaker near his arm said, “She’s in her quarters now, sir. Anything else?”

“No,” he said. Rising to his feet, he collected his papers, put them into his briefcase and left the office.

A moment later he was on his way out of the Unity Control Building, hurrying up the ramp to the confined field, past the nests of heavy-duty aerial guns and on to his private hanger. Soon he was heading across the early evening sky, toward the underground fortress where the great Vulcan computers were maintained, carefully hidden away from the race of man.

Strange little girl, he thought to himself. Mature in some ways, in others perfectly ordinary. How much of her was derived from her father? Father Fields secondhand, Dill thought. Seeing the man through her, trying to infer the father by means of the child.

He landed, and presently was submitting to the elaborate examination at the surface check-point, fidgeting impatiently. The tangle of equipment sent him on and he descended quickly into the depths of the underground fortress. At the second level he stopped the elevator and abruptly got off. A moment later he was standing before a sealed support-wall, tapping his foot nervously and waiting for the guards to pass him.

“All right, Mr. Dill.” The wall slid back. Dill hurried down a long deserted corridor, his heels echoing mournfully. The air was clammy, and the lights flickered fitfully; he turned to the right and halted, peering into the yellow gloom.

There it was. Vulcan 2, dusty and silent. Virtually forgotten. No one came here anymore. Except himself. And even he not very often.

He thought, It’s a wonder the thing still works.

Seating himself at one of the tables, he unzipped his briefcase and got out his papers. Carefully, he began preparing his questions in the proper manner; for this archaic computer he had to do the tape-feeding himself. With a manual punch, he spelled out on the iron oxide tape the first series, and then he activated the tape transport. It made an audible wheezing sound as it struggled into life.

In the old days, during the war, Vulcan 2 had been an intricate structure of great delicacy and subtlety, an elaborate instrument consulted by the skilled technicians daily. It had served Unity well, in its time; it had done honorable service. And, he thought, the schoolbooks still laud it; they still give it its proper credit.

Lights flashed, and a bit of tape popped from the slot and fell into the basket. He picked it up and read:

Time will be required. Return in twenty-four hours, please.

The computer could not function rapidly, now. He knew that, and this did not surprise him. Again taking up the punch, he made the balance of his questions into feeding data, and then, closing his brief case, he strode rapidly from the chamber, back up the musty, deserted corridor.