Vulcan's Hammer (15 page)

Fields gazed out of the ship’s window, ignoring the injured man. At last Barris gave up trying to talk. His eyes shut; Fields took the cigarette as it rolled from the man’s lips onto his shirt.

“We’ll talk later,” Fields said, finishing the cigarette himself.

The ship droned on, in the direction of Geneva.

Looking out at the empty sky, Fields thought, Nice not to see those things flying around. When one died they all died. Strange, to realize that we’ve seen our last one . . . the last hammer to go buzzing, screeching about, attacking and bombing, laying waste wherever it goes.

Kill the trunk, as Barris had said.

The man was right about a lot of things, Fields said to himself. He was the only one who could have gotten all the way in; they did manage to stop the rest of us. The attack bogged down, until those things stopped flying. And then it didn’t matter.

I wonder if he’s right about the rest?

In the hospital room at Geneva, Barris sat propped up in bed, facing Fields. “What information can you give me on the analysis of the remains?” he said. “I have a hazy memory of the trip here; you said that most of the memory elements survived.”

“You’re so anxious to rebuild it,” Fields said.

“As an instrument,” Barris said. “Not a master. That was the agreement between us. You have to permit a continuation of rational use of machines. None of this emotional ‘scrap the machines’ business. None of your Movement slogans.”

Fields nodded. “If you really think you can keep control in the right hands. In our hands. I have nothing against machines as such; I was very fond of Vulcan 2. Up to a point.”

“At that point,” Barris said, “you demolished it.”

The two men regarded each other.

“I’ll keep hands off,” Fields said. “It’s a fair deal. You delivered; you got in there and blew the thing up. I admit that.”

Barris grunted, but said nothing.

“You’ll put an end to the cult of the technocrat?” Fields said. “For experts only—run by and
for
those oriented around verbal knowledge; I’m so damn sick of that. Mind stuff—as if manual skills like bricklaying and pipe-fitting weren’t worth talking about. As if all the people who work with their hands, the skill of their fingers—” He broke off. “I’m tired of having those people looked down on.”

Barris said, “I don’t blame you.”

“We’ll cooperate,” Fields said. “With you priests in gray—as we’ve been calling you in our pamphlets. But take care. If the aristocracy of slide rules and pastel ties and polished black shoes starts to get out of hand again . . .” He pointed at the street far below the window. “You’ll hear us out there again.”

“Don’t threaten me,” Barris said quietly.

Fields flushed. “I’m not threatening you. I’m pointing out the facts to you. If we’re excluded from the ruling elite,
why should
we cooperate?”

There was silence then.

“What do you want done about Atlanta?” Barris said finally.

“We can agree on that,” Fields said. He flipped his cigarette away; bending, he retrieved it and crushed it out. “I want to see that place taken apart piece by piece. Until it’s a place to keep cows. A pasture land. With plenty of trees.”

“Good,” Barris said.

“Can my daughter come in for a while?” Fields said. “Rachel. She’d like to talk to you.”

“Maybe later,” Barris said. “I still have a lot of things to work out in my mind.”

“She wants you to start action going against Taubmann for that slanderous letter he wrote about you. The one she was blamed for.” He hesitated. “Do you want my opinion?”

“Okay,” Barris said.

Fields said, “I think there ought to be an amnesty. To end that stuff once and for all. Keep Taubmann on or retire him from the system. But let’s have an end of accusations. Even true ones.”

“Even a correct suspicion,” Barris said, “is still a suspicion.”

Showing his relief, Fields said, “We all have plenty to do. Plenty of rebuilding. We’ll have enough on our hands.”

“Too bad Jason Dill isn’t here to admonish us,” Barris said. “He’d enjoy writing out the directives and public presentations of the reconstruction work.” Suddenly he said, “You were working for Vulcan 2 and Dill was working for Vulcan 2. You were both carrying out its policies toward Vulcan 3. Do you think Vulcan 2 was jealous of Vulcan 3? They may have been mechanical constructs, but as far as we were concerned they had all the tendencies of two contending entities—each out to get the other.”

Fields murmured, “And each lining up supporters. Following your analysis . . .” He paused, his face dark with introspection.

“Vulcan 2 won,” Barris said.

“Yes.” Fields nodded. “He—or it—got virtually all of us lined up on one side, with Vulcan 3 on the other. We ganged up on Vulcan 3.” He laughed sharply. “Vulcan 3’s logic was absolutely right; there was a vast worldwide conspiracy directed against it, and to preserve itself it had to invent and develop and produce one weapon after another. And still it was destroyed. Its paranoid suspicions were founded in fact.”

Like the rest of Unity, Barris thought. Vulcan 3, like Dill and myself, Rachel Pitt and Taubmann—all drawn into the mutual accusations and suspicions and near-pathological system-building.

“Pawns,” Fields was saying. “We humans—god damn it, Barris; we were pawns of those two things. They played us off against one another, like inanimate pieces. The things became alive and the living organisms were reduced to things. Everything was turned inside out, like some terrible morbid view of reality.”

Standing at the doorway of the hospital room, Rachel Pitt said in a low voice, “I hope we can get out from under that morbid view.” Smiling timidly, she came toward Barris and her father. “I don’t want to press any legal action against Taubmann; I’ve been thinking it over.”

Either that, Barris thought, or making it a point to listen in on other people’s conversations. But he said nothing aloud.

“How long do you think it will take?” Fields said, studying him acutely. “The
real
reconstruction—not the buildings and roads, but the minds. Distrust and mutual suspicion have been bred into us since childhood; the schools started it going on us— they forced out characters. We can’t shake it overnight.”

He’s right, Barris thought. It’s going to be hard. And it’s going to take a long time. Possibly generations.

But at least the living elements, the human beings, had survived. And the mechanical ones had not. That was a good sign, a step in the right direction.

Across from him, Rachel Pitt was smiling less timidly, with more assurance now. Coming over to him, she bent down and touched him reassuringly on the plastic film that covered his shoulder. “I hope you’ll be up and around soon,” she said.

He considered that a good sign too.

PHILIP K. DICK

VULCAN’S HAMMER

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for
The Man in the
High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for
Flow My
Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

NOVELS BY PHILIP K. DICK

Clans of the Alphane Moon
Confessions of a Crap Artist
The Cosmic Puppets
Counter-Clock World
The Crack in Space
Deus Irae
(with Roger Zelazny)
The Divine Invasion
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dr. Bloodmoney
Dr. Futurity
Eye in the Sky
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Game-Players of Titan
Lies, Inc.
The Man in the High Castle
The Man Who Japed
Martian Time-Slip
A Maze of Death
Now Wait for Last Year
Our Friends from Frolix 8
The Penultimate Truth
Radio Free Albemuth
A Scanner Darkly
The Simulacra
Solar Lottery
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Time Out of Joint
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Ubik
VALIS
Vulcan’s Hammer
We Can Build You
The World Jones Made
The Zap Gun

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2004

Copyright © 1960 by Ace Books, copyright renewed 1988 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Dick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Ace Books, New York, in 1960.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file
at the Library of Congress.

www.vintagebooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-43008-3

v3.0