Vulcan's Hammer

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 get 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 brief case and left his 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.