Vulcan's Hammer

Barris said, "Mrs. Pitt-"

"My name is Rachel," she said.

"All right," he said. He paused. Now that he was here, facing this woman, he did not know what to say; he was not even sure, now, why he had come here.

"I know what's on your mind," Rachel Pitt said. "I put pressure on my husband to seek out active service so that we could have a comfortable home."

To that, Barris said nothing.

"Arthur was responsible to Director Taubma

"Are you all by yourself here?" he said. "Do you know anyone in this development?"

"No one that I want to depend on," she said. "Mostly you'll find ambitious young wives here. Their husbands all work for Unity; that goes without saying. Otherwise, how could they afford to live here?" Her tone was so bitter that he was amazed.

"What do you think you'll do?" he said.

Rachel Pitt said. "Maybe I'll join the Healers."

He did not know how to react. So he said nothing. This is a highly distraught women, he thought. The grief, the calamity that she's involved in ... or is she always like this? He had no way of telling.

"How much do you know about the circumstances sur­rounding Arthur's death?" she asked.

"I know most of the data," Barris said cautiously.

"Do you believe he was killed by-" She grimaced. "A mob? A bunch of unorganized people? Farmers and shop­keepers, egged on by some old man in a robe?" Suddenly she sprang to her feet and hurled her cigarette against the wall; it rolled near him and he bent reflexively to retrieve it. "That's just the usual line they put out," she said. "I know better. My husband was murdered by someone in Unity-someone who was jealous of him, who envied him and everything he had achieved. He had a lot of enemies; every man with any ability who gets anywhere in the organization is hated." She subsided slightly, pacing about the room with her arms folded, her face strained and dis­torted. "Does this distress you?" she said at last. "To see me like this? You probably imagined some little clinging vine of a woman sobbing quietly to herself, Do I disap­point you? Forgive me." Her voice trembled with fury.

Barris said, "The facts as they were presented to me-"

"Don't kid me," Rachel said in a deadly, harsh voice. And then she shuddered and put her hands against her cheeks. "Is it all in my mind? He was always telling me about people in his office plotting to get rid of him, trying to get him in bad. Carrying tales. Part of being in Unity, he always said. The only way you can get to the top is push someone else away from the top." She stared at Barris wildly. "Who did you murder to get your job? How many men dead, so you could be a Director? That's what Arthur was aiming for-that was his dream."

"Do you have any proof?" he said. "Anything to go on that would indicate that someone in the organization was involved?" It did not seem even remotely credible to him that someone in Unity could have been involved in the death of Arthur Pitt; more likely this woman's ability to handle reality had been severely curtailed by the recent tragedy. And yet, such things had happened, or at least so it was believed.

"My husband's official Unity car," Rachel said steadily, "had a little secret sca

When Director Taubma

"Why?" Barris said, disconcerted.

"Afraid my husband would rise and threaten him. Jeop­ardize his job. Possibly eventually take his job from him, become Director in his place. Taubma

Barris said, "I-I would prefer to give it some thought."

"Suppose you don't inform on me. I might be doing this to trap you, to test your loyalty to the system. You have to inform-it might be a trick!" She laughed curtly. "Does all this distress you? Now you wish you hadn't come to ex­press your sympathy; see what you got yourself into by having humane motives?" Tears filled her eyes. "Go away," she said in a choked, unsteady voice. "What does the organization care about the wife of a dead minor petty field-worker?"

Barris said, "I'm not sorry I came."

Going to the door, Rachel Pitt opened it. "You'll never be back," she said. "Go on, leave. Scuttle back to your safe office."

"I think you had better leave this house," Barris said.

"And go where?"

To that, he had no ready answer. "There's a cumber­some pension system," he began. "You'll get almost as much as your husband was making. If you want to move back to New York or London-"

"Do my charges seriously interest you?" Rachel broke in. "Does it occur to you that I might be right? That a Director might arrange the murder of a talented, ambitious underling to protect his own job? It's odd, isn't it, how the police crews are always just a moment late."

Shaken, ill-at-ease, Barris said, "I'll see you again. Soon, I hope."

"Good-by, Director," Rachel Pitt said, standing on the front porch of her house as he descended the steps to his rented cab. "Thank you for coming."

She was still there as he drove off.

As his ship carried him back across the Atlantic to North America, William Barris pondered. Could the Heal­ers have contacts within the Unity organization? Impossi­ble. The woman's hysterical conviction had overwhelmed him; it was her emotion, not her reason, that had affected him. And yet he himself had been suspicious of Taubma

Could it be that Father Fields' escape from Atlanta had been arranged? Not the work of a single clever man, a deranged man bent on escape and revenge, but the work of dull-witted officials who had been instructed to let the man go?

That would explain why, in two long months, Fields had been given no psychotherapy.

And now what? Barris asked himself acidly. Whom do I tell? Do I confront Taubma

One other point occurred to him. If he ever did run afoul of Taubma

And, Barris realized grimly, that was valuable in the Unity system, someone to back up your charges-if not with evidence, at least with added assertion. Where there's smoke there's fire, he said to himself. Someone should look into Taubma