When the cab pulled over to the curb and stopped, he saw a slim, dark-haired young woman coming down the front steps of the house. She wore a wide-brimmed Mexican-style hat to protect her head from the midday African sun; from beneath the hat ringlets of black hair sparkled, the long Middle Eastern style so popular of late. On her feet she had sandals, and she wore a ruffled dress with bows and petticoats.
“I’m dreadfully sorry that you were treated that way, Director,” she said in a low, toneless voice as he opened the door of the cab. “You understand that those uniformed guards are robots.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t know. But it isn’t important.” He surveyed her, seeing, he decided, one of the prettiest women that he had ever come across. Her face had a look of shock, a residue from the terrible news of her husband’s death. But she seemed composed; she led him up the steps to the house walking very slowly.
“I believe I saw you once,” she said as they reached the porch. “At a meeting of Unity personnel at which Arthur and I were present. You were on the platform, of course. With Mr. Dill.”
The living room of the house, he noticed, was furnished as Taubmann had said. He saw Early New England oak furniture on every side.
“Please sit down,” Mrs. Pitt said.
As he gingerly seated himself on a delicate-looking straight-backed chair, he thought to himself that for this woman being married to a Unity official had been a profitable career. “You have very nice things here,” he said.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Pitt said, seating herself opposite him on a couch. “I’m sorry,” she said, “if my responses seem slow. When I got the news I had myself put under sedation. You can understand.” Her voice trailed off.
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 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 Taubmann,” Rachel Pitt said. “I ran into Taubmann several times, and he made clear how he felt about me; it didn’t particularly bother me at the time, but of course with Arthur dead—” She broke off. “It isn’t true, of course. Living this way was Arthur’s idea. I would have been glad to give it up any time; I didn’t want to be stuck out here in this housing development, away from everything.” For a moment she was silent. Reaching to the coffee table she took a package of cigarettes. “I was born in London,” she said, as she lit a cigarette. “All my life I lived in a city, either in London or New York. My family wasn’t very well off—my father was a tailor, in fact. Arthur’s family has quite a good deal of money; I think he got his taste in interior decorating from his mother.” She gazed at Barris. “This doesn’t interest you. I’m sorry. Since I heard, I haven’t been able to keep my thoughts in order.”
“Are you all by yourself here?” he said. “Do you know anyone in the 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 woman, 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 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 scanning device mounted on the dashboard. I saw the reports, and it was mentioned in them. When Director Taubmann was talking to me on the vidphone, do you know what I did? I didn’t listen to his speech; I read the papers he had on his desk.” Her voice rose and wavered. “One of the people who broke into Arthur’s car knew about that scanner—he shut it off. Only someone in the organization could have known; even Arthur didn’t know. It had to be someone up high.” Her black eyes flashed. “Someone at Director level.”
“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. Taubmann, I mean.” She smiled thinly. “You know I mean him. So what are you going to do? Inform on me? Have me arrested for treason and carried off to Atlanta?”
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 fieldworker?”
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-bye, 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 Taubmann.
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 Taubmann—with absolutely no facts? Do I go to Jason Dill?
One other point occurred to him. If he ever did run afoul of Taubmann, if the man ever attacked him for any reason, he had an ally in Mrs. Pitt; he had someone to assist him in a counterattack.
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 Taubmann’s relationship with Father Fields. The customary procedure here would be to send an unsigned statement to Jason Dill, and let him start police spies to work tracing Taubmann, digging up evidence. My own men, Barris realized, could do it; I have good police in my own department. But if Taubmann got wind of it . . .
This is ghastly, he realized with a start. I have to free myself from this vicious cycle of suspicion and fear! I can’t let myself be destroyed; I can’t let that woman’s morbid hysteria infiltrate my own thinking. Madness transmitted from person to person— isn’t that what makes up a mob? Isn’t that the group mind that we’re supposed to be combatting?
I had better not see Rachel Pitt again, he decided.
But already he felt himself drawn to her. A vague but nonetheless powerful yearning had come into existence inside him; he could not pin down the mood. Certainly she was physically attractive, with her long dark hair, her flashing eyes, slender, active body. But she is not psychologically well-balanced, he decided. She would be a terrible liability; any relationship with a woman like that might wreck me. There is no telling which way she might jump. After all, her tie with Unity has been shattered, without warning; all her plans, her ambitions, have been thrown back in her teeth. She’s got to find another entrée, a new technique for advancement and survival.
I made a mistake in looking her up, he thought. What would make a better contact than a Director? What could be of more use to her?
When he had gotten back to his own offices, he at once gave instructions that no calls from Mrs. Arthur Pitt be put through to him; any messages from her were to be put through proper channels, which meant that regular agencies—and clerks— would be dealing with her.
“A pension situation,” he explained to his staff. “Her husband wasn’t attached to my area, so there’s no valid claim that can be filed against this office. She’ll have to take it to Taubmann. He was her husband’s superior, but she’s got the idea that I can help in some way.”
After that, alone in his office, he felt guilt. He had lied to his staff about the situation; he had patently misrepresented Mrs. Pitt in order to insure protection of himself. Is that an improvement? he asked himself. Is that my solution?
In her new quarters, Marion Fields sat listlessly reading a comic book. This one dealt with physics, a subject that fascinated her. But she had read the comic book three times, now, and it was hard for her to keep up an interest.
She was just starting to read it over for the fourth time when without warning the door burst open. There stood Jason Dill, his face white. “What do you know about Vulcan 2?” he shouted at her. “Why did they destroy Vulcan 2? Answer me!”
Blinking, she said, “The old computer?”
Dill’s face hardened; he took a deep breath, struggling to control himself.
“What happened to the old computer?” she demanded, avid with curiosity. “Did it blow up? How do you know somebody did it? Maybe it just burst. Wasn’t it old?” All her life she had read about, heard about, been told about, Vulcan 2; it was an historic shrine, like the museum that had been Washington, D.C. Except that all the children were taken to the Washington Museum to walk up and down the streets and roam in the great silent office buildings, but no one had ever seen Vulcan 2. “Can I look?” she demanded, following Jason Dill as he turned and started back out of the room. “Please let me look. If it blew up it isn’t any good anymore anyhow, is it? So why can’t I see it?”
Dill said, “Are you in contact with your father?”
“No,” she said. “You know I’m not.”
“How can I contact him?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He’s quite important in the Healers’ Movement, isn’t he?” Dill faced her. “What would they gain by destroying a retired computer that’s only good for minor work? Were they trying to reach Vulcan 3?” Raising his voice he shouted, “Did they think it was Vulcan 3? Did they make a mistake?”
To that, she could say nothing.
“Eventually we’ll get him and bring him in,” Dill said. “And this time he won’t escape psychotherapy; I promise you that, child. Even if I have to supervise it myself.”
As steadily as possible she said. “You’re just mad because your old computer blew up, and you have to blame somebody else. You’re just like my dad always said; you think the whole world’s against you.”
“The whole world is,” Dill said in a harsh, low voice.
At that point he left, slamming the door shut after him. She stood listening to the sound of his shoes against the floor of the hall outside. Away the sound went, becoming fainter and fainter.
That man must have too much work to do, Marion Fields thought. They ought to give him a vacation.
CHAPTER FIVE
There it was. Vulcan 2, or what remained of Vulcan 2—heaps of twisted debris; fused, wrecked masses of parts; scattered tubes and relays lost in random coils that had once been wiring. A great ruin, still smoldering. The acrid smoke of shorted transformers drifted up and hung against the ceiling of the chamber. Several technicians poked morosely at the rubbish; they had salvaged a few minor parts, nothing more. One of them had already given up and was putting his tools back in their case.
Jason Dill kicked a shapeless blob of ash with his foot. The change, the incredible change from the thing Vulcan 2 had been to this, still dazed him. No warning—he had been given no warning at all. He had left Vulcan 2, gone on about his business, waiting for the old computer to finish processing his questions . . . and then the technicians had called to tell him.
Again, for the millionth time, the questions scurried hopelessly through his brain. How had it happened? How had they gotten it? And why? It didn’t make sense. If they had managed to locate and penetrate the fortress, if one of their agents had gotten this far, why had they wasted their time here, when Vulcan 3 was situated only six levels below?
Maybe they made a mistake; maybe they had destroyed the obsolete computer thinking it was Vulcan 3. This could have been an error, and, from the standpoint of Unity, a very fortunate one.
But as Jason Dill gazed at the wreckage, he thought, It doesn’t look like an error. It’s so damn systematic. So thorough. Done with such expert precision.
Should I release the news to the public? he asked himself. I could keep it quiet; these technicians are loyal to me completely. I could keep the destruction of Vulcan 2 a secret for years to come.
Or, he thought, I could say that Vulcan 3 was demolished; I could lay a trap, make them think they had been successful. Then maybe they would come out into the open. Reveal themselves.
He felt horror, and, in addition, a deep personal loss. This old machine had been a companion of his for many years. When he had questions simple enough for it to answer he always came here; this visit was part of his life.
Reluctantly, he moved away from the ruins. No more coming here, he realized. The creaking old machine is gone; I’ll never be using the manual punch again, laboriously making out the questions in terms that Vulcan 2 can assimilate.
He tapped his coat. They were still there, the answers that Vulcan 2 had given him, answers that he had puzzled over, again and again. He wanted clarification; his last visit had been to rephrase his queries, to get amplification. But the blast had ended that.
Deep in thought, Jason Dill left the chamber and made his way up the corridor, back to the elevator. This is a bad day for us, he thought to himself. We’ll remember this for a long time.
Back in his own office he took time to examine the DQ forms that had come in. Larson, the leader of the data-feed team, showed him the rejects.
“Look at these.” His young face stern with an ever-present awareness of duty, Larson carefully laid out a handful of forms. “This one here—maybe you had better turn it back personally, so there won’t be any trouble.”
“Why do I have to attend to it?” Jason Dill said with irritation. “Can’t you handle it? If you’re overworked, hire a couple more clerks up here, from the pool. There’s always plenty of clerks; you know that as well as I. We must have two million of them on the payrolls. And yet you still have to bother me.” His wrath and anxiety swept up involuntarily, directed at his subordinate; he knew that he was taking it out on Larson, but he felt too depressed to worry about it.
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