Vulcan's Hammer by Philip K. Dick

with gain than with security. To them, society is
an arena of adventure. A structure in which they hope to rise to a
superior power status.
    “I see,” Dill said dutifully.
    A rationally controlled, stable society such as ours defeats their
desires. In a rapidly altering, unstable society the lowest classes
would stand a good chance of seizing power. Basically, the lowest
classes are adventurers, conceiving life as a gamble, a game rather
than a task, with social power as the stakes.
    “Interesting,” Dill said. “So for them the concept of luck plays a major role. Those on top have had good luck. Those—” But Vulcan 3 was not interested in his contribution; it had already continued.
    The dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of ineffectuality. Not an increased standard
of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal. Because
of their emotional orientation, they arise and act when a powerful
leader-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than
a chaotic mass of unformed elements.
    Dill had no reply to that. It was evident that Vulcan 3 had sifted the information available, and had come up with uncomfortably close inferences. That, of course, was the machine’s forte; basically it was a device par excellence for performing the processes of deductive and inductive reasoning. It ruthlessly passed from one step to the next and arrived at the correct inference, whatever it was.
    Without direct knowledge of any kind, Vulcan 3 was able to deduce, from general historic principles, the social conflicts developing in the contemporary world. It had manufactured a picture of the situation which faced the average human being as he woke up in the morning and reluctantly greeted the day. Stuck down here, Vulcan 3 had, through indirect and incomplete evidence,
imagined
things as they actually were.
    Sweat came out on Dill’s forehead. He was dealing with a mind greater than any one man’s or any group of men’s. This proof of the prowess of the computer—this verification of Greenstreet’s notion that a machine was not limited merely to doing what man could do, but doing it faster . . . Vulcan 3 was patently doing what a man could
not
do no matter how much time he had available to him.
    Down here, buried underground in the dark, in this constant isolation, a human being would go mad; he would lose all contact with the world, all ideas of what was going on. As time progressed he would develop a less and less accurate picture of reality; he would become progressively more hallucinated. Vulcan 3, however, moved continually in the opposite direction; it was, in a sense, moving by degrees toward inevitable
sanity,
or at least maturity—if, by that, was meant a clear, accurate, and full picture of things as they really were. A picture, Jason Dill realized, that no human being has ever had or will ever have. All humans are partial. And this giant is not!
    “I’ll put a rush on the educational survey,” he murmured. “Is there anything else you need?”
    The statistical report on rural linguistics has not come in. Why is
that? It was under the personal supervision of your subcoordinator,
Arthur Graveson Pitt.
    Dill cursed silently. Good lord! Vulcan 3 never mislaid or lost or mistook a single datum among the billions that it ingested and stored away. “Pitt was injured,” Dill said aloud, his mind racing desperately. “His car overturned on a winding mountain road in Colorado. Or at least that’s the way I recall it. I’d have to check to be sure, but—”
    Have his report completed by someone else. I require it. Is his
injury serious?
    Dill hesitated. “As a matter of fact, they don’t think he’ll live. They say—”
    Why have so many T-class persons been killed in the past year?
I want more information on this. According to my statistics only
one-fifth of that number should have died of natural causes. Some
vital factor is missing. I must have