Vulcan's Hammer by Philip K. Dick Page B

Barris said, “Will this be all right, this place?”
    “Yes,” Rachel said. “In fact, this is where I would have had the cab take us. I had intended to bring you here.”
    The cab halted and its door swung open. As Barris paid it, he thought, Maybe I shouldn’t have let it decide for me. Maybe I ought to get back in and have it drive on. Turning, he glanced up at the hotel.
    Rachel Pitt had already started up the steps. It was too late.
    Now a man appeared in the entrance, his hands in his pockets. He wore a dark, untidy coat, and a cap pulled down over his forehead. The man glanced at her and said something to her.
    At once Barris strode up the steps after her. He took her by the arm, stepping between her and the man. “Watch it,” he said to the man, putting his hand on the pencil beam which he carried in his breast pocket.
    In a slow, quiet voice the man said, “Don’t get excited, mister.” He studied Barris. “I wasn’t accosting Mrs. Pitt. I was merely asking when you arrived.” Coming around behind Barris and Rachel, he said, “Go on inside the hotel, Director. We have a room upstairs where we can talk. No one will bother us here. You picked a good place.”
    Or rather, Barris thought icily, the cab and Rachel Pitt picked a good place. There was nothing he could do; he felt, against his spine, the tip of the man’s heat beam.
    “You shouldn’t be suspicious of a man of the cloth, in regards to such matters,” the man said conversationally, as they crossed the grimy, dark lobby to the stairs. The elevator, Barris noticed, was out of order; or at least it was so labeled. “Or perhaps,” the man said, “you failed to notice the historic badge of my vocation.” At the stairs the man halted, glanced around, and removed his cap.
    The stern, heavy-browed face that became visible was familiar to Barris. The slightly crooked nose, as if it had been broken once and never properly set. The deliberately short-cropped hair that gave the man’s entire face the air of grim austerity.
    Rachel said, “This is Father Fields.”
    The man smiled, and Barris saw irregular, massive teeth. The photo had not indicated that, Barris thought. Nor the strong chin. It had hinted at, but not really given, the full measure of the man. In some ways Father Fields looked more like a toughened, weathered prize fighter than he did a man of religion.
    Barris, face to face with him for the first time, felt a complete and absolute fear of the man; it came with a certitude that he had never before known in his life.
    Ahead of them, Rachel led the way upstairs.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Barris said, “I’d be interested to know when this woman went over to you.” He indicated Rachel Pitt, who stood by a window of the hotel room, gazing meditatively out at the buildings and rooftops of Geneva.
    “You can see Unity Control from here,” Rachel said, turning her head.
    “Of course you can,” Father Fields said in his hoarse, grumbling voice. He sat in the corner, in a striped bathrobe and fleece-lined slippers, a screw driver in one hand, a light fixture in the other; he had gone into the bathroom to take a shower, but the light wasn’t working. Two other men, Healers evidently, sat at a card table poring over some pamphlets stacked up between them in wired bundles. Barris assumed that these were propaganda material of the Movement, about to be distributed.
    “Is that just coincidence?” Rachel asked.
    Fields grunted, ignoring her as he worked on the light fixture. Then, raising his head, he said brusquely to Barris, “Now listen. I won’t lie to you, because it’s lies that your organization is founded on. Anyone who knows me knows I never have need of lying. Why should I? The truth is my greatest weapon.”
    “What is the truth?” Barris said.
    “The truth is that pretty soon we’re going to run up that street you see outside to that big building the lady is looking at, and then Unity won’t exist.” He smiled, showing his