The Long Tomorrow
Leigh Douglass Brackett
The Long Tomorrow is a science fiction novel by Leigh Brackett, originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc in 1955. Set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, scientific knowledge is feared and restricted.
Leigh Brackett
THE LONG TOMORROW
“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.”
Constitution of the United States
THIRTIETH AMENDMENT
Book One
1
Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter and contemplating a sin. He was fourteen years old, and he had lived all of them on the farm at Piper’s Run, where opportunities for real sinning were comfortably few. But now Piper’s Run was more than thirty miles away, and he was having a look at the world, bright with distractions and gaudy with possibilities. He was at the Canfield Fair. And for the first time in his life Len Colter was faced with a major decision.
He was finding it difficult.
“Pa will beat the daylights out of me,” he said, “if he finds out.”
Cousin Esau said, “You scared?” He had turned fifteen just three weeks ago, which meant that he would not have to go to school any more with the children. He was still a long way from being counted among the men, but it was a big step and Len was impressed by it. Esau was taller than Len, and he had dark eyes that glittered and shone all the time like the eyes of an unbroken colt, looking everywhere for something and never quite finding it, perhaps because he did not know yet what it was. His hands were restless and very clever.
“Well?” demanded Esau. “Are you?”
Len would have liked to lie, but he knew Esau would not be fooled for a minute. He squirmed a little, ate the last bite of pone, sucked the butter off his fingers, and said, “Yes.”
“Huh,” said Esau. “I thought you were getting grown-up. You should have still stayed home with the babies this year. Afraid of a licking!”
“I’ve had lickings before,” said Len, “and if you think Pa can’t lay ’em on, you try it some time. And I ain’t even cried the last two years now. Well, not much, anyway.” He brooded, his knees hunched up and his hands crossed on top of them, and his chin on his hands. He was a thin, healthy, rather solemn-faced boy. He wore homespun trousers and sturdy hand-pegged boots, covered thick in dust, and a shirt of coarse-loomed cotton with a narrow neckband and no collar. His hair was a light brown, cut off square above the shoulders and again above the eyes, and on his head he wore a brown flat-crowned hat with a wide brim.
Len’s people were New Mennonites, and they wore brown hats to distinguish themselves from the original Old Mennonites, who wore black ones. Back in the Twentieth Century, only two generations before, there had been just the Old Mennonites and Amish, and only a few tens of thousands of them, and they had been regarded as quaint and queer because they held to the old simple handcraft ways and would have no part of cities or machines. But when the cities ended, and men found that in the changed world these of all folk were best fitted to survive, the Mennonites had swiftly multiplied into the millions they now counted.
“No,” said Len slowly, “it’s not the licking I’m scared of. It’s Pa. You know how he feels about these preachin’s. He forbid me. And Uncle David forbid you. You know how they feel. I don’t think I want Pa mad at me, not that mad.”
“He can’t do no more than lick you,” Esau said.
Len shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, all right. Don’t go, then.”
“You going, for sure?”
“For sure. But I don’t need you.”
Esau leaned back against the wall and appeared to have forgotten Len, who moved the toes of his boots back and forth to make two stubby fans in the dust and continued to brood. The warm air was heavy with the smell of feed and animals, laced through with wood smoke and the fragrances of cooking. There were voices in the air, too, many voices, all blended together into a humming noise. You could think it was like a swarm of bees, or a wind rising and falling in the jack pines, but it was more than that. It was the world talking.
Esau said, “They fall down on the ground and scream and roll.”
Len breathed deep, and his insides quivered. The fairgrounds stretched away into immensity on all sides, crammed with wagons and carts and sheds and stock and people, and this was the last day. One more night lying under the wagon, wrapped up tight against the September chill, watching the fires burn red and mysterious and wondering about the strangers who slept around them. Tomorrow the wagon would rattle away, back to Piper’s Run, and he would not see such a thing again for another year. Perhaps never. In the midst of life we are in death. Or he might break a leg next year, or Pa might make him stay home like brother James had had to this time, to see to Granma and the stock.
“Women, too,” said Esau.
Len hugged his knees tighter. “How do you know? You never been.”
“I heard.”
“Women,” whispered Len. He shut his eyes, and behind the lids there were pictures of wild preachings such as a New Mennonite never heard, of great smoking fires and vague frenzies and a figure, much resembling Ma in her bonnet and voluminous homespun skirts, lying on the ground and kicking like Baby Esther having a tantrum. Temptation came upon him, and he was lost.
He stood up, looking down at Esau. He said, “I’ll go.”
“Ah,” said Esau. He got up too. He held out his hand, and Len shook it. They nodded at each other and grinned. Len’s heart was pounding and he had a guilty feeling as though Pa stood right behind him listening to every word, but there was an exhilaration in this, too. There was a denial of authority, an assertion of self, a sense of being. He felt suddenly that he had grown several inches and broadened out, and that Esau’s eyes showed a new respect.
“When do we go?” he asked.
“After dark, late. You be ready. I’ll let you know.”
The wagons of the Colter brothers were drawn up side by side, so that would not be hard. Len nodded.
“I’ll pretend like I’m asleep, but I won’t be.”
“Better not,” said Esau. His grip tightened, enough to squeeze Len’s knuckles together so he’d remember. “Just don’t let on about this, Lennie.”
“Ow,” said Len, and stuck his lip out angrily. “What do you think I am, a baby?”
Esau grinned, lapsing into the easy comradeship that is becoming between men. “’Course not. That’s settled, then. Let’s go look over the horses again. I might want to give my dad some advice about that black mare he’s thinking of trading for.”
They walked together along the side of the horse barn. It was the biggest barn Len had ever seen, four or five times as long as the one at home. The old siding had been patched a good bit, and it was all weathered now to an even gray, but here and there where the original wood was projected you could still see a smudge of red paint. Len looked at it, and then he paused and looked around the fairground, screwing up his eyes so that everything danced and quivered.
“What you doing now?” demanded Esau impatiently.
“Trying to see.”
“Well, you can’t see with your eyes shut. Anyway, what do you mean, trying to see?”
“How the buildings looked when they were all painted like Gran said. Remember? When she was a little girl.”
“Yeah,” said Esau. “Some red, some white. They must have been something.” He squinted his eyes up too. The sheds and the buildings blurred, but remained unpainted.
“Anyway,” said Len stoutl
y, giving up, “I bet they never had a fair as big as this one before, ever.”
“What are you talking about?” Esau said. “Why, Gran said there was a million people here, and a million of those automobiles or cars or whatever you called them, all lined up in rows as far as you could see, with the sun just blazing on the shiny parts. A million of ’em!”
“Aw,” said Len, “there couldn’t be. Where’d they all have room to camp?”
“Dummy, they didn’t have to camp. Gran said they came here from Piper’s Run in less than an hour, and they went back the same day.”
“I know that’s what Gran said,” Len remarked thoughtfully. “But do you really believe it?”
“Sure I believe it!” Esau’s dark eyes snapped. “I wish I’d lived in those days. I’d have done things.”
“Like what?”
“Like driving one of those cars, fast. Like even flying maybe.”
“Esau!” said Len, deeply shocked. “Better not let your pa hear you say that.”
Esau flushed a little and muttered that he was not afraid, but he glanced around uneasily. They turned the corner of the barn. On the gable end, up above the door, there were four numbers made out of pieces of wood and nailed on. Len looked up at them. A one, a nine with a chunk gone out of the tail, a five, with the little front part missing, and a two. Esau said that was the year the barn was built, and that would be before even Gran was born. It made Len think of the meetinghouse in Piper’s Run—Gran still called it a church—that had a date on it too, hidden way down behind the lilac bushes. That one said 1842—before, Len thought, almost anybody was born. He shook his head, overcome with a sense of the ancientness of the world.
They went in and looked at the horses, talking wisely of withers and cannon bones but keeping out of the way of the men who stood in small groups in front of this stall and that, with slow words and very quick eyes. They were almost all New Mennonites, differing from Len and Esau only in size and in the splendid beards that fanned across their chests, though their upper lips were clean shaven. A few, however, wore full whiskers and slouch hats of various sorts, and their clothes were cut to no particular pattern. Len stared at these furtively, with an intense curiosity. These men, or others like them—perhaps even still other kinds of men that he had not seen yet—were the ones who met secretly in fields and woods and preached and yelled and rolled on the ground. He could hear Pa’s voice saying, “A man’s religion, his sect, is his own affair. But those people have no religion or sect. They’re a mob, with a mob’s fear and cruelty, and with half-crazy, cunning men stirring them up against others.” And then getting close-lipped and grim when Len questioned further and saying, “You’re forbidden to go, that’s all. No God-fearing person takes part in such wickedness.” He understood now, and no wonder Pa hadn’t wanted to talk about those women rolling on the ground and probably showing their drawers and everything. Len shivered with excitement and wished it would come night.
Esau decided that although the black mare in question was a trifle ewe-necked she looked as though she would handle well in harness, though his own choice would have been the fine bay stallion at the top of the row. And wouldn’t he just take a cart flying! But you had to think of the women, who needed something safe and gentle. Len agreed, and they wandered out again, and Esau said, “Let’s see what they’re doing about those cows.”
They meant Pa and Uncle David, and Len discovered that he would rather not see Pa just now. So he suggested going down to the traders’ wagons instead. Cows you could and did see all the time. But traders’ wagons were another matter. Three, four times in a summer, maybe, you saw one in Piper’s Run, and here there were nineteen of them all together in one place at the same time.
“Besides,” said Len with pure and simple greed, “you never can tell. Mr. Hostetter might give us some more of those sugar nuts.”
“Fat chance,” said Esau. But he went.
The traders’ wagons were all drawn up in a line, their tongues outward and their backs in against a long shed. They were enormous wagons, with canvas tilts and all sorts of things hung to their ribs inside, so they were like dim, odorous caves on wheels.
Len looked at them, wide-eyed. To him they were not wagons, they were adventurous ships that had voyaged here from afar. He had listened to the traders’ casual talk, and it had given him a vague vision of the whole wide and cityless land, the green, slow, comfortable agrarian land in which only a very few old folk could remember the awesome cities that had dominated the world before the Destruction. His mind held a blurred jumble of the faraway places of which the traders spoke: the little shipping settlements and fishing hamlets along the Atlantic, the lumber camps of the Appalachians, these endless New Mennonite farm lands of the Midwest, the Southern hunters and hill farmers, the great rivers westward with their barges and boats, the plains beyond and the horsemen and ranches and herds of wild cattle, the lofty mountains and the land and sea still farther west. A land as wide now as it had been centuries before, and through its dusty roads and sleepy villages these great trader wagons rolled, and rested, and rolled again.
Mr. Hostetter’s wagon was the fifth one down, and Len knew it very well, because Mr. Hostetter brought it to Piper’s Run every spring on his way north, and again every fall on his way south, and he had been doing that for more years than Len could personally remember. Other traders dropped through haphazardly, but Mr. Hostetter seemed like one of their own, though he had come from somewhere in Pennsylvania. He wore the same flat brown hat and the same beard, and went to meeting when he happened to be there on the Sabbath, and he had rather disappointed Len by telling him that where he came from was no different from where Len came from except that there were mountains around it, which did not seem right for a place with a magical name like Pennsylvania.
“If,” said Len, harking back to the sugar nuts, “we offered to feed and water his team—” One could not beg, but the laborer is worthy of his hire.
Esau shrugged. “We can try.”
The long shed, open on its front but closed in back to afford protection from rain, was partitioned off into stalls, one for each wagon. There wasn’t much left in them now, after two and a half days, but women were still bargaining over copper kettles, and knives from the village forges of the East, or bolts of cotton cloth brought up from the South, or clocks from New England. The bulk cane sugar, Len knew, had gone early, but he was hoping that Mr. Hostetter had held onto a few small treasures for the sake of old friends.
“Huh,” said Esau. “Look at that.”
Mr. Hostetter’s stall was empty and deserted.
“Sold out.”
Len stared at the stall, frowning. Then he said, “His team still have to eat, don’t they? And maybe we can help load stuff in the wagon. Let’s go out back.”
They went through the doorway at the rear of the stall, ducking around under the tailboard of the wagon and on past its side. The great wheels with the six-inch iron tires stood higher than Len did, and the canvas tilt loomed up like a cloud overhead, with EDW. HOSTETTER, GENERAL MERCHANDISE painted on it in neat letters, faded to gray by the sun and rain.
“He’s here,” said Len. “I can hear him talking.”
Esau nodded. They went past the front wheel. Mr. Hostetter was just opposite, on the other side of the wagon.
“You’re crazy,” said Mr. Hostetter. “I’m telling you—”
The voice of another man interrupted. “Don’t worry so much, Ed. It’s all right. I’ve got to—”
The man broke off short as Len and Esau came around the front of the wagon. He was facing them across Mr. Hostetter’s shoulder, a tall lean young fellow with long ginger hair and a full beard, dressed in plain leather. He was a trader from somewhere down South, and Len had seen him before in the shed. The name on his wagon tilt was William Soames.
“Company,” he said to Mr. Hostetter. He did not seem to mind, but Mr. Hostetter turned around. He was a big man, large-jointed and awkward,
very brown in the skin and blue in the eyes, and with two wide streaks of gray in his sandy beard, one on each side of his mouth. His movements were always slow and his smile was always friendly. But now he turned around fast, and he was not smiling at all, and Len stopped as though something had hit him. He stared at Mr. Hostetter as at a stranger, and Mr. Hostetter looked at him with a queer kind of a hot, blank glare. And Esau muttered, “I guess they’re busy, Len. We better go.”
“What do you want?” said Hostetter.
“Nothing,” said Len. “We just thought maybe…” He let his voice trail off.
“Maybe what?”
“We could feed your horses,” said Len, feebly.
Esau caught him by the arm. “He wanted more of those sugar nuts,” he said to Hostetter. “You know how kids are. Come on, Len.”
Soames laughed. “Don’t reckon he’s got any more. But how would some pecans do? Mighty fine!”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out four or five nuts. He put them in Len’s hand. Len said, “Thank you,” looking from him to Mr. Hostetter, who said quietly, “My team’s all taken care of. Run along now, boys.”
“Yes, sir,” said Len, and ran. Esau loped at his heels. When they were around the corner of the shed they stopped and shared out the pecans.
“What was the matter with him?” he asked, meaning Hostetter. He was as astonished as though old Shep back at the farm had turned and snarled at him.
“Aw,” said Esau, cracking the thin brown shells, “he and the foreigner were rowing over some trading deal, that’s all.” He was mad at Hostetter, so he gave Len a good hard shove. “You and your sugar nuts! Come on, it’s almost time for supper. Or have you forgotten we’re going somewhere tonight?”
“No,” said Len, and something pricked with a delightful pain inside his belly. “I ain’t forgotten.”
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