The Long Tomorrow

by Leigh Douglass Brackett

  “I don’t know,” said Len. “My father was the best in the world, and I didn’t turn out so good either.”

  He followed Hostetter and Kovacs down a steep hatch ladder into the cargo hold. The barge did not draw much water, but she was sixty feet long and eighteen wide, and every foot of space in her was crammed with chests and bales and sacks. She smelled strongly of wood and river water, flour and cloth, old tallow and pitch, and a lot of things Len could not identify. From beyond the after bulkhead, sounding muffled and thunderous, came the thumping rhythm of the engine. Just under the hatch a sort of well had been left so that a man could come down the ladder and see that nothing had broached or shifted, and the ladder looked like a solid piece of construction butting onto a solid deck. But a square section of the planking had been swung aside and there was a little pit there, and in the pit was a thing that Len recognized as a radio, although it was larger than the one he and Esau had had, and different in other ways. A man was sitting beside it, talking, with a single lantern hung overhead to give him light.

  “Here they are now,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He turned and spoke to Hostetter. “Collins reckons the best thing would be to contact Rosen at the falls. The river’s fairly low now, and he figures with a little help we could slip them there.”

  “Worth trying,” said Hostetter. “What do you think, Joe?”

  Kovacs said he thought Collins was right. “We sure don’t want any fights, and they’re bound to catch up to us, running light.”

  Esau had come down the ladder, too. He was standing by Len, listening.

  “Watts?” he asked.

  “I guess so. He must have gone scurrying around clear over to Shadwell to get men.”

  “They’re crazy mad,” said Kovacs. “They can’t very well get back at the farmers, so they’ll take it out on us. Besides, we’re fair game whenever you find us.” He was a big burly young man, very brown from the sun. He looked as though it would take a great deal to frighten him, and he did not seem frightened now, but Len was impressed by his great determination not to be caught by the boats from Refuge.

  Hostetter nodded to the man at the radio. “All right, Sam. Let’s talk to Rosen.”

  Sam said good-by to Collins and began to fiddle with the knobs. “God,” said Esau, almost sobbing, “do you remember how we worked with that thing and couldn’t raise a whisper, and I stole those books—” He shook his head.

  “If you hadn’t happened to listen in at night,” said Hostetter, “you never would have heard anything.” He was crouched down beside the pit now, hanging over Sam’s shoulder.

  “That was Len’s idea,” said Esau. “He figured you’d run too much risk of being seen or overheard in the daytime.”

  “Like now,” said Kovacs. “We’ve got the aerial up—pretty obvious, if you had light enough to see it.”

  “Shut up,” said Sam, bending over the radio. “How do you expect me to—Hey, will you guys give me a clear channel for a minute? This is an emergency.” A jumble of voices coming in tinny confusion from the speaker clarified into a single voice which said, “This is Petto at Indian Ferry. Do you want me to relay?”

  “No,” said Sam. “I want Rosen. He’s within range. Lay low, will you? We’ve got bandits on our tail.”

  “Oh,” said the voice of Petto. “Sing out if you want help.”

  “Thanks.” Sam fiddled with the knobs some more and continued to call for Rosen. Len stood by the ladder and watched and listened, and it seemed in retrospect that he had spent nearly all of his life in Piper’s Run down by the Pymatuning trying to make voices come out of an obstinate little box. Now, in a daze of wonder and weariness, he heard, and saw, and could not realize yet that he was actually a part of it.

  “This is so much bigger than the one we had,” said Esau, moving forward. His eyes shone, the way they had before again, and the subtle weakness of the mouth was lost in eagerness. “How does it work? What’s an aerial? How—”

  Kovacs began to explain rather vaguely about batteries and transistors. His mind was not on it. Len’s gaze was drawn to Hostetter’s face, half shaded by the brim of his hat—the familiar brown Amish hat, the familiar square cut of the hair and the shape of the beard—and he thought of Pa, and he thought of Brother James and his two boys, and of Gran who would not regret the old world any more, and of Baby Esther who must be grown tall by now, and he turned his head away so that he could not see Hostetter but only the impersonal dark beyond the lantern’s circle, full of dim and meaningless cargo shapes. The engine thumped, slow and steady, with a short sighing like the breathing of someone asleep. He could hear the paddle blades strike the water, and now he could hear other sounds too, the woody creaking of the barge itself and the sloughing and bubbling of the river sliding underneath the hull. One of those moments of disorientation came to him, a wild interval of wondering what he was doing in this place, ending in a realization that a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours and he was tired out

  Sam was talking to Rosen.

  “We’re going to crack on some speed now. It should be right after daybreak, if we don’t run onto a sand bar.”

  “Well, watch it,” said the scratchy voice of Rosen from the speaker. “The channel’s tricky now.”

  “Is anything getting down the rapids?”

  “Nothing but driftwood. It’s all locking through, and I’ve got them piled up at both ends of the canal. I don’t want to tamper with the gates unless I’m forced to it. I’ve spent years building myself up here, but the slightest breath of suspicion—”

  “Not with my barge,” said Kovacs. “We’ve got a long way to go in her yet, and I like her bottom in one piece. There must be another way.”

  “Let me think,” said Rosen.

  There was a long pause while he thought. The men waited around the radio, breathing heavily.

  Rather timidly, a voice spoke, saying, “This is Petto again, at Indian Ferry.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “Well, I was just thinking. The river’s low now, and the channel’s narrow. It ought to be easy to block.”

  “Do you have anything in mind?” asked Hostetter.

  “There’s a dredge working right off the end of the point,” said Petto. “The men come in at night to the village, so we don’t have to worry about anyone drowning. Now, if you could pass here while it’s still dark, and I could be out by the dredge ready to turn her loose, the river makes a bend right here and the current would swing her on broadside, and I’ll bet nothing but a canoe would get by her till she was towed off again.”

  “Petto,” said Sam, “I love you. Did you hear that, Rosen?”

  “I heard. Sounds like a solution.”

  “It does,” said Kovacs, “but when we get there, lock us through fast, just in case.”

  “I’ll be watching,” said Rosen. “So long.”

  “All right,” said Sam. “Petto?” They began to talk, arranging signals and timing, discussing the condition of the channel between their present position and Indian Ferry. Kovacs turned and looked at Len and Esau.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. Know anything about steam engines?”

  “A little,” said Len.

  “Well, all you have to know about this one is to keep the fire up. We’re in a hurry.”

  “Sure,” said Len, glad of something to do. He was tired, but he could stand to be more tired if it would stop his mind from whirling around over old memories and unhappy thoughts, and the picture of Dulinsky’s dying face, which was already becoming confused with the face of Soames. He scrambled up the ladder after Kovacs. In the deckhouse, Amity had apparently fallen asleep, for she made no move when they passed, Esau going on his tiptoes and looking nervously at the blanket curtaining her bunk. For a minute the night air touched them, clean and cool, and then they went down again into the pit where the boiler was. Here there was a smell of hot iron and coal dust, and a very sweaty-looking man with a broad shovel moving
between the bin and the fire door. Kovacs said, “Here’s some help, Charlie. We’re going to move.”

  Charlie nodded. “Extra shovels over there.” He kicked open the door and began to pile in the coal. Len took his shirt off. Esau started to, but stopped with it half unbuttoned and said, looking at the boiler, “I thought it would be different.”

  “What?” said Kovacs.

  “Well, the engine. I mean, coming from Bartorstown, you could have any kind of an engine you want, and I thought—”

  Kovacs shook his head. “Wood and coal are all the fuel there is. We have to use ’em. Besides, you stop a lot of places along the river, and a lot of people come aboard, and the first thing they want to see is your engine. They’d know in a minute if it was different. And suppose you have a breakdown? What would you do then, send all the way back to Bartorstown for parts?”

  “Yeah,” said Esau. “I suppose so.” He was obviously disappointed. Kovacs went away. Esau finished taking his shirt off, got a shovel, and fell in beside Len at the coalbin. They fed the fire while Charlie worked the draft and watched the safety valve. The thump of the piston came faster and faster, churning the paddle wheel, and the barge picked up speed, going away with the current. Finally Charlie motioned them to hold it for a while, and they stopped leaning on their shovels and wiping the sweat off their faces. And Esau said, “I don’t think Bartorstown is going to turn out much like we thought it would.”

  “Nothing,” said Len, “ever seems to.”

  It seemed like an awfully long time before another man came with word that the race was over and told Len and Esau they could quit. They stumbled up on deck, and Len felt the barge jerk and quiver as the paddles were reversed. It was not the first time that night, and Len thought that Kovacs must either have, or be himself, the devil and all of a pilot.

  He leaned against the deckhouse, shivering in the cool air. It was that slack, dark time when the moon has left the sky and the sun hasn’t come yet. The bank was a low black smudge with an edge of mist along it. Ahead it seemed to curve in like a solid wall, as though the river ended there, and in a minute the barge would run head on into it. Len yawned and listened to the frogs. The barge swung, and there was a bend in the river. In the hollow of the bend there was a village, the square shapes of the houses sensed rather than seen. Close by the end of the point a couple of red lights burned, hung apparently in midair.

  Up on the foredeck, a lantern was shown and then covered three times in quick succession. From very low down on the water came an answering series of blinks. Because he knew it was there, Len was able to make out a dim canoe with a man in it, and then all at once the huge spectral shape of the dredger seemed to spring at him out of the gloom. It slid by, a skeletal thing like a partly dismantled house set on a flat platform, very massive and weighted with the heavy iron scoop. Then it was behind them, and Len watched the red lights. For a long time they did not seem to move, and then they seemed to shift a little, and then a little more, and then with a ponderous and mighty slowness they swung in a long arc toward the opposite shore and stopped, and the noise came down the river a moment later.

  Esau said, “They’ll be lucky if they have her out of there by this time tomorrow.”

  Len nodded. He could feel the tension lifting, or perhaps it was only because for the first time in weeks he felt safe himself. The Refuge men could not follow now, and whatever word they might send ahead would be too late to stop them.

  “I’m going to turn in,” he said, and went into the deckhouse. Amity still slept behind her curtain. Len picked a bunk as far away from hers as he could get and fell almost instantly asleep. The last thought he had was of Esau being a father, and it didn’t seem right at all, somehow. Then the face of Watts intruded, and a horrible smell of damp rope. Len choked and whimpered and then the darkness flowed over him, still and deep.

  16

  They went through the canal next morning, one of a long line of craft, towboats, steam barges, flatboats, going down with the current all the way to the gulf, traders’ floating stores that were like the shoregoing wagons, going to lonely little towns where the river was the only road. It was a slow process, even though Kovacs said that Rosen was locking them through faster than usual, and there was a lot of time just to sit and watch. The sun had come up in a welter of mist. That was gone now, but the quality of the heat had changed from the dry burning clarity of the day before. The air was thick and heavy, and the slightest movement brought a wash of sweat over the skin. Kovacs sniffed and said it smelled of storm.

  “About midafternoon,” said Hostetter, squinting at the sky.

  “Yup,” said Kovacs. “Better start figuring a place to tie up.”

  He went away, busy nursing his barge. Hostetter was sitting on the deck in what shade he could find under the edge of the house, and Len sat beside him. Amity had gone back to her bunk, and Esau was with her. From time to time Len could hear the murmur of their voices through the small slit windows, but not any of the words they said.

  Hostetter glanced enviously after Kovacs and then looked at his own big hands with the thick pads of callus on them from the long handling of reins. “I miss ’em,” he said.

  “What?” said Len, who had been thinking his own thoughts.

  “My horses. The wagon. Seems funny, after all these years, just to sit. I wonder if I’m going to like it.”

  “I thought you were happy, going home.”

  “I am. And high time, too, while most of my old friends are still around. But this business of leading two lives has its drawbacks. I’ve been away from Bartorstown for close onto thirty years and only been back once in all that time. Places like Piper’s Run seem more like home to me now. When I told them last fall I was quitting the road, they asked me to settle there—and you know something? I could have done it.”

  He brooded, watching the men at work on the lock without really seeing them.

  “I suppose it’ll all come back to me,” he said. “After all, the place you were born and grew up in—But it’ll seem funny to shave again. And I’ve worn these clothes so long—”

  Water sucked and purled out of the lock and the barge sank slowly until you had to look up to see the top of the bank. The sun beat down, and no breeze stirred in that sunken pocket. Len half shut his eyes and drew his feet in under him because they were in the sun and burning.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  Hostetter turned his head and looked at him, “A trader.”

  “I mean really. What are you in Bartorstown?”

  “A trader.”

  Len frowned. “I guess I don’t understand. I thought all the Bartorstown men were something—scientists, or machine makers—something.”

  “I’m a trader,” repeated Hostetter. “Kovacs, he’s a river-boat man. Rosen is a good administrator and keeps the canal in repair and running smoothly because it’s vital to us. Petto, back there at Indian Ferry—I used to know Petto’s father, and he was a pretty good man in electronics, but the boy is a trader like me, except that he stays more in one place. There are only so many potential scientists and technicians in Bartorstown, like any community. And they need the rest of us to keep them going.”

  “You mean,” said Len slowly, revising some deep-rooted ideas, “that all these years you’ve really been—”

  “Trading,” said Hostetter. “Yes. There are over four hundred people in Bartorstown, not counting us outside. They all have to eat and wear clothes. Then there’s other things too, iron and alloys and chemicals and drugs, and so on. It all has to be brought in from outside.”

  “I see,” said Len. There was a long pause. Then he said sadly, “Four hundred people. That isn’t even half as many as there were in Refuge.”

  “It’s about ninety per cent more than there were ever supposed to be. Originally there were thirty-five or forty men, all specialists, working on this hush-hush project for the government. Then when the reaction came after the war and things began to get nasty,
they brought in a lot of other men and their families, scientists, teachers, people who weren’t very popular on the outside any more. We’ve been lucky. There were a lot of other secret installations in the country, but Bartorstown is the only one that wasn’t discovered or betrayed, or didn’t have to be abandoned.”

  Len’s hands tightened on his knees, and his eyes were bright. “What were they doing there—the forty men, the specialists?”

  A kind of a peculiar look came into Hostetter’s face. But he only said, “They were trying to find an answer to something. I can’t tell you what it was, Len. All I can tell you is, they didn’t find it.”

  “Are they still trying?” asked Len. “Or can’t you tell me that, either?”

  “You wait till you get there. Then you can ask all the questions you want to, from the men who are authorized to answer them. I’m not.”

  “When I get there,” Len murmured. “It sure sounds strange. When I get to Bartorstown—I’ve said it a million times in my mind, but now it’s real. When I get to Bartorstown.”

  “Be careful how you throw that name around.”

  “Don’t worry. But—what’s it like there?

  “Physically,” said Hostetter, “it’s a hole. Piper’s Run, Refuge, Louisville over there, they’ve all got it beat a mile.”

  Len looked at the pleasant village strung out along the canal, and at the wide green plain beyond it, dotted with farmsteads and grazing cattle, and he said, remembering a dream, “No lights? No towers?”

  “Lights? Well, yes and no. Towers—I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh,” said Len, and was silent. The barge glided on. Pitch bubbled gently in the deck seams and it was an effort to breathe. After a while Hostetter took off his broad hat and wiped his forehead and said, “Oh no, it’s too hot. This can’t last.”

  Len glanced up at the sky. It was cloudless and intensely blue, but he said, “It’s going to break. We’ll get a good one.” He turned his attention back to the village. “That used to be a city, didn’t it?”