The Long Tomorrow

by Leigh Douglass Brackett

  Sherman said, “This isn’t an inquistion or anything, we’re just interested. How did you first hear of Bartorstown, what made you so determined to come here, what happened to you because of it, how did it all start. Can you start us off, Ed? I think you were in on the beginning.”

  “Well,” said Hostetter, “I guess it began the night Esau stole the radio.”

  Sherman looked at Esau, and Esau looked uncomfortable. “I guess that was wrong to do, but I was only a kid then. And they killed this man because they said he was from Bartorstown—it was an awful night. And I was curious.”

  “Go on,” said Sherman, and they all leaned forward, interested. Esau went on, and pretty soon Len joined in, and they told about the preaching and how Soames was stoned to death, and how the radio got to be a fixation with them. And with Hostetter nudging them along here and there, and Sherman or one of the other men asking a question, they found themselves telling the whole story right up to the time Hostetter and and the bargemen had taken them out of the smoke and anger of Refuge. Amity had something to tell about that too, and she made it graphic enough. When they were all through it seemed to Len that they had put up with a terrible lot for all they had found when they got here, but he didn’t say so.

  Sherman got up and opened another door on the far side of the room. There was a room there with a lot of equipment in it, and a man sitting in the midst of it with a funny-looking thing on his head. He took this off and Sherman asked him, “How did it go?” and he said, “Fine.”

  Sherman closed the door again and turned around. “I can tell you now that you’ve been talking to all of Fall Creek, and Bartorstown.” He lifted the lid of the wicker basket and showed what was inside. “These are microphones. Every word you said was picked up and broadcast.” He let the lid fall and stood looking at them. “I wanted them all to hear your story, in your own words, and this seemed like the best way. I was afraid if I put you up on a platform with four hundred people staring at you you’d freeze up. So I did this.”

  “Oh my,” said Amity, and put her hand over her mouth.

  Sherman glanced at the other men. “Quite a story, isn’t it?”

  “They’re young,” said Gutierrez. He looked sick enough to die with it, and his voice weak, but still bitter. “They have faith, and trust.”

  “Let them keep it,” said Erdmann shrilly. “For God’s sake, let somebody keep it.”

  Kindly, patiently, Sherman said, “You both need a rest. Will you do us all a great favor? Go and take one.”

  “Oh no,” said Gutierrez, “not for anything. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. I want to see their little faces shine when they catch their first glimpse of the fairy city.”

  Looking at the microphones, Len said, “Is this the reason you said you had for letting us come?”

  “Partly,” said Sherman. “Our people are human. Most of them have no direct contact with the main work to keep them feeling important and interested. They live a restricted life here. They get discontented. Your story is a powerful reminder of what life is like on the outside, and why we have to keep on with what we’re doing. It’s also a hopeful one.”

  “How?”

  “It shows that eighty years of the most rigid control hasn’t been able to stamp out the art of independent thinking.”

  “Be honest, Harry,” said Gutierrez. “There was a measure of sentiment in our decision.”

  “Perhaps,” said Sherman. “It did seem like a betrayal of everything we like to think we stand for to let you get hung up for believing in us. Everybody in Fall Creek seemed to think so, anyway.”

  He looked at them thoughtfully. “It may have been a foolish decision. You certainly aren’t likely, either one of you, to contribute anything to our work, and you do constitute a problem out of all proportion to your personal importance. You’re the first strangers we’ve taken in for more years than I can remember. We can’t let you go again. We don’t want to be forced to do what I warned you we would do. So we’ll have to take pains, far more than with any of our own, to see that you’re thoroughly integrated into the fabric of our living, our thoughts, our particular goal. Unless we’re to keep a watch on you forever, we have to turn you into trustworthy citizens of Bartorstown. And that means practically a complete re-education.”

  He cast a sharp, sardonic glance at Hostetter. “He swore you were worth the trouble. I hope he was right.”

  He leaned over then and shook Amity by the hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Colter, you’ve been very helpful. I don’t think you’d find this trip interesting, so why don’t you come and have some lunch with my wife? She can help you on a lot of things.”

  He led Amity to the door and handed her over to Mary Sherman, who always seemed to be where she was wanted. Then he came back and nodded to Len and Esau.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s go.”

  “To Bartorstown?” asked Len. And Sherman answered, “To Bartorstown.”

  21

  The explanation was simple when you knew it. So simple that Len realized it was no wonder he hadn’t guessed it. Sherman led the way up the canyon, past the mine slope and on to the other side of the little dam. Gutierrez was with them, and Erdmann, and Hostetter, and two of the other men. The rest had gone about their business somewhere else. The sun was hot down here in the bottom of the valley, and the dust was dry. The air smelled of dust and cottonwoods and pine needles and mules. Len glanced at Esau. His face was kind of pale and set, and his eyes roved restlessly, as though they didn’t want to see what was in front of them. Len knew how he felt. This was the end, the solid inescapable truth, the last of the dream. He should have been excited himself. He should have felt something. But he did not. He had already been through all the feelings he had in him, and now he was just a man walking.

  They turned up the disused slope that the rocks had rolled on. They walked between the rocks in the hot sun, up to the hole in the face of the cliff. It had a wooden gate across it, weathered but in good repair, and sign above it saying DANGER MINE TUNNEL UNSAFE Falling Rock Keep Out. The gate was locked. Sherman opened it and they went through, and he locked it again behind him.

  “Keeps the kids out,” he said. “They’re the only ones that ever bother.”

  Inside the tunnel, as far as the harsh reflected sunlight showed, there was a clutter of loose rock on the tunnel floor and a crumbly look about the walls. The shoring timbers were rotted and broken, and some of the roof props were hanging down. It was not a place anybody would be likely to force his way into. Sherman said that every mine had abandoned workings, and nobody thought anything about it. “This one, naturally, is perfectly safe. But the mock-up is convincing.”

  “Too damn convincing,” said Gutierrez, stumbling. “I’ll break a leg here yet.”

  The light shaded off into darkness, and the tunnel bent to the left. Suddenly, without any warning, another light blazed up ahead. It was bluish and very brilliant, not like any Len had seen before, and now for the first time excitement began to stir in him. He heard Esau catch his breath and say, “Electric!” The tunnel here was smooth and unencumbered. They walked along it quickly, and beyond the dazzle of the light Len saw a door.

  They stopped in front of it. The light was overhead now. Len tried to look straight into it and it made him blind like the sun. “Isn’t that something,” Esau whispered. “Just like Gran used to say.”

  “There are scanners here,” said Sherman. “Give them a second or two. There. Go on now.”

  The door opened. It was thick and made of metal set massively into the living rock. They went through it. It closed quietly behind them, and they were in Bartorstown.

  This part of it was only a continuation of the tunnel, out here the rock was dressed very smooth and neat, and lights were set all along it in a trough sunk in the roof. The air had a funny taste to it, flat and metallic. Len could feel it moving over his face, and there was a soft, soft hushing sound that seemed to belong to it. His nerves had tightened now, a
nd he was sweating. He had a brief and awful vision of the outside of the mountain that was now on top of him, and he thought he could feel every pound of it weighing down on him. “Is it all like this?” he asked. “Underground, I mean.”

  Sherman nodded. “They put a lot of places underground in those days. Under a mountain was about the only safe place you could get.”

  Esau was peering down the corridor. It seemed to go a long way in. “Is it very big?”

  Gutierrez answered this time. “How big is big? If you look at Bartorstown one way it’s the biggest thing there is. It’s all yesterday and all tomorrow. Look at it another way, it’s a hole in the ground, just big enough to bury a man in.”

  About twenty feet away down the corridor a man stepped out of a doorway to meet them. He was a young fellow, about Esau’s age. He spoke with easy respect to Sherman and the others, and then stared frankly at the Colters.

  “Hello,” he said. “I saw you coming through the lower pass. My name’s Jones.” He held out his hand.

  They shook it and moved closer to the door. The rock-cut chamber beyond was fairly large, and it was crammed with an awful lot of things, boards and wires and knobs and stuff like the inside of a radio. Esau looked around, and then he looked at Jones and said, “Are you the one that pushes the button?”

  They were all puzzled for a minute, and then Hostetter laughed. “Wepplo was joshing them about that. No Jones would have to pass that responsibility

  “Matter of fact,” said Sherman, “we’ve never pushed that button yet. But we keep it in working order, just in case. Come here.”

  He motioned them to follow him, and they did, with the cautious tenseness of men or animals who find themselves in a strange place and feel they may want to get out of it in a hurry. They were careful not to touch anything. Jones went ahead of them and began casually doing things with some of the knobs and switches. He did not quite swagger. Sherman pointed to a square glass window, and Len stared into it for a confused second or two before he realized that it could hardly be a window at all, and if it were it couldn’t be looking into the narrow rocky cut that was way on the other side of the ridge.

  “The scanners pick up the image and transmit it back to this screen,” Sherman said, and before he could go on Esau cried out in a child’s tone of delighted wonder, “Teevee!”

  “Same principle,” said Sherman. “Where’d you hear about that?”

  “Our grandmother. She told us a lot of things.”

  “Oh yes. You mentioned her, I think—talking about Bartorstown.” Smoothly, but with unmistakable firmness, he drew their attention to the screen again. “There’s always somebody on duty here, to watch. Nobody can get through that gateway unseen, in—or out.”

  “What about nighttime?” asked Len. He supposed Sherman had a right to keep reminding them, but it made him resentful. Sherman gave him a sharp, cool glance.

  “Did your grandmother tell you about electric eyes?”

  “No.”

  “They can see in the dark. Show them, Jones.”

  The young man showed them a board with little glass bulbs on it, in two rows opposite each other. “This is like the lower pass, see? And these little bulbs, they’re the electric-eye pairs. When you walk between them you break a beam, and these bulbs light up. We know right where you are.”

  If Esau got the byplay, he didn’t show it. He was staring with bright envious eyes at Jones, and suddenly he asked, “Could I learn to do that too?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Sherman, “if you’re willing to study.”

  Esau breathed heavily and smiled.

  They went out and down the corridor again, under the brilliant lights. There were some other doors with numbers on them that Sherman said were storerooms. Then the corridor branched into two. Len was confused now about direction, but they took the right-hand branch. It widened out into a staggering series of rooms, cut smooth out of the rock with heavy columns of it left in regular rows to bear the weight of the low roof. The rooms were separate from each other but interconnecting, like the segments of a wheel, and they seemed to have smaller chambers opening from their outer edges. They were full of things. Len did not try, after the first few minutes, to understand what he saw because he knew it would take him years to do that. He just looked, and felt, and tried to get hold of the full realization that he had entered into a totally different world.

  Sherman was talking. Sometimes Gutierrez, too, and sometimes Erdmann, and sometimes one of the other men. Hostetter didn’t say much.

  Bartorstown had been made, they said, as self-supporting as such a place could be. It could repair itself, and make new parts for itself, and there were still some of the original materials it had been supplied with for that purpose. Sherman pointed out the various rooms, the electronics lab, the electrical maintenance shop, the radio shop, rooms full of strange machines and strange glittering shapes of glass and metal, and endless panels of dials and winking lights. Sometimes a man or several men would be in them, sometimes not. Sometimes there were chemical smells and unfamiliar sounds, and sometimes there was nothing but an empty quiet, with the hush-hush of the moving air making them seem even quieter and lonelier. Sherman talked about air ducts and pumps and blowers. Automatic was a word he used over and over, and it was a wonderful word. Doors opened automatically when you came to them, and lights went on and off. “Automatic,” said Hostetter, and snorted. “No wonder the Mennonites got to be such a power in the land. Other folks were so spoiled they could hardly tie their shoelaces any more by hand.”

  “Ed,” said Sherman, “you’re a poor advertisement for Bartorstown.”

  “I don’t know,” said Hostetter. “Seems I was good enough for some.”

  Len looked at him. He knew Hostetter’s moods pretty well now, and he knew he was worried and ill at ease. A nervous chill crawled down Len’s back, and he turned to stare again at the strange things all around him. They were wonderful, and fascinating, and they didn’t mean a thing until somebody named a purpose for them. Nobody had.

  He said so, and Sherman nodded. “They have a purpose. I wanted you to see all of Bartorstown, and not just a part of it, so you would realize how important the government of this country thought that purpose was, even before the Destruction. So important that they saw to it that Bartorstown would survive no matter what happened. Now I’ll show you another part of their planning, the power plant.”

  Hostetter started to speak, and Sherman said quietly, “We’ll do this my way, Ed.” He walked them a little way more around the central corridor that Len had come to think of as the hub of a wheel, and with a sidelong glance at Len and Esau he said, “We’ll use the stair instead of the elevator.”

  All the way down the echoing steel stair, Len tried to remember what an elevator might be, but couldn’t. Then he stopped with them on a floor, and looked around.

  They were in a cavernous place that echoed with a deep and mighty throbbing, overtoned and undertoned with other sounds that were strange to Len’s ear but that blended all together into one unmistakable voice, saying a word that he had heard spoken before only by the natural voices of wind and thunder and flood. The word was power. The rock vault had been left rougher here, and all the space was flooded with a flat white glare, and in that glare a line of mighty structures stood, squat, bulbous, Gargantuan, dwarfing the men who worked around them. Len’s flesh picked up the throbbing and quivered with it, and his nose twitched to the smell of something that was in the air.

  “These are the transformers,” Sherman said. “You can see the cables there—they run in sunken conduits to carry power all over Bartorstown. These are the generators, and the turbines—”

  They walked in the bright white glare under the flanks of the great machines.

  “—the steam plant—”

  Here was something they could understand. It was enormously bigger than any they had dreamed of, but it was steam, and steam they knew as an old friend among these foreign
giants. They clung to it, making comparisons, and one of the two men whose names Len was not sure of patiently explained the differences in design.

  “But there’s no firebox,” said Esau. “No fire, and no fuel. Where’s the heat come from?”

  “There,” said the man, and pointed. The steam plant joined onto a long, high, massive block of concrete. “That’s the heat exchanger.”

  Esau frowned at the concrete. “I don’t see—”

  “It’s all shielded, of course. It’s hot.”

  “Hot,” said Esau. “Well, sure, it would have to be to make the water boil. But I still don’t see—”

  He looked around, into the recesses of the cavern. “I still don’t see what you use for fuel.”

  There was a moment of silence, as silent as it ever was in that place. The thrumming beat on Len’s ears, and somehow he knew that he stood on a moment’s edge before some unguessable pit of darkness, he knew it from the schooled and watchful faces of the men and the way Esau’s question hung loud and echoing in the air and would not die away.

  “Why,” said Sherman, very gently, very casually, and Hostetter’s eyes were sharp and anguished in the light, “we use uranium.”

  And the moment was gone, and the pit gaped wide and black as perdition, and Len shouted, but the shout was swallowed up and drowned until it was only the ghost of a whisper, saying, “Uranium. But that was—that was—”

  Sherman’s hand rose up and pointed to where the concrete structure heightened and widened into a great thick wall.

  “Yes,” he said. “Atomic power. That concrete wall is the outer face of the shield. Behind it is the reactor.”