Silence again, except for the throbbing of that great voice that never stopped. The concrete wall loomed up like the wall of hell, and Len’s heart slowed and the blood in him turned cold as snow water.
Behind it is the reactor.
Behind it is evil and night and terror and death.
A voice screamed in Len’s ears, the voice of the preaching man, standing on the edge of his wagon with the sparks flying past him on the night wind—They have loosed the sacred fire which only I, the Lord Jehovah, should dare to touch—and God said—Let them be cleansed of their sin—
Esau’s voice spoke in shrill denial. “No. There ain’t any more of that left in the world.”
Let them be cleansed, said the Lord, and they were cleansed. They were burned with the fires of their own making, yea, and the proud towers vanished in the blazing of the wrath of God, and the places of iniquity were made not—
“You’re lying,” Esau said. “There ain’t any more of that, not since the Destruction.”
And they were cleansed. But not wholly—
“They’re not lying,” Len said. He backed slowly away from that staring wall of concrete. “They saved it, and it’s there.”
Esau whimpered. Then he turned and ran.
Hostetter caught him. He spun him around and Sherman caught his other arm and they held him, and Hostetter said fiercely, “Stand still, Esau.”
“But it’ll burn me,” Esau cried, staring wild-eyed. “It’ll burn me inside, and my blood will turn white and my bones will rot and I’ll die.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Hostetter. “You can see it hasn’t hurt any of us.”
“He’s got a right to be afraid of it, Ed,” said Sherman, more gently. “You ought to know their teaching better than I. Give them a chance. Listen, Esau. You’re thinking of the bomb. This isn’t a bomb. It isn’t hurtful. We’ve lived with it here for nearly a hundred years. It can’t explode, and it can’t burn you. The concrete makes it safe. Look.”
He let go of Esau and went up to the shield and put his hands on it.
“See? There’s nothing here to fear.”
And the devil speaks with the tongues of foolish men and works with the hands of the rash ones. Father, forgive me, I didn’t know!
Esau licked his lips. His breath came hard and uneven between them. “You go and do it too,” he said to Hostetter, as though Hostetter might be of a different flesh from Sherman, being a part of the world that Esau knew and not solely of Bartorstown.
Hostetter shrugged. He went and put his hands on the shield.
And you, thought Len. This is what you wouldn’t tell me, what you wouldn’t trust me with.
“Well,” said Esau, choking, hesitant, sweating and shaking like a frightened horse but not running now, standing his ground, beginning to think. “Well—”
Len clenched his icy fists and looked at Sherman standing against the shield.
“No wonder you’re so afraid,” he said, in a voice that did not sound like his own at all. “No wonder you shoot people if they try to leave. If anybody went out and told what you’ve got here they’d rise up and hunt you out and tear you to pieces, and there wouldn’t be a mountain in the world big enough to hide yourselves under.”
Sherman nodded. “Yes. That’s so.”
Len shifted his gaze to Hostetter. “Why couldn’t you have told us about this, before we ever came here?”
“Len, Len,” said Hostetter, shaking his head. “I didn’t want you to come. And I warned you, every way I could.”
Sherman was watching, intent to see what he would do. They were all watching, Gutierrez with a weary pity, Erdmann with embarrassed eyes, and Esau in the middle of them like a big scared child. He understood dimly that it had all been planned this way and that they were interested in what words he would say and how he would feel. And in a sudden black revulsion of all the hopes and dreams and childhood longings, the seeking and the faith, he shouted at them, “Wasn’t one burning of the world enough? Why did you have to keep this thing alive?”
“Because,” said Sherman quietly, “it wasn’t ours to destroy. And because destroying it is the child’s way, the way of the men who burned Refuge, the way of the Thirtieth Amendment. That’s only an evasion. You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.”
“Yes,” said Len bitterly, “as long as there are men foolish enough to keep it going. I wanted the cities back, yes. I wanted the things we used to have, and I thought it was stupid to be afraid of something that was gone years and years ago. But I never knew that it wasn’t all gone—”
“So now you think they were right to kill Soames, right to kill your friend Dulinsky and destroy a town?”
“I—” The words stuck in Len’s throat, and then he cried out, “That isn’t fair. There was no atom power in Refuge.”
“All right,” said Sherman reasonably. “We’ll put it another way. Suppose Bartorstown was destroyed, with every man in it. How could you be sure that somewhere in the world, hidden under some other mountain, there wasn’t another Bartorstown? And how could you be sure that some forgotten professor of nuclear physics hadn’t hoarded his textbooks—you had one in Piper’s Run, you said. Multiply that by all the books there must be left in the world. What chance have you got to destroy them all?”
Esau said, slowly, “Len, he’s right.”
“Book,” said Len, felling the blind fear, feeling the crouching of the Beast behind the wall. “Book, yes, we had one, but we didn’t know what it meant. Nobody knew.”
“Somebody, somewhere, would figure it out in time. And remember another thing. The first men who found the secret of atomic power didn’t have any books to go by. They didn’t even know if it could be done. All they had was their brains. You can’t destroy all the brains in the world, either.”
“All right,” cried Len, driven into a corner and seeing no escape. “What other way is there?”
“The way of reason,” said Sherman. “And now I can tell you why Bartorstown was built.”
22
There were three levels in Bartorstown. They climbed now to the middle one, below the laboratories and above the cavern where the old evil hid behind its concrete wall. Len walked ahead of Hostetter, and the others were all around him, Esau still trembling and wiping his mouth over and over with the back of his hand, the Bartorstown men silent and grave. And Len’s mind was a wild dark emptiness like a night sky without stars.
He was looking at a picture. The picture was on a long curving piece of glass taller than a man and lit from inside someway so that the picture was like real, with depth and distance in it, and color, and every tiny thing sharp and clear to see. It was a terrible picture. It was a blasted and fragmented desolation, with one little lost building still standing in it, leaning over as though it was tired and wanted to fall.
“You talk about the bomb and what it did, but you never saw it,” said Sherman. “The men who built Bartorstown had, or their fathers had. It was a reality, a thing of their time. They put this picture here to remind them, so that they wouldn’t be tempted to forget their job. That was what the first bomb did. That was Hiroshima. Now go on, around the end of the wall.”
They did, and Gutierrez was already ahead of them, walking with his head down. “I’ve already seen them too often,” he said. He disappeared, through a door at the end of a wide passageway that had more pictures on either side. Erdmann started after him, hesitated, and then dropped back. He did not look at the pictures either.
Sherman did. He said, “These were some of the people who survived that first bombing, after a fashion.”
Esau muttered, “Holy Jesus!” He began to shake more violently, hanging his head down and looking sidelong out of the corners of his eyes so as not to see too much.
Len did not say anything. He gave Sherman a straight and smoldering look, and Sherman said, “They felt very strongly about the bomb in those days
. They lived under its shadow. In these victims they could see themselves, their families. They wanted very much that there should not be any more victims, any more Hiroshimas, and they knew that there was only one way to make sure of that.”
“They couldn’t,” said Len, “have just destroyed the bomb?”
It was a stupid thing to say, and he was angry with himself instantly for saying it, because he knew better; he had talked about those times with Judge Taylor and read some of the books about them. So he forestalled Sherman’s retort by saying quickly, “I know, the enemy wouldn’t destroy his. The thing to have done was never to get that far, never to make a bomb.”
Sherman said, “The thing to have done was never to learn how to make a fire, so no one would ever get burned. Besides, it was a little too late for that. They had a fact to deal with not a philosophical argument.”
“Well then,” said Len, “what was the answer?”
“A defense. Not the imperfect defense of radar nets and weapon devices, but something far more basic and all-embracing, a totally new concept. A field-type force that could control the interaction of nuclear particles right on their own level, so that no process either of fission or fusion could take place wherever that protecting force-field was in operation. Complete control, Len. Absolute mastery of the atom. No more bombs.”
Quiet, and they watched him again to see how he would take it. He closed his eyes against the pictures so that he could try to think, and the words sounded in his head, loud and flat, momentarily without meaning. Complete control. No more bombs. The thing to have done was never to build them, never build fires, never build cities—
No.
No, say the word again, slowly and carefully. Complete control, no more bombs. The bomb is a fact. Atomic power is a fact. It is a living fact close down under my feet, the dreadful power that made these pictures. You can’t deny it, you can’t destroy it because it is evil and evil is like a serpent that dieth not but reneweth itself perpetually—
No. No. No. These are the words of the preaching man, of Burdette. Complete control of the atom. No more bombs. No more victims, no more fear. Yes. You build stoves to hold the fire in, and you keep water handy to put it out with. Yes.
But—
“But they didn’t find the defense,” he said. “Because the world got burned up anyway.”
“They tried. They pointed the way. We’re still following it. Now go on.”
They passed through the door where Gutierrez had gone, into a space hollowed like the other spaces out of the solid rock, smoothed and pillared and reaching away on all sides under a clear flood of light. There was a long wall facing them. It was not really a wall, but a huge pane as big as a wall and set by itself, with a couple of small machines linked to it. It was nearly six feet high, not quite reaching the roof. It had a maze of dials and lights on it. The lights were all dark, and the needles of the dials did not move. Gutierrez was standing in front of it, his face twisted into a deep, sad, pondering scowl.
“This is Clementine,” he said, not turning his head as they came in. “A foolish name for something on which may hang the future of the world.”
Len dropped his hands, and it was as though in that dropping he cast from him many things too heavy or too painful to be carried. Inside my head there is nothing, let it stay that way. Let the emptiness fill up slowly with new things, and old things in new patterns, and maybe then I’ll know—what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything, and all is darkness and confusion and only the Word—”
No, not that Word, another one. Clementine.
He sighed and said aloud, “I don’t understand.”
Sherman walked over to the big dark panel.
“This is a computer. It’s the biggest one ever built, the most complex. Do you see there—”
He pointed off beyond the panel, into the pillared spaces that stretched away there, and Len saw that there were countless rows of arrangements of wires and tubes set all orderly one after the other, interrupted at intervals by big glittering cylinders of glass.
“That’s all part of it.”
Esau’s passion for machines was beginning to stir again under the fog of fright.
“All one machine?”
“All one. In it, in those memory banks, is stored all the knowledge about the nature of the atom that existed before the Destruction, and all the knowledge that our research teams have gained since, all expressed in mathematical equations. We could not work without it. It would take the men half their lifetimes just to work out the mathematical problems that Clementine can do in minutes. She is the reason Bartorstown was built, the purpose of the shops upstairs and the reactor down below. Without her, we wouldn’t have much chance of finding the answer within any foreseeable time. With her—there’s no telling. Any day, any week, could bring the solution to the problem.”
Gutierrez made a sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. It was quickly silenced. And once more Len shook his head and said, “I don’t understand.”
And I don’t think I want to understand. Not today, not now. Because what you’re telling me is not a description of a machine but of something else, and I don’t want to know any more about it.
But Esau blurted out, “It does sums and remembers them? That don’t sound like any machine, that sounds like—a—a—”
He caught himself up sharp, and Sherman said with no particular interest, “They used to call them electronic brains.”
Oh Lord, and is there no end to it? First the hell-fire and now this.
“A misnomer,” said Sherman. “It doesn’t think, any more than a steam engine. It’s just a machine.”
And now suddenly he rounded on them, his face stern and cold-eyed and his voice as sharp as a whiplash to bring their attention to him, startled and alert.
“I won’t push you,” he said. “I won’t expect you to understand it all in a minute, and I won’t expect you to adjust overnight. I’ll give you reasonable time. But I want you to remember this. You kicked and clawed and screamed to be let into Bartorstown, and now you’re here, and I don’t care what you thought it was going to be like, it’s what it is, so make your peace with it. We have a certain job to do here. We didn’t particularly ask for it, it just happened that way, but we’re stuck with it and we’re going to do it, in spite of what your piddling little farm-boy consciences may feel about it.”
He stood still, regarding them with those cold hard eyes, and Len thought, He means that just the way Burdette meant it when he said, There shall be no cities in our midst.
“You claim you wanted to come here so you could learn,” said Sherman. “All right. We’ll give you every chance. But from here on, it’s up to you.”
“Yes, sir,” said Esau hastily. “Yes, sir.”
Len thought, There is still nothing in my head, it feels like a wind was blowing through it. But he’s looking at me waiting for me to say something—what? Yes, no—and under the sun to keep us out and we would bull our way in, and now we’re caught in a pit of our own digging—
But the whole world is caught in a pit. Isn’t that what we wanted out of, the pit that killed Dulinsky and nearly killed us? The people are afraid and I hated them for it and now—I don’t know what the answer is, oh Lord, I don’t know, let me find an answer because Sherman is waiting and I can’t run away.
“Someday,” he said, wrinkling his brows in a frown of effort so that he looked once more like the brooding boy who had sat with Gran on that October day, “someday atomic power will come back no matter what anybody does to stop it.”
“A thing once known always comes back.”
“And the cities will come back too.”
“In time, inevitable.”
“And it will all happen over again, the cities and the bomb, unless you find that way to stop it.”
“Unless men have changed a lot by tomorrow, yes.”
“Then,” said Len, still frowning, still somber, “then I guess you’re tryin
g to do what ought to be done. I guess it might be right.”
The word stuck to his tongue, but he got it off, and no bolt of lightning came to strike him dead, and Sherman did not challenge him any further.
Esau had moved toward the panel, magnetized by the lure of the machine. He reached hesitantly out and touched it, and asked, “Could we see it work?”
It was Erdmann who answered. “Later. She’s just finished a three-year project, and she’s shut down now for a complete overhaul.”
“Three years,” said Gutierrez. “Yes. I wish you could shut me down too, Frank. Pick my brain to pieces and put it together again, all fresh and bright.” He began to raise and lower his fist, striking the panel each time, lightly as a feather falling. “Frank,” he said, “she could have made a mistake.”
Erdmann looked at him sharply. “You know that isn’t possible.”
“A vagrant charge,” said Gutierrez. “A speck of dust, a relay too worn to function right, and how would you ever know?”
“Julio,” said Erdmann. “You know better. If the slightest thing goes wrong with her she stops automatically and asks for attention.”
Sherman spoke, and the talking stopped, and everybody began to move out into the passageway again. Gutierrez came close behind Len, and even through the doubt and fear that clouded in so thick around him Len could hear him muttering to himself, “She could have made a mistake.”
23
Hostetter was a lamp in the darkness, a solid rock in the midst of flood. He was the link, the carry-over from Piper’s Run to Bartorstown, he was the old friend and the strong arm that had already reached out twice to save him, once at the preaching, once at Refuge. Len clung to him, mentally, with a certain desperation.
“You think it’s right?” he asked, knowing the inevitable answer, but wanting the assurance anyhow.
They were walking down the road from Bartorstown in the late afternoon. Sherman and the others had lingered behind, perhaps deliberately, so that Hostetter was alone with Len and Esau. And now Hostetter glanced at Len and said, “Yes, I think it’s right.”
The Long Tomorrow Page 19
