“But,” said Len softly, “to work with it, to keep it going—”
He was out in the open air again. The mountain was away from over his head, and the rock walls of Bartorstown no longer shut him in, and he could breathe and look at the sun. But the horror was still on him, and he thought of the destroyer crouched in a hole of the rock, and he knew he did not want ever to go back there. And at the same time he knew that he would have to go whether he wanted it or not.
Hostetter said, “I told you there’d be things you wouldn’t like, things that would jar against your teachings no matter how much you said you didn’t believe them.”
“But you’re not afraid of it,” said Esau. He had been thinking hard, scuffing his boots against the stones of the road. Up above them on the east slope was the normal, comforting racket of the mine, and ahead the village of Fall Creek drowsed quietly in the late sun, and it was very much like Piper’s Run if there had been a devil chained in the hills behind it. “You went right up and put your hands on it.”
“I grew up with the idea of it,” said Hostetter. “Nobody ever taught me that it was evil or forbidden, or that God had put a curse on it, and that’s the difference. That’s why we don’t take strangers in but once in a coon’s age. The conditioning is all wrong.”
“I ain’t worrying about curses,” said Esau. “What I worry about is, will it hurt me?”
“Not unless you find some way to get inside the shield.”
“It can’t burn me.”
“No.”
“And it can’t blow up.”
“No. The steam plant might blow up, but not the reactor.”
“Well, then,” said Esau, and walked on awhile in silence, thinking. His eyes got bright, and he laughed and said “I wonder what those old fools in Piper’s Run, old Harkness and Clute and the rest, would think. They were going to birch us just for having a radio, and now we’ve got that. Jesus. I bet they’d kill us, Len.”
“No,” said Hostetter somberly, “they wouldn’t. But all the same, you’d wind up like Soames, at the bottom of a pile of stones.”
“Well, I ain’t going to give them a chance. Jesus! Atom power, the real thing, the biggest power in the world.” His fingers curled with greedy excitement and then relaxed, and he asked again, “Are you sure it’s safe?”
“It’s safe,” said Hostetter, getting impatient. “We’ve had it for nearly a century, and it hasn’t hurt anybody yet.”
“I guess,” said Len slowly, leaning his head against the cool wind and letting it blow some of the darkness out of him, “we don’t have any right to complain.”
“You sure don’t.”
“And I guess the government knew what it was doing when it built Bartorstown.”
They were afraid too, whispered the cool wind. They had a power too big for them to handle, and they were afraid, and well they should have been.
“It did,” said Hostetter, not hearing the wind.
“Jesus,” said Esau, “just think if they had found that thing to stop the bomb.”
“I’ve thought,” said Hostetter. “We all have. I suppose every man in Bartorstown has a guilt complex a mile wide from thinking about it. But there just wasn’t time.”
Time? Or was there another reason?
“How long will it take?” asked Len. “It seems like in almost a hundred years they should have found it.”
“My God,” said Hostetter, “do you know how long it took to find atomic power in the first place? A Greek named Demcoritus got the basic idea of the atom centuries before Christ, so you can figure that out.”
“But it ain’t going to take them that long now!” cried Esau. “Sherman said with that machine—”
“It won’t take them that long, no.”
“But how long? Another hundred years?”
“How do I know how long?” said Hostetter angrily. “Another hundred years, or another year. How do I know?”
“But with the machine—”
“It’s only a machine, it’s not God. It can’t pull an answer out of thin air just because we want it.”
“How about that machine, though,” said Esau, and once more his eyes were glistening. “I wanted to see it work. Does it really—” He hesitated, and then said the incredible word. “Does it really think?”
“No,” said Hostetter. “Not in the way you mean the word. Get Erdmann to explain it to you sometime.” Suddenly he said to Len, “You’re thinking that only God has any business building brains.”
Len flushed, feeling like what Sherman had called him, a conscience-ridden farm boy in the face of these men who knew so much, and yet he could not deny to Hostetter that he had been thinking something like that.
“I guess I’ll get used to it.”
Esau snorted. “He always was a doubtful-minded kind, taking forever to make up his mind.”
“Why, God damn you, Esau,” cried Len furiously, “if it hadn’t been for me you’d still be shoveling dung in your father’s barn!”
“All right,” said Esau, glaring at him, “you remember that. You remember whose fault it is you’re here and don’t go whining around about it.”
“I ain’t whining.”
“Yes, you are. And if you’re worried about sinning, you ought to have minded your pa in the first place and stayed home in Piper’s Run.”
“He’s got you there,” said Hostetter.
Len grumbled, kicking pebbles angrily in the dust. “All right. It scared me. But it scared him, too, and I wasn’t the one that tucked my tail and ran.”
Esau said, “I’d run from a bear, too, till I knew it wouldn’t kill me. I ain’t running now. Listen, Len, this is important. Where else in the world could you find anything as important?” His chest puffed out and his face lit up as though the mantle of that importance had already fallen on him. “I want to know more about that machine.”
“Important,” said Len. “Yes, it is.” That’s true. There isn’t any question about that. Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me?
But Esau is right. It’s too late now to worry about the sinning. Pa always said the way of the transgressor was hard, and I guess this is part of the hardness.
So be it.
They left Esau at Sherman’s to pick up his bride, and Len and Hostetter walked on together toward Wepplo’s. The swift clear dusk was coming down, and the lanes were deserted, with a smell of smoke and cooking in them. When they came to Wepplo’s Hostetter put his foot on the bottom step and turned around and spoke to Len in a strange quiet tone that he had never heard him use before.
“Here’s something to remember, the way you remember that mob that killed Soames, and Burdette and his farmers, and the new Ishmaelites. It’s this—we’re fanatics too, Len. We have to be, or we’d drift away and live our own lives and let the whole business go hang. We’ve got a belief. Don’t tangle with it. Because if you do, even I won’t be able to save you.”
He went up the steps and left Len standing there staring after him. There were voices inside, and lights, but out here it was still and almost dark. And then someone came around the corner of the house, walking softly. It was the girl Joan, and she nodded her head toward the house and said, “Was he trying to frighten you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Len. “I think he was just telling me the truth.”
“I heard him.” She had a white cloth in her hands, as though she might have been shaking it just before. Her face looked white, too, in the heavy dusk, blurred and indistinct. But her voice was sharp as a knife. “Fanatics, are we? Well, maybe he is, and maybe the others are, but I’m not. I’m sick of the whole business. What made you want to come here, Len Colter? Were you crazy or something?”
He looked at her, the shadowy outlines of her, not knowing what to say.
“I heard you talk this morning,” she said.
Len said
uncomfortably, “We didn’t know—”
“They told you to say all those things, didn’t they?”
“What things?”
“About what dreadful people they are out there, and what a hateful world it is.”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” said Len, “but every word of what we said was true. You think it wasn’t, you go out there and try it.”
He started to push past her up the steps. She put a hand on his arm to stop him.
“I’m sorry. I guess it was all true. But that’s why Sherman had you talk over the radio, so we’d all hear it. Propaganda.” She added shrewdly, “I’ll bet that’s why they let you two in here, just to make us all see how lucky we are.”
Len said, very quietly, “Aren’t you?”
“Oh yes,” said Joan, “we’re very lucky. We have so much more than the people outside. Not in our everyday lives, of course. We don’t even have as much, of things like food and freedom. But we have Clementine, and that makes up. Did you enjoy your trip to The Hole?”
“The Hole?”
“It’s a name some of us have for Bartorstown.”
Her manner and her tone were making him uneasy. He said, “I think I better go in,” and started once more up the steps.
“I hope you did,” she said. “I hope you like the canyon, and Fall Creek. Because they’ll never let you leave.”
He thought of what Sherman had said. He did not blame Sherman. He did not have any intention of going away. But he did not like it. “They’ll learn to trust me,” he said, “Someday.”
“Never.”
He did not want to argue with her. “Well, I reckon to stay awhile, anyway. I’ve spent half my life getting here.”
“Why?”
“You’re a Bartorstown girl. You shouldn’t have to ask.”
“Because you wanted to learn. That’s right, you said that this morning. You wanted to learn, and nobody would let you.” She made a wide mocking gesture that took in the whole dark canyon. “Go. Learn. Be happy.”
He got her by the shoulder and pulled her close, where he could see her face in the dim glow from the windows. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I just think you’re crazy, that’s all. To have the whole wide world, and throw it all away for this.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Len. He let her go and sat down on the steps and shook his head. “I’ll be damned. Doesn’t anybody like Bartorstown? Seems to me I’ve heard more griping since I got here than I ever heard in my lifetime before.”
“When you’ve lived a lifetime here,” she said bitterly, “you’ll understand. Oh, some of the men get out, sure. But most of us don’t. Most of us never see anything but these canyon walls. And even the men have to come back again. It’s like your friend says. You have to be a fanatic to feel that it’s all worth while.”
“I’ve lived out there,” said Len. “I think what it is now, and what it could be, if—”
“If Clementine ever gives them the right answer. Sure. It’s been almost a century now, and they’re no nearer than they ever were, but we’ve all got to be patient and devoted and dedicated—dedicated to what? To that goddamned mechanical brain that squats there under the mountain and has to be treated like it was God.”
She leaned over him suddenly, in the faint glow of the lamplight.
“I’m no fanatic, Len Colter. If you want somebody to talk to, remember that.”
Then she was gone around the corner of the house, running. Len heard a door open somewhere at the back. He got up, very slowly, and climbed the steps and went slowly into the house and ate his dinner at the Wepplos’ table. And he did not hear hardly anything that was said to him.
24
The next morning Len and Esau were called again to Sherman’s place, and this time Hostetter was not with them. Sherman faced them over the table in the living room, balancing two keys back and forth between his hands.
“I said I wouldn’t push you, and I won’t. But in the meantime you have to work. Now if I let you work at something you could do in Fall Creek, like blacksmithing or taking care of the mules, you wouldn’t learn anything more about Bartorstown than if you hadn’t left home.”
“Well, no,” said Esau, and then he asked eagerly, “Can I learn about the big machine? Clementine?”
“Offhand, I’d say she’s always going to be beyond you, unless you want to wait until you’re an old man. But you can take it up with Frank Erdmann, he’s the boss on that. And don’t worry, you’ll get all the machine you want. But whatever you pick will mean a lot of studying before you’re ready, and until then—”
He hesitated for only a fraction of a second, perhaps he didn’t really hesitate at all, and perhaps it was only by pure and unmeaning chance that his eyes happened to rest then on Len’s face, but Len knew what he was going to say before he said it and he set himself hard so that nothing would show.
“Until then you’ve been assigned to the steam plant. You’ve had some experience with steam, and it shouldn’t take you too long to master the differences. Jim Sidney, the man you were talking to yesterday, will give you all the help you need.”
He got up and came around the table and handed them the keys. “To the safety gate. Take care of them. Jim will tell you your hours and all that. In free time you can go anywhere you want to in Bartorstown and ask any questions you want so long as you don’t interfere with work in progress. You can make arrangements with Irv Rothstein in the library. And you don’t need to look so stony-faced, both of you. I can read your minds.”
Len looked at him, startled, and he smiled.
“You’re thinking that the steam plant is right next to the reactor and you would rather be anywhere else than there. And that is exactly why you’re going to work on the steam plant. I want to get you so accustomed to the reactor that you’ll forget to be afraid of it.”
Is that the truth? thought Len. Or is it his way of testing us, to see if we can get over being afraid, to see if we can ever learn to live with it?
“Get along now,” Sherman said. “Jim’s expecting you.”
So they went, walking in the early morning up the dusty road and across the slope between the rocks to Bartorstown. And at the safety gate they stopped and fidgeted, each one waiting for the other one to open it, and Len said, “I thought you weren’t afraid.”
“I ain’t. It’s just that—oh, hell, those other men work around it. It’s all right. Come on.”
He jabbed his key savagely in the lock and wrenched it open and went in. And Len closed it carefully, thinking, Now I am locked in with it, the fire that fell from the sky on Gran’s world.
He walked after Esau down the tunnel and through that inner door, past the monitor room where young Jones nodded at them. And isn’t he afraid? No, he’s like Ed Hostetter, he’s never been taught to be afraid. And he’s alive, and healthy. God hasn’t struck him down. God hasn’t struck any of them down. He’s let Bartorstown survive. Isn’t that a proof right there that it’s all right, that this answer they’re trying to find is right?
But the ways of the Lord are past our understanding, and the wicked man is given his day upon the earth—
“What are you mooning about?” snapped Esau. “Come on.”
There was a line of sweat across his upper lip, and his mouth was nervous. They went down the stairs again, the steel treads ringing hollow under their feet, past the level where the big computer was, down and down to the lowest step and then off that and out into the great wide cavern with the throb of power beating through it, past the generators and the turbines, and there it was, the concrete wall, the blank and staring face. And the sins of our fathers are still with us, or if not their sins their follies, and they should never, never have—
But they did.
Jim Sidney spoke to them. He spoke twice before they heard him, but this was their first time there and he was patient. And Len followed him toward the looming mass of the steam plant, feeling dwarfed and s
mall and insignificant among all that tremendous power. He set his teeth and shouted silently inside himself, It’s only because I’m afraid that I feel this way, and I’ll get over it like Sherman said. The others aren’t afraid. They’re men, just like any other men, good men, men who believe they’re doing right, doing what the government trusted them to do. I’ll learn. Gran would want me to. She said Never be afraid of knowing, and I won’t be.
I won’t be. I’ll be a part of it, helping to free the world of fear. I’ll believe, because I am here now and there is nothing else I can do.
No, not that way. I will believe because it is right. I will learn to see that it is right. And Ed Hostetter will help me, because I can trust him, and he says it’s right.
And Len went to work beside Esau on the steam plant, and all the rest of that day he did not look at the wall of the reactor. But he could feel it. He could feel it in his flesh and his bones and the tingling of his blood, and he could still feel it when he was back in Fall Creek and in his own bed. And he dreamed about it when he fell asleep.
But there was no escape from it. He went back to it the next day, and the day after that, and regularly on the days that followed, except Sunday, when he went to church and walked in the afternoons with Joan Wepplo. It reassured him to go to church. It was comforting to hear from a pulpit that God was blessing their effort, and all they had to do was remain patient and steadfast and not lose heart. It helped him to feel that they really were right. And Sherman’s treatment did seem to be working. Every day the shock of being close beside that dreadful wall grew less, perhaps because a nerve continually pricked and rubbed will become too callused to react. He got so he could look at it calmly, and think calmly, too, about what was behind it. He could learn a little about the instruments set into its face that measured the flow of force inside, and he could learn a little more, of layman’s knowledge, about what that force was and how it worked, and how in this form it was so easily controlled. He would get along like that sometimes for several days, laughing and talking with Esau about how the folks in Piper’s Run would feel if they could see them now—Mr. Nordholt, the schoolmaster, who thought he knew so much and dealt his knowledge out so sparingly lest it should corrupt the young, and the other elders of the town, who would take off your hide with a birch rod for asking questions, and, yes, Pa and Uncle David, whose answer was the harness strap. No, that wasn’t true of Pa, and Len knew all too well what Pa would say, and he didn’t like to think about that. So he would turn his thoughts to Judge Taylor, who got a man killed and a town burned up because he was afraid that it might sometime become a city, and he would think vindictively that he would like to tell Judge Taylor what was under the rock of Bartorstown and watch his face then. And I am not afraid, he would think. I was afraid, but now I am not. It is only a natural force like any other force. There is nothing evil in it, any more than in a knife, or in gunpowder. There is only evil in the way it is used, and we will see to it that no evil will ever be done with it again. We. We men of Bartorstown. And, oh Lord, the nights of cold and shivering along the misty creek beds, the days of heat and mosquitoes and hunger, the winters in strange towns all the days and nights and years when we dreamed of being men of Bartorstown!
The Long Tomorrow Page 20
