The Long Tomorrow

by Leigh Douglass Brackett

  But the dream was different then. It was all bright and wonderful, like Gran used to tell about, and there was no darkness in it.

  He would get along that way, and he would think, Now I really have got over it. And then he would wake up screaming in the night with Hostetter shaking his shoulder.

  “What were you dreaming about?” Hostetter would ask.

  “I don’t know. A nightmare, that’s all.” He would get up and get a drink of water, and let the sweat on him dry. Then he would ask, casually, “Did I say anything?”

  “No, not that I heard. You were just yelling.”

  But he would catch Hostetter looking at him with a brooding eye, and wonder if he did not know perfectly well what the nightmare was.

  Esau’s fear ran shallower than Len’s. It was practically all physical, and once he was convinced that no unseen force was going to burn his bones to powder he got very casual and proprietory with the reactor, almost as though he had made it himself. Len would ask him sometimes, “Doesn’t it ever worry you—I mean don’t you ever think that if this reactor thing hadn’t been kept going here there wouldn’t be any need to find an answer—”

  “You heard what Sherman said. There could be other ones. Maybe enemy ones. Then where would you be?”

  “But if it was the last one in the world?”

  “Well, it ain’t hurting anything. And anyway, Sherman said even if it was it wouldn’t matter, somebody’d figure atoms out again.”

  Maybe not, maybe never. Maybe he’s only saying that to justify himself. Hostetter had a word for it. Rationalizing. Anyway, it wouldn’t be for a long time. A hundred years, two hundred, maybe longer. I’d never live to see it.

  Esau laughed. “That woman of mine, she’s sure a dandy.”

  Len didn’t go around Amity much. There was a certain chill between them, a sort of mutual embarrassment that did not make for pleasant conversations. So he asked, “How’s that?”

  “Well, when she heard about this atom power being here she had a terrible fit. Swore she was going to lose the baby, it was so bad. And now do you know what? She’s got it all fixed up in her mind that it’s a big lie just to make her think everybody here is awfully important, and she can prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Because everybody knows what atom power does, and if there’d ever been any here there wouldn’t be any canyon left, but only a big crater like the judge used to tell about.”

  “Oh,” said Len.

  “Well, it makes her happy. So I don’t argue. What’s the use? She don’t know anything about anything like that, anyway.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning. “I sure hope that kid of mine’s a boy. Maybe I can’t learn enough to work that big machine, but he could. Hell, he might even be the one to find the answer.”

  Esau was fascinated by the big machine called Clementine. He hung around it every minute he could in his off hours, asking questions of Erdmann and the technicians who were working there until Erdmann began to talk up a tremendous enthusiasm for radio every time he even met Esau in the street. Often Len would go with him. He would stand looking at the dark face of the thing until a feeling of nervousness crept over him, as though he stood by the bed of a sleeper who was not really asleep but was watching him from under closed, deceitful lids. And he would think, It is not really a brain, it does not really think, it is only called a brain, and the things it knows and the mathematics it can do are only imitations of thought. But through the night hours a creature haunted him, a creature with a great throbbing heart of hell-fire and a brain as big as Pa’s barn.

  On the whole, though, he was trying hard and adjusting pretty well. But there were other hours, waking hours, in which another creature haunted him and left him little peace. And this was a human creature and no nightmare. This was a girl named Joan.

  25

  Three different groups of strangers came into Fall Creek before snow, stayed briefly to trade, and went away again. Two of them were little bands of dark hardy men who followed the wild herds, hunters, and horse tamers, offering half-broken colts in exchange for flour, sugar, and corn whiskey. The third and last were New Ishmaelites. There were about twenty-five of them, demanding powder and shot as a gift to the Lord’s anointed. They would not stay the night in Fall Creek, nor come in past the edges of the town, as though they were afraid of contamination, but when Sherman sent them out what they wanted they began to sing and pray, waving their arms and crying hallelujah. Half the people in Fall Creek had come out to watch them, and Len was there too, with Joan Wepplo.

  “One of ’em will preach pretty soon,” she said. “That’s what everybody’s waiting for.”

  “I’ve seen enough preaching,” muttered Len. But he stayed. The wind was icy, blowing down the canyon from snow fields on the high peaks. Everybody was wearing cowhide or horsehide coats against it, but the New Ishmaelites had nothing but their shrouds and their goatskins to flap about their naked legs. They did not seem to mind it.

  “They suffer terribly in the winters, just the same,” said Joan. “Starve to death, and freeze. Our men find their bodies in the spring, sometimes a whole band of them, kids and all.” She looked at them with cold contemptuous eyes. “You’d think they’d give the kids a chance, at least. Let them grow up enough to make up their own minds about freezing to death.”

  The children, bony and blue with the chill, stamped and shouted and tossed their tangled mops of hair. They would never be able to make up their own minds about anything, even if they did grow up. Habit would have got too big a start on them. Len said, “I guess they can’t afford to, any more than your people or mine.”

  A man stepped out of the group and began to preach. His hair and beard were a dirty gray, but Len thought that he was not as old as he looked. New Ishmaelites did not seem to get very old. He wore a goatskin, greasy and foul, with the hair worn off it in big patches. The bones of his chest stood out like a bird cage. He shook his fists at the people of Fall Creek and cried:

  “Repent, repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand! You who live for the flesh and the sins of the flesh, your end is near. The Lord has spoken in flame and thunder, the earth has opened and swallowed the unrighteous, and some have said, This is all, He has punished us and now we are forgiven, now we can forget. But I tell you that God in His mercy only gave you a little more time, and that time is nearly gone, and you have not repented! And what will you say when the heavens open, and God comes to judge the world? How will you beg and plead and cry out for mercy, and what will your luxuries and your vanities buy you then? Nothing but hell-fire! Fire and brimstone and everlasting pain, unless you repent and do penance for your sins!”

  The wind made his words thin and blew them far away, repent, repent, like a fading echo down the canyon, as though repentance was already a lost hope. And Len thought, What if he knew, what if I was to go and shout it at him, what’s up the canyon there not half a mile away? Then what good would it all be to him, his dirty goatskin and the murders he’s done in the name of faith?

  Get out. Get out, crazy old man, and stop your shouting.

  He did, at last, seeming to feel that he had made sufficient payment for the gift. He rejoined the group and they all moved off up the winding road to the pass. The wind had got stronger, whistling cruelly past the rocks, and they bent a little under it and the steepness of the climb, their long hair blown out in front of them and their ragged garments lashing around their legs. Len shivered involuntarily.

  “I used to feel sorry for them, too,” Joan said, “until I realized that they’d kill us all in a minute if they could.” She looked down at herself, at her coat of calfskin with the brown and white outside and her woolen skirt and her booted legs. “Vanity,” she said. “Luxury.” And she laughed, very short and hard. “The dirty old fool. He doesn’t know the meaning of the words.”

  She lifted her eyes to Len. They were bright with some secret thought.

  “I could show you, Len. What those words mean.�
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  Her eyes disturbed him. They always did. They were so keen and sharp and she always seemed to be thinking so fast behind them, thoughts he could not follow. He knew now she was challenging him in some way, so he said, “All right, then, show me.”

  “You’ll have to come to my house.”

  “I’m coming there for dinner anyhow. Remember?”

  “I mean right now.”

  He shrugged. “Okay.”

  They walked back through the lanes of Fall Creek.

  When they reached the house he followed her inside. It was quiet, except for a couple of flies buzzing on a sunny windowpane, and it felt warm after the wind. Joan took off her coat.

  “I guess my folks are still out,” she said. “I guess they won’t be back for a while. Do you mind?”

  “No,” said Len. “I don’t mind.” He took off his own coat and sat down.

  Joan wandered over to the window, slapping vaguely at the flies. She had walked fast all the way, but now she did not seem in any hurry.

  “Do you still like working in the Hole?”

  “Sure,” said Len warily. “It’s fine.”

  Silence.

  “Have they found the answer yet?”

  “No, but as soon as Erdmann—Now why ask a question like that? You know they haven’t.”

  “Has anybody told you how soon they will?”

  “You know better than that, too.”

  Silence again, and one of the flies lay dead on the floor.

  “Almost a hundred years,” she said softly, looking out the window. “It seems such an awful long time. I just don’t know if we can stand it for another hundred.”

  She turned around. “I don’t know if I can stand it for another one.”

  Len got up, not looking straight at her. “Maybe I better go.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, your folks aren’t here, and—”

  “They’ll be back in time for dinner.”

  “But it’s a long time till dinner.”

  “Well,” she said, “don’t you want to see what you came for?” She showed him the edges of her teeth, white and laughing. “You wait.”

  She ran into the next room and shut the door. Len sat down again. He kept twisting his hands together, and his temples felt hot. He knew the feeling. He had had it before, in the rose arbor, in the judge’s dark garden with Amity. He could hear Joan rummaging around in the room. There was a sound like the lid of a trunk banging against the wall. A long time went by. He wondered what the devil she was doing and listened nervously for footsteps on the porch, knowing all the time that her folks would not be back because if they were going to come she would not be doing this, whatever it was.

  The door opened and she came out

  She was wearing a red dress. It was faded a little, and there were streaks and creases in it from having been folded away for a long time, but those were unimportant things. It was red. It was made of some soft, shiny, slithery stuff that rustled when she moved, and it came clear down to the floor, hiding her feet, but that was about all it hid. It fitted tight around her waist and hips and outlined her thighs when she walked forward, and above the waist there wasn’t very much at all. She held out her arms at the sides and turned around slowly. Her back and shoulders were bare, white and gleaming in the sunlight that fell through the window, and her breasts were sharply outlined in the red cloth, showing above it in two half-moon curves, and her black hair fell down dark and glossy over her white skin.

  “It belonged to my great-grandmother. Do you like it?”

  Len said, “Christ.” He stared and stared, and his face was almost as red as the dress. “It’s the most indecent thing I ever saw.”

  “I know,” she said, “but isn’t it beautiful?” She ran her hands slowly down her front and out across the skirt, savoring the rustle, the softness. “This was real vanity, real luxury. Listen, how it whispers. What do you think that dirty old fool would say if he could see it?”

  She was quite close to him now. He could see the fine white texture of her shoulders and the way her breasts rose and fell when she breathed, with the bright red cloth pressing them tight. She was smiling. He realized suddenly that she was handsome, not pretty like Amity had been, but dark-eyed handsome even if she wasn’t very tall. He looked into her eyes and suddenly he realized that she was there, not just a girl, not just a Joan Wepplo, but herself and something happened to him inside like when the electric lights came on in the dark tunnel that led to Bartorstown. And this feeling he had never had for Amity.

  He reached out and took hold of her and she held up her mouth to him and laughed, a deep throaty little laugh, excited and pleased. A wave of heat swept over Len. The red cloth was silky, soft and rustling under his fingers, stretched tight over the warmth of her body. He put his mouth down over hers and kissed her, and kissed her again, and all by themselves his hands came up onto her bare shoulders and dug hard into the white skin. And this too was not like it had been with Amity.

  She pulled away from him. She was not laughing now, and her eyes were as hard and bright as two black stars burning at him.

  “Someday,” she said fiercely, “you’ll want a way out of this place, and then you come to me, Len Colter. Then you come, but not before.”

  She ran away into the other room again and slammed the door and shot the bolt in its socket, and it was no use trying to get in after her. And when she came out again in her regular clothes, a long time later, her folks were coming up the path and it was as if nothing had been said or done.

  But it was Joan, in another place, at another time, who told him about Solution Zero.

  26

  Winter came. Fall Creek became an isolated pocket of light and life in a vast emptiness of cold and rock and wind and blizzard snows. The pass was blocked. Nothing would move in or out of the canyon before spring. The snow piled high around the houses and drifted in the lanes, and the mountains were all white, magnificent on a clear day with the sun on them, ghostly in the dusk like the mountains of a dream, but too large and still to have in them any friendliness for man. And the air they breathed down across their icy slopes was bitter as the chill of death.

  In Bartorstown there was neither winter not summer, night nor day. The lights burned and the air went hushing through the rock rooms, never altering, never changing. The Power entrapped behind the concrete wall gave of its strength silently, untiring, the deathless heart beating and throbbing in the rock. Above in its chamber the brain slept, Clementine, the foolish name for the hope of the world, while men soothed and healed the frayed wires and the worn-out transistors of her being. And above that, in the monitor room, the eyes watched and the ears listened, on guard against the world. Len worked at his job, and sweated and struggled over the books he was advised to read, and thought how much he was learning and how few other people in the ignorant, fearful, guilt-ridden, sin-stricken world outside would have been able to do what he and Esau had done, and what they would do to make tomorrow different from the terrible yesterday. He wondered why the evil dreams still caught him unawares in the jungles of sleep, and he envied Esau his untroubled nights, but he did not say so. He hardly ever thought any more of the Bartorstown he had spent half his life to find, accepting the reality, and a little more of his youth slipped away from him. He thought about Joan, and tried to stay away from her, and couldn’t. He was afraid of her, but he was even more afraid to admit that he was afraid of her, because then in some obscure way she would have beaten him, she would have proved that he did want to leave Fall Creek and run away from Bartorstown. She was a challenge that he didn’t dare ignore. She was also a girl, and he was crazy about her.

  Other people had work to do, too. Hostetter spent long hours with Sherman, doing what it seemed he had come home to do—giving the advice gained from his years of experience on how to make the system of outside trade work smoother and better. He was a different-looking Hostetter these days, with his beard trimmed short and his hair cro
pped, and the New Mennonite dress laid aside. Len had done this a long time ago, so he could not say why it seemed wrong, but it did. Perhaps it was only because he had grown up with one image of Hostetter firmly fixed in his mind, and it was hard to change it. They still shared the same room, but they each had their own work, and Hostetter had his own friends, and Len’s spare time was pretty much taken up with Joan. After a while he got the feeling that the Wepplos figured they would probably get married any day. It made him feel guilty every time he went there, remembering what Joan had said, but not guilty enough to keep him away.

  “Just girl talk,” he would say to himself, “like Amity teasing me along when it was really Esau she wanted. They don’t know what they’re after. She’s got an idea about outside just like I had about here, but she wouldn’t like it.”