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.”
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—
Esau’s voice spoke in shrill denial. “No. There ain’t any more of that left in the world.”
“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!
