“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,
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 trying 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
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.”
