The Long Tomorrow

“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?”