He withdrew from her, slowly, carefully, as a man draws from the edge of a quicksand.
“No.”
“Why, Len? Why should you spend your whole life in this hole for something you never heard of before? Bartorstown isn’t anything to you but a dream you had once when you were a kid.”
“No,” he said again. “I told you before. Leave me alone.”
He started away, but she scuffled through the snow and stood in front of him.
“They filled you up on all that stuff about the future of the world, didn’t they? I’ve heard it since I was born. The burden, the sacred debt.” He could see her face in the frosty pale snow glimmer, all twisted up with anger she had saved and hidden for a long time and now was turning loose. “I didn’t make the bomb and I didn’t drop it, and I won’t be here a hundred years from now to see if they do it again or not. So why have I got any debt? And why have you got any, Len Colter? You answer me that.”
Words came stumbling to his tongue, but she looked so fiercely at him that he never said them.
“You haven’t,” she said. “You’re just scared. Scared to face reality and admit you’ve wasted all those years for nothing.”
Reality, he thought. I’ve been facing it every day, reality you’ve never seen. Reality behind a concrete wall.
“Let me alone,” he said. “I ain’t going, I can’t. So shut up about it.”
She laughed at him. “They told you a lot of stuff up there in Bartorstown, but I bet there’s one thing they never mentioned. I bet they never told you about Solution Zero.”
There was such a note of triumph in her voice that Len knew he should not listen any more. But she jeered at him. “You wanted to learn, didn’t you? And didn’t they tell you up there always to look for the whole truth and never be satisfied with only part of it? You want the whole truth, don’t you? Or are you afraid of that, too?”
“All right,” he said. “What is Solution Zero?”
She told him, with swift, vindictive relish. “You know how they work, building theories and turning them into equations, and feeding the equations to Clementine to solve. If they work out, that’s another step forward. If they don’t, like the last time, that’s a blind alley, a negative. But all the time they’re piling these equations into Clementine, adding up these steps toward what they call the master solution. Well, suppose
“God,” said Len, “is that possible? I thought—”
He stared at her in the snowy night, feeling sick and miserable, feeling an utter fool, betrayed.
“You thought it was certain, and the only question was when. Well, you ask old Sherman if you don’t believe me. Everybody knows about Solution Zero, but you don’t hear them talk about it, any more than they talk about how they’re going to die someday. You ask. And then you figure how much of your life
She left him. She had a genius for knowing when to leave him. He did not go on to the party. He went home and sat alone, brooding, until Hostetter came in, and by that time he was in such a mean, low mood that he didn’t give him a chance to shut the door before he demanded, “What’s this about Solution Zero?”
There was a cloud on Hostetter’s brow, too. “Probably just what you heard,” he said, taking off his coat and hat.
“Everybody’s kept mighty quiet about it.”
“I advise you to, too. It’s a superstition we’ve got here.”
He sat down and began to unlace his boots. Snow was melting from them in little puddles on the puncheon floor. Len said, “I don’t wonder.”
Hostetter methodically unlaced his boots.
“I thought they knew,” Len said. “I thought they were sure of it.”
“Research isn’t done that way.”
“But how can they spend all that time, and maybe that much more again, if they know it might be all for nothing?”
“Because how would they know if they didn’t try? And because there isn’t any other way to do it.” Hostetter flung his boots in the corner by the potbellied stove. Usually he set them there, neatly, and not too close to the heat.
“But that’s a crazy way,” said Len.
“Is it? When your pa put seed in the ground, did he have a guarantee it was going to come up and yield him a harvest? Did he know every calf and shoat and lamb was going to stay healthy and pay back all the feed and care?”
He began to pull off his shirt and pants. Len sat scowling.
“All right, that’s true. But if his crop failed or his cattle died there was always another season. What about this? What if it does come out—nothing?”
“Then they try again. If no such force-field is possible, then they think of other ways. And maybe some part of the work they did will give them a clue, so it isn’t all lost.” He slapped his clothes over the hide-seated chair and climbed into his bunk. “Hell, how do you think the human race ever learned anything, except by trial and error?”
“But it all takes such a long, long time,” said Len.
“Everything takes a long time. Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life, and what are you complaining about, anyway? You just got here. Wait till you’re as old as the rest of us. Then you might have some reason.”
He turned his back and covered his head with the blanket. After a while Len blew out the lamp.
The next day it was all over Fall Creek that Julio Gutierrez had got drunk at Sherman’s and knocked Frank Erdmann down, and Ed Hostetter had stepped in and practically carried Gutierrez home. A brawl between the senior physicist and the chief electronics engineer was scandal enough to keep the tongues all wagging, but it seemed to Len that there was a darker, sadder note in the gossip, a shadow of discouragement. Or maybe that was only because he had dreamed all night of rust in the wheat and new lambs dying.
27
Esau came banging at the door before it was light. It was the third morning in January, a Monday, and the snow was coming down in a solid desperate rush as though God had suddenly commanded it to bury the world before lunch. “Ain’t you ready?” he asked Len. “Well, hurry up, this snow’s going to slow us down enough as it is.”
Hostetter stuck his head out of the bunk. “What’s all the rush?”
“Clementine,” said Esau. “The big machine. They’re going to test her this morning, and Erdmann said we could watch before work. Hurry up, can’t you?”
“Let me get my boots on,” Len grumbled. “She won’t run away.”
Hostetter said to Esau, “Do you figure you can work with Clementine someday?”
“No,” said Esau, shaking his head. “Too much math and stuff. I’m going to learn radio instead. After all, that’s what got me here. But I sure do want to see that big brain do its thinking. Are you ready now? You sure? All right, let’s go!”
The world was white, and blind. The snow fell straight down, with hardly a vagrant breath of air to set it swirling. They groped their way through the village, still able to follow the deep-trodden lanes, and conscious of the houses even if they could not really see them. Out on the road it was different. It was like being in the fields at home when it snowed like this, with no landmark, no direction, and the same old dizzy feeling came over Len. Everything was gone but up and down, and presently even that would go, and there was not even any sound left in the world.
“You’re going off the road,” said Esau, and he floundered back from the drifted ditch. Then it was Esau’s turn. They walked close together, making the usual comments on the cursedness of fate and the weather, and Len
