said suddenly, “You’re happy here, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” said Esau. “I wouldn’t go back to Piper’s Run if you gave me the place.”
He meant it. Then he asked, “Aren’t you?”
“Sure,” said Len. “Sure.”
They plowed on, the chill feathery flakes patting their faces, trying to fill up their noses and mouths and smother them quietly, whitely, because they disturbed the even blankness of the road.
“What do you think?” asked Len. “Will they ever find the answer? Or will it come out zero?”
“Hell,” said Esau, “I don’t care. I got enough of my own to do.”
“Don’t you care about anything?” Len growled.
“Sure I do. I care about doing what I want to do, and not having a lot of damn fool old men telling me I can’t. That’s what I care about. That’s why I like it here.”
“Yes,” said Len. “Sure.” And that’s true, you can do what you want and say what you want and think what you want—except one thing. You can’t say you don’t believe in what they believe in, and that way it isn’t much different from Piper’s Run.
They stumbled and blundered up the slope, between the artfully tumbled boulders. About halfway up to the gate Esau started and swore, and Len shied too as he sensed a dark dim shape moving, in all that whiteness, furtively among the rocks.
The shape spoke to them, and it was Gutierrez. The snow was piled up thick across the top of his shoulders and on his cap, as though he had been standing still in it for some time, waiting. But he was sober, and his face was perfectly composed, and pleasant.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said. “I seem to have mislaid my own key to the gate. Do you mind if I go in with you?”
The question was purely rhetorical. The three of them walked on together up the slope. Len kept glancing uneasily at Gutierrez, thinking of the long night hours spent with the papers and the jug. He felt sorry for him. He was also afraid of him. He wanted desperately to question him about Solution Zero, and why they couldn’t be sure a thing existed before they spent a couple of hundred years in hunting for it. He wanted to so much that he was certain Esau would blurt the question out, and then Gutierrez would knock them both down. But nobody said anything. Esau, too, must have been awed into wisdom.
Beyond the safety gate there was a drift of snow, and then only the darkness and the dank, freezing chill of a place shut off forever from the sun. Gutierrez went ahead. He had stumbled that first time, but now he did not stumble, walking steadily, his head held high and his back very straight. Len could hear him breathing, heavy breathing like that of a man who had been running, but Gutierrez had not been running. Where the passage bent and the light came on, far down over the inner door, he had left them far behind, and Len had a curious cold feeling that the man had forgotten them entirely.
They stood side by side again under the scanners. Gutierrez looked straight ahead at the steel door until it swung open, and then he strode away down the hall. Jones came out of the monitor room and looked after him, wondering out loud, “What’s he doing here?”
Esau shook his head. “He came in with us. Said he lost his key. I suppose he’s got some work to do.”
Jones said, “Erdmann won’t be happy. Oh well. Nobody told me to keep him out, so my conscience is clear.” He grinned. “Let me know what happens, huh?”
“He was drunk the other night,” said Len. “I don’t reckon anything will happen.”
“I hope not,” said Esau. “I want to see that brain work.”
They left their coats in a locker room and hurried on down to the next level, past the picture of Hiroshima, past the victims with their tragic impassive eyes. And the voices reached them from beyond the door.
“No, I am sorry, Frank. Please let me say it.”
“Forget it, Julio. We all do things. Forget it.”
“Thank you,” said Gutierrez, with immense dignity, with great contrition.
Len hesitated outside, looking at Esau, whose face was a study in violent indecision.
“How does she go?” asked Gutierrez.
“Fine,” said Erdmann. “Smooth as silk.”
Their voices fell silent. Len’s heart came up into his throat and stuck there, and a cold cord was knotted through his belly. Because there was now another voice audible in the room, a voice he had never heard before. A small, dry, busy whisper-and-click, the voice of Clementine.
Esau heard it, too. “I don’t care,” he whispered. “I’m going in.”
He did, and Len followed him, walking softly. He looked at Clementine, and she was no longer sleeping. The many eyes on the panel board were bright and winking, and all through that mighty grid of wires there was a stir and a quiver, a subtle pulse of life.
The selfsame pulse, thought Len, that beats down there below. The heart and the brain.
“Oh,” said Erdmann, almost with relief. “Hello.”
The high-speed printer burst into a sudden chatter.
Len started violently. The eyes on the panel board winked as though with laughter, and then it was all quiet, all dark again, with the exception of a steady light that burned as a signal that Clementine was awake.
Esau sucked in his breath. But he did not speak because Gutierrez beat him to it.
He had taken some papers out of his pocket. He did not seem to be aware that anyone was there but Erdmann. He held the papers in his hands and said, “My wife felt that I shouldn’t come here and bother you today. She hid my key to the safety gate. But of course this was far too important to wait.”
He looked down at the papers. “I’ve gone over this whole sequence of equations again. I found where the mistake was.”
Something tightened and became wary behind Erdmann’s face. “Yes?”
“It’s perfectly plain, you can see for yourself. Here.”
He shoved the papers into Erdmann’s hand. Erdmann began to scan through them. And now there came into his face an acute discomfort, a sorrow, a dismay.
“You can see,” said Gutierrez. “It’s plain as day. She made a mistake, Frank. I told you. You said it wasn’t possible, but she did.”
“Julio, I—” And Erdmann shook his head from side to side and glanced in desperation at Len, and found no help there, and began to shuffle again through the papers in his hands.
“Don’t you see it, Frank?”
“Well, Julio, you know I’m not mathematician enough—”
“Hell,” said Gutierrez impatiently, “how did you get to be an electronics engineer? You know enough for that. It’s all written out plain. Anybody should see it. Here.” He fumbled at the papers in Erdmann’s hands. “Here, and here, you see?”
Erdmann said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Why, run it through again. Correct it. Then we’ll have the answer, Frank. The answer.”
Erdmann moistened his lips. “But if she made a mistake once she might do it again, Julio. Why don’t you get Wentz or Jacobs—”
“No. It would take them all winter, a year. She can do it right now. You’ve tested her. You said so. You said she was smooth as silk. That’s why I wanted it to be today, while she’s still fresh and unused. She can’t possibly make the same mistake again. Run it through.”
“I—well,” said Erdmann. “Well, all right.”
He went over to the input mechanism and began to transfer onto the tape. Gutierrez waited. He still had his heavy outdoor clothes on, but he did not seem to feel that he was hot or uncomfortable. He watched Erdmann, and from time to time he glanced at the computer and smiled and nodded, like a man who has caught someone else in an error and thereby vindicated himself. Len had withdrawn into the background. He did not like the look on Erdmann’s face. He began to wonder if he should go, and then the lights on the panel began to glow and wink at him, and the dim voice hummed and murmured, and he was as fascinated as Esau and could not go.
He was startled when Erdmann spoke to them. “I’ll be free in a bit. Then I’ll answer your questions.”
“Would you rather we’d come back later?” asked Len.
“No,” said Erdmann, glancing at Gutierrez. “No, you stick around.”
Clementine pondered, mumbling softly. Apart from that it was very still. Gutierrez was calm, standing with
