American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “What?” said Kovacs.

  “Well, the engine. I mean, coming from Bartorstown, you could have any kind of an engine you want, and I thought——”

  Kovacs shook his head. “Wood and coal are all the fuel there is. We have to use ’em. Besides, you stop a lot of places along the river, and a lot of people come aboard, and the first thing they want to see is your engine. They’d know in a minute if it was different. And suppose you have a breakdown? What would you do then, send all the way back to Bartorstown for parts?”

  “Yeah,” said Esau. “I suppose so.” He was obviously disappointed. Kovacs went away. Esau finished taking his shirt off, got a shovel, and fell in beside Len at the coalbin. They fed the fire while Charlie worked the draft and watched the safety valve. The thump of the piston came faster and faster, churning the paddle wheel, and the barge picked up speed, going away with the current. Finally Charlie motioned them to hold it for a while, and they stopped, leaning on their shovels and wiping the sweat off their faces. And Esau said, “I don’t think Bartorstown is going to turn out much like we thought it would.”

  “Nothing,” said Len, “ever seems to.”

  It seemed like an awfully long time before another man came with word that the race was over and told Len and Esau they could quit. They stumbled up on deck, and Len felt the barge jerk and quiver as the paddles were reversed. It was not the first time that night, and Len thought that Kovacs must either have, or be himself, the devil and all of a pilot.

  He leaned against the deckhouse, shivering in the cool air. It was that slack, dark time when the moon has left the sky and the sun hasn’t come yet. The bank was a low black smudge with an edge of mist along it. Ahead it seemed to curve in like a solid wall, as though the river ended there, and in a minute the barge would run head on into it. Len yawned and listened to the frogs. The barge swung, and there was a bend in the river. In the hollow of the bend there was a village, the square shapes of the houses sensed rather than seen. Close by the end of the point a couple of red lights burned, hung apparently in midair.

  Up on the foredeck, a lantern was shown and then covered three times in quick succession. From very low down on the water came an answering series of blinks. Because he knew it was there, Len was able to make out a dim canoe with a man in it, and then all at once the huge spectral shape of the dredger seemed to spring at him out of the gloom. It slid by, a skeletal thing like a partly dismantled house set on a flat platform, very massive and weighted with the heavy iron scoop. Then it was behind them, and Len watched the red lights. For a long time they did not seem to move, and then they seemed to shift a little, and then a little more, and then with a ponderous and mighty slowness they swung in a long arc toward the opposite shore and stopped, and the noise came down the river a moment later.

  Esau said, “They’ll be lucky if they have her out of there by this time tomorrow.”

  Len nodded. He could feel the tension lifting, or perhaps it was only because for the first time in weeks he felt safe himself. The Refuge men could not follow now, and whatever word they might send ahead would be too late to stop them.

  “I’m going to turn in,” he said, and went into the deckhouse. Amity still slept behind her curtain. Len picked a bunk as far away from hers as he could get, and fell almost instantly asleep. The last thought he had was of Esau being a father, and it didn’t seem right at all, somehow. Then the face of Watts intruded, and a horrible smell of damp rope. Len choked and whimpered, and then the darkness flowed over him, still and deep.

  16

  They went through the canal next morning, one of a long line of craft, towboats, steam barges, flatboats, going down with the current all the way to the gulf, traders’ floating stores that were like the shoregoing wagons, going to lonely little towns where the river was the only road. It was a slow process, even though Kovacs said that Rosen was locking them through faster than usual, and there was a lot of time just to sit and watch. The sun had come up in a welter of mist. That was gone now, but the quality of the heat had changed from the dry burning clarity of the day before. The air was thick and heavy, and the slightest movement brought a wash of sweat over the skin. Kovacs sniffed and said it smelled of storm.

  “About midafternoon,” said Hostetter, squinting at the sky. “Yup,” said Kovacs. “Better start figuring a place to tie up.” He went away, busy nursing his barge. Hostetter was sitting on the deck in what shade he could find under the edge of the house, and Len sat beside him. Amity had gone back to her bunk, and Esau was with her. From time to time Len could hear the murmur of their voices through the small slit windows, but not any of the words they said.

  Hostetter glanced enviously after Kovacs and then looked at his own big hands with the thick pads of callus on them from the long handling of reins. “I miss ’em,” he said.

  “What?” said Len, who had been thinking his own thoughts.

  “My horses. The wagon. Seems funny, after all these years, just to sit. I wonder if I’m going to like it.”

  “I thought you were happy, going home.”

  “I am. And high time, too, while most of my old friends are still around. But this business of leading two lives has its drawbacks. I’ve been away from Bartorstown for close onto thirty years and only been back once in all that time. Places like Piper’s Run seem more like home to me now. When I told them last fall I was quitting the road, they asked me to settle there—and you know something? I could have done it.”

  He brooded, watching the men at work on the lock without really seeing them.

  “I suppose it’ll all come back to me,” he said. “After all, the place you were born and grew up in—— But it’ll seem funny to shave again. And I’ve worn these clothes so long——”

  Water sucked and purled out of the lock and the barge sank slowly until you had to look up to see the top of the bank. The sun beat down, and no breeze stirred in that sunken pocket. Len half shut his eyes and drew his feet in under him because they were in the sun and burning.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  Hostetter turned his head and looked at him. “A trader.”

  “I mean really. What are you in Bartorstown?”

  “A trader.”

  Len frowned. “I guess I don’t understand. I thought all the Bartorstown men were something—scientists, or machine makers—something.”

  “I’m a trader,” repeated Hostetter. “Kovacs, he’s a river-boat man. Rosen is a good administrator and keeps the canal in repair and running smoothly because it’s vital to us. Petto, back there at Indian Ferry—I used to know Petto’s father, and he was a pretty good man in electronics, but the boy is a trader like me, except that he stays more in one place. There are only so many potential scientists and technicians in Bartorstown, like any community. And they need the rest of us to keep them going.”

  “You mean,” said Len slowly, revising some deep-rooted ideas, “that all these years you’ve really been——”

  “Trading,” said Hostetter. “Yes. There are over four hundred people in Bartorstown, not counting us outside. They all have to eat and wear clothes. Then there’s other things too, iron and alloys and chemicals and drugs, and so on. It all has to be brought in from outside.”

  “I see,” said Len. There was a long pause. Then he said sadly, “Four hundred people. That isn’t even half as many as there were in Refuge.”

  “It’s about ninety per cent more than there were ever supposed to be. Originally there were thirty-five or forty men, all specialists, working on this hush-hush project for the government. Then when the reaction came after the war and things began to get nasty, they brought in a lot of other men and their families, scientists, teachers, people who weren’t very popular on the outside any more. We’ve been lucky. There were a lot of other secret installations in the country, but Bartorstown is the only one that wasn’t discovered or betrayed, or didn’t have to be abandoned.”

  Len’s hands tightened on his knees, and his eyes we
re bright. “What were they doing there—the forty men, the specialists?”

  A kind of a peculiar look came into Hostetter’s face. But he only said, “They were trying to find an answer to something. I can’t tell you what it was, Len. All I can tell you is, they didn’t find it.”

  “Are they still trying?” asked Len. “Or can’t you tell me that, either?”

  “You wait till you get there. Then you can ask all the questions you want to, from the men who are authorized to answer them. I’m not.”

  “When I get there,” Len murmured. “It sure sounds strange. When I get to Bartorstown—I’ve said it a million times in my mind, but now it’s real. When I get to Bartorstown.”

  “Be careful how you throw that name around.”

  “Don’t worry. But—what’s it like there?”

  “Physically,” said Hostetter, “it’s a hole. Piper’s Run, Refuge, Louisville over there, they’ve all got it beat a mile.”

  Len looked at the pleasant village strung out along the canal, and at the wide green plain beyond it, dotted with farmsteads and grazing cattle, and he said, remembering a dream, “No lights? No towers?”

  “Lights? Well, yes and no. Towers—I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh,” said Len, and was silent. The barge glided on. Pitch bubbled gently in the deck seams and it was an effort to breathe. After a while Hostetter took off his broad hat and wiped his forehead and said, “Oh no, it’s too hot. This can’t last.”

  Len glanced up at the sky. It was cloudless and intensely blue, but he said, “It’s going to break. We’ll get a good one.” He turned his attention back to the village. “That used to be a city, didn’t it?”

  “A big one.”

  “I remember now, it was named after the king of France. Mr. Hostetter——”

  “Hm?”

  “Whatever happened to those countries—I mean, like France?”

  “They’re just about like us—the ones on the winning side. Lord knows what happened to the ones that lost. The whole world has jogged back to pretty much what it was when Louisville was this size before, and this canal was first dug. With a difference, though. Then they were anxious to grow and change.”

  “Will it always stay like this?”

  “Nothing,” said Hostetter, “ever stays always like anything.”

  “But not in my time,” Len murmured, echoing Judge Taylor’s words, “nor in my children’s.” And in his mind was the far, sad sound of the falling down of high buildings built on clouds.

  “In the meantime,” said Hostetter, “it’s a good world. Enjoy it.”

  “Good,” said Len bitterly. “When it’s full of men like Burdette, and Watts, and the people who killed Soames?”

  “Len, the world has always been full of men like that, and it always will be. Don’t ask the impossible.” He looked at Len’s face, and then he smiled. “I shouldn’t ask the impossible either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a matter of age,” said Hostetter. “Don’t worry. Time will take care of it.”

  They passed through the lower locks and out onto the river again below the great falls. By midafternoon the whole northern sky had turned a purplish black, and a silence had fallen over the land. “Line squalls,” said Kovacs, and sent Len and Esau down to stoke again. The barge went boiling downstream, her paddles lashing up the spray. It got stiller yet, and hotter, until it seemed the world would have to burst with it, and then the first crackings and rumblings of that bursting made themselves heard over the scrape of the shovels and the clang of the fire door. Finally Sam put his head down the ladder and shouted to Charlie to let off and bank up. Drenched and reeling, Len and Esau emerged into a portentous twilight, with the sky drawn down over the country like a black cowl. They were tied up now in midstream in the lee of an island, and the north bank rose up in a protecting bluff.

  “Here she comes,” said Hostetter.

  They ducked for the shelter of the house. The wind hit first, laying the trees over and turning up the lighter sides of their leaves. Then the rain came, riding the wind in a white smother that blotted everything from sight, and it was mixed with leaves and twigs and flying branches. After that was the lightning, and the thunder, and the cracking of trees, and then after a long time only the rain was left, pouring down straight and heavy as though it was tipped out of a bucket. They went out on deck and made sure everything was fast, shivering in the new chill, and then took turns sleeping. The rain slacked and almost stopped, and then came on again with a new storm, and during his watch Len could see lightning flaring all along the horizon as the squalls danced on the forward edge of the cool air mass moving down from the north. About midnight, through diminished rain and distant thunder, Len heard a new sound, and knew that it was the river rising.

  They started on again in a clear bright dawn, with a fine breeze blowing and a sky like scoured porcelain dotted with white clouds, and only the torn branches of the trees and the river water roiled with mud and debris were left to show the wildness of the night. Half a mile below where Kovacs had tied up they passed a towboat and a string of barges, tossed up all along the south bank, and below that again a mile or two was a trader’s boat sunk in the shallows where she had run onto a snag.

  That was the beginning of a long journey, and a long strange period for Len that had the quality of a dream. They followed the Ohio to its mouth and turned north into the Mississippi. They were breasting the current now, beating a slow and careful way up a channel that switched constantly back and forth between the banks, so that the barge seemed always to be about to run onto the land beside some whitewashed marker. They used up the coal, and took on wood at a station on the Illinois side, and beat on again to the mouth of the Missouri, and after that for days they wallowed their way up the chutes of the Big Muddy. Mostly it was hot. There were storms, and rain, and around the middle of August there came a few nights cold enough to hint of fall. Sometimes the wind blew so hard against them they had to tie up and wait, and watch the downriver traffic go past them flying. Sometimes after a rain the water would rise and run so fast that they could make no headway, and then it would fall just as quickly and show them too late how the treacherous channel had shifted, and they would have to work the barge painfully and with much labor and swearing off the sand bar where she had stuck fast. The muddy water fouled the boiler, and they had to stop and clean it, and other times they had to stop for more wood. And Esau grumbled, “This is a hell of a way for Bartorstown men to travel.”

  “Esau,” said Hostetter, “I’ll tell you. If we had planes we’d be glad to fly them. But we don’t have planes, and this is better than walking—as you will find out.”

  “Do we have much farther to go?” asked Len.

  Hostetter made a pushing movement with his head against the west. “Clear to the Rockies.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Another month. Maybe more if we run into trouble. Maybe less if we don’t.”

  “And you won’t tell us what it’s like?” asked Esau. “What it’s really like, the way it looks, how it is to live there.”

  But Hostetter only said curtly, “You’ll find out when you get there.”

  He refused to talk to them about Bartorstown. He made that one statement about Piper’s Run being a pleasanter place, and then he would not say any more. Neither would the other men. No matter how the question was phrased, how subtly the conversation was twisted around to trap them, they would not talk about Bartorstown. And Len realized that it was because they were afraid to.

  “You’re afraid we might give it away,” he said to Hostetter. And then, not in any spirit of reproach but merely as a statement of fact, “I guess you don’t trust us yet.”

  “It isn’t a question of trust. It’s just that no Bartorstown man ever talks about it, and you ought to know better than to ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Len. “It’s just that we’ve thought about it so long. I guess we’ve got a lot t
o learn.”

  “Quite a lot,” said Hostetter thoughtfully. “It won’t be easy, either. So many things will jar against every belief you’ve grown up with, and I don’t care how you scoff at it, some of it sticks to you.”

  “That won’t bother me,” said Esau.

  “No,” said Hostetter, “I doubt if it will. But Len’s different.”

  “How different?” demanded Len, bristling a bit.

  “Esau plays it all by ear,” said Hostetter. “You worry.” Later, when Esau was gone, he put his hand on Len’s shoulder and smiled, giving him a close, deep look at the same time, and Len smiled back and said, “There’s times when you make me think an awful lot of Pa.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Hostetter. “I don’t mind at all.”

  17

  The character of the country changed. The green rolling forest land flattened out and thinned away, and the sky became an enormous thing, stretched incredibly across a graygreen plain that seemed to go on and on over the rim of the world, drawing a man’s gaze into its emptiness until his eyes ached with it, and until he searched hungrily for a tree or even a high bush to break the blank horizon. There were prosperous villages along the river, and Hostetter said it was good farming country in spite of how it looked, but Len hated the flat monotony of it, after the lush valleys he was used to. At night, though, there was a grandeur to it, a feeling of windy vastness all ablaze with more stars than Len had ever seen before.

  “It takes a while to get used to it,” Hostetter said. “But it has its own beauty. Most places do, if you don’t shut your eyes and your mind against it. That’s why I’m sorry I made that crack about Bartorstown.”

  “You meant it, though,” said Len. “You know what I think? I think you’re sorry you’re going back.”