American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “And all they have to do is push something?” said Esau, wetting his lips.

  Wepplo swung his hand again, and repeated, “Boom! ”

  “They must have really had something almighty secret here,” said Esau, “to go to all that trouble.”

  Wepplo opened his mouth, and Hostetter said, “Give a hand with the wagon here, will you?” Wepplo shut his mouth again and leaned onto the tail gate of a wagon that seemed already to be rolling smoothly. Len looked sharply at Hostetter, but his head was bent and his whole attention appeared to be on the pushing. Len smiled. He did not say anything.

  Beyond the cut was a road. It was a good, wide road, and Hostetter said it had been made a long time ago before the Destruction. He called it a switchback. It zigzagged right up the side of a mountain, and Len could still see the marks on the rock where huge iron teeth had bitten it away. They moved up slowly, the teams grunting and puffing, and the men helping them, and Hostetter pointed to a ragged notch very high up against the sky. He said, “Tomorrow.”

  Len’s heart began to beat fast and the nerves pricked all through his stomach. But he shook his head, and Hostetter asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “I never thought there’d be a road to it. I mean, just a road.”

  “How did you think we’d get in and out?”

  “I don’t know,” said Len, “but I thought there’d be at least walls or guards or something. Of course they can stop people in the cut back there——”

  “They could. They never have.”

  “You mean people walk right through there? And up this road? And through that pass into Bartorstown?”

  “They do,” said Hostetter, “and they don’t. Didn’t you ever hear that the best way to hide something is to leave it right out in the open?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Len. “Not at all.”

  “You will.”

  “I guess so.” Len’s eyes were shining again in that particular way, and he said softly, “Tomorrow,” as though it was a beautiful word.

  “It’s been a long way, hasn’t it?” said Hostetter. “You really wanted to come, to stick to it like that.” He was silent a minute, looking up at the pass. Then he said, “Give it time, Len. It won’t be all that you’ve dreamed about, but give it time. Don’t make any snap decisions.”

  Len turned and studied him gravely. “You keep sounding all the time like you’re trying to warn me about something.”

  “I’m just trying to tell you to—not be impatient. Give yourself a chance to get adjusted.” Suddenly, almost angrily, he said, “This is a hard life, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s hard for everybody, even in Bartorstown, and it doesn’t get any easier, and don’t expect a shiny tinsel heaven and then break your heart because it isn’t there.”

  He looked hard at Len, very briefly, and then looked away, breathing hard and doing the mechanical things with his hands that a man does when he’s upset and trying not to show it. And Len said slowly, “You hate the place.”

  He could not believe it. But when Hostetter said sharply, “That’s ridiculous, of course I don’t,” he knew that it was true.

  “Why did you come back? You could have stayed in Piper’s Run.”

  “So could you.”

  “But that’s different.”

  “No, it isn’t. You had a reason. So have I.” He walked on for a minute with his head bent down. Then he said, “Just don’t ever plan on going back.”

  He went ahead fast, leaving Len behind, and Len did not see him alone again the rest of that day and night. But he felt as shocked as he would have if, in the old days, Pa had suddenly told him that there was no God.

  He did not say anything to Esau. But he kept glancing up at the pass, and wondering. Toward late afternoon they were high enough up on the mountain that he could see back the other way, over the ridge of the scarp, to where the desert lay all lonely and burning. A terrible feeling of doubt came over him. The red and yellow rock, the sharp peaks that hung against the sky, the gray desert and the dust and the dryness, the pitiless light that was never softened by a cloud or gentled by rain, the vast ringing silences where nothing lived but the wind, all seemed to mock him with their cheerlessness and lack of hope. He wished he was back—no, not home, because he would have to face Pa there, and not in Refuge, either. Just somewhere where there was life and water and green grass. Somewhere where the ugly rock did not stand up every way you looked, like——

  Like what?

  Like the truth, when all the dreams are torn away from it?

  It wasn’t a happy thought. He tried to ignore it, but every time he saw Hostetter it came to him again. Hostetter seemed broody and withdrawn, and after they camped and had supper he disappeared. Len started to look for him and then had sense enough to stop.

  They were camped in the mouth of the pass, where there was a wide space on both sides of the road. The wind blew and it was bitterly cold. Just before dark Len noticed some letters cut in the side of a cliff above the road. They were crumbling and weatherworn, but they were big, and he could make them out. They said FALL CREEK 13 mi.

  Hostetter was gone, so Len hunted up Wepplo and asked him what they meant.

  “Can’t you read, boy? They mean just what they say. Fall Creek, thirteen miles. That’s from here to there.”

  “Thirteen miles,” said Len, “from here to Fall Creek. All right. But what’s Fall Creek?”

  “Town,” said Wepplo.

  “Where?”

  “In Fall Creek Canyon.” He pointed. “Thirteen miles.”

  He was grinning. Len began to hate the old man’s sense of humor. “What about Fall Creek?” he asked. “What does it have to do with us?”

  “Why,” said Wepplo, “it’s got damn near everything to do with us. Didn’t you know, boy? That’s where we’re going.”

  Then he laughed. Len walked away fast. He was mad at Wepplo, mad at Hostetter, mad at Fall Creek. He was mad at the world. He rolled up in his blanket and lay shivering and cursing. He was dog-tired. But it was a long time before he fell asleep, and then he dreamed. He dreamed that he was trying to find Bartorstown. He knew he was almost there, but there was fog and darkness and the road kept shifting its direction. He kept asking an old man how to get there, but the old man had never heard of Bartorstown and would only say over and over that it was thirteen miles to Fall Creek.

  They went through the pass the next day. Both Len and Hostetter were now morose and did not talk much. They crossed the saddleback before noon, and after that they went much faster, going down. The mules stepped out smartly as though they knew they were almost home. The men got cheerful and eager. Esau kept running up as often as he could get away from Amity and asking, “Are we almost there?” And Hostetter would nod and say, “Almost.”

  They came out of the pass with the afternoon sun in their eyes. The road pitched down in another switchback along the side of a cliff, and way at the bottom of the cliff there was a canyon, with the blue shadow of the opposite wall already sliding across it. Hostetter pointed. His voice was neither excited, nor happy, nor sad. It was just a voice, saying, “There it is.”

  Book Three

  19

  The wagons went down the wide steep road with the brake shoes screeching and the mules braced back on their haunches. Len looked over the edge, into the canyon. He looked a long time without speaking. Esau came and walked beside him, and they both looked. And it was Esau who turned around with his face all white and angry and shouted at Mr. Hostetter, “What do you think this is, a joke? Do you think this is real funny, bringing us all this way——”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Hostetter. He sounded tired now, all of a sudden, and impatient, and he spoke to Esau the way a man speaks to an annoying child. Esau shut up. Hostetter glanced at Len. Len did not turn or lift his head. He was still staring down into the bottom of the canyon.

  There was a town there. Seen from this height and angle it was mostly a collection of roofs, clu
stered along the sides of a stream bed where some cottonwoods grew. They were ordinary roofs of ordinary little houses such as Len had been used to seeing all his life, and he thought that many of the houses were made of logs, or slab. At the north end of the canyon was a small dam with a patch of blue water behind it. Beside the dam, straggling up a slope, there were a couple of high, queerlooking buildings. Close by them rails ran up and down the slope, leading from a hole in the cliff to a dump of broken rock. There were tiny cars on the rails. At the foot of the slope were several more buildings, low and flat ones this time, with a curving top. They were a rusty color. From the other side of the dam a short road led to another hole in the cliff, but there were no rails or cars or anything connected with this one, and rocks had rolled down across the road.

  Len could see people moving around. Smoke came from some of the chimneys. A team of tiny mules brought a string of tiny cars down the rails on the slope, and the carts were dumped. After a minute or two the sound drifted up to him, faint and thin like an echo.

  He turned and looked at Hostetter.

  “Fall Creek,” said Hostetter. “It’s a mining town. Silver. Not very high-grade ore, but good enough and a lot of it. We still take it out. There’s no secret about Fall Creek, never has been.” He swept his hand out in a brief, curt gesture. “We live here.”

  Len said slowly, “But it isn’t Bartorstown.”

  “No. That’s kind of a wrong name, anyway. It isn’t really a town at all.”

  Even more slowly, Len said, “Pa told me there was no such place. He told me it was only a state of mind.”

  “Your Pa was wrong. There is such a place, and it’s real. Real enough to keep hundreds of people working for it all their lives.”

  “But where?” said Esau furiously. “Where?”

  “You’ve waited this long. You can wait a few hours longer.”

  They went on, down the steep road. The shadow of the mountain widened and filled the canyon, and began to flow up the eastern wall to meet them. Farther down, on the breast of an old fall, a stand of pines caught the light and turned a harsh green, too bright against the red and ochers of the rock.

  Len said, “Fall Creek is just another town.”

  “You can’t get clear out of the world,” Hostetter said. “You can’t now and you couldn’t then. The houses are built of logs and slab because we had to build them out of what there was. Originally Fall Creek had electricity because it was the fashion then. Now it isn’t the fashion, so we don’t have it. Main thing is to look like everybody else, and then they don’t notice you.”

  “But a real secret place,” said Len. “A place nobody knew about.” He frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “A place you don’t dare let anybody know about now—and yet you just live openly in a town, with a road to it, and strangers come and go.”

  “When you start barring people out they know you have something to hide. Fall Creek was built first. It was built quite openly. What few people there were in this Godforsaken part of the country got used to it, got used to the trucks and a particular kind of plane going to and from it. It was only a mining town. Bartorstown was built later, behind the cover of Fall Creek, and nobody ever suspected it.”

  Len thought that over. Then he asked, “Didn’t they even guess it when all the new people started coming in?”

  “The world was full of refugees, and thousands of them headed for places just like this, as far back in the hills as they could get.”

  The shadow reached up and they went into it, and it was twilight. Lamps were being lit in the town. They were just lamps, such as were lit in Piper’s Run, or Refuge, or a thousand other towns. The road flattened out. The mules were tired, but they pricked their long ears forward and swung along fast, and the drivers yelled and made their whips crack like rifle shots. There was quite a crowd waiting for them under the cottonwoods, lanterns burning, women calling out to their men on the wagons, children running up and down and shouting. They did not look any different from any other people Len had seen in this part of the country. They wore the same kinds of clothes, and their manners were the same. Hostetter said again, as though he knew what Len was thinking, “You have to live in the world. You can’t get away from it.”

  Len said with a quiet bitterness, “There isn’t even as much here as we had in Piper’s Run. No farms, no food, nothing but rocks all around. Why do people stay here?”

  “They have a reason.”

  “It must be a mighty damn big one,” retorted Len, in a tone that said he did not believe in anything any more.

  Hostetter did not answer.

  The wagons stopped. The drivers got down and everybody that was riding got out, Esau lifting down a pale and rumpled Amity, who stared about her distrustfully. Boys and young men ran up and took the mules and led them away with the wagons. There were a terrible lot of strange faces, and after a while Len realized that they were nearly all staring at him and Esau. They hung together instinctively, close to Hostetter. Hostetter was craning his head around, yelling for Wepplo, and the old man came up grinning, with his arm around a girl. She was kind of a small girl, with dark hair and snapping dark eyes like Wepplo’s, and a face that was perhaps a little too sharp and determined. She wore a shirt with the neck open and the sleeves rolled up, and a skirt that came down just over the tops of a pair of soft high boots. She looked first at Amity, and then at Esau, and then at Len. She looked the longest at Len, and her eyes were not at all shy about meeting his.

  “My granddaughter,” said Wepplo, as though she was made of pure gold. “Joan. Mrs. Esau Colter, Mr. Esau Colter, Mr. Len Colter.”

  “Joan,” said Hostetter, “will you take Mrs. Colter with you for a while?”

  “Sure,” said Joan, rather sulkily. Amity hung onto Esau and started a protest, but Hostetter shut her up.

  “Nobody’s going to bite you. Go along, and Esau will come as soon as he can.”

  Amity went, reluctantly, leaning on the dark girl’s shoulder. She looked as big as a house, and not from the baby, either, which was still a long way off. The dark girl gave Len a sly laughing glance and then disappeared in the crowd. Hostetter nodded to Wepplo and hitched up his pants and said to Len and Esau, “All right, come on.”

  They followed him, and all along the way people stared at them and talked, not in an unfriendly way, but as though Len and Esau were of tremendous interest to them. Len said, “They don’t seem to be very used to strangers.”

  “Not strangers coming to live with them. Anyway, they’ve been hearing about you two for a long time. They’re curious.”

  “Hostetter’s boys,” said Len, and grinned for the first time in two days.

  Hostetter grinned too. He led them down a dark lane between scattered houses to where a fairly large frame house with a porch across its front was set on a slope, higher than the others and facing the mine. The clapboards were old and weathered, and the porch had been shored up underneath with logs.

  “This was built for the mine superintendent,” said Hostetter. “Sherman lives in it now.”

  “Sherman is the boss?” asked Esau.

  “Of a lot of things, yes. There’s Gutierrez and Erdmann, too. They have the say about other things.”

  “But Sherman let us come,” said Len.

  “He had to talk to the others. They all had to agree to that.”

  There was lamplight in the house. They went up the steps onto the porch, and the door opened before Hostetter could knock on it. A tall thin gray-haired woman with a pleasant face stood in the doorway, smiling and holding out her arms to Hostetter. He said, “Hello, Mary,” and she said, “Ed! Welcome home!” and kissed him on the cheek. “Well,” said Hostetter. “It’s been a long time.” “Eleven, no, twelve years,” said Mary. “It’s good to have you back.”

  She looked at Len and Esau.

  “This is Mary Sherman,” said Hostetter, as though he felt he had to explain, “an old friend. She used to play with my sister when we were all you
ng—my sister’s dead now. Mary, these are the boys.”

  He introduced them. Mary Sherman smiled at them, half sadly, as though she had much she could say. But all she did say was, “Yes, they’re waiting for you. Come inside.”

  They stepped into the living room. The floor was bare and clean, the pine boards worn down to the grain. The furniture was old, most of it, and plain, of a kind Len had seen before that was made before the Destruction. There was a big table with a lamp on it, and three men were sitting around it. Two of them were about Hostetter’s age, and one was younger, perhaps forty or so. One of the older ones, a big square blocky man with a clean-shaven chin and light eyes, got up and shook hands with Hostetter. Then Hostetter shook hands with the others, and there was some talk. Len looked around uncomfortably and saw that Mary Sherman was already gone.

  “Come here,” said the big blocky man, and Len realized that he was being spoken to. He stepped into the circle of lamplight, close to the table. Esau came with him. The big man studied them. His eyes were the color of a winter sky just before snow, very keen and penetrating. The younger man sat beside him, leaning forward on the table. He had reddish hair and he wore spectacles and his face looked tired, not as though he needed to rest right now but as though it always looked tired. Behind him, in the shadows between the table and the big iron stove, was the third man, small, swarthy and bitter, with a neat pointed beard as white as linen. Len stared back at them, not knowing whether to be angry or awed or what, and beginning to sweat from sheer nervousness.

  The big man said abruptly, “I’m Sherman. This is Mr. Erdmann”—the younger man nodded—“and Mr. Gutierrez.” The small bitter man grunted. “I know you’re both Colters. But which is which?”

  They named themselves. Hostetter had withdrawn into the shadows, and Len heard him filling his pipe.

  Sherman said to Esau, “Then you’re the one with the—ah— expectant mother.”

  Esau started to explain, and Sherman stopped him. “I know all about it, and I’ve already given Hostetter his tongue-lashing for exceeding authority, so we can forget it, except for one thing. I want you to bring her here at exactly ten o’clock tomorrow morning. The minister will be here. Nobody needs to know about it. Is that understood?”