This part of it was only a continuation of the tunnel, but here the rock was dressed very smooth and neat, and lights were set all along it in a trough sunk in the roof. The air had a funny taste to it, flat and metallic. Len could feel it moving over his face, and there was a soft, soft hushing sound that seemed to belong to it. His nerves had tightened now, and he was sweating. He had a brief and awful vision of the outside of the mountain that was now on top of him, and he thought he could feel every pound of it weighing down on him. “Is it all like this?” he asked. “Underground, I mean.”
Sherman nodded. “They put a lot of places underground in those days. Under a mountain was about the only safe place you could get.”
Esau was peering down the corridor. It seemed to go a long way in. “Is it very big?”
Gutierrez answered this time. “How big is big? If you look at Bartorstown one way it’s the biggest thing there is. It’s all yesterday and all tomorrow. Look at it another way, it’s a hole in the ground, just big enough to bury a man in.”
About twenty feet away down the corridor a man stepped out of a doorway to meet them. He was a young fellow, about Esau’s age. He spoke with easy respect to Sherman and the others, and then stared frankly at the Colters.
“Hello,” he said. “I saw you coming through the lower pass. My name’s Jones.” He held out his hand.
They shook it and moved closer to the door. The rock-cut chamber beyond was fairly large, and it was crammed with an awful lot of things, boards and wires and knobs and stuff like the inside of a radio. Esau looked around, and then he looked at Jones and said, “Are you the one that pushes the button?”
They were all puzzled for a minute, and then Hostetter laughed. “Wepplo was joshing them about that. No, Jones would have to pass that responsibility on.”
“Matter of fact,” said Sherman, “we’ve never pushed that button yet. But we keep it in working order, just in case. Come here.”
He motioned them to follow him, and they did, with the cautious tenseness of men or animals who find themselves in a strange place and feel they may want to get out of it in a hurry. They were careful not to touch anything. Jones went ahead of them and began casually doing things with some of the knobs and switches. He did not quite swagger. Sherman pointed to a square glass window, and Len stared into it for a confused second or two before he realized that it could hardly be a window at all, and if it were it couldn’t be looking into the narrow rocky cut that was away on the other side of the ridge.
“The scanners pick up the image and transmit it back to this screen,” Sherman said, and before he could go on Esau cried out in a child’s tone of delighted wonder, “Teevee!”
“Same principle,” said Sherman. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“Our grandmother. She told us a lot of things.”
“Oh yes. You mentioned her, I think—talking about Bartorstown.” Smoothly, but with unmistakable firmness, he drew their attention to the screen again. “There’s always somebody on duty here, to watch. Nobody can get through that gateway unseen, in—or out.”
“What about nighttime?” asked Len. He supposed Sherman had a right to keep reminding them, but it made him resentful. Sherman gave him a sharp, cool glance.
“Did your grandmother tell you about electric eyes?”
“No.”
“They can see in the dark. Show them, Jones.”
The young man showed them a board with little glass bulbs on it, in two rows opposite each other. “This is like the lower pass, see? And these little bulbs, they’re the electric-eye pairs. When you walk between them you break a beam, and these bulbs light up. We know right where you are.”
If Esau got the byplay, he didn’t show it. He was staring with bright envious eyes at Jones, and suddenly he asked, “Could I learn to do that too?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Sherman, “if you’re willing to study.”
Esau breathed heavily and smiled.
They went out and down the corridor again, under the brilliant lights. There were some other doors with numbers on them that Sherman said were storerooms. Then the corridor branched into two. Len was confused now about direction, but they took the right-hand branch. It widened out into a staggering series of rooms, cut smooth out of the rock with heavy columns of it left in regular rows to bear the weight of the low roof. The rooms were separate from each other but interconnecting, like the segments of a wheel, and they seemed to have smaller chambers opening from their outer edges. They were full of things. Len did not try, after the first few minutes, to understand what he saw because he knew it would take him years to do that. He just looked, and felt, and tried to get hold of the full realization that he had entered into a totally different world.
Sherman was talking. Sometimes Gutierrez, too, and sometimes Erdmann, and sometimes one of the other men. Hostetter didn’t say much.
Bartorstown had been made, they said, as self-supporting as such a place could be. It could repair itself, and make new parts for itself, and there were still some of the original materials it had been supplied with for that purpose. Sherman pointed out the various rooms, the electronics lab, the electrical maintenance shop, the radio shop, rooms full of strange machines and strange glittering shapes of glass and metal, and endless panels of dials and winking lights. Sometimes a man or several men would be in them, sometimes not. Sometimes there were chemical smells and unfamiliar sounds, and sometimes there was nothing but an empty quiet, with the hush-hush of the moving air making them seem even quieter and lonelier. Sherman talked about air ducts and pumps and blowers. Automatic was a word he used over and over, and it was a wonderful word. Doors opened automatically when you came to them, and lights went on and off. “Automatic,” said Hostetter, and snorted. “No wonder the Mennonites got to be such a power in the land. Other folks were so spoiled they could hardly tie their shoelaces any more by hand.”
“Ed,” said Sherman, “you’re a poor advertisement for Bartorstown.”
“I don’t know,” said Hostetter. “Seems I was good enough for some.”
Len looked at him. He knew Hostetter’s moods pretty well now, and he knew he was worried and ill at ease. A nervous chill crawled down Len’s back, and he turned to stare again at the strange things all around him. They were wonderful, and fascinating, and they didn’t mean a thing until somebody named a purpose for them. Nobody had.
He said so, and Sherman nodded. “They have a purpose. I wanted you to see all of Bartorstown, and not just a part of it, so you would realize how important the government of this country thought that purpose was, even before the Destruction. So important that they saw to it that Bartorstown would survive no matter what happened. Now I’ll show you another part of their planning, the power plant.”
Hostetter started to speak, and Sherman said quietly, “We’ll do this my way, Ed.” He walked them a little way more around the central corridor that Len had come to think of as the hub of a wheel, and with a sidelong glance at Len and Esau he said, “We’ll use the stair instead of the elevator.”
All the way down the echoing steel stair, Len tried to remember what an elevator might be, but couldn’t. Then he stopped with them on a floor, and looked around.
They were in a cavernous place that echoed with a deep and mighty throbbing, overtoned and undertoned with other sounds that were strange to Len’s ear but that blended all together into one unmistakable voice, saying a word that he had heard spoken before only by the natural voices of wind and thunder and flood. The word was power. The rock vault had been left rougher here, and all the space was flooded with a flat white glare, and in that glare a line of mighty structures stood, squat, bulbous, Gargantuan, dwarfing the men who worked around them. Len’s flesh picked up the throbbing and quivered with it, and his nose twitched to the smell of something that was in the air.
“These are the transformers,” Sherman said. “You can see the cables there—they run in sunken conduits to carry power all over Barto
rstown. These are the generators, and the turbines——”
They walked in the bright white glare under the flanks of the great machines.
“—the steam plant——”
Here was something they could understand. It was enormously bigger than any they had dreamed of, but it was steam, and steam they knew as an old friend among these foreign giants. They clung to it, making comparisons, and one of the two men whose names Len was not sure of patiently explained the differences in design.
“But there’s no firebox,” said Esau. “No fire, and no fuel. Where’s the heat come from?”
“There,” said the man, and pointed. The steam plant joined onto a long, high, massive block of concrete. “That’s the heat exchanger.”
Esau frowned at the concrete. “I don’t see——”
“It’s all shielded, of course. It’s hot.”
“Hot,” said Esau. “Well, sure, it would have to be to make the water boil. But I still don’t see——” He looked around, into the recesses of the cavern. “I still don’t see what you use for fuel.”
There was a moment of silence, as silent as it ever was in that place. The thrumming beat on Len’s ears, and somehow he knew that he stood on a moment’s edge before some unguessable pit of darkness, he knew it from the schooled and watchful faces of the men and the way Esau’s question hung loud and echoing in the air and would not die away.
“Why,” said Sherman, very gently, very casually, and Hostetter’s eyes were sharp and anguished in the light, “we use uranium.”
And the moment was gone, and the pit gaped wide and black as perdition, and Len shouted, but the shout was swallowed up and drowned until it was only the ghost of a whisper, saying, “Uranium. But that was—that was——”
Sherman’s hand rose up and pointed to where the concrete structure heightened and widened into a great thick wall.
“Yes,” he said. “Atomic power. That concrete wall is the outer face of the shield. Behind it is the reactor.”
Silence again, except for the throbbing of that great voice that never stopped. The concrete wall loomed up like the wall of hell, and Len’s heart slowed and the blood in him turned cold as snow water.
Behind it is the reactor.
Behind it is evil and night and terror and death.
A voice screamed in Len’s ears, the voice of the preaching man, standing on the edge of his wagon with the sparks flying past him on the night wind—They have loosed the sacred fire which only I, the Lord Jehovah, should dare to touch—and God said—Let them be cleansed of their sin——
Esau’s voice spoke in shrill denial. “No. There ain’t any more of that left in the world.”
Let them be cleansed, said the Lord, and they were cleansed. They were burned with the fires of their own making, yea, and the proud towers vanished in the blazing of the wrath of God, and the places of iniquity were made not——
“You’re lying,” Esau said. “There ain’t any more of that, not since the Destruction.”
And they were cleansed. But not wholly——
“They’re not lying,” Len said. He backed slowly away from that staring wall of concrete. “They saved it, and it’s there.”
Esau whimpered. Then he turned and ran.
Hostetter caught him. He spun him around and Sherman caught his other arm and they held him, and Hostetter said fiercely, “Stand still, Esau.”
“But it’ll burn me,” Esau cried, staring wild-eyed. “It’ll burn me inside, and my blood will turn white and my bones will rot and I’ll die.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Hostetter. “You can see it hasn’t hurt any of us.”
“He’s got a right to be afraid of it, Ed,” said Sherman, more gently. “You ought to know their teaching better than I. Give them a chance. Listen, Esau. You’re thinking of the bomb. This isn’t a bomb. It isn’t hurtful. We’ve lived with it here for nearly a hundred years. It can’t explode, and it can’t burn you. The concrete makes it safe. Look.”
He let go of Esau and went up to the shield and put his hands on it.
“See? There’s nothing here to fear.”
And the devil speaks with the tongues of foolish men and works with the hands of the rash ones. Father, forgive me, I didn’t know!
Esau licked his lips. His breath came hard and uneven between them. “You go and do it too,” he said to Hostetter, as though Hostetter might be of a different flesh from Sherman, being a part of the world that Esau knew and not solely of Bartorstown.
Hostetter shrugged. He went and put his hands on the shield.
And you, thought Len. This is what you wouldn’t tell me, what you wouldn’t trust me with.
“Well,” said Esau, choking, hesitant, sweating and shaking like a frightened horse but not running now, standing his ground, beginning to think. “Well——”
Len clenched his icy fists and looked at Sherman standing against the shield.
“No wonder you’re so afraid,” he said, in a voice that did not sound like his own at all. “No wonder you shoot people if they try to leave. If anybody went out and told what you’ve got here they’d rise up and hunt you out and tear you to pieces, and there wouldn’t be a mountain in the world big enough to hide yourselves under.”
Sherman nodded. “Yes. That’s so.”
Len shifted his gaze to Hostetter. “Why couldn’t you have told us about this, before we ever came here?”
“Len, Len,” said Hostetter, shaking his head. “I didn’t want you to come. And I warned you, every way I could.”
Sherman was watching, intent to see what he would do. They were all watching, Gutierrez with a weary pity, Erdmann with embarrassed eyes, and Esau in the middle of them like a big scared child. He understood dimly that it had all been planned this way and that they were interested in what words he would say and how he would feel. And in a sudden black revulsion of all the hopes and dreams and childhood longings, the seeking and the faith, he shouted at them, “Wasn’t one burning of the world enough? Why did you have to keep this thing alive?”
“Because,” said Sherman quietly, “it wasn’t ours to destroy. And because destroying it is the child’s way, the way of the men who burned Refuge, the way of the Thirtieth Amendment. That’s only an evasion. You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.”
“Yes,” said Len bitterly, “as long as there are men foolish enough to keep it going. I wanted the cities back, yes. I wanted the things we used to have, and I thought it was stupid to be afraid of something that was gone years and years ago. But I never knew that it wasn’t all gone——”
“So now you think they were right to kill Soames, right to kill your friend Dulinsky and destroy a town?”
“I——” The words stuck in Len’s throat, and then he cried out, “That isn’t fair. There was no atom power in Refuge.”
“All right,” said Sherman reasonably. “We’ll put it another way. Suppose Bartorstown was destroyed, with every man in it. How could you be sure that somewhere in the world, hidden under some other mountain, there wasn’t another Bartorstown? And how could you be sure that some forgotten professor of nuclear physics hadn’t hoarded his textbooks—you had one in Piper’s Run, you said. Multiply that by all the books there must be left in the world. What chance have you got to destroy them all?”
Esau said, slowly, “Len, he’s right.”
“Book,” said Len, feeling the blind fear, feeling the crouching of the Beast behind the wall. “Book, yes, we had one, but we didn’t know what it meant. Nobody knew.”
“Somebody, somewhere, would figure it out in time. And remember another thing. The first men who found the secret of atomic power didn’t have any books to go by. They didn’t even know if it could be done. All they had was their brains. You can’t destroy all the brains in the world, either.”
“All right,” cried Len, driven into a corner and seeing no escape. “What other way is there
?”
“The way of reason,” said Sherman. “And now I can tell you why Bartorstown was built.”
22
There were three levels in Bartorstown. They climbed now to the middle one, below the laboratories and above the cavern where the old evil hid behind its concrete wall. Len walked ahead of Hostetter, and the others were all around him, Esau still trembling and wiping his mouth over and over with the back of his hand, the Bartorstown men silent and grave. And Len’s mind was a wild dark emptiness like a night sky without stars.
He was looking at a picture. The picture was on a long curving piece of glass taller than a man and lit from inside someway so that the picture was like real, with depth and distance in it, and color, and every tiny thing sharp and clear to see. It was a terrible picture. It was a blasted and fragmented desolation, with one little lost building still standing in it, leaning over as though it was tired and wanted to fall.
“You talk about the bomb and what it did, but you never saw it,” said Sherman. “The men who built Bartorstown had, or their fathers had. It was a reality, a thing of their time. They put this picture here to remind them, so that they wouldn’t be tempted to forget their job. That was what the first bomb did. That was Hiroshima. Now go on, around the end of the wall.”
They did, and Gutierrez was already ahead of them, walking with his head down. “I’ve already seen them too often,” he said. He disappeared, through a door at the end of a wide passageway that had more pictures on either side. Erdmann started after him, hesitated, and then dropped back. He did not look at the pictures either.
Sherman did. He said, “These were some of the people who survived that first bombing, after a fashion.”
Esau muttered, “Holy Jesus!” He began to shake more violently, hanging his head down and looking sidelong out of the corners of his eyes so as not to see too much.
Len did not say anything. He gave Sherman a straight and smoldering look, and Sherman said, “They felt very strongly about the bomb in those days. They lived under its shadow. In these victims they could see themselves, their families. They wanted very much that there should not be any more victims, any more Hiroshimas, and they knew that there was only one way to make sure of that.”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 59