American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “They couldn’t,” said Len, “have just destroyed the bomb?”

  It was a stupid thing to say, and he was angry with himself instantly for saying it, because he knew better; he had talked about those times with Judge Taylor and read some of the books about them. So he forestalled Sherman’s retort by saying quickly, “I know, the enemy wouldn’t destroy his. The thing to have done was never to get that far, never to make a bomb.”

  Sherman said, “The thing to have done was never to learn how to make a fire, so no one would ever get burned. Besides, it was a little too late for that. They had a fact to deal with, not a philosophical argument.”

  “Well, then,” said Len, “what was the answer?”

  “A defense. Not the imperfect defense of radar nets and weapon devices, but something far more basic and all-embracing, a totally new concept. A field-type force that could control the interaction of nuclear particles right on their own level, so that no process either of fission or fusion could take place wherever that protecting force-field was in operation. Complete control, Len. Absolute mastery of the atom. No more bombs.”

  Quiet, and they watched him again to see how he would take it. He closed his eyes against the pictures so that he could try to think, and the words sounded in his head, loud and flat, momentarily without meaning. Complete control. No more bombs. The thing to have done was never to build them, never build fires, never build cities——

  No.

  No, say the words again, slowly and carefully. Complete control, no more bombs. The bomb is a fact. Atomic power is a fact. It is a living fact close down under my feet, the dreadful power that made these pictures. You can’t deny it, you can’t destroy it because it is evil and evil is like a serpent that dieth not but reneweth itself perpetually——

  No. No. No. These are the words of the preaching man, of Burdette. Complete control of the atom. No more bombs. No more victims, no more fear. Yes. You build stoves to hold the fire in, and you keep water handy to put it out with. Yes.

  But——

  “But they didn’t find the defense,” he said. “Because the world got burned up anyway.”

  “They tried. They pointed the way. We’re still following it. Now go on.”

  They passed through the door where Gutierrez had gone, into a space hollowed like the other spaces out of the solid rock, smoothed and pillared and reaching away on all sides under a clear flood of light. There was a long wall facing them. It was not really a wall, but a huge panel as big as a wall and set by itself, with a couple of small machines linked to it. It was nearly six feet high, not quite reaching the roof. It had a maze of dials and lights on it. The lights were all dark, and the needles of the dials did not move. Gutierrez was standing in front of it, his face twisted into a deep, sad, pondering scowl.

  “This is Clementine,” he said, not turning his head as they came in. “A foolish name for something on which may hang the future of the world.”

  Len dropped his hands, and it was as though in that dropping he cast from him many things too heavy or too painful to be carried. Inside my head there is nothing, let it stay that way. Let the emptiness fill up slowly with new things, and old things in new patterns, and maybe then I’ll know—what? I don’t know. I don’t know anything, and all is darkness and confusion and only the Word——

  No, not that Word, another one. Clementine.

  He sighed and said aloud, “I don’t understand.”

  Sherman walked over to the big dark panel.

  “This is a computer. It’s the biggest one ever built, the most complex. Do you see there——”

  He pointed off beyond the panel, into the pillared spaces that stretched away there, and Len saw that there were countless rows of arrangements of wires and tubes set all orderly one after the other, interrupted at intervals by big glittering cylinders of glass.

  “That’s all part of it.”

  Esau’s passion for machines was beginning to stir again under the fog of fright.

  “All one machine?”

  “All one. In it, in those memory banks, is stored all the knowledge about the nature of the atom that existed before the Destruction, and all the knowledge that our research teams have gained since, all expressed in mathematical equations. We could not work without it. It would take the men half their lifetimes just to work out the mathematical problems that Clementine can do in minutes. She is the reason Bartorstown was built, the purpose of the shops upstairs and the reactor down below. Without her, we wouldn’t have much chance of finding the answer within any foreseeable time. With her— there’s no telling. Any day, any week, could bring the solution to the problem.”

  Gutierrez made a sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. It was quickly silenced. And once more Len shook his head and said, “I don’t undertand.”

  And I don’t think I want to understand. Not today, not now. Because what you’re telling me is not a description of a machine but of something else, and I don’t want to know any more about it.

  But Esau blurted out, “It does sums and remembers them? That don’t sound like any machine, that sounds like—a— a——”

  He caught himself up sharp, and Sherman said with no particular interest, “They used to call them electronic brains.”

  Oh Lord, and is there no end to it? First the hell-fire and now this.

  “A misnomer,” said Sherman. “It doesn’t think, any more than a steam engine. It’s just a machine.”

  And now suddenly he rounded on them, his face stern and cold-eyed and his voice as sharp as a whiplash to bring their attention to him, startled and alert.

  “I won’t push you,” he said. “I won’t expect you to understand it all in a minute, and I won’t expect you to adjust overnight. I’ll give you reasonable time. But I want you to remember this. You kicked and clawed and screamed to be let into Bartorstown, and now you’re here, and I don’t care what you thought it was going to be like, it’s what it is, so make your peace with it. We have a certain job to do here. We didn’t particularly ask for it, it just happened that way, but we’re stuck with it and we’re going to do it, in spite of what your piddling little farmboy consciences may feel about it.”

  He stood still, regarding them with those cold hard eyes, and Len thought, He means that just the way Burdette meant it when he said, There shall be no cities in our midst.

  “You claim you wanted to come here so you could learn,” said Sherman. “All right. We’ll give you every chance. But from here on, it’s up to you.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Esau hastily. “Yes, sir.”

  Len thought, There is still nothing in my head, it feels like a wind was blowing through it. But he’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something—what? Yes, no—and oh Lord, he’s right, they did everything under the sun to keep us out and we would bull our way in, and now we’re caught in a pit of our own digging——

  But the whole world is caught in a pit. Isn’t that what we wanted out of, the pit that killed Dulinsky and nearly killed us? The people are afraid and I hated them for it and now—I don’t know what the answer is, oh Lord, I don’t know, let me find an answer because Sherman is waiting and I can’t run away.

  “Someday,” he said, wrinkling his brows in a frown of effort, so that he looked once more like the brooding boy who had sat with Gran on that October day, “someday atomic power will come back no matter what anybody does to stop it.”

  “A thing once known always comes back.”

  “And the cities will come back too.”

  “In time, inevitably.”

  “And it will all happen over again, the cities and the bomb, unless you find that way to stop it.”

  “Unless men have changed a lot by tomorrow, yes.”

  “Then,” said Len, still frowning, still somber, “then I guess you’re trying to do what ought to be done. I guess it might be right.”

  The word stuck to his tongue, but he got it off, and no bolt of lightning came to strike him dea
d, and Sherman did not challenge him any further.

  Esau had moved toward the panel, magnetized by the lure of the machine. He reached hesitantly out and touched it, and asked, “Could we see it work?”

  It was Erdmann who answered. “Later. She’s just finished a three-year project, and she’s shut down now for a complete overhaul.”

  “Three years,” said Gutierrez. “Yes. I wish you could shut me down too, Frank. Pick my brain to pieces and put it together again, all fresh and bright.” He began to raise and lower his fist, striking the panel each time, lightly as a feather falling. “Frank,” he said, “she could have made a mistake.”

  Erdmann looked at him sharply. “You know that isn’t possible.”

  “A vagrant charge,” said Gutierrez. “A speck of dust, a relay too worn to function right, and how would you ever know?”

  “Julio,” said Erdmann. “You know better. If the slightest thing goes wrong with her she stops automatically and asks for attention.”

  Sherman spoke, and the talking stopped, and everybody began to move out into the passageway again. Gutierrez came close behind Len, and even through the doubt and fear that clouded in so thick around him Len could hear him muttering to himself, “She could have made a mistake.”

  23

  Hostetter was a lamp in the darkness, a solid rock in the midst of flood. He was the link, the carry-over from Piper’s Run to Bartorstown, he was the old friend and the strong arm that had already reached out twice to save him, once at the preaching, once at Refuge. Len clung to him, mentally, with a certain desperation.

  “You think it’s right?” he asked, knowing the inevitable answer, but wanting the assurance anyhow.

  They were walking down the road from Bartorstown in the late afternoon. Sherman and the others had lingered behind, perhaps deliberately, so that Hostetter was alone with Len and Esau. And now Hostetter glanced at Len and said, “Yes, I think it’s right.”

  “But,” said Len softly, “to work with it, to keep it going——”

  He was out in the open air again. The mountain was away from over his head, and the rock walls of Bartorstown no longer shut him in, and he could breathe and look at the sun. But the horror was still on him, and he thought of the destroyer crouched in a hole of the rock, and he knew he did not want ever to go back there. And at the same time he knew that he would have to go whether he wanted it or not.

  Hostetter said, “I told you there’d be things you wouldn’t like, things that would jar against your teachings no matter how much you said you didn’t believe them.”

  “But you’re not afraid of it,” said Esau. He had been thinking hard, scuffing his boots against the stones of the road. Up above them on the east slope was the normal, comforting racket of the mine, and ahead the village of Fall Creek drowsed quietly in the late sun, and it was very much like Piper’s Run if there had been a devil chained in the hills behind it. “You went right up and put your hands on it.”

  “I grew up with the idea of it,” said Hostetter. “Nobody ever taught me that it was evil or forbidden, or that God had put a curse on it, and that’s the difference. That’s why we don’t take strangers in but once in a coon’s age. The conditioning is all wrong.”

  “I ain’t worrying about curses,” said Esau. “What I worry about is, will it hurt me?”

  “Not unless you find some way to get inside the shield.”

  “It can’t burn me.”

  “No.”

  “And it can’t blow up.”

  “No. The steam plant might blow up, but not the reactor.”

  “Well, then,” said Esau, and walked on awhile in silence, thinking. His eyes got bright, and he laughed and said, “I wonder what those old fools in Piper’s Run, old Harkness and Clute and the rest, would think. They were going to birch us just for having a radio, and now we’ve got that. Jesus. I bet they’d kill us, Len.”

  “No,” said Hostetter somberly, “they wouldn’t. But all the same, you’d wind up like Soames, at the bottom of a pile of stones.”

  “Well, I ain’t going to give them a chance. Jesus! Atom power, the real thing, the biggest power in the world.” His fingers curled with greedy excitement and then relaxed, and he asked again, “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “It’s safe,” said Hostetter, getting impatient. “We’ve had it for nearly a century, and it hasn’t hurt anybody yet.”

  “I guess,” said Len slowly, leaning his head against the cool wind and letting it blow some of the darkness out of him, “we don’t have any right to complain.”

  “You sure don’t.”

  “And I guess the government knew what it was doing when it built Bartorstown.”

  They were afraid too, whispered the cool wind. They had a power too big for them to handle, and they were afraid, and well they should have been.

  “It did,” said Hostetter, not hearing the wind.

  “Jesus,” said Esau, “just think if they had found that thing to stop the bomb.”

  “I’ve thought,” said Hostetter. “We all have. I suppose every man in Bartorstown has a guilt complex a mile wide from thinking about it. But there just wasn’t time.”

  Time? Or was there another reason?

  “How long will it take?” asked Len. “It seems like in almost a hundred years they should have found it.”

  “My God,” said Hostetter, “do you know how long it took to find atomic power in the first place? A Greek named Democritus got the basic idea of the atom centuries before Christ, so you can figure that out.”

  “But it ain’t going to take them that long now!” cried Esau. “Sherman said with that machine——”

  “It won’t take them that long, no.”

  “But how long? Another hundred years?”

  “How do I know how long?” said Hostetter angrily. “Another hundred years, or another year. How do I know?”

  “But with the machine——”

  “It’s only a machine, it’s not God. It can’t pull an answer out of thin air just because we want it.”

  “How about that machine, though,” said Esau, and once more his eyes were glistening. “I wanted to see it work. Does it really——” He hesitated, and then said the incredible word. “Does it really think?”

  “No,” said Hostetter. “Not in the way you mean the word. Get Erdmann to explain it to you sometime.” Suddenly he said to Len, “You’re thinking that only God has any business building brains.”

  Len flushed, feeling like what Sherman had called him, a conscience-ridden farm boy in the face of these men who knew so much, and yet he could not deny to Hostetter that he had been thinking something like that.

  “I guess I’ll get used to it.”

  Esau snorted. “He always was a doubtful-minded kind, taking forever to make up his mind.”

  “Why, God damn you, Esau,” cried Len furiously, “if it hadn’t been for me you’d still be shoveling dung in your father’s barn!”

  “All right,” said Esau, glaring at him, “you remember that. You remember whose fault it is you’re here and don’t go whining around about it.”

  “I ain’t whining.”

  “Yes, you are. And if you’re worried about sinning, you ought to have minded your pa in the first place and stayed home in Piper’s Run.”

  “He’s got you there,” said Hostetter.

  Len grumbled, kicking pebbles angrily in the dust. “All right. It scared me. But it scared him, too, and I wasn’t the one that tucked my tail and ran.”

  Esau said, “I’d run from a bear, too, till I knew it wouldn’t kill me. I ain’t running now. Listen, Len, this is important. Where else in the world could you find anything as important?” His chest puffed out and his face lit up as though the mantle of that importance had already fallen on him. “I want to know more about that machine.”

  “Important,” said Len. “Yes, it is.” That’s true. There isn’t any question about that. Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question
, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me?

  But Esau is right. It’s too late now to worry about the sinning. Pa always said the way of the transgressor was hard, and I guess this is part of the hardness.

  So be it.

  They left Esau at Sherman’s to pick up his bride, and Len and Hostetter walked on together toward Wepplo’s. The swift clear dusk was coming down, and the lanes were deserted, with a smell of smoke and cooking in them. When they came to Wepplo’s Hostetter put his foot on the bottom step and turned around and spoke to Len in a strange quiet tone that he had never heard him use before.

  “Here’s something to remember, the way you remember that mob that killed Soames, and Burdette and his farmers, and the New Ishmaelites. It’s this—we’re fanatics too, Len. We have to be, or we’d drift away and live our own lives and let the whole business go hang. We’ve got a belief. Don’t tangle with it. Because if you do, even I won’t be able to save you.”

  He went up the steps and left Len standing there staring after him. There were voices inside, and lights, but out here it was still and almost dark. And then someone came around the corner of the house, walking softly. It was the girl Joan, and she nodded her head toward the house and said, “Was he trying to frighten you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Len. “I think he was just telling me the truth.”

  “I heard him.” She had a white cloth in her hands, as though she might have been shaking it just before. Her face looked white, too, in the heavy dusk, blurred and indistinct. But her voice was sharp as a knife. “Fanatics, are we? Well, maybe he is, and maybe the others are, but I’m not. I’m sick of the whole business. What made you want to come here, Len Colter? Were you crazy or something?”

  He looked at her, the shadowy outlines of her, not knowing what to say.

  “I heard you talk this morning,” she said.