And he told her over and over how she wouldn’t like it, describing this and that about the great, quiet, sleeping country and the people and the life that was lived there. Over and over, trying to make her understand, until he got so homesick he would have to stop, and she would turn away to hide the satisfaction in her eyes.
Besides, that was crazy talk about a way out of the canyon. There wasn’t any way. The cliffs were too steep to climb, the narrow gorge of the stream bed was too broken and treacherous with falls and rockslides, and beyond them was only more of the same. The site had been carefully picked, and it had not changed in a century. The eyes of Bartorstown watched, the ears listened, and the hidden death was always ready in that winding lower pass. There was a personal matter, too. Len knew, without having to be told, without having to see any overt signs of it, that every move he made was noted carefully by somebody and reported on to Sherman. The problem of finding Bartorstown would be easy compared with that of getting away from it again. And yet she sounded so sure, as if she had a way all planned. It kept nagging at him, wondering what it could be—just for curiosity. But he didn’t ask her, and she didn’t tell him, nor even hint at it again.
For everybody it was a dull and ingrown time, a time for peering too closely at your neighbors and getting too concerned with what they did, and talking about it too much. Before Christmas the whispers had started about Gutierrez. Poor Julio, he sure took that last disappointment hard. Well, his life’s work—you know. Oh sure, but everybody gets disappointed, and they don’t take to drink like that, couldn’t he pull himself together and try again? I suppose a man gets tired, loses heart. After all, a lifetime—Did you hear they found him passed out in a drift by Sawyer’s back fence, and it’s a wonder he didn’t freeze to death? His poor wife, it’s her I feel sorry for, not him. A man his age ought to know this life isn’t all cakes and roses for anybody. I hear he’s hounding poor Frank Erdmann nearly out to his mind. I hear—
I hear. Everybody heard, and nearly everybody talked. They talked about other people and other things, of course, but Gutierrez was the winter’s sensation and sooner or later any conversation got around to him. Len saw him a few times. Some of those times he was obviously drunk, an aging man staggering with stiff dignity down a snowy lane, his face dark with an inner darkness above the neat white beard. At other times he seemed to be less drunken than dreaming, as though his mind had wandered off along some shadowy byway in search of a lost hope. Len saw him only once to speak to, and then it was only Len who spoke. Gutierrez nodded and passed on, his eyes perfectly blank of recognition. At night there was nearly always a lamp burning in a certain room in Gutierrez’ house, and Gutierrez sat beside it at a table covered with papers, and he would work at them and drink from a handy jug, work and drink, until he fell asleep and his wife came and helped him to the bed. People who happened to be passing by at night could see this through the window, and Len knew that it was true because he, too, had seen it; Gutierrez working at a vast tangle of papers, very patient, very intent, with the big jug at his elbow.
Christmas came, and after church there was a big dinner at the Wepplos’. The weather was clear and fine. At one in the afternoon the temperature topped zero, and everybody said how warm it was. There were parties all over Fall Creek, with people trudging back and forth in the dry crunching snow between the houses, and at night all the lamps were lit, shining yellow and merry out of the windows. Joan got very passionate with the excitement, and when they were on the way to somebody else’s place she led him into the darkness behind a clump of trees, and they forgot the cold for a few minutes, standing with their arms around each other and their mingled breaths steaming in a frosty halo around their heads.
“Love me?”
He kissed her so hard it hurt, his hand bunched in her hair at the back of her neck, under her wool cap.
“What does that feel like?”
“Len. Oh, Len, if you love me, if you really love me—”
Suddenly she was tight against him, talking fast and wild.
“Take me out of here. I’ll lose my mind if I have to stay here cooped up any longer. If I wasn’t a girl I’d have gone alone, long ago, but I need you to take me. I’d worship you all the rest of my life.”
He withdrew from her, slowly, carefully, as a man draws from the edge of a quicksand.
“No.”
“Why, Len? Why should you spend your whole life in this hole for something you never heard of before? Bartorstown isn’t anything to you but a dream you had once when you were a kid.”
“No,” he said again. “I told you before. Leave me alone.”
He started away, but she scuffled through the snow and stood in front of him.
“They filled you up on all that stuff about the future of the world, didn’t they? I’ve heard it since I was born. The burden, the sacred debt.” He could see her face in the frosty pale snow glimmer, all twisted up with anger she had saved and hidden for a long time and now was turning loose. “I didn’t make the bomb and I didn’t drop it, and I won’t be here a hundred years from now to see if they do it again or not. So why have I got any debt? And why have you got any, Len Colter? You answer me that.”
Words came stumbling to his tongue, but she looked so fiercely at him that he never said them.
“You haven’t,” she said. “You’re just scared. Scared to face reality and admit you’ve wasted all those years for nothing.”
Reality, he thought. I’ve been facing it every day, reality you’ve never seen. Reality behind a concrete wall.
“Let me alone,” he said. “I ain’t going, I can’t. So shut up about it.”
She laughed at him. “They told you a lot of stuff up there in Bartorstown, but I bet there’s one thing they never mentioned. I bet they never told you about Solution Zero.”
There was such a note of triumph in her voice that Len knew he should not listen any more. But she jeered at him. “You wanted to learn, didn’t you? And didn’t they tell you up there always to look for the whole truth and never be satisfied with only part of it? You want the whole truth, don’t you? Or are you afraid of that, too?”
“All right,” he said. “What is Solution Zero?”
She told him, with swift, vindictive relish. “You know how they work, building theories and turning them into equations, and feeding the equations to Clementine to solve. If they work out, that’s another step forward. If they don’t, like the last time, that’s a blind alley, a negative. But all the time they’re piling these equations into Clementine, adding up these steps toward what they call the master solution. Well, suppose that one comes out negative? Suppose the final equations just don’t work, and all they get is the mathematical proof that what they’re looking for doesn’t exist? That’s Solution Zero.”
“God,” said Len, “is that possible? I thought—”
He stared at her in the snowy night, feeling sick and miserable, feeling an utter fool, betrayed.
“You thought it was certain, and the only question was when. Well, you ask old Sherman if you don’t believe me. Everybody knows about Solution Zero, but you don’t hear them talk about it, any more than they talk about how they’re going to die someday. You ask. And then you figure how much of your life that’s worth!”
She left him. She had a genius for knowing when to leave him. He did not go on to the party. He went home and sat alone, brooding, until Hostetter came in, and by that time he was in such a mean, low mood that he didn’t give him a chance to shut the door before he demanded, “What’s this about Solution Zero?”
There was a cloud on Hostetter’s brow, too. “Probably just what you heard,” he said, taking off his coat and hat.
“Everybody’s kept mighty quiet about it.”
“I advise you to, too. It’s a superstition we’ve got here.”
He sat down and began to unlace his boots. Snow was melting from them in little puddles on the puncheon floor. Len said, “I don’t wonder.”
Hostetter methodically unlaced his boots.
“I thought they knew,” Len said. “I thought they were sure of it.”
“Research isn’t done that way.”
“But how can they spend all that time, and maybe that much more again, if they know it might be all for nothing?”
“Because how would they know if they didn’t try? And because there isn’t any other way to do it.” Hostetter flung his boots in the corner by the potbellied stove. Usually he set them there, neatly, and not too close to the heat.
“But that’s a crazy way,” said Len.
“Is it? When your pa put seed in the ground, did he have a guarantee it was going to come up and yield him a harvest? Did he know every calf and shoat and lamb was going to stay healthy and pay back all the feed and care?”
He began to pull off his shirt and pants. Len sat scowling.
“All right, that’s true. But if his crop failed or his cattle died there was always another season. What about this? What if it does come out—nothing?”
“Then they try again. If no such force-field is possible, then they think of other ways. And maybe some part of the work they did will give them a clue, so it isn’t all lost.” He slapped his clothes over the hide-seated chair and climbed into his bunk. “Hell, how do you think the human race ever learned anything, except by trial and error?”
“But it all takes such a long, long time,” said Len.
“Everything takes a long time. Birthing takes nine months, and dying takes you all the rest of your life, and what are you complaining about, anyway? You just got here. Wait till you’re as old as the rest of us. Then you might have some reason.”
He turned his back and covered his head with the blanket. After a while Len blew out the lamp.
The next day it was all over Fall Creek that Julio Gutierrez had got drunk at Sherman’s and knocked Frank Erdmann down, and Ed Hostetter had stepped in and practically carried Gutierrez home. A brawl between the senior physicist and the chief electronics engineer was scandal enough to keep the tongues all wagging, but it seemed to Len that there was a darker, sadder note in the gossip, a shadow of discouragement. Or maybe that was only because he had dreamed all night of rust in the wheat and new lambs dying.
27
Esau came banging at the door before it was light. It was the third morning in January, a Monday, and the snow was coming down in a solid desperate rush as though God had suddenly commanded it to bury the world before lunch. “Ain’t you ready?” he asked Len. “Well, hurry up, this snow’s going to slow us down enough as it is.”
Hostetter stuck his head out of the bunk. “What’s all the rush?”
“Clementine,” said Esau. “The big machine. They’re going to test her this morning, and Erdmann said we could watch before work. Hurry up, can’t you?”
“Let me get my boots on,” Len grumbled. “She won’t run away.”
Hostetter said to Esau, “Do you figure you can work with Clementine someday?”
“No,” said Esau, shaking his head. “Too much math and stuff. I’m going to learn radio instead. After all, that’s what got me here. But I sure do want to see that big brain do its thinking. Are you ready now? You sure? All right, let’s go!”
The world was white, and blind. The snow fell straight down, with hardly a vagrant breath of air to set it swirling. They groped their way through the village, still able to follow the deep-trodden lanes, and conscious of the houses even if they could not really see them. Out on the road it was different. It was like being in the fields at home when it snowed like this, with no landmark, no direction, and the same old dizzy feeling came over Len. Everything was gone but up and down, and presently even that would go, and there was not even any sound left in the world.
“You’re going off the road,” said Esau, and he floundered back from the drifted ditch. Then it was Esau’s turn. They walked close together, making the usual comments on the cursedness of fate and the weather, and Len 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 f
ace 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.
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