Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow

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.”

“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 word 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 pane 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 understand.”

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 farm-boy 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 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.”