Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow

“Just girl talk,” he would say to himself, “like Amity teasing me along when it was really Esau she wanted. They don’t know what they’re after. She’s got an idea about outside just like I had about here, but she wouldn’t like it.”

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 thatone 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!”