The Long Tomorrow

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————

Esau’s voice spoke in shrill denial. “No. There ain’t any more of that left in the world.”

—

“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?”