The Long Tomorrow

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.