The Long Tomorrow

“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 face 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.”