The Long Tomorrow - Leigh Brackett by The Long Tomorrow-3S(v1)(html)

Author:The Long Tomorrow-3S(v1)(html) [Tomorrow-3S, The Long]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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14

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It was night, warm and tranquil. There was a moon, lighting the surface of the river and turning the two banks into masses of black shadow. The barge supped along, chuffing gently as it added a bit to the deck, tied down securely and covered with canvas against the rain. Len had found a place in it. He had slept for a while, and he was sitting now with his back against a bale, watching the river go by.

Hostetter came by, walking slowly along the narrow space left clear on the foredeck, trailing a fragrance of tobacco smoke from an old pipe. He saw Len sitting up, and stopped. “Feel better?”

“I feel sick,” Len said, so viciously that Hostetter knew what he meant. He nodded.

“You know now how I felt the night they killed Bill Soames.”

“Murderers,” said Len. “Cowards. Bastards.” He cursed them until the words choked in his throat. “You should have seen them standing there across the road. And then Burdette shot him. He shot him just the way you’d shoot some vermin you found in the corn.”

“Yes,” said Hostetter slowly, “we’d have had you out of there sooner if you hadn’t gone up after Dulinsky. Poor devil. But I’m not surprised.”

“Couldn’t you have helped him?”

“Us? You mean Bartorstown?”

“He wanted the same things you want. Growth, progress, intelligence, a future. Couldn’t you have helped?”

There was an edge to Len’s voice, but Hostetter only took the pipe out of his mouth and asked quietly, “How?”

Len thought about that. After a while he said, “I suppose you couldn’t.”

“Not without an army. We don’t have an army, and if we did have we wouldn’t use it. It takes an almighty force to make people change their whole way of thinking and living. We had a force like that just yesterday as time goes for a nation, and we don’t want any more of them.”

“That’s what the judge was afraid of. Change. And he just stood there and watched Dulinsky die.” Len shook his head. “He died for nothing. That’s what he died for, nothing.”

“No,” said Hostetter, “I wouldn’t say that. But it takes more than one Dulinsky. It takes a lot of them, one after the other, in different places—”

“And more Burdettes, and more burnings.”

“Yes. And someday one will come along at the right time, and the change will be made.”

“That’s a lot to look forward to.”

“That’s the way it is. And then all the Dulinskys will become martyrs to a great ideal. In the meantime, you’re disturbers of the peace. And damn it, Len, you know in a way they’re right. They’re comfortable and happy. Who are you—or any of us—to tell them it’s all got to be torn up and changed?”

Len turned and looked at Hostetter in the moonlight. “Is that why you just stand by and watch?”

Hostetter said, with just the faintest note of impatience in his voice, “I don’t think you understand about us yet. We’re not supermen. We’ve got all we can do just to stay alive, without trying to remake a country that doesn’t want to be remade.

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