Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“My God, Net! I said so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.

You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s out!”

“You got any different inspirations? Or better ones?”

“That one isn’t even an idea. Look, Net. I appreciate the way you’re taking this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No. That would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”

“Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”

“I could lose my joh—”

“Lose your job, my eye! Jake has put men in the Green Prairie River in a barrel of cement for less. That’s the only way he can keep his books in the black: making his collections tough.”

“Maybe Hank Conner…?”

“Look, Beau. You borrowed five hundred from Hank last year. Remember? And eight hundred, two… three years before that.”

“Sure. But—”

“But what? Hank’s generous. He’s a damned good neighbor in a lot of ways. He’s come to your rescue five or six times. And you never paid him back a cent.”

“Sure, but he knows I’m good for it. Someday I’ll—”

“Someday you’ll—nothing! You don’t even know how much you’ve borrowed, over the years. Okay, go to Hank. If you get the twenty-five hundred, I’ll really think he’s crazy. If you don’t….” She broke off. She had already said enough about his access to inactive portfolios.

Enough for the moment. To Netta, raised in the wrongest part of that wretched territory on the wrong side of every track, being in trouble with Jake Tanetti was far more dangerous than lifting a few bonds from a bank—especially when one way or another you would make sure to get the bonds back before their absence was checked.

Beau drew a long breath, exhaled, picked up the bottle, saw that Netta was not going to forbid him, and poured a highball. He breathed again and said relievedly, casting the whole burden away from himself and toward the woman, “Brother! Are we in a mess!”

In the hall, the front door dosed with a click. Lenore came in, tiredly, her coverall over her arm. She set down the Geiger counter. “Is there anything unusual about the Baileys being in a mess?”

“This time,” her mother said, “it’s a real one. Beau…!”

His eyes implored. “Don’ t—Mother! Not to Len!”

Netta brought to an end her state of uncompromising sympathy. Beau deserved to be punished. And so, for that matter, did Lenore. Just for being intractable. Just for passing up her opportunities. Just for refusing to do what a daughter should in behalf of parents who had sacrificed everything. Netta thought that if Lenore had any sense of obligation they wouldn’t be sweating now over any measly five thousand dollars.

She said, “Your father, Lenore, has at last succeeded in making the priceless kind of horse’s behind of himself I always expected.”

The girl dropped on the end of the divan near her parents and ran her fingers into her hair, pulling out pins, letting it fall. “Now what?”

Netta told her in a few flat sentences.

Lenore said nothing. Her eyes filled and overflowed. She didn’t look at her mother or her father. She just sat still, crying silently. Her anguish was a source of satisfaction to her mother, an intolerable spectacle for her father.

“ Don’t baby.” he kept saying. “ Don’t cry. Net and I will find a way out of it. We always have.” But she kept on crying. After a while she rose and went to her room and left her parents sitting together, not talking. Beau had a drink.

The Green Prairie Civil Defense “practice alert” had repercussions.

These repercussions had long heralded their approach, in complaints and criticisms, gripes and threatened suits. To be sure, Green Prairie took pride in its Civil Defense outfit for the reason that its state was one of the “top-ranking five” in the “National Ready Contest”—and the Green Prairie organization was the best in the state. The perpetual competition between the Sister Cities, like every eternal war between siblings, furnished a further motive for local pride and support: for the six hundred thousand inhabitants of River City, being citizens of another state, shared the views of its thrice-elected governor, Joseph Barston, that Civil Defense was “a waste of money, a squandering of public energy, a meddlesome civil intrusion into military spheres and, all in all, just one more Washington-spawned interference with the rights of common man.”

Governor Barston had made the statement at a private banquet and off the record years before. Somehow it had found its way into print and it keyed a near-universal attitude in his bailiwick. Gentlemen in the state legislature, loath to enter into the costly, intricate affairs of Civil Defense, had been only too glad to follow the governor’s lead and table as many bills referring to “CD” as possible.

As for the politicians of River City, though it was obviously the only worthy “enemy target” in the state, and though a hit across the river would damage them, their feeling was that for once they were off the hook. Competition with Green Prairie was a standing plank in the platform of every one of them. Here was a chance to compete by doing nothing. Instead of laboring mightily to construct a CD outfit equal or superior to that in Green Prairie, they had only to relax—and make jokes about the earnestly rehearsing citizens across the river.

The truth was that after a number of years (and even though Green Prairie had rescue teams, hordes of auxiliary fire-fighters and police, tons of medical supplies and the like) almost nobody believed there was any danger. Few had believed it to begin with. The passage of many years of “cold war,” “border war,” satellite seizure, international tension, international relaxation, deals made and broken, peace offers, peace hopes, peace arrangements—along with the corresponding variations in American sentiment, national economy, draft laws and a thousand other domestic matters—had convinced most people everywhere that Russia” and China were without the technical means to wage a large scale war, would never undertake one, relied wholly on prickly politicking and small grabs to exhibit power, and did not warrant the anxiety of those few citizens who continued to predict that Armageddon was forever around the corner.

Long before, Harry Truman, speaking as if still in the White House, had said that in his opinion the Soviet probably did not have even one real atomic bomb. The Sister Cities thought that kind of information, passed on to the people at the close of his Administration and thus having the sound of a “last-word” confidence, represented “one of the few good things Truman had done.” They were, after all, inland Americans. They had been “neutral” in spirit before the First World War and isolationist until the hour of Pearl Harbor. With the opening years of the Atomic Age, they returned to their habitual attitude.

People for the most part have little imagination and less will to use it. The prairie cities were far away from the border of the sea; its level suggestion of distance and otherness beyond was not present before their landlocked minds. The air ocean over their heads they regarded as a kind of property; they thought, indeed, it differed wherever they were, so that a special blueness canopied the Sister Cities and their sovereign states. Everyone in the region felt that same way and talked about “Missouri skies” and “Kansas skies” as if the atmosphere had taken cognizance of political boundaries.