Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Every day, many times over, planes left the local airports to fly nonstop hops longer than the distance from the Sisler Cities to the closest potential “enemy” air bases. But, such facts, determined by the simple shape of the planet, were dismissed with a single popular word: globaloney. It may be that people who live on flatlands retain the Biblical belief that the earth is Bat. Or perhaps people who live between great mountain ranges feel specially secure. At any rate, the River City citizens eschewed Civil Defense and the people of Green Prairie embraced it out of pride and for fun.

Both groups felt that the “domestic Communists,” interminably quizzed by Congressional committees, were more a menace than all the Communists in Russia together with their weapons and intentions—an attitude which possibly had its basis in the unconscious fears of Americans during that long period. It was a time when Americans once again refused to face certain realities that glared at them with an ever-increasing balefulness.

What actually precipitated the “Civil Defense scandal” was a trifle. When the snow’s right, however, a cap pistol can bring down an avalanche.

Minerva Sloan, on the afternoon of the practice alert, attended a directors meeting in the Mercantile Trust Company which lasted until six o’clock. When she left the bank, she could not immediately find her limousine. A large, a very large woman-tall and fleshy, imposing, heavy-jowled and bemoled—an English bulldog of a woman—she paced the wide sidewalk angrily and at length. Because dinner at her home would not begin until eight-thirty (when ten guests would sit down to one of her famed repasts, followed by a musicale), Minerva went into the near-by White Elephant Restaurant and took a table at the windows, to watch for her delinquent chauffeur.

Outside, heavy traffic poured south on Central Avenue between the towering skyscrapers of downtown Green Prairie, south toward the residential sections: during afternoon rush hour, Central Avenue was a one-way thoroughfare. Minerva ordered coffee and a doughnut and kept watching. Traffic—four lanes wide wherever trucks were not parked to unload goods, wherever buses were not loading people and wherever other chauffeurs, double-parked, were not waiting for homing businessmen—moved slowly and clamorously. Minerva scowled at this stasis of the big artery and thought poorly of Green Prairie’s city fathers, though traffic in her own city across the river was at least as loud, as slow, as frustrate. She dunked her doughnut angrily and not furtively because, being Minerva Sloan, she could do as she damn pleased.

Finally, she saw her car and ran out peremptorily—also because she was Minerva Sloan and the waitress knew it and would collect from the bank. She held up her pocket-book to bring traffic to a stop and took her time about getting into her car.

She sat back, unrelaxed. “Willis,” she said, “where were you?”

“The police,” he answered, “made me move from Adams Avenue.”

“Didn’t you tell them whose car…?”

“They were very apologetic, ma’am.” Willis’s gray head faced forward and his outspread ears reddened. His corded hands tightened a little on the wheel. He had expected her indignation but, even after thirty years, its majesty alarmed him.

“Then, why did you move?” This inquiry was interrupted, suddenly, by the beginning growl of sirens. The limousine had gone less than a block meanwhile. One of the largest sirens was on top of the Sloan Building, which Minerva owned. It was a double-horn, revolving type, with a ten-horsepower motor. This was its first test. Officials hoped it would serve for the entire skyscraper section, penetrating every ferroconcrete tower in the municipal thicket, thrusting its noisy way through them to the warehouses on the bluffs above the river, and perhaps even traversing Simmons Park, to serve in the same harsh breath as a warning for the dwellers in hotels, apartments and apartment hotels along Wickley Heights Boulevard, which was the “gold coast” of Green Prairie. It subsequently proved that the horns were inadequate: they could be heard better in parts of River City than in Wickley Heights and not in the warehouse district at all. But their effect on Central Avenue was astonishing.

As the beginning growl of the siren intensified, traffic stopped dead. Minerva had time to say, “What on earth is that?”

Willis had time to shout back, “Air-raid practice.”

Minerva’s infuriated rejoinder was lost in a crescendo of pitch and volume that yodeled through the streets, the vertical valleys, the stone labyrinths. Car doors, truck doors popped open.

People ran toward the vaulted entries of the tall buildings, following instructions printed in the papers bidding them, if caught in their cars by the surprise alert, to pull to the curb, park and take cover. It was, of course, impossible to pull to the curb in the rush hour on Central Avenue: the whole street was a solid flux of molasses-slow vehicles. So people just stopped where they were, piled out, and entered those doors and arches marked “Shelter Area”—a designation which included virtually all the buildings and arcades for some blocks in every direction.

The first sound-apex of the siren was not its best effort. Even so, Minerva was obliged to wait till the head-splitting scream diminished before she could make herself audible. “Willis,” she bawled, “get us out of this!”

He seemed ready to oblige. “I’ll find an officer,” he said ·and jumped out with alacrity, considering his age.

Minerva leaned back on the cushions of the car. The siren went up again and this time the noise, surging through the canyons of the city, was literally painful. Her ears ached. One of her fillings seemed to vibrate, hurting her tooth. She snatched the hand tassel and hung on as if she were bucking the sound while riding at a fast pace.

The scream held until she thought she could not bear it and then descended the scale.

Around her, now, was a sea of cars and trucks and buses, all untenanted. For a moment, she couldn’t see a soul. Then she caught sight of two men approaching, men with brassards and helmets.

“Wardens,” she said with the utmost disdain. “Oh, the idiots! The meddlesome fools!”

The wardens were looking into the cars. They spotted Minerva and swung through the stalled cars toward her—young fellows, strangers. They opened the door politely enough, if it could be called polite when rank invasion of privacy was involved. “Madam,” one of them said, “you’ll have to take cover.”

Minerva sat like a she-Buddha. “I will not.”

They were obliged to wait-wardens and the obdurate woman—for another crescendo of the siren. “Rules,” the spokesman of the paired youths then said. “If you’ll step into the Farm Industries Building here, it’ll all be over in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes! I haven’t got twenty minutes. I’m Minerva Sloan.”

They looked blank. She supposed there were people in Green Prairie, newcomers and illiterates, who didn’t know her name. She waved brightly at the thirty-five-story stone edifice on the corner behind the limousine. “Sloan Building,” she bellowed. And then, because the tearing sound was rising again, she pointed at herself-at the center of her full-rounded bosom where a bunch of violets reposed between the much-lifted lapels of her beige gabardine suit.

It didn’t mean anything to them. They in turn pointed to the entry of the Farm Industries Building, which was newer—and loftier—than her own structure. She shook her head and covered her ears with gloved hands. It helped. The pressure of sound finally waned.

“We’ll have to call the police, if you refuse,” the warden said.