Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Things,” he learned, even before she finished a preliminary clearing of her throat, were not good. “This business has got to stop, at once,” she began.

“What business?”

“This Civil Defense nonsense!” She began to talk.

She was angry. She was very angry. It was not unusual.

He argued, but to less than no avail. He pointed out that it was Transcript policy to back up CD in Green Prairie, that she had her River City paper in which to condemn it.

Minerva was not moved, not moved at all. He had never heard her more furious, more determined, or more irrational:

“Two of the biggest cities in America,” she thundered, “blocked up for hours!” Green Prairie and River City, together, added up to one of the largest twenty or thirty American municipal areas. Minerva always spoke of them, however, as if they were aligned just behind New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. “You know what it is, Coley? It amounts to sabotage! Sabotage left over from the imbecilities of Harry Truman’s Administration! It wastes millions. It squanders billions of man-hours. For what? Absolutely nothing whatsoever! Do you know what I suspect about Civil Defense, actually?”

“No, Minerva.” His tone was wary.

“That it’s Communist-inspired. All it does is frighten people.” She warmed to the idea.

“Terrorize them by making them react to weapons the Reds probably don’t even own.

Meanwhile they are completely diverted and weakened in their attempt to wipe out dangerous radicals at home. The last thing a sane government would do would he to get its citizens playing war games in the streets…!”

Coley said, “Hey! Wait up!” because he was extremely well acquainted with the old lady.

“Doesn’t it go the other way around? Doesn’t the failure of the American people to get ready for atomic warfare reflect lack of realism and guts? Isn’t Green Prairie rather exceptional—because it is sort of ready, after all these years? If you were the Soviets, wouldn’t you rather America neglected atomic defense and wasted its muscle chasing college professors and persecuting a few writers? You bet you would!”

There was quite a long pause. Minerva’s voice came again, as quiet but as taut as a muted fiddlestring. “Coley. Am I going to have to replace you?”

Sitting in his office, high above Green Prairie, sitting in the new Transcript Tower which he’d help build by building up the newspaper, Coley felt the familiar whip. “No,” he said. “No, Minerva.”

“All right, then! Stop arguing—and get to work on the kind of job you know how to do!”

She swept from the phone booth into the main dining mom of the Ritz-Hadley and ordered a meal of banquet proportions.

Coley Borden hung up and dropped his head onto the desk blotter. He struggled with his rage. After a few minutes, he sent out the night boy for a ham sandwich and a carton of coffee.

Coley was, simply, a good man—with all the strengths inherent in the two words. He had weaknesses, also; his capitulation to Minerva exhibited weakness. But his courage and love of humanity outweighed lesser qualities. He had, in his life, deeply loved four persons: his mother, his wife, his son and his elder brother. His mother had died at forty-eight after a long agony of cancer. His wife had been killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1952. His son had died in the polio epidemic of 1954. And his brother had become a hopeless alcoholic who (though Coley had tried everything to save him) had disappeared in the skid rows of unknown cities.

In spite of that, Coley maintained unaltered a snappish yet tenderhearted steadfastness.

Every year, his shoulders had stooped a bit more, his retreating hair had moved farther from his arched, inquisitive brows, and his hands had trembled more as he smoked his incessant cigarettes. But his smile never slackened; the directness of his eyes never wavered and his newspaper acumen seemed to increase. The Green Prairie Transcript was read everywhere in its home city, and almost everywhere in the city across the river; it had an immense circulation in the state and a fairly large one throughout the Middle West.

Coley was the man responsible. A liberal, an agnostic, a lover of mankind, a great editor.

He looked out now, through the evening, at the other skyscrapers—some glittering from top to bottom, others splashed with the bingo-board patterns of offices being cleaned at night. To the north, half a mile away beyond the bluffs and the river, rose a second thicket of ferroconcrete, of sandstone, brick and steel: the lofty architecture of the River City downtown section. He went to the window and looked out. Traffic torrents were flowing freshet-fast again, paced by the red-green lights. All four lanes on the Central Avenue Bridge (the “Market Street Bridge” at its River City end) were crowded, tail lamps crimson on one side, white headlights like advancing fireflies on the other. Between, in uncertain shafts of light, were the roofs and escarpments of ten- and fifteen-story buildings.

At all this he looked fondly and he looked out across the flat, winking expanses of residential areas, across the night-hooded hulks of the warehouses, up and down the river where he could see the running beads of traffic on many other bridges and out toward the dark, toward the rich reach of the plains. Gradually his whimsical mouth drew tight and two sharp wrinkles appeared, running from his big nose to the resolved lips like anchor lines. He turned from the spectacular view of the double metropolis and walked into the city room.

Most of the leg men were out on assignments having to do with the air-raid drill. Some were at dinner. Around the horseshoe of the rewrite desk a half-dozen men worked, separated by twice the number of empty chairs. They were in shirt sleeves; some wore green visors. Coley Borden walked toward them, beckoning to others, who looked up from their typewriters. He sat on the end of the horseshoe. “How’s the drill going?”

The night city editor grinned. “Dandy! About an eighty per cent turnout. That means, over thirty-five thousand volunteers actually participated.”

“We’re going to crap on it.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then the city editor said, ‘Why?”

“Minerva’s mad.”

“You can’t do it!” Grieg, a reporter, a man of forty with graying red hair, made the assertion flatly. “The whole town’s proud—except for the usual naysayers. It’s the best CD blowout ever staged in the middle west. About the least popular thing you could do would be crap on it.”

“Civil Defense,” Coley answered, with nothing but intonation to indicate his scorn, “is Communist-inspired.”

“ What !”

“So Mrs. Sloan claims.”

“I always predicted,” Grieg moodily murmured, “they’d come for that moneybag with nets someday. Men in white.”

Payton, the city editor, said, “Just what do you want, Coley?”

The managing editor sighed. “I merely want to undo the work of about forty thousand damned good citizens-not to mention a like number of school kids—over the last years.” He considered. “Every day in Green Prairie, people get hurt in car crashes. All people hurt this afternoon will be victims of our crazed Civil Defense policies. Any dogs run over will be run over because of the air-raid rehearsal. Any fires started. All people delayed will be delayed unnecessarily. If anybody died in the hospitals, it will be—because the traffic jam held up some doctor.”

Grieg whistled. “The works, eh? Jesus! She must be mad!”

“She didn’t get home for dinner,” Coley answered quietly, “and she had guests.”