Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Very good—very good, indeed, Charles! Evelyn?”

A solemn child with a pale face, bangs and a surprisingly animated, even sassy voice said, “He forgot—toothpaste, synthetic flavorings, canned vegetables and a small but promising garment industry.”

“Excellent! Now, what does River City make and do besides these?”

Hands fluttered again, like confetti.

Roy Rich filled in: “River City has many of those industries, also.” His eyes did not squint, but shut, as he consulted memory and ripped off in a staccato: “World’s biggest built-in, tractor-plow factory, huge ceramics industry, lead and zinc smelters, electric-furnace reduction plants, nation’s eighth largest surgical aid and pros- pros- something—”

“Prosthetics.”

“Pros-thetics-whatever-that-is-plant, high-grade special oils, tungsten wire, nuts, bolts, screws and automatic screw machines, chicken and fence wire, and that’s all I remember.”

Mrs. Brock sighed. It hadn’t taken half the period, after all, to pull from her class the various items of the Sister Cities’ endless business and, she thought irrelevantly, the attendant smoke, fumes, slums, labor troubles and traffic congestion. She brightened. “Now, class, you’ve pretty well covered the lists in the book. We’ll turn to a more creative project. What industries can you yourselves list that are not in our geography book?”

Fewer hands rose. Nora thought poutily, She’s a sucker for anything she thinks is creative!

It was not far from the truth, though Nora’s momentarily low opinion of Mrs. Brock’s educational penchant was unjustified.

“Halleck?” Mrs. Brock beamed.

“Candy,” said Halleck Watrous, hardly rising and dropping back in his seat at once.

“Well-yes,” the teacher murmured dubiously.

“Mr. Papandrocopulis makes the best nougat in the West,” Halleck said defensively.

“It’s a small local business. Who else?” She looked. “Mary?”

A sleek, prettied-up sixth grader with very blonde hair said, “My own father is superintendent of the Acme Rubber Products Company.”

“Very good,” Mrs. Brock nodded. Then, catching a subdued snicker in the male section, she flushed faintly and hurried on. “I can think of dozens of things! John?”

“Slaughterhouses and sawmills.”

“Excellent! Manda?”

“Lace. Old ladies tat it.”

“Marvin?”

“The Teen-James Company makes police whistles.”

“I suppose they do—very good—novelty products, we should call it.”

Nora had an idea and put up her hand, thinking to recoup. Mrs. Brock, surprised, said,

“Yes, Nora?”

“Amusement rides—Swan Island’s the biggest amusement park in the whole area.”

Mrs. Brock’s reaction was less than delighted and the class giggled.

“It isn’t play —for the people that make money out of it!” Nora said defensively. “It’s a business. I bet they make more money than the banks !”

The teacher nodded happily. “ Banks! Now there is a big Sister City business. Finance, market trading, clearing houses, banks.” Horse dust, Nora thought to herself, with no clear image of a substance, but a sense that the phrase was appropriate.

Mrs. Brock went on. “Well, let me hint. What’s big, and mostly glass, that you see in the suburbs and the country…?”

They guessed it. Greenhouses, nurseries and a new hydroponics experiment in winter-vegetable raising.

It was not a good day for Nora. She was unable to define “commission government” in civics, and she got three dates wrong in the history test. Moreover, when she stopped beside the school fence to argue with Judy Martin on the meaning of “morphodite,” Billy Westcott crept up behind her, tied her two long pigtails together and hung them over an iron picket. The result was that, finding herself overwhelmed by Judy’s superiority in esoteric information and being told there was “no such word,” Nora decided to run—and did not. Instead, her head jerked back nastily, her neck-hair was painfully pulled, she bumped the iron fence, and only a fast, reflex scuffling of her feet saved her from falling, and from hanging ignominiously by her braids. She unhooked herself speedily. The same thing had already happened twice before that year: once on the iron cleat of a phone pole and once on a fire extinguisher. She threw four futile rocks at the hilarious, rapidly retreating Billy.

Her journey back to her home did little to improve things.

The way from Public School 44 led out Dumond A venue and over Walnut-a matter of some twelve blocks, or about a mile. Nora preferred, however, to come by less direct routes. She had several favorites, depending on the season. One, involving a long detour, took her past Restland Cemetery and a good third of the distance into town. Another followed Hickory—the school being on the corner of that street and Dumond Avenue—diagonally across Hobart Park, which placid preserve had been a bequest to Green Prairie by the long-deceased founder of Hobart Metal Products. The park, once the Hobart estate, contained a pond; Nora enjoyed ponds-ducks came to them, fish lived in them, rowboats tipped over in them, and you could wade, if the cop was trifling with some nursemaid. She also liked, when in the humor, to go clear over to Cold Spring Street, which was beyond her home, and watch trains go by on the Kansas and Southern Railroad.

This day, however, she went along Hickory merely to River Avenue and turned south.

River Avenue crossed Plum Street, Oak, Spruce, Pine and Maple, before reaching Walnut. It was a broad thoroughfare, much used by buses and trucks and, in this district, a minor shopping street besides. Now, however, River Avenue was dug up and new sewers were being laid. This enterprise involved noise, fire and big machinery, men, moraines of Green Prairie’s underlying clay, dynamite explosions and other interesting features.

Nora’s tour, however, was unlucky. She met two boys she’d never seen before who said they lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, challenged her to penny-pitching and won eight cents, all she had on her at the time. Furthermore, a bus hit a puddle at the Spruce Street intersection and spattered her dress.

Her inner condition was mediocre when she reached home. She was about to open the front door and enter, which was her right, when her father drove into the yard with a sound of brakes that meant either he was mad or he had to go to the bathroom in haste. She looked and saw that he was mad. Very mad.

“Nora,” he said, “I want you to stay outdoors this afternoon! I’m having a meeting.”

“It’s impossible,” Nora responded.

Thus challenged, he took closer cognizance. “You sick? It’s a perfectly swell, hot day!”

“My dress is filthy—through the fault of the Green Prairie Street Transportation Company.”

“Well, go round the back way then. I expect a lot of people here shortly.”

“Where’s Mom?”

He went in. “How do I know? I just got here, too! Making sandwiches, I hope.”

“What’s the meeting for?”

“Civil Defense indignation meeting. My section. We may decide to cancel all our subscriptions to the Transcript .”

“ That old stuff!” Nora murmured. She brightened. “Anyhow—if it ever did happen—it would probably be a hydrogen bomb and there wouldn’t even be a stone standing in the uttermost corners of the County.”

He stared at her. “Sometimes,” he said gently, “I feel that would be best.”

He slammed the door. His daughter shrugged several times and tittered. Inasmuch as her mother was putatively making sandwiches, Nora went dutifully around back. She was given a cheese-and-jelly and a cold meat.