Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

His aunt and uncle asked, diffidently, about service. Did he hate it? Was it really rugged?

Jim, who had been deferred in the Second War because of his family, seemed to hide under the question a mixture of guilt and romantic expectation.

“It’s just dull,” Charles said. “Lord, the kids are growing! Marie’s really a young woman!”

Jim hitched a suspender and rubbed his Adam’s apple. “That’s what she tells us daily,”

he laughed. “She’s a year and a half older than Nora.”

“Nora,” said Charles, “is getting the same idea. She cut her own hair the other day….”

They laughed at the story.

“We haven’t seen much of Beth and Henry.” Ruth sounded apologetic. “Time was when Ferndale seemed practically next door to Walnut Street. But now”—she sighed—“by the time I get the kids organized, or a few hours of an afternoon, it seems a million miles off.”

“I know,” Chuck nodded. “Took me an hour and a quarter to get over here.”

“Mercy!”

“Both cities,” Jim said, speaking with professional assurance, “were horse-and-buggy designed. I read the other day in my drafting magazine that cities are strangling themselves.

Green Prairie and River City sure are!” Jim suddenly realized that, although his nephew was the younger man, he had a degree in architecture. “What do you think?” he asked, yielding his moment of pontification.

“You’d believe so, if you could hear Dad and his wardens talk! They jammed up Green Prairie, but good, last week.”

Ruth said, “I wish Hank Conner would get out of that thing!”

Charles lit a cigarette. “Why? He loves it. Dad’s a kind of natural leader of folks.”

“Think of the effect on Nora, though—and Ted—”

“ What effect?”

Jim put in anxiously, “You see, Chuck, we’re not allowed to mention atom bombs or anything having to do with them in this household.”

“It’s emotionally destructive,” Ruth Williams said emphatically.

Charles realized his aunt was serious. A stiffness had come into her comfortable, plump body. He laughed. “You mean harmful to the kids? I don’t know. They were having a war on Venus when I arrived. The carnage was fabulous, they told me. I don’t believe hearing a few useful facts about what to do in case of enemy aggression—”

“It’s the school,” Jim said.

“It is not merely the school,” Ruth said heatedly. “It’s scientific information.”

Charles grinned, yet frowned a little, too. “I don’t get it.”

“She always goes to the P.T.A.” Jim yawned a little in spite of himself. He covered up by taking a sip of elderberry wine.

Ruth appealed to her soldier-nephew. “I can show you the facts, in the Bulletin! Every time they run off a series of atomic tests anywhere, the kids of the United States show a marked rise of nervousness, of nightmares, of delinquency. The Rorschach Tests prove it!” she shuffled in a stack of papers, schoolbooks, bills, checkbooks, women’s magazines on the top of a radiator.

The heap made a bulge in the lace curtains.

“I suppose kids do,” Charles agreed. “They react to things. Nevertheless, we have to run the weapons tests, don’t we?”

“ Why?” Ruth turned, hot-eyed, from her search. Papers and magazines cascaded to the floor. She reminded Chuck of his mother when his mother was on the verge of administering “righteous” punishment. “Why do they have to go on forever scaring the daylights out of people?

You tell me why!”

“Just to try to keep ahead of the Reds,” he answered.

“I thought we were making peace with the Reds!”

“We’ve been ‘about to’ ever since I was in high school and maybe before that, for all I can remember.”

“Peace, peace, peace!” she said heatedly. “Why don’t we accept this last offer? The one they made in August?”

“We’re trying to, Mother.” Jim was obviously endeavoring to divert his wife. “The United Nations is trying.”

“Maybe they’re right,” she said. “Maybe our people—the military men and the big steel manufacturers—don’t really want peace.”

“It isn’t that, Aunt Ruth.” Charles tried to be lucid.

“Every time, every single time, we’ve thought we were on the verge of an understanding with the Kremlin—whammo! They broke loose somewhere else. Stop them there—get a deal set—and bingo! They hit in China again. Burma, the Balkans—”

“ So what? Are those people worth dying for? Worth trillions of dollars? Worth making permanent nervous wrecks of all the children in America and a lot of grownups, besides, like your father?”

Charles considered the idea of his father as a “nervous wreck”; it was such an unfamiliar thought that it fascinated him. He chuckled. “I know how you feel, Aunt Ruth. After all, it’s why I have to spend time in service. But look. There’s one thing the Soviets have never offered—offered and meant it. That’s to let the world come in and inspect them and make sure they aren’t stockpiling mass-destruction weapons. Right?”

“They’ve offered, time and again, to inspect themselves ! I don’t see why, for the sake of ending all this crazy strain, we can’t try having just that much confidence in them.”

“You’ve shown a marked lack of confidence in the American citizens who have turned out to be Communists.”

“That’s different!”

“Why?”

“When an American citizen goes Communist, it shows that person is a moral leper and utterly untrustworthy, through and through.”

“But the Kremlin, with the same beliefs, can be trusted?”

Charles had felt a twinge of anger at his aunt and met it with vehemence.

“Oh, hell, let’s not argue,” Jim said unhappily. “Have some more wine, Chuck.”

“What would you feel,” Ruth asked, ignoring her husband, “if you were a whole government, and another government flatly refused to take your treaty oath and your word?”

“The Soviet Government,” Charles replied, “goes on the principle that its own word is no damned good whatsoever. That’s why we can’t trust their mere promise to disarm. That’s why we have to test A-bombs and keep up a draft army and remain powerful, until and unless Russia permits the world to see for itself that it is doing what it has promised to do. There’s no other way! Our Government would have found it long ago if there had been.”

“You’re wrong!” Ruth was shaking with anger.

Marie came in the front door and stood in the hall, holding the hand of six-year-old Don.

She looked very mature for not-yet-fourteen—and very pretty.

“See here,” Charles said, trying to restore the tone of good will, “suppose we do accept world peace under Soviet terms? Okay. We disarm. We destroy all our atomic weapons, as per the terms. We cut our army and air force and navy down to the bone. Do we feel better? That’s what you say you want, Aunt Ruth. But suppose you got it? Would you then quit worrying?

Would you then feel safe, knowing the Soviets had made a big promise, and knowing, at the same time, you didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were really doing behind an Iron Curtain that would still be down?” Charles shrugged. “I think you’d find yourself, in exactly no time at all, so terribly much more worried about A-bombs, you would really be a nervous wreck.

And you’d have a right good reason for being afraid, too. Because then you’d know the Russians could fly over us any time, and we couldn’t even hit back !”