Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

At the doorway, Don began to whine. “Stop talking about atomic bombs.”

“Why?” Charles asked calmly. The little boy’s face twisted. “It scares me. I don’t want to hear about it. I hate talking about cities blowing up.”

“You see ?” Ruth said. She said it as if every point she had brought up had been proven beyond further debate. Her job was the protection of her children. Whatever assailed them was evil and wrong; worry over world conditions and the dreadful advances of science upset the young; ergo: the world should be altered. Ruth obviously could not reason beyond that—to the theoretical possibilities, to the absolute need of protecting her young from something fantastically worse than nervousness.

This narrowness, this ingrained sense that River City would always be there because it had always been there, the emotional identification with the immediate here and the refusal even to look at the hard and horrible face of tomorrow yonder, annoyed Charles more than such things usually did. He did not realize that his private irritability was colored by the private disappointment in his leave. He would even have denied stoutly that his visit to his favorite relatives had been a second-choice manner of spending the evening.

He took up the challenge again. “I don’t see, Aunt Ruth. What I see— all I see—is the one fact we must never lose sight of! So long as even the potential threat of A-bombs on America exists, nothing we can do in the way of arming ourselves, of testing weapons, of civil defense, is too much. I think little Don here is jittery because you’ve made him jittery. I think—”

Jim said, firmly, “Cut it, son! Mother’s mad.”

She was “mad.” She controlled her temper long enough however, to order the wide-eyed, very blonde Marie to take her towheaded brother upstairs and put him in bed. Then she whirled on her nephew. “I know you’re a soldier. That’s no excuse for your coming to a quiet, peaceable, domestic scene and scaring hell out of mere children!”

“Somebody ought to be scared,” he answered.

“ You should be! People like you! People like your crazy father! Yes. People like my sister, stringing along with that everlasting playacting about sudden death! A fine way to bring up a whole generation, watching grown men and women make like they are dead and dying. I tell you, Charles Conner….”

“…and I tell you, Aunt Ruth, you ought to go get those ancient newspapers out, where they announced Russia had exploded an H-bomb, and sit on your broad backside and reflect what that means to your kids—”

“’Bout time,” Jim Williams said, mildly still, “for you to be running along, isn’t it, Chuck?”

He went.

He had walked a mile down Willowgrove Avenue before his vexation abated. Then he laughed a little. Most people took it the way Ruth did. They were frantic inside. Themselves and trying, somehow, to fight off the feeling, simply because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, nerve themselves to look squarely at the cause. Hysterical, that was the word. Hysteria was the thing that knocked out the brain when it refused to face fact and pretended something unreal was true instead. Ruth had got plenty mad and plenty active and mighty effective in the bargain—two years ago when she discovered the fourth-grade teacher once had belonged to a subversive organization. That teacher hadn’t lasted three days.

The trouble was, she couldn’t carry her fear of Communism into the realm of war. War wasn’t her department. She felt it wasn’t any civilian’s department. Most civilians couldn’t imagine that war might suddenly become their whole concern. Not American civilians: Europeans, maybe. So Ruth was living in a dream world, trying to compel the real world to match her dream, where there could be no civilian war. Trying to make a special peace—for her kids, she thought, but actually to assuage her own deep guilt for turning away from the big picture of a nation, her nation, in trouble.

Twelve blocks of walking took Charles well into River City. He decided he might as well walk the rest of the distance. It was only nine fifteen. He cut over to James Street and up the steep bank around the reservoir. The moon had come up, a harvest-sized moon, and the water in the reservoir was so clear he could see the brick-lined bottom—as well as pop and beer bottles, cartons, Kleenexes and picnic residue people had tossed in, despite the signs all along the fence saying, “You Drink It, Keep It Clean—River City Water Supply.”

The reservoir was in an old section of town, one much like the Pearson Square section to the west. Along one side were large mansions which had long ago been divided into small apartments and the one-room niches of boarding-houses. On the side opposite, the north, old familics who had kept their money and refused to move still maintained their mansions and grounds, mansions behind iron gates and brick walls, with apple trees and grape arbors in back, mansions where often the only relict would be one old lady, with aging memories and trunks full of vintage clothes, albums full of dated photographs.

To the west, the sky line of River City sharp and high, picket-thick, glittered against the aurora of the Amusement Park beyond on Swan Island. South were the lights of River City’s colored town—the streaming radiance of Mechanic Street—and beyond, the darkling shadows of Water Street, the river itself, and the less-visible thrust of Green Prairie’s business district.

He went around the reservoir and down to Mechanic Street, taking pleasure from the full-throated aliveness there—markets still open—kids still wide awake and playing on the street-fat colored women talking from window to tenement window in voices like velvet-radios shooting band music over the nocturnal streetscape-fruits, vegetables, hucksters, hock shops, saloons—a pretty, thin girl who walked toward him and enquired huskily, “Busy, good looking?”

He followed Mechanic Street. Its last four blocks led across back alleys and alongside commercial buildings that stepped up to Market’s tall structures. Here, trucks and cars went individually and people, too, hurrying alone under the spitting arc lights on errands connected with belated shipping orders, or other, less legitimate errands. For here, in small, brick-fronted buildings that once had been homes, the nefarious part of River City’s life was conducted.

Charles knew Pol Taylor’s place was somewhere here—and here was Jake’s.

It was here he saw Beau Bailey.

Chuck Conner did not know the precise location of Jake’s, any more than he knew which of the many grimed brick houses contained Pol Taylor’s high-class bordello. He knew only that some businessmen of the Sister Cities referred to this area as “The Block” and that it contained numerous centers of diversion frowned on by churches and right-thinking people. He saw Beau because Beau stumbled down three steps to the sidewalk, nearly fell—a man in conspicuous trouble.

Charles hurried. Beau, looking wildly up and down the street, rushed away, not recognizing Charles. He went totteringly, and the younger man stopped. Several things had become plain to him in that instant. Beau’s eye was cut and bleeding and his nose was bloody.

But he had not been looking for help. His face, in the arc light, had been tormented by fear; he had been furtive. The chance that the man he noted, in the shadows, but near enough to recognize him, would be somebody able to identify him did not even enter Beau’s head: most people he knew didn’t frequent The Block. Beau rushed on, lurching a little, toward Market Street, and Charles decided he had better not follow: Beau had probably been in a fight; the less said about which, the better.