Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

He’d be sitting there, or standing, when fog rolled in or when the wind picked up dry earth from between the myriad acre-miles of corn stubble and plunged the cities into the darkness of a duster.

He’d watch rain there.

Sometimes the men at the city desk would say, “Coley’s getting a bit odd.” Then, thinking how his family had perished one by one in ways which, to the lucky, are merely statistical, they’d add a kindly, “No wonder.”

Mrs. Berwyn, his secretary, would always say, “You’re crazy—not the boss. He’s just taken to doing his thinking looking out the window. Maybe some of you dumb journalists would improve your work by staring at something more than city-room walls.”

Coley was, one night, looking at the moon and its effect upon the spires and minarets of his homeland. A powdery light sifted over the region and picked out not just the loftiest buildings but lesser structures, objects that did not usually draw his daytime attention. Thus the tarred roof of the block-square produce market stood revealed across River Avenue. Out toward Rocky Glen, near the Country Club, he could see the glister of a greenhouse and guessed it was the Thomas Nursery. Slossen’s Run, a muddy tributary of the river, indistinguishable by day from a dusty road, now glinted to the west wherever the buildings left a space for it to show-a proper water course by night, however much the day defiled it. He saw, too, the distant spires of River City’s Roman Catholic Cathedral newly finished, up on the corner of Market and, appropriately, St. Paul.

He was thinking that there had been a time in America, not long before even by the brief calendar of human lives, when church spires had been the loftiest landmarks. Now, the steeples of commerce towered above, dwarfing and belittling man’s homage to God. It was not, Coley reflected, an accidental phenomenon. When men turned from inner values to those outside, to “getting and spending,” their tabernacles dwindled while trade places grew majestic.

He heard his door open and sighed, looking away from the moon-lacquered panorama.

“Mr. Conner’s here to see you,” his secretary said. “And it’s almost ten o’clock.”

“Conner?”

“Henry Conner.”

Borden smiled. “Oh. Hank. Tell him to come right in.”

“You haven’t had supper yet, Mr. Borden. Would you like…?”

“Later. Later.” He snapped on lights and sat down at his desk.

Coley Borden could tell, nine times out of ten, about how a man felt, just from a glance.

Seven times out of ten, with the same quick look he could guess what a man was thinking. With women, he wasn’t so sure. In the case of Hank Conner, Coley knew even without the seeing what his thoughts would be. He was astonished, however, when Hank came in. Hank was “dragging his shoulders.” His hair wasn’t iron-gray, any more; it was just plain gray, curly still, but he was getting bald. His homely, solid face was still good-humored, but in a patient way, not with his old exuberance. He looked like a man who would have a quiet chuckle ready for an ironic joke, not like a man who would yell louder than a Sioux and do a war dance in a bowling alley after six strikes in a row.

“Hello, Hank.”

And there was also a new, unwelcome diffidence about Henry Conner. He sat down uncomfortably in the walnut-armed, leather-upholstered chair beside the desk. “Good evening, Coley.” He didn’t add, “You old type-chewer,” or anything.

“Like a cigar?”

Hank’s head shook. “Brought my pipe. Mind?”

“This place has been perfumed by some of the vilest furnaces in the Middle West. Fire it up!” Hank did. “Came to talk about Civil Defense, Coley.”

“I know.”

“Kind of hate to. Always liked the Transcript. Respected it.” His big mouth spread with something like his old-time smile and when he rubbed his cheek, Coley could hear the bristles that had grown since morning. “You know, first time my name was in the paper, or my picture, it was the Transcript. High school graduation.”

Coley said, “Sure.”

“Tried to get you at your home. Mrs. Slant said you were still down here. So I hopped in the car.”

Coley didn’t say anything. Hank’s diffidence was real; so was the determination underneath. The best thing was to let Hank go about it in his own way. The editor felt sad. His instincts—and every syllable of his logic—were on the other man’s side.

“Of course,” Hank went on, after a sip of smoke, “I know Minerva Sloan was responsible for your policy change.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s doing us bad harm. Real bad.” Hank mused a while, got up and lumbered across the room to the big map on the west wall. It was a street map of the two cities, their suburbs and the surrounding villages; there was a duplicate at CD headquarters. Hank used his pipestem for a pointer. “My district, Coley, is here—from West Broad on the north to Windmere Parkway. And from Bigelow to Chase Drive. Takes in a lot of territory—about four square miles, give you a few acres.” He smiled again. “It isn’t so full of folks as you’d think, on account of Crystal Lake and Hobart Park—about eleven thousand people is all. A little over three thousand homes and buildings. Stores in three small shopping centers. Libraries and schools and churches and hospitals and so on. You know it, about as well as I do.”

“Sure, Hank.”

“Out of my area, we had darn near a thousand volunteers, all told.” His eyes, clear and blue like Nora’s eyes, sparkled a little. “Three quarters of ’em roughly were just plain people, working people, running from masons and carpenters and delicatessen owners to the middle category, folks like us Conners. I wouldn’t say more than a quarter—if that, quite—came from the big places around Crystal Lake or up in the chichi district toward Cold Spring. Just a cross section of ordinary city people, you might say. And I’m tolerably sure that out of the thousand not every man-jack—or woman-jill—would show up set and ready, if my outfit ever got asked to do what it’s here for.

“The point is, Coley, these people are the backbone of not just Green Prairie or the Sister Cities, or a couple of states, but the whole doggoned country. Les Brown may just be a handyman. But if you were cast on a desert island for a few years, you’d be smart to take Les—for company and comforts. Alton Bowers may own ten acres of lawn and landscaped gardens and a big mansion, and he may own a pile of grain elevators, but he’s as close to Christian as Baptists ever get!” Hank, a Presbyterian, let the joke linger for a moment. Then the brightness left his eyes, he came back and sat down. “Called a meeting of the whole gang at the South High yesterday, Coley.” Hank looked at his pipe. “Forty-three people showed up.”

“Good Lord!”

Henry sighed. “We usually turned out around five, six hundred.”

“What do you want me to do, Henry?”

The bulky man stirred in his chair, frowned, rubbed his thorny cheek and said, “Talk, first of all. Get out from behind Minerva Sloan’s skirts and talk!” He reached around his neck and wrestled, one-handedly, with his vertebrae, disarranging his neat blue suit. “I’ve always had a good deal of respect for you. You’ve been right about things in this man’s town—sometimes when I was wrong. You’ve got a good mind, Coley. You’ve read a lot of history. You know a lot about this science stuff. Your paper’s been wide awake. Now, all of a sudden, because we jam up traffic—and it’s not the first time we’ve done it but maybe the tenth—you change tack on us.”

Coley Borden’s face wrinkled with intensity, glowed with a burning expression, like helpless sympathy. It was a brownish face, as if perennially suntanned; and the eyes were too big for it. Time, not very much time at that, for Borden was contemporary with Henry Conner, had bent and gnarled the editor. “I can imagine how you feel, Henry.”