Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Green Prairie has a lot of volunteer auxiliary police and the cops train ’em. River City?

You tell me how they’d handle things. They’ve got nothing.”

“What’s Federal policy?” Coley persisted. “After all, the Government must realize that somewhere between a quarter and a half of your big-city people aren’t what could be called at all emotionally stable. They’re pushovers for panic and naturals for improper reaction.”

“No policy,” the other replied. “Except force. Police effort. How can there be?”

“And psychological contagion?”

“Meaning what?”

“If the nuts, the near-nuts, the neurotic, the criminal, the have-not people and the repressed minorities go haywire—why, how many of the rest will catch it? What’s more catching than panic?”

“You got me,” Henry said. He sighed and stood. “All I believe is, the more people face what might happen, ahead of time, without being deluded about how ‘firm’ they are, the fewer’ll go wild.” He glanced around the office as if it symbolized something he cherished and had reluctantly hurt. ‘‘I’m sorry to come up here with all this on my mind, Coley….”

“I know.”

“Guess you do. Well…!”

They shook hands warmly.

When the lights had been turned on, when Henry Conner had gone, saying it was past his bedtime, chuckling, walking out with square shoulders, Coley Borden sat a while and then buzzed for Mrs. Berwyn. She came in—red hair piled high, greenish eyes mapped out as usual with mascara, all her brains and kindness and unanchored tenderness concealed in the outlandish aspect of her homely face and big body. (After Nan died, he thought, I should have married Beatrice; she’d be terrific—you’d only have to have it dark.)

“Get your book, Bea,” he said over his shoulder. He was standing again, looking along shelves for a volume which, presently, he took down. When he turned, she was sitting; she had brought her pencils and stenographic notebook with the first buzz.

“How old are you, Bea?” he asked, opening the book and looking from page to page. “You never asked me that.” Her voice was clear and rather high.

“Asking now.”

“Fifty-three.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“Why? Didn’t a woman ever tell you her right age before?”

He gazed at her and his lips twitched. “Sure. Once. I thought it was going to land me in prison, too. She was seventeen.”

“Your dissolute ways!” the green eyes flickered.

“I was kind of surprised,” he said quietly, “because you’re a year older than me. That’s all.”

“Oh.” She looked at the Door. “From you, that’s a compliment.”

“Right. We’re going to do some work. An editorial.”

“For morning? The page is in.”

“Yeah. If it comes out right, it’ll be for morning. I’m kind of rusty, Bea. But I’ll take a crack at it and maybe I’ll run it. Ready?”

She nodded.

He began to walk in front of his desk and to dictate:

“Ten years ago and more, this nation hurled upon its Jap foe a new weapon, a weapon cunningly contrived from the secrets of the sun. Since that day the world has lived in terror.

“Every year, every month, every hour, terror has grown. It is terror compounded of every fear. Fear of War. Fear of Defeat. Fear of Slavery. These fears are great, but they are common to humanity. Man in his sorrow has sustained them hitherto. But there are other fears in the composition of man’s present terror. These are fears that his cities may be reduced to rubble, his civilization destroyed, humanity itself wiped out; in sum, fear that man’s world will end. And this last fear has been augmented through the long, hideous years by hints from the laboratories that, indeed, the death of life is possible—and even the incineration of the planet may soon be achievable, by scientific design or by careless accident.

“Fears of mortal aggression and human crimes are tolerable, however dreadsome. But men have never borne with sanity a fear that their world will end. To all who accept as likely that special idea, reason becomes inaccessible; their minds collapse; madness invades their sensibilities. What they then do no longer bears reasonably upon their peril, however apt they deem their crazed courses. They are then puppets of their terror. And it is as such puppets that we Americans have acted for ten years, and more.”

Coley paused. Bea looked up and nodded appreciatively at his rhetoric. But when he did not immediately continue, she said, “I think, if you asked the first hundred people on the street if they were terrified, they’d laugh.”

“That’s a fact,” he answered. “Good suggestion.” He went on:

“Man has always reacted with universal panic to notions of the world’s end. Time and again in the Dark Ages, some planetary conjunction, the appearance of a comet, or an eclipse led to general convulsion. Business stopped. Mobs Bed the cities. Cathedrals were thronged.

Hideous sacrifices, repulsive persecutions, stake burnings and massacres were hysterically performed in efforts to stay the catastrophe. Futile efforts. Yet, whenever the people were thus frightened, they turned to violence, sadism and every evil folly. Time and again, multitudes on hilltops, awaiting to ascend to heaven, trampled each other to death while sparring for the best position from which to be sucked up by a demented Jehovah.

“The end of the Dark Ages did not alter this sinister trait. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our American hills have seen the scramble of the doomed as they awaited Judgment. At the beginning of this very century, the country was stricken by awe when it learned Earth would pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet. By that day, to be sure, science had so prospered in a climate of liberty that many millions stood steadfast in the presence of the celestial visitation. These restrained the rest. Blood did not flow on the altars of our churches; infants were not dashed against cathedral walls in atonement for presumed guilt; mobs of True Believers did not loot their own institutions and rape their own relatives in a last ecstasy of zealous horror. But today it is not the priest, not the self-appointed prophet with his crackpot interpretation of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, who says, ‘The earth may end.’ It is that very group of reasonable, orderly, unhysterical men upon whom society has learned, a little, to lean for comfort and truth: the scientists themselves!”

Mrs. Berwyn interrupted. “Two hundred thousand church-going subscribers of the Transcript are going to view that dimly.”

“True, isn’t it?”

She reflected, tapping her lush lips with a pencil. “Yes. I suppose it’s all perfectly true. But….”

A muscle tensed visibly in his jaw. He paced away from her, swung around, came jauntily back:

“The more civilized a man may be, or a woman, or child, the less readily he, or she, or the child will admit panic. That is what ‘civilized’ means: understanding, self-control, knowledge, discipline, individual responsibility. What happens, then, if a civilized society finds itself confronted with a reasonable fear, yet one of such a magnitude and nature that it cannot be tolerated by the combined efforts of reason and the common will? Such luckless multitudes, faced with that dilemma, will have but one solution. Feeling a gigantic fear they cannot (or they will not) face, they must pretend they have no fear. They must say aloud repeatedly, There is no reason to be afraid.’ They must ridicule those who show fear’s symptoms. Especially, they must pit themselves, for the sake of a protective illusion, against all persons who endeavor to take the measure of the common dread and respond sensibly to its scope. To act otherwise would be to admit the inadmissible, the fact of their repressed panic.