Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Beau managed to stave it off this time by darting to the farthest corner as he said, “John Jessup.” Jake nodded thoughtfully. “So okay. What are you hanging around here for?”

Beau ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, tripped, almost fell, and found the gloomy sanctuary of night. He hadn’t gone many blocks before he realized, clearly, rather than in a horror-strewn corner of his brain, that now—and forever—Jake really had him by the short hair.

Sweat broke out over him; for several blocks he couldn’t remember which street led back to Market.

Beau was one of the luckless….

Two weeks after the termination of his dealings with Jake, two weeks of blessed relief after an at least temporary termination, Beau walked across the marble floor of the bank, on the way to lunch. He had decided, as usual—after a struggle, as usual—that he’d have two Manhattans and pork chops: weather was really cold now.

His eye detected a singular customer amongst the hurrying, queued scores, the dozens writing and blotting at the desk.

It was a very, very tall man, wearing two pairs of glasses, waiting in line at one of the “Trust Funds” windows.

It was John Jessup.

Some undistinguished men are heroes; some distinguished heroes are not men at all in the good sense of the name; and such a person was Kit Sloan. He was unaware of the defect as are thousands.

From his ancestors, he had taken his lithe, big body and the resilient “constitution” that went with it. From a forgotten forebear, probably a carefully forgotten one, he’d come by the

“Sloan darkness,” the coloring of eyes and hair and skin which had suggested to Nora Conner a Latin actor. Some said the Sloans had Italian blood, others said gypsy, and some, of course, hit upon the truth—commonplace in the west: an Indian squaw had participated in combining the Sloan genes.

No one who had lived a long life in either of the Sister Cities would deny that the Sloans had brains; any native of vintage age could add, often from harsh experience, that Minerva brought to the family an additional measure of shrewdness and force besides. Kittridge Sloan, in whom these elements presumably reposed, conceived of himself as so imbued and endowed with every needful quality as to make demonstration unnecessary save when he chose. He did not often choose. To be sure, he was obliged to do a certain amount of work to graduate from Princeton, where he’d been sent at nineteen. He enjoyed sports, however, and was so proficient at them that professors who might otherwise have failed him were possibly persuaded not to do so by anxious coaches. Besides, Kit invariably elected the easiest courses: he had a definite knack for finding paths of least resistance. Whether he could have exhibited, under pressure, the acumen of his parents remained unknown; he chose not to try, deeming it unnecessary.

He interrupted his undergraduate career for military service. His mother preferred the Navy, but Kit, for once opposing her wishes, went into the Air Force. Athletes have an affinity for flying, often, and Kit, who’d ridden the fastest horses and driven the fastest cars (with several mishaps in the Sister Cities which had been expensive to his family and more than bruising to his fellow citizens), took easily to flying.

He found himself in actual combat, as an interceptor pilot in the Eighth Air Force, over England, before he thought to regret the whole thing. Until he was shot at, he had kept his mind closed to that aspect of his temporary trade. But when, high in the British air, he felt and saw German bullets entering the delicate tissues of his plane, Kit went into funk. He dived clear of attack, leaving two wing mates exposed to a fate which both met soon and heroically. On the ground, he found a plausible explanation for his “lucky” escape. The attack upon six Nazi scouting fighters had not been observed by anybody save those engaged. It was a cloudy day.

Kit knew, however, that in some very present mission he would be obliged again to engage the foe and he knew he would, again, turn tail. He spent two febrile days trying to figure a way out of a situation which, until then, he had regarded as an exhilarating sport and which, to his horror, had become deadly dangerous. Then, on what he sweatily felt was the eve of his disgrace, he and his fighter group were reassigned to another field and a different activity. Buzz bombs had appeared over Britain and it was the task of Kit to intercept these, if possible.

Attacking buzz bombs was dangerous and demanded skill. Ram-jet engines drove the miniature planes at terrific speed, for that era. It was necessary to wait high above, spot one (or learn of an approach by radio) and dive down toward it, using the acceleration of the plunge to overtake the missile. When these bombs were shot at, they usually exploded in the air and the plane that did the shooting was often unable to evade the blast. Thus, some attacking planes, in the early days, blew up themselves to save London’s citizens; others on the same dedicated mission were torn to bits as they streaked into flying fragments. Soon, however, it was discovered that the slipstream of an overshooting fighter could be used to knock down a buzz bomb, tipping it over, causing it to crash prematurely in the open countryside rather than on the intended city.

This feat was a matter of technique and daring. And the VI’s had a negative characteristic which perfectly suited Kit’s personality: they did not shoot back. A cool and skillful pilot with very fast reflexes, Kit became one of the most celebrated assailants of the buzz bombs and so a hero. Where he would have failed altogether in the purpose for which he had been trained, this substitute endeavor matched his inadequate specifications. No one ever doubted, not even the men in his own squadron, that his “nerve” was anything but consummate. It was, so long as the risks he took involved only decisions made by himself. The appearance of any factor he could not control, such as hostile fire, alone unmanned him. He had cut close to pedestrians and other cars—and clipped a few—all his life: diving on a ton of HE carried by a zombie aircraft was no different. It could not hurt him so long as he made no blunders at the controls. That was his psychology and he came home to U.S.A., went back to Princeton, cloaked in a wreath of medals, Sister City awe and maternal ecstasy.

By that time, so long as the issue did not rise in fact, Kit had completely repressed his short-term awareness of any combat defect. He could talk air slaughter on even terms with any ace.

On a cold, gray day, shortly before Thanksgiving, feeling at loose ends and noting (on the bathroom scales, after rising and showering) that he had gained five unwanted pounds, Kit made two decisions which he regarded as important. He would skip lunch for a week. And he would get more exercise.

At breakfast he told his mother, with the urgent solemnity of a businessman who had decided to open a new branch, or a surgeon, to open a peritoneum. They were sitting in the upstairs breakfast room of the Sloan mansion, looking out over their landscaped acres on Pearson Square which, in Victoria’s time (or Garfield’s or Grover Cleveland’s), had been the center of River City bon ton but now, save where Minerva held the fort, was much like the decayed area a mile or so on the other side of Market Street: a run-down neighborhood in which the big houses were compartmented for roomers, or hung with signs denoting piano and voice instruction, furniture repair, spiritualist readings, philately and whatnot, or torn down and replaced by already shabby row houses, which in some instances had yielded again to supermarkets and filling stations.