Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Five pounds,” Kit said with a shake of his handsome head.

Minerva shook hers in sympathy. “But why not eat a small breakfast and a small lunch?”

“It’s a problem, I admit. If I don’t eat lunch at all, I’ll get hellishly hungry. That means, I’ll have to do something pretty interesting in the afternoon, to stave off the old pangs. So I thought I’d drive the Jag out to the airport and fly first. Then back to town and the A.C. for squash. The fellows wanted me to play for the club and I was too lazy. But I’ll change my mind.

A rubdown up on the roof solarium, maybe a cabinet bath, perhaps even a few fast rounds with Percy Wigman, on days when there’s time—and home again. All reduced. Or, if it’s an evening out, home and change and scram.”

“I wish you wouldn’t fly.”

“I know, Muzz. Silly of you.”

He went at the matter of losing five pounds, and diverting his mind from hunger’s pangs meanwhile, with great intensity. His heredity had, after all, geared him for large enterprise and since he’d eschewed them he was obliged to undertake small things in a big way. His red Jaguar roared north from Pearson Square and west the five miles on Elk Drive to Gordon Field, the civil airport. He’d phoned ahead; his fast, small plane was ready. He took off, ignoring rule and law, in the manner of hot Soviet pilots, retracting his landing gear to become air-borne.

High above the vast panoply of the two cities, he stunted. People on the ground watched with fascination. Old hands at the airport, even if they’d missed the take-off, identified the pilot by his performance in the air.

After half an hour, Kit tired of using the gray sky for a trampolin and came down closer to the cities, separated by a leaden river, which soon would freeze and bear a burden of dirty snow on its ice. He cut south and on the way came close to earth. Using the deserted Gordon Stadium as a kind of inverted hurdle, he made several passes into it at an altitude lower than its cement circle of seats, its press stand and TV stalls. The maneuver, also illegal, reminded him of faster and trickier antics over Britain. That thought sent him farther south and west to Hink Field, the military airport, where, keeping to the letter of the law, he annoyed several junior officers in Flight Control by circling the area at the closest permissible approach and shooting past nervous young men in trainers.

Swinging, then, on an arc of several miles, he bethought himself of Lenore Bailey. It was easy, at five thousand feet, to sight the metal glint of Crystal Lake. He came in over it low, circling its banks, unmindful of wincing patients in the Jenkins Memorial Hospital, and, zooming, twisting, he sorted from the residences below the intersection of Walnut and Bigelow.

On the northwest corner, the Bailey house sent up chimney smoke. Kit dived fast, pulled out hard, and blew the smoke into the yard. He climbed at full power and came down in a series of loops. He took all of Walnut in a roaring run, at the end of which he zoomed and came back-upside down.

These antics attracted a large and almost unanimously indignant audience among which he could not spot Lenore. People ran out of their thunder-stricken houses—mothers with babies in their arms, housewives with sudsy hands; carrying dish towels, waving pans and pots, and irate businessmen who lunched at home, with shaking fists and tucked napkins. Netta Bailey appeared, in a kimona and hair curlers, which the pilot could not discern; Beau was not there. He did not practice the economical but plebian custom of lunching at home. And Lenore was downtown shopping.

When he could not spot the girl, but only her mother, Kit made one last run over the bare treetops of Walnut Street, flying at crop-duster’s altitude, and winged back toward the airport.

On the way, he dived through the low-hanging drift of yellowish smoke which was being blown by a west wind from the Hobart Metal Products plant across the center of the two downtown regions. He whipped the smoke into satisfying patterns and took a tum above the skyscrapers of Green Prairie and River City. They rose magically out of the factory smoke and stood above them in a single cluster at what seemed the heart of one great metropolis.

His last trick was a pass at the steel stack of the refining plant beyond the metalworks—a tall column topped by a flame which consumed waste gases and sent a horizontal smoke-trail of its own across the city. Not realizing that the blaze was self-illumined, Kit tried to extinguish it with his prop-wash much in the same way he had once diverted buzz bombs from their courses.

But after three passes at the flame he gave up and left both the stack and the plant foreman burning.

He drove back to town, played brilliantly for an hour and a half at squash with Freddie Perkman, took assorted baths and then, in a terry-cloth robe, went out in the solarium of the River City A.C. for his massage. The glass-enclosed summit of the skyscraper building furnished a three hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the cities, obstructed only here and there by the few taller structures. Kit, having just had an even better view from the air, didn’t even glance through the enormous windows of the square-sided roof garden. He lay down on a table and submitted to the attentions of the masseur, who had greeted him with, “Glad to see you in the club.”

“Had to come back, Taps; getting fat.”

“Taps” Flaugherty, accustomed to the truly overweight bodies of River City’s well-to-do, grinned at the near-perfect specimen on the table. “Can’t see an ounce, Mr. Sloan.”

“The scales can,” Kit grunted.

An hour and a quarter later, the red Jaguar took him home. At eight, precisely, he sat opposite his mother in the shadowy dining room of the Sloan mansion, gustily spooning soup.

“Have a good day, son?”

“Passable.”

“Any plans for the evening?”

“Thought I’d pick up Lenore Bailey “

That suited Mrs. Sloan for an opening. Her eyes fastened briefly on her hungry son and moved thoughtfully into the distances of the formal room where the gold rims of place plates gleamed from china racks, and cabinets of cut glass sparkled dully.

“You’ve seen a lot of the Bailey girl, lately.”

“Yeah.”

“Does that mean anything, Kit?”

He smiled at his mother. “Ask Lenore.”

She passed that up with a gesture that was partly disdainful and partly indulgent. She thought, with pride, that the Sloan men had always possessed a way with women. She was able to feel pride, not rancor, now that her husband was occupying a plot in Shadyknoll, with a thirty-foot obelisk to mark the grave of a great industrialist, banker and rakehell. Her son’s

“conquests,” as she thought them (though he rarely found himself obliged to use aggression), did not in her opinion belong in the same category as her late husband’s “vices.” There was the mitigating fact that Kittridge was an “irresistible young man”; her spouse had been an “old fool”; there was a further alleviating circumstance in the fact that morals, amongst smart young people, had changed. In sum, there was (though she did not admit it) the fact that her husband’s perennial blonde had driven Minerva half mad with jealous fury, while she found herself taking in her son’s amours an almost masculine and quasi-participatory interest.

“You in love with Lenore?”

“Hell, Muzz. I love ’em all—if they’re pretty. If they’re as pretty as she, I love double.”

“She’s an interesting girl.”

“How do you know?” he inquired with ample suspicion, and he said in the same breath,

“This is good soup.”

“You better not have any more. There’s roast beef—Yorkshire pudding—I knew you’d be famished.”