Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Lacey called, “Just a sec.”

Henry spoke his thoughts. “Never did realize how much education folks need. Matter of fact, I hide those dummies myself. Wonder if I should? Maybe there ought to be a permanent display in a downtown department-store window, so people wouldn’t faint if the real thing ever came along. Fat chance of getting a display!” He started through the door.

“I’ve got more to say.” Henry stopped and looked back gloweringly. Lacey said, “I told you, your ‘Minnie’ fell out of your car—”

“Damn it, I was on the way to a rescue drill. I keep Minnie, and two others, in my garage.”

“Yeah. Well, when Billings radioed in they had you, without knowing at the moment who you were, I got another call.”

Henry groaned. “What’d Minnie do? Grave-walk?”

“Some kids found her. And about fifteen minutes ago, Albert Higgley answered his doorbell and saw something in his barberry bushes. He switched on his porch light and took a good look and fell down six steps. They think his collarbone’s broken.”

“Too bad,” Henry said. “You don’t feel any—liability in the matter? A judge might think differently.”

“I said, by cracking godalmighty, it’s Civil Defense business! Some of us still stick to duty. If a couple of boys played a prank with poor old Minnie, get the boys.”

“We did. One was your boy. Ted.”

He considered. He chuckled slightly. “Ted, eh?”

“They’re bringing him here.”

“Ted never did care much for Albert Higgley,” Henry mused. “The old squirt owns a vacant lot near our place, has grape arbors on it. Nobody picks the grapes, unless kids like Ted do. One year-oh-maybe seven… eight years back—my hoy Ted and a couple of other nippers were having grapes. Old Higgley ambushed ’em. Swung with a heavy cane, no warning, just whammed out of the bushes. Broke Ted’s nose first crack. He wasn’t more’n eight-nine, maybe….”

Lacey rubbed his chin. “I see. You didn’t charge him?”

“Heck, no! Everybody has one or two mean neighbors.”

“He’s charging you. His wife is anyhow. Lewd and obscene exhibition—”

“ What?”

Lacey nodded. “That store dummy was pretty realistic, wasn’t it?”

“Was,” Henry said. “And is. The interns went to some trouble to make it more so. Hair, and like that. Point is, if you’re going to have personnel trained to stand the shock of human beings burned and hurt, you gotta train them with something that looks human.”

“I suppose you do.” Lacey gazed at the ceiling. “Point is, there’s a city ordinance about lewd exhibition. That dummy was female—and naked—”

“Dam’ right! So would bomb casualties be! Clothes burned off ’em, and naked as the day they were born, and bumed—like Minnie.”

“Guess I can let you go, Hank. I’ll talk to your kid—scare him good—and let him go, too. But I think you may have to answer in court, someday soon—if Higgley’s collarbone is really broken—for this ‘lewd’ business.”

In alternations of rage and laughter, Henry told Beth. When he finished, like most excited persons, he went back to the beginning. ‘‘There I was, tooling along to CD headquarters to drill the rescue gang! Wham! There they came, sirens yowling. ‘Pull over!’ they hollered, and so help me God, when I got out, they had drawn their guns!”

He slapped his thigh and chortled.

His wife smiled, but not with his hilarity.

“It’s funny,” she said quietly, “but I don’t recall ever seeing Minnie.”

He shot her a quick glance, his smile gone. “Minnie’s an ugly sight,” he replied. “Kept her in that locked closet, with the others. Didn’t see any call to show you our chamber of horrors.”

“Why, Henry?”

“Well….”

“Isn’t that what they’re for ?”

“Sure. I suppose, though—that is, I always figured, why upset Beth. She can stand what she has to. A lot of people passed out or puked the first time we used those things—and not all women, by any means.”

“I think I ought to look.”

Henry’s amusement, as well as his indignation, were gone, now. “Hell, Mom!” he protested.

She beckoned with her head.

They went to the garage. Henry switched on the light. He unlocked a closet. Inside, standing, leaning against the walls, were two figures of human beings-a man and a child—

horribly mutilated. Beth Conner touched the back of her hand to her mouth. She said, almost in a whisper, “All right, Hank. Shut the door.”

He followed her, around the Oldsmobile and into the yard, wondering what she was thinking. She whispered something finally, and he thought she said, “The beasts!” He guessed, presently, she had said that, referring to the Reds, maybe, or maybe to scientists, or maybe just to humanity at large. But when she faced him she was calm and she took his arm by its crook.

“Hank,” she murmured, “don’t you ever quit Civil Defense!”

Lenore said, “I won’t!”

Netta ate another pecan. The Applebys had sent them from Florida—too late for Thanksgiving but too early for Christmas. The Applebys had never before sent a gift to the Baileys. The Applebys lived on Crystal Lake and went to Miami every year. Word, Netta thought, must be seeping around, the way it always does, ahead of the fact. The pecans were therefore a delicious token of a bounteous Hood to come.

“I think you will,” Netta said, “simply because I know you haven’t lost your mind.”

“Nevertheless, I will not marry Kit.”

“Why?”

“How’d you like to?”

“I’ve had worse,” Netta said, and then catching herself, she added, “all my life.”

Lenore’s eyes were savage. “You’ve had worse all your life! Poor Dad !”

“It’s so plain it hurts,” Netta said. “You refuse Kit. Okay. Your father’s in jail-five to ten years. Kill him sure.”

“Maybe it would—what’s left of Dad!”

“The house goes. Both cars. All the furniture. Probably even our clothes, forced sales and repossession. Then we have nothing.”

“But self-respect.”

Netta said quietly, “You’ve never been poor. Flat. Stony. Broke. Without a friend or a dime—unless you hustle a friend and he gives you a dime. Maybe even a few dollars.”

Lenore thought that over. “I doubt it. People would tide you and me over—”

“Who?”

Lenore looked through a window. “The Conners.”

“The Conners—the Conners!—the Conners ! I’ve heard it all my life. I’m sick to death of it. Who are the Conners? An accountant, that’s who! And a crazy young kid who thinks he’ll be an architect in maybe ten years when you’ve got bags under your eyes and a bridge.”

Lenore took a pecan. She looked at it, halved it, threw the paper-thin middle husk onto the hearth and shook her head. She felt frightened, cold, sick. She was trapped and she knew it as well as her mother. If it were just disgrace, as such, and poverty, that would be thinkable. But she couldn’t face the image of her father in prison, marching in a line to eat, going out on the roads in stripes, cold and miserable and rejected. She knew he was weak. But she knew, also, that he was kind. Kind and rather gentle and, in his way, loving. Which her mother was not, unless, in some twisted way, she too cared for Beau.

Lenore was intelligent. She was realistic. Her bent toward science had showed it and her studies of science had developed the quality. She had been brought up to like and enjoy “nice” things and to want and to know how to use far more of them than her father could ever supply.