Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Presently a hysterical and varied chatter began to pour into his astounded ears.

“It’s real,” he whispered to himself. “It’s— it .”

Anyone looking at the teen-ager in that transfixed moment would have thought that “it”

was the most wonderful thing that the young man could have hoped for. It wasn’t, exactly; but nobody could top it for pure, raging excitement.

In Ferndale, Chuck got through at last to Hink Field. Dinner was spoiled. His mother and his aunt were indignant; Ruth was, in fact, weeping with disappointment and rage. He could hear her say, over and over, “The fools! Oh, the fools! They’re little boys, really. It’s all a big game and they love it.”

Grimly, Chuck hoped that she would go on forever thinking it was just a “big game.” The baby started to cry, as if she, too, realized the party was over, spoiled, done for.

That was when he dialed for the twentieth time and got through.

“Captain Parker here,” a voice said.

“Jeff? This is Chuck Conner—”

“Chuck? Report out here as soon as possible, hunh?”

“Know anything?”

There was a minute pause—as if the captain had looked over his shoulder. Then his voice came, tense, low and fast. “ Yeah! Only a Yellow alert, so far. First wave sneaked in low, somewhere above Great Slave Lake. Spread out and cruised slowly. They’re split in pieces now and under attack. Thing is—thing that gets everybody! —a wave is coming from the south!” The voice became Hat again: “Okay, Conner. Report, Hink, instanter.”

At that moment, Charles Conner had perhaps the most accurate information of any person within the main confines of the Sister Cities.

He walked back into the distraught living room and said, casually almost, “Mother, I’ve got to report to Hink, myself. Guess I should take you home now; we’ll have to use the buses.”

“Take my car,” Jim said. Chuck looked at him. “Wouldn’t you rather keep it, under the circumstances?”

Jim was sitting in his easy chair now, his face puckered with indignation and a glass of beer in his hand. “Hell. This phoney-baloney? Take the car, boy.”

“It may not be—phoney….” Chuck didn’t want to frighten his uncle, merely to warn him. And he didn’t want to violate his own trust. He was cleared to know the thing he now knew.

Unauthorized civilians in this region, so far, were not supposed to know anything at all.

Jim Williams stood up, his expression sardonic. “You complete your call?”

Chuck nodded.

“The Hink Field soldiers take it straight?”

Chuck nodded.

“Bunch of idiots! I tell you—even if this spreads all over the country—it’s fake. Some lousy Government idea of a test run. Making the civilian population knuckle to the military.

Damned fraud, I say. Watch my vote next time! Brother !”

“Just the same,” Chuck said, bringing his own and his mother’s coats, aware of his mother’s eyes, “if you hear the air-raid siren, get down in your cellar with all the kids—and stay there.”

Jim was grinning. “That’s a hot one! Notice what the man said, Ruth? ‘ If we hear the sirens!’ Son, there aren’t six sirens in all River City and the nearest one to Ferndale is audible in a strong wind only about to the reservoir.”

Chuck had forgotten the great difference between the defense preparations of the two cities. He said, “Promise this. Keep the radio on.”

“Believe me, I will. Should be a circus—everybody running like headless chickens!”

“Keep the radio on. If you hear a Condition Red, get in the cellar and get there fast and stay there!”

“Sure. If we hear a Condition Red. Fat chance!”

Chuck gave a worried glance at the Williams kids, saw that Ruth was still merely scornful, and opened the door. “Promise?”

“Sure,” Jim said negligently. “ Gosh! I never realized I had such spooky, damned fool relatives.”

In the Williams car, Beth said, “It’s real, isn’t it, Charles?”

“Damned real.”

“You were told—more than you can tell us?”

He turned into Willowgrove, avoided a speeding truck, and started south. “This is for you, Mother—and only you. Dad will get it shortly beyond doubt. The whole area, I guess. There are two… three waves of bombers on the way and one’s corning from the south—God knows why or how.”

She didn’t answer. He looked around. His mother had bowed her head and shut her eyes and he realized, at first with a sense of shock and then with a sense of its fitness, that she was crying.

It wasn’t the dead, Nora realized as she looked in fixed horror. The dead didn’t wear hip boots. It was just some sewer men carrying lanterns. Her relief was overwhelming.

Almost any adult who had passed through such a series of ideas and corresponding nervous and visceral shocks would have folded up quietly on the curved cement. But Nora, relieved of the infernal terrors, now faced terrors common to persons of her age: the terrors of angered adults.

“What the hell! A kid !”

Nora called timidly, “Hello.”

The men held up lanterns. There were three of them. “What in God’s name you doing here?”

Nora perceived in the man’s voice more astonishment than wrath. The men behind also seemed amazed. Astonishment in adults offered, not peril, but opportunity.

“I’m lost,” Nora said. “I was running away from—people—and I saw a ladder in a hole. I went down—and slid—and I guess I hit kind of hard and when I came to my senses I was wandering in this place. Where is it?”

“Issa bout Washanan an’ da riva,” a man with a mustache said. “Da poor leetle keed.”

“They were boys I was running away from,” Nora went on hurriedly. “Big boys. Men, almost. They asked me to do—terrible things.” A woman in distress, Nora felt, one who was trying to get sympathy, should be in distress for a more suitable reason than pursuit by Mrs.

Bailey.

“Be goddam!” said the Italian.

The man who’d spoken first said, “What’s the name, sister?”

“Nora Conner.”

“You sure you didn’t come in here a-purpose?”

“I don’t even know were it is—-or what, exactly.”

“I’m Ken Smith and don’t tell any more dam’ lies. Come on, Nora, we’ll get you out.”

“Where?”

“Washington Avenue.” The man held the lantern up but could not read her face. “That suit you?”

“Anything,” she said dramatically, “to get out.”

She almost told them that she’d thought they were the dead from the cemetery. She realized in time, being Nora, that the confidence, true and horrific though it might be, would reveal the good knowledge she’d had of her whereabouts.

They walked along with Nora second in the file. “What were you doing here?” she asked.

“Trying to stop a leak in a joint.”

“Are you the superintendent?”

Ken Smith grunted, “Foreman.” Light showed ahead and soon a ladder and a round, white eye above. Ken boosted her. “Scraggle out, kid,” he said. “And don’t come in here any more. They got rats in this sewer as big as you.”

Nora climbed. She thought Mr. Ken Smith was about half a nice person and half not very nice. There was no such thing as a rat as big as she. The higher she got and the closer to the light, the surer she felt of that. In a moment, she was outdoors.

The light hurt her eyes for a while.

When the hurt stopped, she started over Washington.

All around, now, were the big buildings, the skyscrapers, and the shops. The sidewalks, though broad, couldn’t hold the people. They tramped in the snow, packing it down, and they bulged out in the street, off the curb, and cars honked at them. Cars piled up at every cross street; people going over in big bunches sometimes made the cars wait over an entire green light, honking in fury, but helpless.