Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Of all the blunders, the most serious was that which derived not from military judgment (or any lack of it) but from the philosophy of domestic politics. Civil Defense had always been considered a matter for states to organize and administer. The Federal Government had advised, urged, supplied research and data—and left most practical decisions to the states. So the fact that any day, on the briefest notice, every city might go to war had been considered as each city’s own business, or as the business of the state in which it happened to be.

Some states had responded relatively well; others, as might be expected, where politics was the measure, hardly at all. Much had been done in Green Prairie for that reason; little, in its Sister City across the river. What had not been clearly observed in the Pentagon, or by any other branch of authority, was this: that in any “next” war, while the armed forces went forth to fight as one, the states and cities would be obliged to defend themselves as variously as a hundred different medieval principalities besieged by a single adversary.

In every other fashion, these cities were bound together, interdependent, and dependent upon the nation as well. Under atomic assault, they were obliged to react separately and according to the diverse provisions of the separate states. The situation, from the military point of view, was all but hopeless. There was no way to standardize procedure. What Maryland was ready to do, Ohio had not yet even thought of. When, in the space of a dozen hours, the actual onslaught took place, this disorganized, decentralized, variable whole soon lost every tenuous relationship. Wires went, tunnels blew, power stations became vapor in the sky, nothing worked that should have; the people at Pearl were paragons of preparedness by comparison.

The analogue—raised to some nth power—went further. For the enemy not only struck on a great shopping day, and during generally poor weather, but in a period of imminent holiday when the military itself, bone-cut by tightened budgets, was cut again by holiday leaves. In many areas, the blow fell before a commanding general got back on duty, before enough technical sergeants were at their proper posts. Pearl Harbor on Sunday was far readier than U.S.A., in that moment of hope concerning peace, that Christmas holiday.

Such thoughts passed through the mind of Charles Conner in the ensuing hour. They were characteristic of his sort of mind. For he had been one of the few who had seen beyond the pacifistic, international horizon and noted that the stepped-up reconnaissance of U.S.A. by the Soviet might be designed to cause clouds of search planes to take the air, filling it, confounding the imperfect radar screen, mixing up signals, and thereby facilitating attack. His imagination had such sweep, along with the constant ability to discount what other men were saying and what they believed.

He was, of course, like every sentient American that day, aghast and unable to weigh emotion. But unlike most, he could set emotion aside, in a single area of his mind, and use the rest for reason.

He thought, toward the middle of the afternoon, that the Sister Cities would probably escape. Many other city areas of equal size stood unscathed, unmenaced. The enemy planes had flown far; they’d been in the air a long while; they had faced every form of interception America could muster. It was considerable. And pilots of jets, after the first few quarter hours, did not bother to press the triggers of their guns and rocket-releases. Wherever they saw the Red Star on alien wings, they plunged headlong. As they died, they knew they had struck a target which no man, with but his one life, could afford to miss.

In the general’s Operations office, there was no true awareness of passing time.

Outdoors, planes came in, refueled, took off. The cups on the wind gauge kept turning, the sock streamed and the radar antenna swung in its interminable circle. The snow stopped; the clouds lifted but did not dissipate. And then, in the gilded brightness of a winter day, in the rise of light that so often is the first admonition of the day’s shortness and the imminent twilight, certain pins on the great map turned from their coursing far below, to the south. They turned in a direction that made the room so still Chuck heard breathing, and nothing else.

Lenore sat under the drier at Aubrey’s Beauty Salon, on the eleventh floor of the Manhattan Department Store. She could see a line of other Christmas—primping women, chic women, for Aubrey’s was the smart hairdresser of the Sister Cities, and she could see the magazine in her lap, Harper’s Bazaar for January. She could reflect, if she wanted to, on why she had been handed the latest issue of one of the most modish magazines. In years past, they’d given her an old copy of the Bazaar or Vogue to read under the drier. But the mixture of gossip and dynasty is potent and Aubrey’s was a center of both. The fact that Lenore was probably soon to be the bride of Kit Sloan gave her a high priority for everything, even magazines. Only Minerva herself, along with half a dozen other dowagers, a movie star who had married a River City tycoon, and three or four rather pushing career women, could have pre-empted the new copy of Harper’s Bazaar.

Amongst all persons and concerning all things, however trivial, there are pecking orders—showing how little good has been done mankind so far by reason and logic, by democracy and humanism, by liberty or faith or any other ideal. In all the main things, ants and dogs, jackals and people are still much closer together than any of them imagine.

Lenore, however, did not want to look at the priority magazine. She did not want to look at the overweight (or, rarely, underweight) wives of the Sister Cities’ socially elite. There they were, with Aubrey’s pastel kimonos covering underthings picked up in Paris, with their hair wet and nasty, with creams on their faces, with shampoo girls and manicurists working over them like operating-room nurses, with tongues a-clatter in a persistent effort to abet their own status at the expense of other reputations, with cigarette smoke curling through their jewel-weary fingers, with Aubrey’s special recordings playing an interminable litany of baritone mush and Aubrey’s special perfume making the air like a brothel or perhaps a harem.

Lenore wanted to look beyond it all, out the windows. She could do it by scrunching lower than the attendant liked and by rolling her eyes up toward her forehead. She could see, then, the blue sky patches and a big, unopened snow-bag moving in overhead, against which rose the sides and tops of half a dozen of the nearest skyscrapers—a winter vignette of the Green Prairie sky line. It was the blue, diminishing bits of sky she wanted to see. For they, somewhat like her own freedom and self-respect, were being closed up and eradicated; overcast, was the word. Yet she had a sense, haunting, unhappy, hypnagogic as the drier’s hum, that everything was happening because she willed it so, that by some different magic of her own mind she could break the dark spell of her days, perhaps even push back the invading snow clouds.

The drier was a head noise like, she thought, things people hear on the verge of nervous breakdown. The sound, she knew, was steady but it seemed to have changing cadences and various volumes; it was her head, her hearing, her own nerves that perceived unevenly. Low on the horizon, between buildings, the remaining blue sky looked moonstone pale; high up, it was cobalt, like a bluebird’s back. This, she thought, was a true distinction and not fancied.

“Francine,” she called, wondering what Lizzie, what Edna or Dot had been francophized for the sake of swank, “my nails are dry enough for the last coat. And I’m in a hurry.”