Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Sorry.” Not because of his age but because he looked like such a nice little guy.

He was on his way to get the only Christmas present he intended to give: something for Mrs. Slant, his housekeeper. What she needed, he reflected, thinking warmly of the good care she gave him, was Covermark for her wine-colored birthmark and a little plastic surgery for her wens. What he was going to get was a wrist watch. She’d said, months before, sighing as she picked up a dust mop and went to work on Coley’s study, “I do wish I had one of those newfangled wrist watches. Be so downright handy.”

He had remembered.

The best jewelry store was Wesson’s and he was going to get the watch at the best store.

No diamonds—but a good watch.

It had been a long trolley ride from Edgeplains and it was a long walk across town from the trolley line. On the way, he passed the Court Avenue entrance of the Transcript Tower and he stepped inside it, briefly, full of such recollections that he knew he should hurry on, before one of the boys came by and caught him red-eyed. It was worse than being caught red-handed, Coley thought.

He felt an arm on his shoulder just then and he heard a familiar voice:

“Hello, boss. Somebody tell you?”

Coley smiled and raised his head and there was Payton, the city editor, grinning, but looking odd, too. “Tell me what ?”

“Thought that was why you’d come down here.” Payton glanced apprehensively at the streaming people and lowered his voice: “The whole country’s under air blitz, Coley. They’re holding it back here, to prevent panic, in the belief this area is not on the target list.”

“What is this?” Coley asked softly, “April Fool?”

“It’s it,” Payton answered. “You should know!”

Coley stepped back till he felt the firm stones of the skyscraper against his shoulders.

“God help us!” he whispered. “God help us all.” Then he snapped, “What’s the Transcript doing about it?”

“Standing by—for the story.”

“That maybe it’ll never print! Where you going?”

“Out to CD headquarters. Vilmer just ordered me there.”

“Well, get on, son. Don’t waste time with a broken-down old prophet!” Payton grinned, patted his former boss on the arm, and hurried into the crowds.

Coley stood awhile, without moving. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was merely summoning the strength to get going again.

He entered the building, finally. He took an elevator to the top. When he stepped out, the smell was familiar, the sounds were remembered and fond; the look of the place was home itself.

Where Chuck Conner stood, the news came abruptly, repeated by Zinsner, who had first signaled General Boyce:

“Three planes—four-engined turbo-prop bombers—now diverted from main wing—

Green-Prairie-River-City destination probable. Approach in Sector two-oh-nine. Repeat: two-zero-nine. Intercept at distance one hundred fifty miles minimum or combat probably ineffective.

Bomb carrier probably equipped to launch medium-range missile. That is all.”

General Boyce began giving orders which were swiftly relayed to all fighters aloft. Then he looked at the mayor of River City, but not with bitterness. “Condition Red,” the general said quietly, “and God pity them!”

The siren stiffened Henry Conner at his desk. He had put in a telephone call and now somebody—he could not remember who—was saying over and over in a faint voice, “Hello?

Hello? What do you want? Hello?”

The great wail of fright went over the city. It rose to a scream. Air raid wardens in Henry’s sector tightened their belts, pulled at their helmets, looked up at the still-bright sky and walked on. “Take cover!” they yelled at all other pedestrians. Men in the rescue squads in the high school playgrounds began rechecking equipment. The engines of bulldozers and cranes roared into trial life and were stilled. In the gymnasium, below Henry, the Radiation Safety volunteers anxiously examined their monitoring gauges. At the hospital on Crystal Lake, the last patients who could be moved safely were taken out. The returning ambulances poised them selves in the parking yard. Superintendents and head nurses began unlocking closets stacked to the ceiling with drugs, medicines, bandages.

At the Broad Street Police Station, all but three men had already reported and half had already been assigned by Lacey to street duties. In the near-by firehouse, the men listened in-credulously. They knew they were as ready as they could be under existing circumstances—and not ready at all.

Henry knew that. He went on with his work.

In the attic, on Walnut Street, the iron shriek hurt Ted’s listening eardrums. “There’s she goes !” he murmured. “Oh, boy !”

His mother came upstairs, again, gray-faced. “I haven’t found a trace of Nora,” she said, waiting for a lull in the sustained bellow. “Nothing. Netta said she just went.”

“She’ll be okay,” Ted answered, feeling frightened. “Trust old Nora!”

Mrs. Conner sat down on the bed, under the college pennants. Her eyes had tears in them.

She held her hands together and didn’t move all during the next crescendo of the siren. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said, then. “It really is!”

Ted got up, shucked off his phones, gripped his mother’s shoulders and said something, when the siren allowed it, which changed Beth. It was, under the circumstances, the right thing—and a remarkable thing for a sixteen-year-old boy to say. “Just about every other mother in America has a Nora, someplace, right now,” he told her.

The woman stood up then, looked intently at her son, nodded slowly. Her answer was blotted out by the siren; but Ted knew approximately what it was: “I’m supposed to go over to the church.”

He knew what she meant, because she smiled at him in a loving way and left the room.

He went back to his seat. His damned hands were getting slippery. The old sweat.

The limousine was moving through Pearson Square when the crescendo-diminuendo sound reached its chauffeur. He speeded up, ignoring Minerva’s rap on the glass partition. He swung the big car into the driveway. He leaped out nimbly for his age. “We better get in the cellar,” he said.

“ Nonsense !”

“I’ve kind of fixed it up, ma’am. With the help of Jeff and some other servants and the gardener. It’s right comfortable.”

Minerva listened to the faint and far-off rise and fall of River City’s inadequate warning devices. The sound of a police car, passing in the distance, its own siren going, was much plainer.

Willis was waiting, holding the door, and yet looking away and upward toward the winter lace of treetops and the glimmer of high buildings in the distance.

“If any ‘preparations’ were made in my cellar,” Minerva said, “I should have been told!”

“We thought you might object, ma’ am.”

“I would have! Insane…!”

“It was owing to the gardener’s brother, mostly. He went through the blitz in the last war.

Near London.” Willis coughed vaguely. “You see, ma’am, this house is pretty close in toward town, for so fine a place. The big buildings are only a little more than a mile away.”

Minerva, scornful but shaken, said, “Very well. Come on, Norma.”

“I’m Nora. Do you think there’ll be an A-bomb?”

“I think,” her august guardian replied, “there will be the biggest scandal in the history of this Government! But Willis thinks otherwise, so we’ll go to my cellar.”

Beau Bailey had just reached his door, too, when the sirens went. He rushed inside. “Turn off the gas!” he yelled. Netta, who had run upstairs, shouted back, “The last pamphlet told us to leave it on! Lenore made me read it.”