Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Duck, everybody!” he had bellowed at the empty room.

He shoved back his chair, fell on his face, crawled beneath the desk. The fist struck the building. It lurched. Steel-hard air ripped part of the roof away, went around walls, closed beyond and, driving and sucking, took the windows on one side across the schoolrooms to shatter and cascade along the walls, flung the rest out in the day, horizontally in the velocities, the temperatures, the glare.

Henry got up, looked at a crack through which the sky showed, watched plaster dribble, heard bricks cataract into the yard, stamped on a firebrand that dropped in the room, stared at the unglassed windows, noted by the scene beyond how the last flare of the fireball was vanishing.

Still it imbued with livid light a cityscape that seemed disorderly now and heaving, that had begun to show sudden smokes.

He was all right. And people, scared, moving weakly, were coming back from a corridor where every electric bulb had gone out.

“There’s a fire downstairs,” someone said.

“Two men,” someone else said, “are lying in the hall. Under bricks.”

“It was worse on the bomb side,” somebody murmured.

These voices came dimly, through the ringing of his cars.

They were looking at him and filing back, more all the time. “

Okay,” he heard his voice begin, “Trent and Dawson, see about the fire. The house crew’ll probably be on it soon, but check. The house medical’s in the gym. Send for them—start picking the bricks off the hurt men. Leete, inspect the other side and report back. Have the runners’ information collated downstairs from now on; just bring me the main points.”

Someone else said, “Maybe this building is no longer safe!”

Henry felt his lips turn into a grin, and the feeling buttressed him just when he needed support. “So what?” he replied. “It’s still here! That’s at least something.”

People began to move, to do things—slowly, Henry thought….

Ted Conner went under his table. The Light came. The house bucked and screamed as if some cosmic claw hammer were trying to open it. A thud seemed to compress his body on all sides at once. His radio equipment, the precious store of instruments earned by hundreds of mowed lawns, was flung on the floor and smashed. Hundreds of hours or work done on the set by his father, too: smithereens.

He picked himself up. His leg was bruised and bleeding. He drew out a jagged piece of Bakelite.

He went downstairs. The house was battered, but it was a house and their house still. His mother’s china cupboard lay on its face; broken cut glass glistened on the carpet. The kitchen was a shambles of crocks and pots and pans.

He went out in the back yard, stupefied. The clapboards on that side of the house were scorched, but nothing was burning. The blast, he thought, had put out the fire. The building looked tilted a little and askew on its foundations.

Queenie came up to him, mewing. Beau Bailey bolted from his front door and ran, yelling something Ted didn’t catch….

Netta had insisted on trying to get her clothes down to the cellar. She argued; Beau, increasingly panicked by the siren, had taken a reluctant armful down and stayed—in the warm company of the furnace.

For him, the Light was a stabbing bar that shot through the dirty coal windows and turned the place to day.

For Netta, still upstairs, it was incomprehensible, an irritant. Her reaction was to run to the window and gaze obliquely north toward the perplexing source. She could not see it, quite.

But she did realize it was a phenomenon of some new, fantastic sort and, dimly, she began to feel horror.

The blast brought the window in on her. Her face, her breast, her abdomen were sliced to red meat; she was doll-flung to the opposite wall, mercifully knocked unconscious.

Beau, calling, coming up a step at a time, afterward, found her. He assumed she was dead and watched the pulsing blood for no more than a moment. Then he tiptoed down the suddenly treacherous stairs and entered his living room. “Need a drink,” he said quietly to himself.

He found a bottle finally that wasn’t broken. He drank from it and with it in his hand, without a coat, he went outdoors. He had a vague idea that somebody should do something about Netta.

As he left his house, not aware he was running, he kept calling, “Where’s a doctor?

Where’s a doctor?”

Those were the words Ted Conner heard and did not understand—before he went back indoors, checked the gas and the lighting circuits (there was no power) and got his coat and hat in preparation for making his scarey way over to the school to report.

It was what they had always planned he should do if his radio set was knocked out, or the power failed.

Mrs. Conner was on her way to the Presbyterian Church, a fairly long walk. She was, wearing her old winter coat—glad she hadn’t given it away—and carrying a heavy suitcase. The suitcase was her own idea and she hadn’t told Henry about it. In it were “odds and ends,”

assembled by Beth as she had listened over the years to Civil Defense talk about what might happen. She had slipped onto her arm the brassard of her volunteer corps: “Emergency Nurse,” it said, in red, white and blue felt letters.

The sirens were warbling like wounded demons and the only other people on foot were air-raid wardens, here and there, who hurried toward her to tell her to take cover, then saw the arm band and grinned and called, usually, “Hello, Mrs. Conner!” or, “Watch it!”

She answered mildly. She was thinking about Nora. And she was obliged, besides, to cross carefully at the intersections. There weren’t many cars about in this part of town; but the ones moving were hitting sixty or seventy and taking corners on two wheels, some headed away from town but most of them converging on South High where Henry would be.

The Light caught her on Ash Street, near Arkansas Avenue. Henry had told her to get down in the gutter with the curb between herself and the hot whiteness, but she was afraid of the cars. There were, however, small terraces in the Wister’s front lawn, where Maud had crocuses because of the southern slope. Beth dropped on her hands and knees, then flattened herself. The blast and the Wister windows and some of the tiles from the roof went over her and she was not hurt.

She got up and trudged on, carrying the suitcase still. When she reached Lake View Road she saw that the windows of the Jenkins Memorial Hospital had been blown away; and the steeple of the Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, her destination, a hospital itself in the event of emergency, had been broken off at the middle.

In Ferndale, Jim Williams’s family assembled while the sirens wailed unheard, and only the ultracalm radio voice gave a warning. Ruth, whoo-whooing, brought the older ones in. Jim hastily put some Coke in a pail—and some beers—and pulled out the screw driver which served as a bolt for the cellar door. The house was heated by oil stoves, so he’d had no occasion to go down to the cellar for some days.

When the door creaked open, he knew by the smell, however.

He switched on the light. Sure enough. Water had seeped in during the thaw, a week back. There was a dark pool of it on the floor.

“Wait up, you!” he called, and went down the cobwebby steps. He found the handle of an old shovel and probed gingerly.

“Water down here,” he reported disgustedly. “About a foot deep! We better stay upstairs after all.”

Relieved, the entire family went back to the parlor. They sat around uncertainly, the kids, for once, quiet. Ruth, alone, stood. When the Light came, she snatched the baby from its pen, where she’d just put her down. Irma began to sob irritatedly. Ruth patted her, feeling comforted because the little thing was in a mother’s arms, where all infants should be in moments of blinding, fearsome Light.