Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

The city roared like a volcano and the night shook.

Henry stood still. He stopped eating. It was his city, his life, his boyhood and manhood and it had died and this was its funeral pyre—this tremendous thing.

The heart and significance of the city was gone. Only its people, the majority of its human contents, could be saved. But they had raised it up.

The city, he thought, transfixed by the magnificence of its dying, was the people. It was an extension of their bodies.

When they had been primitive men, they had added the hides of beasts to their own insufficient body hair and the protection of caves to that, and then huts, and now a city. The railroads and all the cars and the motors and engines had been added to their muscles. To their ears, telephones, radios, communications. To their eyes, TV. The very pavement of the streets and the traffic it bore were extensions of the bare feet of men.

It was all, Henry thought, just a big human body—all that city of his and the city beyond it. All part of man. If his blood did not actually flow through it, his mind did. If his cells did not actually develop the intricacies of it, his brain cells had contrived every bit. It moved and had life and function and meaning and purpose only when, and only because, the nerves of man moved first, commanding his giant self-extension, his city.

It was dying, Henry thought, the huge superbody of man. But not man.

“Okay,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it.”

He went back.

“The goddamndest thing!” a runner reported breathlessly, as Henry came back,

“happened out Bigelow, beyond Decatur. A train, loaded with people, pulled from downtown and got all the way out there before it smacked a freight. The whole shebang went off the rails.

And nobody even noticed until an hour or so ago! Hardly anyone lived. It was going about ninety when it hit.”

Henry merely nodded.

Ted Conner was carrying a walkie-talkie with the mixed gang of firemen, cops and CD people who were trying to crash and beat their way back down James Street to Simmons Park. It was outside his father’s sector, in K. But the Sector K headquarters had been wrecked, and they were borrowing people from adjacent areas. The Wickley Heights section, near where they worked, had been hit hard. Most of the people, the ones who could move, had got out by way of the Golf Course, even people who ran clear across Simmons Park, farther in. But there were undoubtedly plenty more in the big houses, the luxury hotels, the fancy apartments, who couldn’t move, who were there, still—with fires breaking out and a wind that rushed toward the one, municipal flame, tearing loose cornices, ripping off roofs, bringing down walls. You couldn’t leave people there.

Besides, if they reached the park in spite of the fact that a comer of it was enveloped in fire storm (Ted knew that, from Hink Field, which already had planes in the air, reconnoitering and reporting back to the field and thence to CD), the men might be able to cut across the far side, go the long block east, on Jefferson, to the curve in the river and reach the two bridges there. They were the first ones standing, the planes said, and both of them were loaded with people, and mobs had backed into River City from these bridges. They seemed trapped—as well as the men in the planes could tell, flying in the heat, the smoke, the suction and draft and the down-fall of solids.

In fact, Hink Field relayed, River City’s organization had itself collapsed and nobody on that side of the river was doing much officially. The bulk of the population was already on the move, outside town.

The crew on James Street encountered another block: the façade of the Shelley Garden Apartments had slid into the highway. Bulldozers began raging at the mountains of bricks. That meant a wait before the next advance. So Ted walked over to the sidewalk and sat down on the curb.

A bank, with white marble walls, shielded him from the burning sky.

He unshipped his walkie-talkie because the straps were cutting into his thin shoulders. He got out a Hershey bar someone had handed him when they had mobilized for this job. It was limp from the heat but he ate it, wishing he had a drink of water to go with it.

The curb on which he sat trembled with the thunder of the fire. The wind that blew was cold and fresh, though, except for occasional surges of smoke from something left behind, burned and practically out, or safely doused down. Up ahead, dozers charged, bricks avalanched, dynamite let go and men yelled orders. When they had cleaned a lane through the cascaded apartment house they’d move on. Until then, he could rest—unless one of the chiefs or the wardens wanted to send a message. Then they’d start hollering, “Signals!” and he’d have to run up.

Ted took a dirty handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped sweat out of his eyes.

Because of his job, he knew a great many miscellaneous facts that he had passed on to nobody, for lack of time and owing to the concentration everywhere on the struggle at hand.

The diameter of the main fire was just over two miles. He knew that, from Hink Field.

It took in the whole business district, the shopping area, the skyscrapers and stores, the central half-circles of both cities and all of Swan Island on the east, the warehouse district on the west, nine bridges, the railroad yards, and various other “undetermined areas.” For the next mile out, in every direction, damage was severe and fires were numerous but would not, so Hink Field stated, “anucleate with the main fire storm.”

There was no estimate of the casualties. Owing to the delay in warning by siren, an

“undetermined but vast” number of persons had been caught by the bomb in the downtown area.

He knew things like that, miscellaneous scads of them, which had come deluging over the walkie-talkie, intended for others.

He knew more—most of it, too, from Hink Field.

New York was gone. H-bombed. The whole thing.

So were San Francisco and Los Angeles and Philadelphia. About twenty-five other cities had been hit by fission bombs like the one which had struck the Sister Cities, “probably a secondary target or target of expediency,” they asserted. Germ war had begun on some of the people around the edge of bombed areas, and elsewhere nerve gas had been used.

Every state had declared martial law.

Two vast waves of bombers had come in across Canada.

Two enemy aircraft carriers, the existence of which had not been known, had made their way into the waters south of the Gulf of Lower California and launched planes equipped with robot missiles which were armed with “unexpectedly powerful” plutonium bombs.

The bomb that had detonated over Green Prairie River was now estimated at approximately one hundred kilotons. The aiming point was thought to have been the Central Avenue-Market Street Bridge, and the actual Ground Zero, a few hundred yards west. The robot bomb had been launched at a distance of more than a hundred miles and apparently guided by TV-radar devices.

The launching plane had been brought down, in a suicide dive, by Captain Leo Cohen of Hink Field, only seconds after the discharge of its missile.

Ted knew (if he cared to think about it) that:

An all-out counterattack had been launched.

Moscow and Leningrad were gone.

Several other Soviet cities had been destroyed, the names of which he could not even pronounce, let alone remember. The Eastern seaboard of U.S.A. was in rout and panic. The whole state of Florida had been declared a hospital area and casualties from the rest of the nation, which could be transported there, would be accepted. Texas and the Gulf States also had “hospital reception” areas. (Who in hell could reach Florida or Texas when we can’t even get to River City, Ted thought?)