Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

There was no longer a place that could be called either Washington or the District of Columbia. An H-bomb hurled by submarine had exploded there.

Above all else, Ted learned, fear of new raids drove the millions into the winter, the oncoming dark, the universal chaos.

The radio air was hot with speculation. Obviously, the enemy had used only a small part—so far—of his plutonium bombs. Possibly the enemy had now exhausted his supply of hydrogen weapons. But perhaps a rain of them was scheduled to fall later. More likely, the foe had launched his attack prematurely, in order to keep the United States from taking the little further time needed to build an immense arsenal of H-bombs. This was a Soviet “preventive war,” many thought, undertaken with whatever the Russians had—a genocidal, eleventh-hour gamble.

But even if the enemy had managed to prepare only five H-bombs for their blitz, it was enough to panic those who survived. Planes, scouting cautiously, were beginning to report….

The District of Columbia was a white-hot saucer, deep-hammered in the land. The Potomac, and the tides, rolling back over the depression, were turning into mountain ranges of live steam. Where Philadelphia had been was a similar cauldron. Manhattan Island was gone-demolished, vaporized, pressed beneath the Hudson—and the sea was already cooling over much of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and the Jersey marshes. That half of the “Golden Gate” which had supported San Francisco had also vanished: a peninsula with a city upon it. Los Angeles County was a bowl of white-hot gravel. Conditions like those in Green Prairie and River City prevailed only at a distance from the H-bombed cities, in suburbs and lesser metropolises, on perimeters circling for a hundred and fifty miles around each city.

Ted heard all that, and more—more than the mind could grasp.

The President was dead.

Martial law wasn’t working in many states because the National Guardsmen couldn’t reach mobilization points, or were too occupied dealing with situations right where they were to go anywhere else or, in some instances, had no mobilization point left to go to.

People, by millions, were streaming in their cars and on foot and by boat and train and rail and ferry and bridge from all the cities of U.S.A. Unhit cities feared that they would be next.

Nothing stopped these people. Word that no further waves of Red planes had appeared anywhere did nothing to stop them. Even shooting at them as they stampeded did no good. They just piled over the dead and went on.

These items had boiled up out of the babble on the walkie-talkie and out of gossip between parties using it and on the ham set to which Ted had at first been assigned duty. He thought about some of them for a while.

Finally, he got up from the curb, feeling more tired than when he’d sat down. Just around the comer, he saw a drugstore. It was dark inside, of course, not on fire, and without windows.

He hurried toward it, licking his lips thirstily. The soda fountain seemed intact, except for broken glass. The water spiggot didn’t produce, but the soda spiggot did. He got a wax paper cup and filled it and drank and filled it and drank until he was not thirsty any more.

When he came out, he saw, in the flickering semidark, somebody on the top steps of a red brick residence across the street. He thought it was a woman; he didn’t know why. Because she was sitting down, he went over to see. When he got near, he could see well enough, too well.

She must have been knocked out for a long time. But not so she couldn’t get up finally, and make it through her front door. Then—her insides must have popped. At least, she was sitting in a great puddle of blood, trying—his gelid eyes saw—to push things back inside her.

But what stopped Ted was the fact that her organs seemed to be moving with a convulsive, blood-camouflaged, separate life. She kept pushing them against the rent across her abdomen and all of a sudden the biggest object let out a blat and Ted knew what it was: a baby, unborn—

born, rather, right then, when she had stood up to run out—and the woman was trying to get it back within herself—probably it was too soon.

She looked up at him so he could see her eyes in the reflected glare and she sort of smiled as if she were embarrassed and he could tell she was stark, raving crazy. Then she flopped over, but the other thing went on blatting and blatting, its breath catching on every intake.

He was sorry he’d just drunk so much soda.

Back on the comer, they were yelling, “Signals! Signals!”

He hitched into the walkie-talkie and trotted toward the men. “Here I am!”

“For crissake, stay in the main drag, willya? We needya!”

It was cold out at Hink Field.

It was a cold, icy-clear night, with stars.

Toward the cities, of course, the stars were obscured. And even directly overhead, they were dimmer. That was owing to the fire. It lit up Hink Field the way a flare from a private gas well lights a farmer’s barnyard. It threw an immense pall of smoke across the eastern sky. But the high, steady wind from the northwest blew it away from the airports. And at Hink, by midnight, the thermometer was down to twenty.

They were doing what they could. It wasn’t much.

The enemy had stabbed in with four planes. Not three, as the first report had stated. One had carried the bomb. Cohen got it, died with it, too late. One plane had either been strictly reconnaissance or had turned yellow. It had vanished to the west, at any rate, right after the bomb. The other two, going fast, had run around the perimeter of the city, time and again, pursued by fighters that couldn’t catch them. They’d taken their time and ultimately dropped parachute-borne aerosol-spray germ bombs. After that, one plane had calmly landed in Gordon Field and the crew had tried to surrender to the airport police. It was found that one of the crew members could speak English, just before a civilian had snatched a Tommy gun from a cop and shot the whole crew.

The other plane had been brought down by Lieutenant Pfeffer, in a jet fighter. Pfeffer had come back from that feat alive.

General Boyce had ordered his Crash Plan into effect.

He had stripped the Base to send food and medical supplies, hospital corpsmen and medical officers into the cities. He had sent all the Base fire-fighting equipment. He had called up every enlisted man and every noncommissioned officer, paymasters, bandmasters, cooks, bakers, dental hygienists—every man in uniform except the regular guard. To these he had added the mixed service personnel who had reported to him, since his was the only military establishment in the region: marines and gobs, naval officers, WACS and even WAVES, many veterans, and all the National Guardsmen who showed up there, when they learned they had no armories left. He broke out every weapon and all the ammo. He started officers organizing rescue and aid squads, emergency military police, technical-assistance squads. He sent all the communications and signal people he could spare to the Green Prairie CD authorities: he couldn’t raise anybody in River City who would accept that kind of help.

He put some of his technical staff to work on bomb determinations. He sent out his two helicopters, with special observers to swing around the stricken areas and spot and report rescue needs. He sent light planes in, and two bombers, to reinforce that mission. He prepared parachute bundles of water and food for quick air-drops into the areas where people were trapped by fire and debris—parks and playgrounds, golf courses, reservoirs, playing fields. He got volunteers, three hundred, all he needed-though most were without experience—to jump as required into such beleaguered areas.