Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Have to paint that pole, Ted thought; wouldn’t want it to rot. He moved again, drowning out the cicadas in the trees with a not dissimilar sound.

His father had boarded up all the windows that first winter, when there was no window glass and when he had been in the hospital. At the Country Club, that was—with many other people. He was among the lucky. Plenty of them hadn’t left that place alive. They’d died of about everything you could think of, injuries and burns, shock and even of radiation, like that Catholic priest and the Baptist minister. So many people…!

For a moment, the fear of those days returned to him. No one had been sure of anything.

Everything was short—food, blankets, bandages, medicine. Nobody knew whether the war was over or not; they knew only that the Soviet planes didn’t come back. Mobs were ravaging the countryside; for weeks it seemed the armed forces couldn’t stop them, couldn’t restore order, couldn’t prevent the looting and the murdering and everything else. Everybody was scared, scared the bombers might return, scared the mobs might come back to the cities or to what was left of cities.

That time passed.

Peace came. Then, for more weeks, the burying. It was still going on when he could sit up in bed and look out the window. They made a new cemetery of the Green Prairie Country Club golf course, the last nine holes. Digging and blasting all through February and March, burying people, or whatever they found that had been a person. Later that spring, in common with other bombed cities, they designed their Cenotaph and it stood now above the graves-a monument to the ninety-some thousand known dead of Green Prairie. There was one in River City, also-for a hundred and twenty thousand. At what had been the ball park.

Ted mowed down the edge of the sidewalk.

It must have been—when?—around June, around this time, two years back, that they’d stopped all the mobs. What a job! Still a job! Some of the towns and villages that city dwellers had overrun were almost as bad off, afterward, as the bombed areas. Nobody knew, exactly, how many people had been killed by the crazed fugitives or how many people had been killed in self-defense and killed by the soldiers and the police. The total was thought to be more than a million.

More than two million people had been hurt that way, besides, and as many more driven mad.

But things were getting better everywhere, and fast, now.

When he finished the edge of the walk, he went around the house, limping a little, for a bushel basket. His mother had set one out on the back porch. Before he picked it up, however, he stood on the porch, looking north.

Nora had been right: you could just see the top of the new Farm Industries Building that was being erected near the devastated area—Green Prairie’s fourth huge postwar structure. It wasn’t going to be a skyscraper, just an immense, horizontal building, with parking zones around it. Not that there were too many cars to park, as yet, Ted thought; or that there was much gasoline to run them.

The bushel basket, when he picked it up, seemed odd. It wasn’t made the regular way and it didn’t appear to be the right size. He saw faded stencil marks and read: Produit de France. The good old Frogs! he thought. In the “Aftertime,” they’d kicked through—the French and, of course, the English, the Italians and Belgians and Dutch and the Latin-Americans and about everybody else except the Russians—who almost didn’t exist—and the satellite countries.

With America bathed in blood, martyred, crucified, a flood of aid began. In that first dreadful winter, unreckoned millions of Ted’s fellow citizens were saved by European bounty.

He even recalled foreign labels on some of the medicine bottles at his bedside, when he’d been smashed up.

Now, the basket was another example. Everybody in U.S.A. owed something tangible to lots of people abroad. He chuckled a little, thinking what hell that had raised with the old “isolationists.”

Then he went around in front of the dilapidated house, raked up a green mound of fresh-cut grass and carried it, in the French hamper, to the chicken yard. The Conners now had more than sixty chickens and five pigs. Henry was even angling for a cow; some of the Crystal Lake people had offered grazing room on their estates.

His mother came down the street, walking slowly because of the heat and because of her mood. But when she saw the mowed grass, saw her tall, broad-shouldered son mopping his sweaty light-brown hair, she moved faster and she smiled.

Ted knew where she had been. He didn’t ask any questions—just said, “Hello! Been expecting you. Haven’t we got company coming for supper?”

“A lot of people! The lawn looks lovely, Ted!”

“It would—if we had a matching house.”

She laughed. Her eyes moved to the even more tatterdemalion house in which the Baileys had lived. “I think our place looks fine! Call it quaint.” Her tone changed. “I believe Ruth is getting better, Ted! The doctors over at the Home think so, too!”

“No fooling !”

She nodded. “I’ll bring you some iced coffee.”

“Dandy!”

He was in the back yard when she brought coffee. He went indoors and washed before sitting down with her on the kitchen steps.

“You know,” she said slowly to her son, “Ruth’s never been able to say—what did happen.”

“I know.”

“She’s told ! The doctors a few days ago. And me just now!”

The young man gazed over the sun-yellowed green of the lawn to the cool blue-green of its shady places. “Bad, hunh?”

“Too awful to think about…!”

He drank the cold coffee, tinkled ice, refilled the glass from a pitcher. His mother’s weekly visits to her sister, in the asylum they referred to as the “Home,” invariably depressed her. Today, however, she seemed in a different frame of mind: hopeful, but frightened. Ted knew-most people in these days knew-a great deal about such attitudes. “Better tell me,” he said.

“Right now. And get it over with.”

His mother glanced at him lovingly and nodded to herself. “I—I guess it isn’t really any different from—thousands of stories like it. Only, when it’s your own sister…! Your own nieces and nephews…!”

“Sure,” he said.

She Sighed and her eyes looked far away. “They got the warning on the radio,” she finally began, “the red signal. They started for the cellar, but it had a foot of water in it. Jim, the fool, decided not to take cover. The windows blew in on them, including new storm windows, she said. It—killed the baby, Irma—but…” She halted.

Ted murmured, “But what?”

“You see—Ruth was holding the baby and the baby’s body saved her face. It ripped up Jim’s face and chest. They—just decamped—ran away—like so many people. Ruth in the lead—

the others following-holding a rope. Some teenage boys, in a car, saw them—saw young Marie, that is. The boys stopped and talked. They soon got out and took Marie, and nobody’s heard any more about her. She was only a little older than Nora.”

Beth hesitated. Tears welled in her eyes.

“And then?”

She averted her face, but reached for his hand. Her voice continued evenly. “Ruth got them to the ball park. People were pouring into it. Ruth thought it was probably some kind of shelter or aid station. I suppose everybody on the outside got that idea. Inside, it was dreadful—packed. Jim had to lie down—he’d bled so badly, all that way. And—she’d— dropped the baby somewhere. It was dead. Anyhow, brands kept falling from the sky and finally the bleachers caught fire so badly no one could put them out. That was when people stampeded. Besides, there was a rumor going around that Russian planes would drop germ bombs on every large crowd.