Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

They did, too—where they found crowds! That whole mass of hurt grownups and kids started for the exits at once. Ruth rolled Jim under some steel seats—he was nearly unconscious—and she tried to save the youngsters.”

“ Save them?”

“Yes. From the mob. It was like a river of people, she said, like trying to protect them from a rising flood. And the kids were hysterical, sure they’d be burned to death, trying to get out. Don broke away with Tom, finally, and got separated from Ruth. Trampled. And a man actually yanked Sarah away from Ruth—because they were in his path—and hurled her to the ground. That was what happened.” She wept soundlessly.

“You mean—they all… ?”

“Most of the children in that ball park were trampled to death. It’s—inhuman, isn’t it?

But that’s what people do. Ruth lost the youngsters then and there. But, somehow, the crowd carried her out of the park without killing her. She was nearly suffocated by the pressure. Her feet didn’t touch the ground for minutes at a time. She had ribs broken. But she was pushed and driven through a gate. When she could, she went back. She found Jim again and he was unconscious. So she stayed there. She thinks she was there—with thousands of others—for two days. Some of our people finally got to her and brought her out—and she doesn’t remember much, after that, for a long time. You see, Jim had gone into a fever the day after, and died of it, or loss of blood, of untreated infection—shock—all that. Her family was wiped out before her eyes—and she lived—and it’s no wonder she—lost her reason!”

Ted turned his mother around and forced her head onto his shoulder. She wept quietly there and he held her. Because she was weeping, he felt relieved. If she hadn’t cried, he would have worried. It was almost always the ones who didn’t weep, didn’t show emotion, didn’t speak, who were liable to crack up later. Pretty much everybody knew that.

He knew, also, that she would soon do just about what she did.

She pulled herself away, blew her nose on a clean handkerchief with holes in it, and said,

“Imagine a tough old character like me! But I just couldn’t break up, in front of Ruth.

I had to take it evenly. Ted! I really hope, now, she’ll recover!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he answered. “Not a bit. She could come home here.”

“Do you think Henry would mind, if I tried having her here when the doctors say it’s possible?”

Ted looked into his glass, empty again. “Sometimes, I think the old man doesn’t mind anything this side of hell. He’s got more guts than grizzly bears.”

Mrs. Conner sniffled in a manner reminiscent of the younger Nora. “I know. And I’m glad I cried this out in front of you, Ted. Because now, I can tell him straight, without a whimper—if you promise not to tell on me, for being feeble-headed?”

He winked at her. She bustled to her feet. “Here it is nearly four o’clock and I’ve got twenty-odd guests to feed!”

“Ye gods! I thought it was just us and the Laceys.”

“I asked both families that have moved in the Bailey place.” She glanced across.

“They’re new, and they don’t know a soul in this part of town. I thought we’d get them acquainted. Their names are Brown and Frazetti.”

“I know. Already met the Frazetti kids. Twins.” She nodded. “What about the Brown girl? Have you seen her?”

“Didn’t know there was one.”

“She’s sixteen,” his mother smiled. “Blue eyes and the prettiest red hair I ever saw. If you aren’t in love with her by nine o’clock tonight, I’ll lose a bet.”

“Phooie,” he said.

“Wait till you see her! Name’s Rachel.” Ted looked, also, at the neighboring house. For a year and a half after X-day, it had been occupied by people billeted by town authorities. Then it had been roughly remodeled inside as a double house and occupied by two families. After one winter, they had moved again. The present occupants had arrived recently.

“I wonder what happened to Beau,” he said.

She stopped in the screen door, holding the coffee pitcher and the glasses. “I doubt if we ever find out now!” She thought of her visit with her sister. “Though you can’t tell, can you?”

“Nope.”

It was the way it was in those days.

Lenore’s mother had been sent to Florida and she was still there, undergoing plastic surgery. But Lenore’s father had vanished.

Weeks had passed, months, and now two years and a half—with no word. The bureau set up by the Federal Government to trace people hadn’t located him. Or any sign of him. Netta knew only that he’d been in the cellar when the Bomb burst. After that, he walked into the silences. He was one of the anonymous dead. Or one of the unidentified mad. Or one of the unfound bodies. Or someone who had a new name and a new life somewhere else—because he’d come to unable to remember, ever again, who he was, where he lived, what his name had been—or because he had wanted to forget.

Nora came home on her bike.

Since he had been thinking about the already-remote “Aftertime,” Ted saw Nora in a new light. She was fourteen now and trying to behave like eighteen. Occasionally, for minutes at a time, the effort was fairly convincing. She’d changed in two years and half. She was hardly a kid now. There was something very precise and well-cut about her profile which (wonder of wonders, he thought) had an almost sweet look. Her nose didn’t turn up so much. Her hair, light like his, was not lank like his any more; it was wavy, like their mother’s. And her clear blue eyes were getting slanty—exactly, he thought, as Nora would prefer it: slanty-eyed women got the dangerous men, she claimed.

At this instant, however, she behaved on the kid side. “Mom!” she yelled through the kitchen screen, “Mr. Nesbit didn’t have enough hamburger to make fifty patties. I got sixty hot dogs instead.”

“That’ll be fine, dear. And don’t bellow.”

She yodeled briefly, put away her bike, came around the house and approached her brother who was clipping edges. She then assumed her pseudo maturity. “Good afternoon, beast .”

“Greetings, afreet. How’s things?”

“Ted. Will you give me an answer to a serious inquiry?”

“Sure. Any old answer. What’s your problem?”

“I’m not kidding. Do you think it’s inevitably, in any case, a mistake for a fourteen-year-old girl to be engaged?” He concealed his grin by great attention to the grass. “Is she deeply in love?”

“Very,” said Nora in a deeply-in-love tone.

“Well”—he rose on his knees, thought somberly—His the boy able to support her?”

“He will be someday. He’s extremely intellectual. He intends to become an anthropologist.”

“Be all right,” he said, nodding in self-agreement. “That is, if the girl’s going to have a child.”

“Oh! You meanie! You evil thing!”

“If they’re going to have a child,” he asserted in an offended tone, “I really think they owe it to the little stranger to marry.”

“There are times,” Nora said, “when you ought to be afraid the earth would open and swallow you up! I’m talking about the sacred kind of love, not the profane kind!”

“They’re so interchangeable,” Ted mummured. “You start out on the profane tack—and lo!—you’re full of nice sentiments, just when you could do without them. And vice versa.”

“ You !” she said. ‘What do you know about it?” Idly, she raked up grass with her fingers and threw it on him. “A girl in my class,” she said, “is leaving school this summer to take a job. I don’t think it’s sensible for a girl to abandon her education—”