Tomorrow! (2 page)

Henry drew a breath, expelled it. “How often do we have to go through the routine, Mrs.

Dace? You’re supposed to check all those things before you jump in a car and start for your post.

You’ll have to get a phone priority slip and tell your neighbors to turn off the gas—”

“It’s a coal range.”

“All
right!
To turn down the drafts and haul out the pans.” Hank began searching the school grounds for somebody connected with telephone priorities. He wondered with a kind of good-humored annoyance how in hell the citizens of Green Prairie would learn to save lives when they couldn’t remember to salvage biscuits.

In that segment of the attic which had long ago been converted into “the boys’ room,”

Ted Conner worked feverishly amidst a junklike jumble of wires, dimly glowing tubes, switches, dials, condensers, transformers and other paraphernalia with which gifted young men—

specialists at the age of sixteen or so—are able to communicate with one another, often over distances of hundreds of miles. Ted Conner was a member in good standing of the American Radio Amateurs’ Society. He was also a volunteer member of Civil Defense, Communications Division.

To Ted, more than to any other person in the family (and partly because his function was the most realistic), the rise and fall of the siren spelled excitement. It was his instant duty to rush to his post, which meant his radio set. It was his assignment to get the set going and tune in headquarters. It was his additional assignment, every five minutes on the second, to listen for thirty seconds to his opposite number in Green Prairie’s “Sister City,” directly across the river.

Ted was going to be big like his grandfather Oakley, a blacksmith. He had his mother’s light-brown hair—as did Nora—and his father’s clear, blue eyes, as also did his sister. Only Chuck had the Oakley brown eyes; but Chuck hadn’t inherited the size, the big bones and the stature; Chuck was slender. Ted sat now with one leg hooked over the arm of a reconstructed swivel chair, his blue eyes shining, his usually clumsy hands turning the radio dials with delicacy. He was oblivious to everything in his environment: the pennants and banners on the wall; the stolen signs that said, “Danger,” and “Do Not Disturb,” and “Men”; the battered dresser and its slightly spotted mirror framed in snapshots-snapshots of girls in bathing suits and girls with ukuleles and a burning B-29.

He did not see any of it. Not the rafters over his head. Not the end-of-summer leaves on the treetops outside the window, where a setting sun cast ruddy light. Not the moraine of mixed garments which lay, contrary to familial orders, on his bed—not made up, contrary to the same rules. To Ted Conner, who was sixteen, a hideous danger now menaced Green Prairie and its sister metropolis, River City. To Ted, the theoretical enemy bombers were near. To him, brave men like his brother Chuck (though Chuck, actually, was a Ground Force officer) were even now climbing from near-by Hink Field into the stratosphere to engage atom-bomb-bearing planes that winged toward Green Prairie.

This stage setting was necessary to accompany the rest of the dream he had, every time there was a drill:

One enemy bomber was getting through. Man after man was trying for it and missing. Its bomb-bay doors were opening. The horrendous missile was falling. There was an earth-shaking explosion. Half of Green Prairie and even more of River City were blotted out. Now, Ted Conner was alone—alone at his post in the attic. His family had been evacuated. The place was a shambles and on fire. But there he sat, ice calm, sending and giving messages which were saving uncounted lives—to the last. They would put up a monument for him later—when they found his high school class ring, miraculously unmelted in the ashes of the Conner home.

His earphones spoke. “Headquarters. Condition Red! Condition Red! Stand by, all stations.”

Ted felt gooseflesh cascade down his back.

He stood by.

Headquarters had been saying that off and on for twenty minutes. And not much else.

Downstairs, Nora asked if she could have another piece of pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Mrs. Conner said, “Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll go out and play till it’s dark.”

“You’ll do your homework, that’s what you’ll do! It’ll be dark in a quarter of an hour, anyhow.”

“Mother!
It’s
ridiculous
to ask anybody to study during an
air raid.”

“It is ridiculous,” her mother replied, “to think you can use a drill for an alibi. You go in the living room, Nora, and do your arithmetic.”

“I hate it!”

“Exactly. So—the sooner you do it “

Chuck grinned reminiscently and excused himself. He went through the kitchen to the back door. Queenie, the Conner tomcat, was meowing to be admitted. The lieutenant let him in, marveling briefly over the mistake in gender which had led to the original name and his young sister’s defense, which had permitted the misnomer to stick. “A cat,” Nora had said long ago,

“can look at a queen. So, he’ll
stay
Queenie, even if he has got a man sex.”

He had stayed Queenie for five years though, Chuck thought fleetingly, and after a glance, the scars on the aging tom suggested he had overcompensated for what he must have considered a libel.

Dusk was gathering in the yard. On the high clouds there remained signs of where the sun had gone—purplish shadows, glints of orange. But the Olds was already hidden in the darkness of the open garage and the soldier could smell rather than see that his brother had recently mowed the lawn. He could see, however, that Ted hadn’t trimmed the grass along the privet hedge which separated the Conners’ yard from the Baileys’. Chuck reflected that in his boyhood he had been a precise trimmer and clipper. But then, he’d always wanted to be what he would be now, were it not for his uniform: an architect. And Ted was different: he wanted to be an inventor—at least right now. Inventors were probably not much interested in even lawns, while architects definitely were.

Chuck stood in the drive and looked uncertainly at the Bailey house. Time was when his family’s house and the residence next door had been quite similar—ordinary American homes—

two-story-and-attic frame houses, white, with front porches and back porches, clapboard sides, scroll-work around the eaves, and big lawns. Both had been planted with spirea and forsythia, with tulips for spring, random crocuses, and, for fall, dahlias. Both had had vegetable gardens in the back and both had long ago lost barns and acquired garages.

But the Baileys had “modernized” their place in the years just after World War II. The sprangly shrubbery had been replaced by neat evergreens. The front porch had been carted away and the front façade remade with imitation adobe bricks and a picture window instead of the old comfortable curved bay. The vegetable garden had vanished entirely and in its place were a summerhouse and a barbecue pit where, wearing a chef’s hat and an apron with jokes printed on it, Beau Bailey, Lenore’s father, sometimes ruined good beefsteak while his guests drank martinis in the gloaming.

As a man with a degree in architecture (who had gone into uniform from the ROTC

before he had professionally designed so much as a woodshed), Chuck now skirted the Bailey property, critically surveying the
moderne
effect and looking for any recent changes. The house didn’t seem right any more, he thought. Its proportions were wrong. There was nothing in Green Prairie to warrant the use of imitation adobe either. It might be “modernistic,” but it was suitable for the desert, not for a region where winter came in November and went away in May. All in all, Howard Bailey (who was called “Beau” even by the president of the bank where he worked as cashier) had spent a lot of money for his remodeling job, and failed to fool anybody. Such was Chuck’s professional opinion—and his human opinion was similar. Putting on “side”

characterized not only Beau, but his wife.

Lenore was different.

At least, Chuck hoped she was different, still.

For Chuck could hardly recall a day in his life when he had not been in love with the Baileys’ only child. Propinquity might have explained that: there was no day when Chuck had not lived next door to Lenore. But propinquity was not needed to explain the attachment.

Lenore long ago had won a “Prettiest Grade School Girl” contest that had included River City as well as Green Prairie. At eighteen she had been May Princess at the South High School, which meant she was the most attractive girl in her senior class. And she had been voted the

“Most Beautiful Coed” when she had graduated from State University.

Beauty, then, could have explained Chuck’s fealty—the simple fact that he had grown up next door to a girl who became one of the loveliest women in the city. But the matter of Lenore’s desirability involved more than the impelling forces set going by loveliness. She happened to be bright, and in addition she had been sweet and gracious, democratic and sincere.

Now, Chuck wasn’t so sure. Where Lenore was concerned, he’d had no lasting assurance anyhow.

They had always been “friends.” As “friends” they had enjoyed an intimacy of a particular sort. Chuck was sure, for example, that he was the first boy who had ever kissed Lenore; but it was not very impressive assurance. He had kissed her when they were both six years old. In fact, he had then carried a mixture of ardor and curiosity, which she had shared, considerably beyond mere kissing. The Baileys and the Conners were one day appalled to discover that their two six-year-olds were not merely kissing but that—in the elderberry thicket which had then existed in a then-vacant lot behind the Bailey premises—they were both stark naked, their small shoes, socks, overalls and underwear commingled in an untidy heap. Such findings perennially stun nearly all parents, and Lenore and Chuck had suffered the shocked, conventional punishments. But though Chuck recalled the episode with warmth and savor, his close amity with Lenore at six did little to bolster his confidence at twenty-four.

He hadn’t written her that he was coming home for his thirty days because, until the last moment at the base in Texas, he hadn’t been sure of the date on which his leave would begin.

He’d reached the house, by cab from the airport, just in time for dinner. He had wanted then to phone Lenore of his arrival. But he had felt it would slight his family, his mother especially, if he immediately sought out someone else. He had hoped all during the meal (which the siren had spoiled as a family reunion anyhow) that Lenore might step across for some reason or another and find him there. Maybe the Bailey phone would be out of order—or they’d need to borrow coffee-or something. He had known the hope was preposterous. He had also reflected during the meal (while he told his mother that life in the Air Force “wasn’t bad at all” and while he had watched with incredulity the amount of food Nora consumed) that in years past he had run over to the Bailey house freely, casually, while now he felt a definite constraint.

He still felt it as he walked along on the mowed grass between his driveway and the privet hedge, examining the Bailey house. There was a Buick parked at the curb—“a Buick,” his father often said, “trying to look like a Cadillac”—and a Ford in the back yard. That meant all three Baileys were probably at home: Beau, Netta and Lenore. But it didn’t mean Lenore had no date that evening or that Chuck, at twenty-four, could simply enter without even knocking as he’d done when he and Lenore had studied algebra together.

He had about decided to go back in the house and phone formally when a door opened and somebody came out. At first he couldn’t tell who the person was. Not Mrs. Bailey: too tall.

But it wasn’t Beau: no sign or his expanded waistline. It was somebody, he could see, in a kind of plastic jumper, yellow, with a hood that covered the head. The person was carrying a box with wires attached to it and a silvery gadget dangling from the wires. This figure turned toward the open door and called in a husky, pleasant voice, “Don’t wait up for me. I’ve got a date—after.”

It was Lenore’s voice. Chuck, completely bewildered, shouted, “Hey!”

The box with its attached gadgetry was set on the lawn. The voice now floated toward him.
“Chuck!
When did you get back?” Lenore ran toward him.

Had Charles Conner been more experienced in the behavior of women, had he even been of that temperament which is given to shrewd scrutiny of others, he would have noticed the impulsiveness with which the girl started toward him. It was emphasized by the fact that she remembered the outlandishness of her costume only later, when she had skirted a neat bed of tea roses, come up to him, held out both her hands and exclaimed, “What a wonderful surprise! Why didn’t you let me know?”

He was not such a person. He was a gentle and dreaming kind of young man, somewhat introverted, modest, in his opinion far from handsome. His head was long and narrow, his features somewhat ascetic; his hair had retreated a little way: he would soon be half-bald like his father; meantime, the effect was to make his forehead seem extraordinarily high. Lenore’s good looks invariably brought out his diffidence.

In addition, her regalia (astounding for any woman and all but unthinkable for Lenore) put him off. She was dressed as if she were going to crawl under the Buick and fix it-a chore of which she was capable; but it was not for that, he knew. He knew it if for no other reason than that neither her mother, whose social ambitions were limitless, nor her father, who had matching financial desires, would let their daughter play mechanic in the street.

It was only when they touched hands there in the gathering twilight, with a subconscious pulling—when they felt warmth and strength each in the other—that Chuck associated the girl’s costume and recent events. “Ye gods!” he cried, letting go of her, “a
Geigerman
!”

She nodded serenely, a little impishly. “Isn’t it becoming?” She pirouetted like a model.

“Yellow,” she went on, “is the fall color. The material is simply amazing. Not only weatherproof and mothproof, but fire-resistant too. Absolutely dustproof. No common chemicals can damage it. The hood”—she pulled it farther over her face and drew down a green, transparent visor which sealed her from view—” provides adequate protection from the elements,
all
the elements, including their radioactive isotopes!” She broke off, pulled down the hood, disclosed blue eyes, tumbling dark hair, raised, crimson lips. “Oh,
Chuck!
I’m so glad to see you! Kiss me.”