Tomorrow!

by Philip Wylie

  They looked more serious than usual. Usually nobody took the weekly Intelligence meeting with any seriousness at all.

  The colonel, sitting at the head of a worn conference table, returned Charles’s salute.

  Charles sat down and unlocked the brief case. He was acting for Major Blayert, the Staff Intelligence Officer at the base. As assistant, Charles was not always even present at these Staff Intelligence meetings. But the major had been detached, temporarily, to duty at the new briefing school in Flagstaff.

  “We have,” the colonel said, “some new, secret orders. From Washington.” Eames looked at the officers. “They are pretty elaborate and they mean plenty of work here at the base.”

  Nobody appeared to be overjoyed at that news.

  “As you know, contrails have been spotted for years, over Alaska, over Canada.”

  “And we’re ordered to go up and erase ‘em?”

  Captain Pierce said that. It was like him. He was an anything-but-dour New Englander, a man with a wisecrack for every situation. Everybody liked Captain Pierce. But the colonel, at this moment, was not amused. “In other words,” he went on, ignoring the remark, “we’ve known for a long time the Russkis have reconnoitered our northern defense perimeter. Lately”—He tapped his own brief case—“they have moved in over the United States.”

  “Is that positive?” Major Wroncke asked sharply. “Rumors—”

  “I know.” The colonel hesitated. “Civilian spotting has fallen down badly. And with the last appropriations cut by Congress, the radar defense has had to be reduced.” He glanced unconsciously at his shoulder, at the eagle on his right shoulder.

  The men at the table knew, with sympathy, what the glance meant. With the long effort at

  “budget balancing,” with the many steps in reduction of Federal expenditures for military affairs, the armed forces had diminished in numbers. That meant, to officers like Colonel Eames, no promotion. As CO of the base he ought to have been at least a brigadier general. He remained a colonel just as the numbers of bombers at the base remained inadequate for the purposes envisaged in the event of war.

  “What have they got on it?” Major Taylor asked. He was a fussy man who constantly tried to “move things ahead”—equipment, people, plans, conversations.

  “Plenty,” Colonel Eames answered. “And not Flying Saucer material, either! Contrails over Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio and all the states down here in the Southwest. Definitely not our own.”

  “Any contacts?” Major Taylor asked.

  “None. Radar blips, though.”

  “Plane types?”

  The colonel frowned faintly at his impatient staff officer. “I’ll boil it down to this. GHQ

  is satisfied that there have been, for some months, numbers of Red planes over this country, flying very fast at very high altitude-probably turbo-prop types-probably photography recon.

  None of our interceptors has so far gotten up to one fast enough to take a good look. We do have a few rather definite photographs, taken at long ranges with telephoto lenses from our own panes.”

  “That’s pretty definite,” Captain Pierce murmured.

  Eames nodded. “Very definite. With commercial stuff getting higher every year, of course, and moving faster, GHQ was pretty unwilling to accept the evidence at first. Besides, since the peace efforts are apparently on the verge of success, they didn’t believe the Reds would be foolish enough to push their northern recon planes over our states and cities. In fact, they took it for granted all last year that such stuff was being suspended.”

  “We’ve felt them out,” Major Wroncke stated.

  “And gotten burned for it,” Major Taylor said crisply.

  “What’s the interpretation?” Captain Pierce asked.

  Colonel Eames turned away and frowned. “None. Yet. The point is, we’re being ordered to put on a big show. For the next six weeks there are going to be ‘air exercises.’ That’s what the public, and the world at large, will be told. We’ll get everything in the air we can, as high as we can, with cameras and arms, also.” He tapped the brief case. “Orders here for a new friend-or-foe recognition pattern. Using that, we are expected to keep open eyes, to photograph anything unidentified we see, to fire on it when and if we can overtake it. Bombers are to do the job, not interceptors. The bombers can go up, stay, and cruise.”

  Major Wroncke whistled.

  Colonel Eames smiled without pleasure. “In a nutshell,” he said, acknowledging the whistle. “At this base, it means a lot of partly trained crews are going to have to fly some of the latest equipment. It means a logistic problem, just to keep what we’ve got up and on patrol. Six weeks is a long time. We aren’t supplied for it, so we have to get supplied, fast. It means we’ve got to expand the intelligence side; an Intelligence officer is supposed to fly in every plane.”

  Captain Pierce laughed. “That’s going to chop up the Lieutenant, here, mighty fine.”

  Charles also laughed a little, but his face was serious. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the colonel, “but did Major Blayert show you the fabric at the last meeting?”

  “Fabric?” the colonel repeated.

  “That the rancher brought in, sir?”

  They were looking at him. Eames said, “I’m afraid I don’t get it, Lieutenant. Blayert certainly didn’t bring ‘fabric’ of any kind to the Intelligence meetings, if that’s what you mean.”

  Charles had felt it his duty to explain. But now he flushed. His superior officer hadn’t mentioned the shred of old cloth. By mentioning it now, in the major’s absence, Charles would be doing his superior officer a disfavor. But it was too late to stop. He explained briefly:

  “A few days ago, about ten, an old rancher-prospector came to the base, here, in his Ford.

  He had found, somewhere up in the Sawbuck Mountains, a piece of fabric, greenish, with some letters stamped on it in white ink. Stuff had been outdoors quite a while; it was faded. Looked like denim, about that weight. The point was, the lettering was Russian, the man thought.”

  “Was it?” Eames asked sharply.

  “Yes, sir. Numbers and initial letters.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the office safe, I think, sir. Or a security cabinet. Major Blayert thought it of no importance. That is”—Charles felt further embarrassment—“he thought it could have been part of some war trophy or souvenir somebody had brought back from Europe, years ago, after the Second World War. Some piece of Russian equipment. A pillow cover, maybe.

  Or wrapping from a box that held something.”

  “What did you think, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.

  “It occurred to me, sir, that it could have come from a plane. Accident aloft. Explosive decompression might have ripped out some seat covering. Lining. Something.”

  “But the major didn’t agree?”

  “No, sir.”

  Eames considered. “I’d like to see it. Maybe send it to the Pentagon. It could be more evidence of this sort of business.” He drew a studied breath and went on. “Anyway, appropriate orders for all of you here are being made out, as of now. We’re going, ostensibly, to hold air games. Actually the entire continent is to be scouted by the Air Force, at high altitude, for the next six weeks. During that time, incidentally, there’s to be a change in alerts. Condition Yellow will be confidential, as it used to be years ago.”

  “Isn’t that risky?” Major Taylor snapped.

  “GHQ thinks not. They’ve got good information lines into Russia, China, the satellite states. No sign of activity. No mobilization. No evidence, from any channel, of large air preparations. Attack is therefore regarded as out of the question. The point is, if Condition Yellow stood as at present, every tenth civilian sky watcher and every other Filter Center would constantly be reporting our own flights: they won’t be announced. Our own planes, then, would touch off hundreds of false alerts; Condition Yellow would flash into every city time and again.

  The only way to prevent tha
t is to return to the confidential basis.”

  Charles said impulsively, “If the enemy knew, it would make a good opportunity for. . .

  !” The colonel grinned. “It would, if the ‘enemy,’ as you call him, showed any signs now of preparation. But he doesn’t. So the Pentagon feels the plan is safe. The official opinion is that this business of reconnaissance is one more stupid action, one more mere crude breach of ordinary international etiquette. They spar for peace, but they can’t resist the improved chance it gives them to sneak a few photographs.”

  “Sounds like them,” Major Taylor grunted.

  “Still,” Charles said, “if they wanted to get our planes up, foul our warning system—”

  The colonel nodded. “Orders,” he said. “Any more questions, gentlemen?”

  There were none. The meeting ended. Colonel Eames walked across his office with Charles. “Bring back the fabric.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t worry, Lieutenant, about the air games and your ‘enemy.’”

  “No, sir.”

  “I did myself, Chuck, at first. Went through exactly your train of thought. We have to rely on our own Intelligence.”

  It was the first time the colonel had ever used Charles’s nickname, even his first name.

  Charles was unaware that his commanding officer even knew his whole name. He felt flattered.

  But he also perceived that the slight familiarity involved a skillful act. Things at the base were about to tighten up. Half-trained men were going to undertake the work of trained crews. Ships, inevitably, would crash. People would be hurt, and killed. The colonel, almost instinctively, had began to behave with that increased intimacy which danger and morale required.

  All Charles replied was, “Yes, sir.”

  But the colonel stayed beside him, walking toward the door. “I even called Washington myself, before the meeting,” he said. “I suggested restoring Condition Blue to the alert system, just in case. They thought I was crazy. And I guess I was.” He opened the door because Charles couldn’t, so long as the colonel talked. “I’ll put you in a staff car,” he said. “Long way back to your quarters, and a real cold day.”

  Charles thanked him. He saluted and started for one of the cars.

  The colonel called, “And about that—material. Appreciate your mentioning it. Proper, under the circumstances.”

  A damned good officer, Charles thought, as a sergeant drove him swiftly along the edge of the big field.

  3

  The Mildred Tatum Infirmary for Colored was a large, brick building on the corner of St. Anne and James streets in River City. Its location, four blocks north of the heart of “Niggertown,” was due to a number of factors, none of which was related to the convenience of the patients or the requirements of therapy. Emmet Sloan had always liked colored people in a genuine, if somewhat patronizing, way. His grandfather, coming to River City from Illinois after the Civil War, had been an abolitionist and for a time had run an “underground railroad station” on the bloody road that led slaves from the South to freedom.

  Like other Americans of large affairs, Emmet Sloan had welcomed the tide of working immigrants—the “Micks, Wops, Latwicks, Polacks, Hunkies” and others, who had poured into River City at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. They worked hard and cheap at mill jobs and in foundries and they thus furnished much of the muscle that was essential to make America great—as well as to make men like Emmet Sloan rich. These people settled near the river, east of Market Street, on the mile-long, parallel stretches of Mechanic and Water streets, for the most part, and on the close-in cross streets. Land there was cheap. In summer it boiled with heat and damp from the river, as well as with mosquitoes. In winter it was raw and cold and gloomy. There were, furthermore, several then-small factories in the district as well as the GK. and T.T. yards and roundhouse. It was a smoky, clangorous neighborhood.

  Gradually, however, the Irish and Italians and Slavs pushed north into the St. Anne, St.

  Paul and Mary streets area, which came to he known as the “Catholic Section.” The Negroes, displaced for a generation to outlying districts, often to mere tin shacks along the municipal dump, poured back in town and filled the slummy vacuum left by the economically ascending

  “foreigners.” These, by the early twenties, were second- and third-generation Americans and controlled much of River City’s politics as well as most of its organized vice and its rackets.

  Emmet Sloan, perhaps because his occasional patronage of The Block kept him in sensory touch with the dismal living conditions of the Negroes, determined to do something for them. Their direst need was a hospital. And when, in 1937, he foreclosed on a rayon knitting mill on James Street, he rebuilt it into an “infirmary.” At first, the inhabitants of the “Catholic” area had violently and actively resented the resulting enlargement of Negro “territory.” There had been street brawls. The windows of the Infirmary had been smashed the night before its dedication. But Sloan, a determined man, finally established his gift for its intended recipients, by the costly but very effective means of constructing a much better hospital for the “foreign”

  population on a site which thitherto had been the territory of “white” people—native sons, one hundred per cent Americans, his “own” group. This in turn caused litigation. However, the “old families” of River City along with its citizens were beginning to move to the suburbs.

  Looking at maps, thinking of the temper of people, considering the future population and the probable developments of technology, Emmet Sloan decided the migration to suburbs in the thirties and forties was the start of a future landslide. Hence he invested in real estate on River City’s edges and was among the first to finance the removal into suburban communities of branches of big department stores. His grandfather had seen what railroads meant to the farm and the city; his father had seen what automobiles would do to make cities grow; now Emmet perceived the automotive vehicle was about to strangle cities. All three had acted on their views with phenomenal financial success.

  Minerva had never been much interested in colored people. While her husband lived, she had dutifully inspected the Infirmary from time to time and irregularly dropped in on Wednesday afternoons, when a group of white Episcopal ladies—“meddlesome gossips and prying shrews,”

  Minerva called them—came to the Infirmary to sew. One of Minerva’s countless, small sensations of relief, at the time of Emmet’s funeral, had been the realization that he would no longer “dragoon” her to those charitable Wednesdays.

  In that, to her astonishment, Minerva found she had erred.

  Shortly before his death, Emmet had signed a contract employing as the new head of the Infirmary one Alice Groves, an expert in hospital management, with a varied postgraduate background and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. Minerva had paid little attention at the time and remembered only her husband’s delighted remark that he and the hospital board had “bribed the woman away from Kansas City.” She understood the joys of successful bribery.

  After Emmet was decently interred, Minerva had herself driven by Willis, in the Rolls, to what she thought of as a “last” Wednesday meeting. She was very much discountenanced to find that the new head of the Infirmary, Alice Groves, was herself a Negress. A mulatto, Minerva decided on sight. Not only that, hut Alice Groves was beautiful, gracious, young and, of course, exceedingly well educated. She spoke English with “a better Eastern accent than my son, Kit,”

  Minerva told certain outraged ladies.

  She was warm and kind with Minerva, who made the sourest and most critical inspection in the history of the Infirmary, even though she found little enough to criticize, the facilities considered. After the tour of the hospital, to Minerva’s intense amazement, reporters from her own papers, accompanied by cameramen, took pictures of her with Alice and a dozen white-uniformed, dark-skinned nurses. These were duly printed, with captions noting how Mr
s. Sloan was “carrying on the traditional family charities.” There was much editorial talk about the Infirmary being her late husband’s “favorite” charity and about her “nobility” in visiting it while her “bereavement was so recent.”

  Minerva knew, of course, that it was a put-up job. Alice Groves was well aware her patronage was essential to the running of the hospital. So Alice Groves meant to keep Minerva’s interest. She was evidently publicity wise and had used publicity to gain her ends: Minerva could not repudiate a vast amount of printed praise. She came for a few Wednesdays and signed the annual check.

  Just when she thought she could let the duty wither on the vine, she learned of a movement to rename the Infirmary. Mildred Tatum had been the first free slave to settle in River City. The colored population had apparently decided that, since they were no longer slaves, their hospital should have a different name. And “school children [Minerva again noted in her own newspapers] had voted by hundreds,” in a contest, to call it the “Minerva Sloan Infirmary.”