Tomorrow! Read Free

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