Tomorrow! (16 page)

Mrs. Berwyn demurred. “Still, I hate to think of any Commies sneaking around in Government, in the Pentagon, anywhere. . . .”

“Me, too. Catching them, though, isn’t an amateur sport. It’s a hard job for the FBI and the intelligence and counter-intelligence people.” He whipped out a pocket handkerchief and wiped his damp face. “Do you realize how nutty we’ve become? Getting professors to sign oaths? Making a lot out of whether or not people refuse to admit party membership? Your real, dangerous, hard-core Commie will sign
any
oath. He’ll swear to
any
lie. He belongs to a church.

He maybe even works as an investigator for a Senate committee. His Communism is hidden under careful coats· of everything that looks ‘American’ to the most brassy patriot, the biggest oaf. These Senators have ‘exposed’ a number of Commies—sure. How many
dangerous
ones have they unearthed? Put it the other way. Why don’t they turn up some people who were unsuspected even of liberalism? Get my point? Let a Senator and his posse of meddlers expose one three-star general in the pay of the Kremlin, or a bishop or a nun—and I’ll have some respect for this empty game of sifting miscellaneous fools, skeptics and dissenters through a mesh. of senatorial bigotry, prejudice, empty-headedness and personal ambition. Show the people the enemies of freedom and you are really a great man, I say. Play on their fears, feed them straw men and whipping boys, and Huey Long’s your name!” Coley shrugged.

“Is that all,” she asked.

“All?” He stared uncomprehendingly. “No. Not quite all.” He walked across the room and gazed over the moon-ghosted cities as he talked on:

“Some of us, nowadays, take refuge in such medieval and panicky hiding places as these, undoing our own liberty in false hope of saving our skins. Some are sillier still. They look to people, imaginary people not unlike God, to come from ‘outer space’ and save them. They see Flying Saucers on every breeze and in every night sky and console themselves with the idea that beings ‘higher’ than themselves will soon come and save mankind from man and his bombs.

This is escapism, too, fantasy, exactly such superstitious stuff as was the foundation for many medieval tenets.

“Others take their qualms back to the churches—the churches they abandoned years back for golf on Sunday, bridge, pleasure riding, and TV. There are millions. They are praying for peace, now, and protection against holocaust. Such prayer, uttered ardently by billions to every major deity man’s been able to invent, has never yet been answered! The wars have gone on.

Those historic devotees who exhausted themselves, their time and energy in such incantations were merely easier prey for foes they would not prepare for. This indeed may be the American fate-the price of doing away with intellectual freedom and putting a compulsion on belief.
Yet, in
all the other provinces of peril, we stay sane.”

His eyes focused on the far phosphors of the night. “On our prairies,” he dictated,

“farmers, fearing the onslaught of the wind, dig cyclone cellars. They rod their barns and ground their aerials, lest the lightning strike. If the autumn is dry, their ploughs make circuits around their homes and livestock pens so prairie fire cannot consume what they hold dear.” He looked far away, to his right. “Downstream on the Green Prairie River, and below on the Missouri, men have erected great dams, constructed lakes, set up levees, against Hood. In our cities, lest fire break out, we maintain engines and men to save us from burning. And against all crimes, police patrol our streets, in cars these days, vigilant with every electronic device. We have appraised many dangers and prepared against them in these and a hundred other fashions.
What of the peril
of world’s end?

“Today in Washington, men who do not, who cannot, understand what it is they are talking about argue interminably concerning how doomsday may be resisted or put off. Since, in their technical ignorance, they cannot appraise recent perils, their thoughts concerning the perils to come are useless. We maintain a navy—against what may never move by sea. We levy vast armies and hold them the final arbiter of every battle even though, just the other year, an empire called Japan fell to us with never a foot soldier on its main islands. We believe our airplanes can deliver stroke for stroke, and better, but we will not count the effect of strokes upon ourselves.

We admit our radar screen is leaky. We have dreamed up—and left largely on drawing boards—

such weapons as might adequately defend a sky-beleaguered metropolis. In sum, we face the rage of radioactivity, the blast of neutrons, the killing solar fires, with peashooters and squirt guns.

“Indeed, if the findings of our local schoolmarms are accepted, we soon may taboo even the
mention
of such dangers. It upsets the pupils, they say; Rorschach Tests reveal this remarkable perturbation. All hell may be winging toward us in the sky but, in the name of American education, let us not permit it to ruffle a single second-grader!”

Mrs. Berwyn snorted.

His answering grin was bleak. “It’s the truth! Minerva just sent us some bloody pedagogical bulletin full of ‘data’ about ‘anxiety-curve-rise’ with every set of atom tests in Nevada. Minerva feels, and she’s backed up by nervous parents and whole school boards, that the radio, TV and press should, perhaps, stop publishing any reference
whatever
to mass-destruction weapons, atomic-energy tests, or anything connected with the subject.”

“The ostrich principle?”

“Yeah. That got us, unready, into two big wars lately and several small ones.”

“Anything else?” she asked. “Just a paragraph or two.” His desk chair received him, squeaked a little as he tipped it back, boosted his feet onto his blotter and spoke:

“America had—and missed—its only golden chance. If, in 1945, or 1946, or even 1947, the American people had seen the clear meaning of liberty, there would have been no war and there would be no danger now. The proposition is exquisitely simple. Our nation is founded on the theory that the majority of the people, if informed, will make appropriate decisions. That, in turn, implies—it necessitates—the one freedom that underlies all others: freedom to know, intellectual liberty, the open access of all men to all truth. That—that
alone
—is the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. When the Soviets showed the first signs of enclosing, in Soviet secrecy, mere scientific principles like those of the bomb, we Americans could and should have seen that Russian secrecy would instantly compel American secrecy. We should have seen that an America thus suddenly made secret, in the realm of science where knowledge had thitherto been open, would no longer be free, and its democratic people could no longer be informed.

Hence Russia’s Iron Curtain would have been seen as what it was and is and always will be: a posture of intolerable aggression against American freedom.

“If that had been seen at the time, the Iron Curtain could have been dissolved by a mere ultimatum: America then was the earth’s most powerful nation, Russia was devastated. But we were powerful only in arms and trusted them. We were feeble-minded in ideals and ideology: our vision of freedom was myopic. We, too, clamped down on abstract knowledge a new, un-American curtain called ‘security,’ and every kind of freedom commenced inevitably to dwindle in a geometric progression. That was our chance. Our peril today, our ever-growing and ever-more-horrible peril in the visible future, is the cost of saying we were free and acting otherwise.

We flubbed the greatest chance for liberty in human history and hardly even noted our blunder, our betrayal.

“Ten years have gone by. We could, at vast expense, have decentralized our cities. We didn’t. We could, at lesser expense, have ringed our continent with adequate warning devices and learned to empty our cities in a few hours. We didn’t. The cost, still, was too great; the dislocation of human beings, the drills and inconveniences, beyond our bearing. We had cause, in a struggle to regain landsliding liberties, we have always had the cause, to challenge Soviet power earlier, in the name of liberty, brotherhood, justice, human integrity and decency. All we did was to make a few peripheral challenges, as in Korea. We didn’t face the issue when the Kremlin’s bombs were scarce and weak. We are not even good opportunists.

“Now, the sands of a decade and more have run out. We cannot challenge without venturing the world’s end. Quite possibly our death notice is written, a few months or years farther along on the track of this wretched planet. Then, perhaps, our flight from freedom will get the globe rent into hot flinders, atomized gas. But the only question before you, citizens of Green Prairie, of River City, of the wide prairie region, of this momentarily fair nation and the lovely world, is this, apparently:

“What new idiocy can you dream up, with your coffee, your porridge, your first cigarette,
to keep yourself awhile longer from facing these truths?”

Coley fell silent. He wiped his brow again.

“What do we do with it?” Mrs. Berwyn asked, a little stunned by the blunt finale.

“Eh?” He was paying no attention.

“I said, what shall I do? Tear it up? Do you want it transscribed? Is it for the archives, so you can whip it out someday in case it’s justified?”

He was looking at her, then, perplexedly. “I said. It’s tomorrow’s editorial.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why?”

She glanced apprehensively at her wrist watch and back at the smallish man in the chair.

“It would fill the whole page. There’s hardly time to set it up, anyhow, to make the home-delivery edition. Bulldog’s almost out. . . .”

“Shoot it right to composing,” he said, yawning.

She stood up and came to the side of his desk. “You quitting the
Transcript,
Coley, after you spent your life to build it?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean—
maybe?
This thing rubs salt in every sore in town! It kicks every private idol to smithereens!”

“Yeah. And may wake up a sleepwalking nation.”

“It violates what people
believe.
Even some of what I believe.”

“Does it?”

“I think it does,” she answered, suddenly doubtful. She was close to unprecedented tears.

“You
can’t
do it, Coley. You can’t kick apart the town you love!”

“I’m trying to keep it from
being
kicked apart!”

“Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Do the
Transcript
a favor. Wait till tomorrow. Let everybody mull it over—”

“Remember, Bea, back in nineteen forty-three. When I went abroad?”

“What’s
that
got to do—”

“To England,” he said, musingly. “The whole Middle West refused to believe in the blitz.

The folks were deluded then, the same way. They wouldn’t face the fury of Hitler’s
Luft
waffe—

and they wouldn’t admit the British had the guts to take such a beating. I went over, just so they could read the stories of a typical Middle Western editor—written from London, while the fire bombs fell and the ack-ack drummed.
Remember?”

“Sure,” she said. “My husband was alive—then.” He ignored that human dating of the occasion. “I went because, by God, I’m an
editor.
Because I knew what the papers reported was the truth. Because I thought an editor, an American editor, was obligated to help the American people
face facts.
I
still
think so!”

“Even, Coley, if it means you commit newspaper suicide?”

He rocked forward in his chair and began, delicately, to straighten and align the objects which comprised his desk set: clock, calendar, pens, pencils, inkstand, paper cutter, memo pad, the engraved paperweight given him by the YMCA Newsboys Club.

He said, “Sure. Even if it marches me off the stage.”

“You think it’s
right?”

“I think
anything
else is wrong. Dead wrong. And almost everybody is wrong. I was on the edge of that conclusion a long while back. Weeks. I reached it when good old Hank Conner came in tonight. Besides”—he turned and smiled at the big woman—“who knows? Minerva Sloan has brains. Lots of brains. The arguments in that editorial make plain common sense. She won’t
listen
to them; she won’t read them in the places where they’re appearing. In her own paper, though, she’ll
have
to read them!”

“You think you can change the mind of Minerva?”

“Stranger things have been accomplished.”

“I better get to my typewriter.”

He watched her go—the magnificence of her hair—the absurdity of her make-up—the splendor of her bosom and hips—the fantastic smallness of her high-heeled shoes. His blood stirred and he half rose.

“Old ass,” he said of himself, aloud.

Just before daybreak, remembering he’d had no dinner, he went down to Court Avenue and Fenwick and had pumpkin pie and coffee at the Baltimore Lunch. Some raggedy women, charwomen from the tall buildings, were sliding trays along the vast cafeteria’s silver rails. A man—perhaps a once-respectable man—a bum now. One of his own reporters. A young girl in a yellow evening dress, a too-young girl, for the hour, with a disheveled college boy, slightly drunk. The white-dressed people behind the glass counters and steam tables looked sleepy.

He went back up in the lonely elevator and watched dawn invest the cities.

Life returned to the great building, where it had not quite perished in the long night. The presses, underground, shook it a little. Doors slammed. Elevators hummed at intervals. It didn’t sleep, quite. And as the light increased, the tower became a tympanum that vibrated in tempo with the increasing traffic down below.

When the sun cut deep into the man-made canyons, throwing aside the rectilinear shadows of the buildings, shining on windshields, bus tops, palisades of glass windows, he knew Minerva would be awake. She would be ringing for her maid. Getting coffee and a folded copy of the morning paper which she owned. Making phone calls to executives who would try, by alert rejoinders, to pretend they, also, greeted every daybreak with all snoring put aside, eyes open and a message to Garcia avidity for the new day’s commands. Coley knew.