They would want a complete report, she told herself. Not just the final three or four pages. No one watched her closely. Ft would be easy to make one additional carbon. She planned how she would do it. Fold the additional carbons and stick them in the blue facial-tissue box. Then take the box with her to the lavatory. There she could fold the sheets smaller and tuck them into her bra. But she would do it with the next report. Not this one, because it was only a portion of a report.
Sherra’s report took twice as long as it should have. She made continual errors. Twice Clint Reese stopped by to pick up the completed report for checking by Cudahy, and each time she told him it would be ready soon. When she took it to him at last she imagined that he gave her an odd look before he went on into Cudahy’s office, the report in his hand.
Big Tom Blajoviak’s note was on her spindle: “Come and get it, sweetheart.” She took her book and went toward the cubicle in the corner where there was barely room for Tom and a desk.
The door was ajar a few inches. He glanced up at her and said, “Enter the place of the common people, Francie. Just because I’m not a doctor, it’s no reason to—”
“Have you really got something this time, Tom? Or is it more repetition?”
“Child, your skepticism is on the uncomplimentary side. Open thy book and aim your little pointed ears in this direction. Hark to the Blajoviak.”
“Honestly?”
His square, strong face altered. The bantering look was gone. “At five o’clock yesterday, Francie, we began to get a little warm. Here we go.” He held his copy of the last report in front of him. “This would be new main subject, Francie. I make it Roman numeral nine. Isolation of margin error in Berkhoff Effect. Sub A. Following the series of tests described in Roman eight above, one additional memory tube was added to circuit C. The re-running of the tests was begun on October twenty-third...”
He dictated rapidly. Francie’s pencil darted along the notebook lines with the automatic ease of long practice. It took nearly an hour for the dictation.
“So that’s it,” he said, leaning back, smiling with a certain pride.
“Not that it means anything to me, you know.”
“It just might, Francie. It just might mean that instead of getting fried into the asphalt, you might look out to sea and say, ‘Ah,’ at the big white lights out there. Fireworks for the kiddies instead of disintegration.”
She glanced down at her whitened knuckles. “Is it that important, Tom?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No. I just don’t understand — all this.”
“There was a longbow, and some citizen comes up with body armor. And then the crossbow, and so they made heavier armor. And then gunpowder, which eventually put guys into tanks. Every time, it sounded like an ultimate weapon, and each time a defense just happened to come along in time. Now our ultimate weapon is the atomic missile. Everybody is naked when that baby comes whining down out of the stratosphere. So we have to stop it up there where it won’t do any damage. We can’t depend on the slow reaction time of a man. We’ve got to have a gizmo. And now, for the first time, I think we’re getting close to the ultimate interceptor. If you-know-who could find out now how close we are, I’ll bet they’d risk everything to try to knock us out before we could get into production on the defensive end. Cudahy wants this one fast as you can get it out, honey.”
She stood up. “All right, Tom. As soon as I can get it out.”
She went to work. She watched her hands add the extra onionskin sheet to the copies required by office routine. At five o’clock Cudahy came out of his office to check on progress. He seemed to be concealing jubilation with great difficulty. He patted her shoulder. “Take a food break at six, Mrs. Aintrell, and then get back to it. I’ll be here, so you won’t have to lock anything up.”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a thin voice. Cudahy had not noticed the extra copy. But she could not risk leaving the extra copy in sight while she went to the mess hall. At five of six she took the tissue box, containing the folded sheets, into the lavatory. She tucked the sheets into her bra, molding the papers into an inconspicuous curve.
She looked at her face in the mirror, ran the finger tips of both hands down her cheeks. Bob had told her she would be lovely when she was seventy.
“The bones are so good,” he said. He had traced, with gentle finger, the line of brow, of jaw, of cheek. “Here and here and here. Good structure.”
She looked into the barren depths of her own eyes and she could hear Bob’s voice. Hear also the voice of Tom Blajoviak: “Fireworks for the kiddies instead of disintegration... knock us out before we could...”
There was another scene to remember. The night of their engagement. Bob, walking away, his back to her, his voice thick: “Don’t say yes until I say something.”
“What do you mean, Bob?”
He hadn’t turned. “Look; you can’t expect a guy who stood three hundred and eleventh in his class to be an intellectual giant.”
“You’re a nice giant.”
“This is not for jokes. This is something I want to say, without the right words for it. Baby, I’m a guy in a brown suit. It has implications.” He had turned then, reaching for her, and then pulled his hand back quickly.
“Implications, darling?”
“Suppose you marry, say, a steeplejack. It drives you nuts, him up on tall buildings. So you chop at him a little and he turns into an insurance salesman. You’re both very happy.”
“You make me sound like a shrew or something.”
“No. I don’t mean that. I mean, when you marry the other guy, you don’t marry steeple-jacking, too. But when you say yes to me, you are also marrying the Army. It has a claim. It trained me. It put me in a brown suit. Along comes a war. I’m there in my brown suit, and you’re marrying that angle, too. I’m a weapon, I suppose. Expendable. You’ve got to know that. I’m in a business where they say, ‘Aintrell, keep your company on that ridge while the rest of the battalion pulls out.’ And I do it. It’s my trade... Do I make any sense?”
“Yes.”
“So figure on jealousy, too, baby. Just remember that when I’m putting my trade ahead of you, I’m also putting my trade ahead of myself. That sounds corny, but the Army comes first, then you, then me. In that order.”
“I won’t be jealous.”
“Don’t kid me, or yourself. There’ll come times when you’ll wish you’d met that insurance salesman.”
“Never!”
“Baby, nobody can fit their mind around dying. It’s too big a thing. Everybody says it never happens to them. A sort of egotism, I guess. The world is all heated up now. Suppose something breaks somewhere. I go. You don’t go. Suppose I get it. So I’m fulfilling an obligation when I make myself as expensive as possible. That’s the way we’re going to take care of things. By everybody making themselves as tough as possible to knock over. Nobody sneaking around, trying to suck up to the opposition. Think they’ll elect me governor?”
“Mayor, at least. Won’t you stop talking and let me say yes?”
“I’ll probably never make more than captain.”
“Didn’t you hear me? Yes!”
His exaggerated sigh. “What can I do?” Fishing a box out of his pocket, “Catch, then.” She caught it, opened the box. He sat beside her, fitted it on her finger, kissed the finger, her lips, her eyes, her lips again. “Crazy woman.”
“Crazy in love.”
“Be happy.”
“Forever and ever.”
So forever and ever lasted exactly sixty-three days, and then it was a very bad time for a lot of young men. And a very bad time for the young women they left behind, who by then had learned enough about the Army to know that any delaying action involving the infantry can become coldly wasteful of all company grade officers.