“Want to take another run, please? Over.”
“Roger. Give us a vector. Over.”
“Vector three-one-zero, angels three. Choose your own approach. We want to be surprised. Start out at about a hundred and fifty, will you? We want to see what kind of range pickup we’ve got.”
“Hope you’ve got plenty of time,” the pilot said. “This buggy can’t do much more’n two hundred and fifty per. This ain’t a jet, you know.”
“I know,” Masters said. “We’ll be ready for you when you come back.”
“They should’ve put this crate in moth balls years ago,” the pilot muttered, and then he added, “Out.”
Masters turned to Singer. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Singer? Were you asleep?”
“I was getting a lot of land-mass echo, sir.”
“Baloney,” Masters said. “There’s nothing between you and England but the Atlantic ocean.”
“Must be high waves, then, sir.”
“Come on, Singer, get on the ball. You pick him up at thirty miles, and he’s on us before we can get a plane to him. All right, let’s leave this for now. I want all of you in Room Thirty-three in ten minutes. Take a smoke, and be there on the button. We’re going to try a few torpedo runs.”
“We did that already,” Kraus, another of the radarmen, complained.
“And we’ll keep doing it until we get it right,” Masters snapped. “Go take your smokes.”
Andrew Brague, an ensign fresh out of communications school, walked over to Masters. “Think we’re riding them too hard, sir?”
“What?” Masters said, wondering why every idiot ensign in the world eventually came under his wing.
“The men, sir. Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on them?”
“How so?” Masters asked, annoyed.
“No liberty since we’ve been here. Round-the-clock watches. Classes every minute except for chow and smoke breaks. I don’t know, sir.”
Masters eyed Brague sourly. “Tell me, Ensign,” he said, “just what the hell you think this is — a picnic?”
“Sir?” Brague said, startled.
“We’re here to unify these men into a smoothly working machine. We’re going to be a picket ship, Brague. Do you know what that means? It means that the life of the Sykes and the life of the task force behind the Sykes will depend upon the efficiency of our radar screen. Do you know what the average life span of a picket ship on station is, Brague?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s measured in minutes, Brague,” Masters said. “I don’t want to wind up as a statistic. So I’m trying to pound some working knowledge into the heads of these men. This may all be a joke to them now, but someday it may be serious, damned serious, and I think we should be ready, don’t you?”
“Well, of course, sir.”
“Then don’t tell me I’m riding the men too hard. I’ll ride them as hard as I have to, and there’ll be no liberty until I can see something sinking in. Have I been ashore yet, Brague?”
“No, sir.”
“Damn right I haven’t. And I’ll tell you something else, Brague. There’s a girl I’ve been dying to call for the past week. She’s in Norfolk right now, and that’s where I’d like to be, and I want her to know that. But every time I come within six yards of that phone booth in the lobby, there’s always somebody coming along with another damn order from the C.O. of this joint. I haven’t even had time to write her a letter! So don’t come weeping to me about the men. We’re all ‘men,’ Brague, and to hell with Navy jargon. And I don’t like this any more than the rest of us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t look so damn sad. Round up the rest of the officers, and we’ll have a conference on thus torpedo stuff before the run-through. Bring your cigarettes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Brague?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Would you like to take my mid-watch tonight? So that I can finally get that letter off?”
Brague looked militantly disappointed. “If you say so, sir.”
“Skip it. I was just kidding. Get your cigarettes and your fellow officers. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
On the base at Norfolk there was talk, lots of talk.
“Sure, I knew Greg Barter,” the talkers said. “Hell of a nice guy. But I understand he was an attendant in the booby hatch at Bethesda. That stuff’s contagious, you know.”
“Greg Barter, yes,” the talkers said, “a good man, one of my best. Inclined toward melancholia, however. Should have foreseen this, should have sensed it coming. Well, you never know when a suicidal tendency will emerge full blown, do you? Eh?”
“I spotted him for a nut from go,” the talkers said.
The talkers said, “Greg thank too much. When you start thinking, you find out you don’t like yourself so much. Bang! You jump out the window.”
And the talkers said, “I liked Greg. You can’t tell me he jumped through that glass. He musta slipped.”
“All alone in the solarium,” the talkers said. “Who the hell knows what happened, really?”
“One guy knows,” the talkers said, “and that’s Greg Barter, and he ain’t telling it to nobody but Saint Peter.”
There were two men who knew.
One of them might or might not have been telling it to Saint Peter.
The second was telling it to nobody.
He stood in the head and shaved carefully, very carefully. He wanted to look good tonight. This was the first time she’d be seeing him in anything but pajamas or a robe, and he felt that the first impression was the most important one.
Jean Dvorak, Lamb Being Led to Slaughter.
Well, not exactly to slaughter. To Wilmington would be more like it. And not tonight, of course. Tonight was the preliminary bout, so to speak. The main event would come later, depending on what happened tonight. He had no doubts about how tonight would turn out. He was sure of her already. She was a confused kid, yes, but the confused kids were the best kind. She didn’t know which end was up, and she wouldn’t know until he showed her, and he was looking forward to the demonstration with considerable relish.
Confused, but gorgeous. With that nice pure beauty, that unspoiled kind of beauty, like a field of snow waiting for footprints. Oh, Jesus, how innocent!
Her innocence pained him. It was almost too excruciating to bear. Claire had been beautiful, but she was wise and knowing, and a little hard, he supposed, but beautiful, yes, beautiful, hell, you couldn’t take that away from her. But you couldn’t deny she was hard either. He’d spotted her instantly, spotted her as an easy mark — if he appealed to her. He knew she was the kind you had to appeal to. She was hard, but she wasn’t petrified. And he’d appealed to her because he knew which approach to take. The right approach was the most important thing, of course. With Jean, you had to put things on an emotional plane, the undying-love pitch. Well, he was ready to give her his undying devotion, but there were strings, of course, and the strings weren’t too painful, were they? Shouldn’t love be unselfish? Of course, Jean. And isn’t our love a beautiful, fragile, tender thing? Jean, can’t we... Couldn’t we...
Damn right we can, he thought, smiling.
From the sink opposite him, Petroff, a gunner’s mate said, “You back already?”
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Wha’d you have?”
“Cat fever.”
“Yeah, I had that once,” Petroff said. “Hey, was you there when that pecker checker took the plunge?”
“Was I where?” he asked.
“At the hospital, natch.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Musta been a psycho, huh?”
“Definitely nuts,” he answered.