“You have just received it, you impertinent imbecile!”
“Begging the Admiral’s pardon, but orders to the Quartermaster must be cut in triplicate on Form A-394-C, sir, and signed by the senior officer.”
The admiral just stared at him, turning light purple. “Why, you insubordinate, goldbricking, malingering, cowardly lackey! You do as I command you, or there’ll be hell to pay!”
Papa felt the rage churning inside him and kept his face carefully wooden. He decided that there would be hell to pay—and that he would send the admiral the bill.
The order never arrived, of course, and Papa made sure his staff kept on sending back the defectives. And there was no summons to a court martial—Papa had known there wouldn’t be. But it did shake him, knowing that a full admiral, one of the high command, had sold out to the profiteers. So he did send the admiral the bill.
He stayed late one night, checking out the admiral’s requisitions personally—everything for his own porkbarrel use, down to the aftershave and razorblades, Then he locked himself in the computer room alone, and cut routing slips guaranteeing that every single item that went to that admiral was defective.
It was almost satisfying—but not quite, because he never did hear the admiral squawk. He couldn’t, after all. He’d made sure there was no trail to show who had cut the routing orders.
But he didn’t doubt for a minute that the admiral knew. Especially after the next attack.
“Biedermann!”
Alice turned away from the time clock and toward the Fore with a thudding heart. Yeah?”
“Boss wants to see you.” The fore jerked her thumb toward the office.
“What for?”
“Not my problem.” The fore shrugged. “I did see all those rejects you’ve been piling up.”
Alice couldn’t pull every code yellow off the line, or she would have been fired for sure—but she had pulled all the blues as well as the reds. “So I’m up for termination.”
“Hope not.” The fore met her gaze. “You have the lowest absenteeism rate of anyone on the shift. Besides, you never come drunk, and you don’t make trouble. No, I hope not. But you’re probably in for a dressing-down.”
“Thanks.”Alice smiled, with warm surprise at the woman’s support. Then she turned toward the office and went in, breathing slowly and deeply.
The under-manager was at her desk, flanked by a clerk who looked up and said, “What’s it about?”
“You tell me,” Alice said.
The under looked up. “Biedermann?”
“Yeah.”
The under looked down at her screen. “You have a lot of rejects, Biedermann.”
“Not much in point in letting the blues go by,” Alice answered. “They’ll just come back to us.”
“But the yellows won’t?”
“I send the yellows for hand-checking.”
“That loses a lot of time, Biedermann—and twenty per cent of your yellows have to be scrapped. You know what you’re costing the company?”
Alice kept her face rigid. “A thousand a day?”
“More like five. Why are you so finnicky, Biedermann?”
“Isn’t that what l‘m there for?”
“Guess so.” The under looked up. “The Company wants better quality control. They want a fore just for that—and you’re it.”
Alice could only stare.
“But why?” she said to Pepe that night. “You can’t tell me they weren’t trying to foist off duds on the Navy before!”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Papa assured her.
She gave him a narrow look. “No, they’d only plan on it! So why all of a sudden this push for high quality?”
“Well,” Papa mused, “it might be because I just rejected a whole shipment of cannons.”
Alice spun to face him, wide-eyed.
Papa shrugged. “After all, I found flawed castings in the breeches of one out of every five—and the three I tested exploded at the breech after a dozen shells. Well, one lasted long enough to make a hundred.”
“How long did that take, ten minutes?”
“About. So I told them to re-check the whole load.” Papa grinned. “You should have seen the salesman’s face!”
“I’ll bet! No wonder they want to boost quality control!”
“Yeah. Saves time and money to do it right the first time. I’II bet you’re going to be getting that load of cannon back, though one piece at a time.”
But Alice wasn’t really listening any more. She turned haunted eyes toward him. “Peppy, I don’t like this. They weren’t supposed to notice me.”
He saw the fear and reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “They won’t. They have no reason to link us up, or even to think about it. So you’re going out with a cashiered soldier. So what? Don’t most of your fellow workers? And even if they did, they wouldn’t dare try anything. Don’t worry, beautiful.”
She looked up at him, startled. “What did you say?”
“I said they wouldn’t try anything. Well, they might fire you, but that’s all. Come on, let’s think of happier things—like shellfish and steak.”
She let him whisk her away to a nice restaurant and a bottle of champagne to celebrate her promotion. She floated through the rest of the evening in a happy daze. He called her “beautiful” twice more that night, the second when he kissed her at her doorway.
She closed the door behind her, hit the lights, and turned to look at herself in the mirror-nose blue with cold, eyes teary, wisps of hair straying from under her hood. Beautiful? No—he had to have been lying.
But she felt very warm inside, anyway.
Winter had turned the corner, and was heading toward spring—not that Papa would have known it from the weather. It was still dark when he arrived at his office, dark again by the time he started home. But he took quick glances at the stars as he strode along toward home and saw that the spring constellations were peeking over the horizon.
Not that he could do much more than peek. He still walked home, and meant to keep doing it—only fresh air he got anymore—but he had to be alert. That meant no rubbernecking.
His glance roved over the street ahead, the shop doorways, the windows above. Nothing out of the ordinary; nothing suspicious ahead.
Behind was another matter. Two tall, dark figures in Burleigh coats had been following him ever since he had come out of HQ. He slowed down, they slowed down—he sped up, they sped up. Not much chance of mistaking—they were shadowing him.
Of course, they weren’t being that obvious about it. They mingled with the crowd, one on one side of the street, the other on the other, always several people between them and a block behind. If he stopped to look in a shop display, the one visible out of the corner of his eye would already have stopped to read a news screen or pick his way around an icy patch. And every so often, one of them would disappear, but almost instantly, Papa would see a new man way ahead of him.
It sent the thrill of danger coursing through his nerves—good, good! It had been too long since he’d been in combat, too long. He opened his coat, the better to be able to reach the pistol under his arm. The knowledge that he might die, hollowed his stomach—the Colonels of Industry might not be homicidal, but their lieutenants would love to see him dead.
Well, if it happened, it happened. But there was no point in letting the assassins name the time and place when Papa could force the issue. He strolled onward, scanning the street ahead, picking out a good alleyway.
When he came up to it, he lurched aside as though he’d stumbled, into the alley, out of sight—where he sprinted for cover: a worn-out sofa waiting for trash pick-up.