His superiors at the Naval Air Experimental Station hadn’t noticed yet, but Isaac knew that when they did, the raises would stop, and his smart mouth would lead him into trouble. Given a choice between saving his career and mouthing off, he’d mouth off every time.
On that day, September 16, Isaac waited almost patiently at the Navy Yard gate, whistling the Major General’s Song and counting the rivets on the guard box. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead. His shirt stuck to his back. Philadelphia in the summer was like Brooklyn under water.
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical. 377 rivets. Not an uninteresting number. A Fibonacci number, in fact, and the product of two primes: 13 and 29. About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news, With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse….
Heinlein had told him to wait here by the guardhouse, and Isaac was convinced he had something up his sleeve. Bob had a hair up his ass, anyway, since Isaac had signed that petition about not working on Yom Kippur.
“You don’t believe in that stuff,” Heinlein had complained, trying to bully Isaac into taking his name off the petition. “You’re not going to temple! If Bernie hadn’t come to you with that petition, you wouldn’t even have known when Yom Kippur was. Why not take off Christmas with everyone else?”
“So, Bob, you’re telling me Christmas is the official holiday for hypocrites like us?”
Heinlein had a hide like an ox. And he was doing everything in his power to get Isaac to work next Monday on Yom Kippur. He’d recruited Isaac for the job at the Navy Yard, and he took a personal interest in turning Isaac into a gung-ho militarist like himself. It was a lost cause.
For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury, Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century…. A jeep pulled up and Heinlein waved from the passenger seat. “Climb in! You’re wasting gas!”
Isaac got in behind him, and the vehicle pulled away. “What’s this all about?”
“Don’t ask.” Heinlein nodded at the driver. “The sailor here’s not cleared for that information.” The driver didn’t blink.
They sped across the Yard to the destroyer berths at the far end. Isaac smiled as the wind evaporated his sweat. An open jeep was considerably pleasanter than walking, and it wasn’t an option usually available to shit-job civilians.
Leave it to Heinlein. He had a pencil-thin black mustache and a beautifully tailored suit. He was as suave as you could be without sliding off the face of the earth. And he could get jeeps.
The private dropped them off next to the DE 173, the USS Eldridge, a steam-electric ship so new it still had a price tag dangling from the bow. Heinlein gestured toward it and said, “They’re going to do it, Isaac. This is our ship.”
“Did I ask for a ship?”
“The Tesla-coil experiment. The Navy agreed to give it a try.” Heinlein was pumped plump with excitement.
“You’re kidding?! That’s a wild goose chase, if ever there was one.”
Not three weeks before, sitting around the mess-hall table, he and Heinlein and Sprague de Camp had tossed around a science-fictional scenario for making a ship invisible to detection by radar, which the Germans were rumored to be deploying. Isaac had jokingly suggested creating clutter echoes by running a current through Tesla coils, and got a big laugh from the others. When the hooting died down, though, Sprague looked up from his plate of miserable beef, and said thoughtfully, “You know that might almost work, except — ” Several excepts later, they had a plan, which Heinlein submitted the same day. And now the Navy thought it would work? Isaac mugged astonishment.
Heinlein shrugged. “Well, it’s not quite what we submitted, but it’s close enough that they want us to go along to observe the experiment.” They’d reached the gangplank. He motioned Asimov ahead of him. “Climb aboard, Isaac. We’re shipping out.”
“Shipping out?” Philadelphia was as far as Isaac ever intended to get from Brooklyn. Heinlein had to be joking. “Fuggeddaboudit, as we say in my country. My wife’s expecting me for dinner.”
“Not any more, she’s not. I sent her a telegram: We’re on essential war work, top secret, gone two weeks minimum. Unfortunately, you’ll be on board ship for the Jewish holidays, so you might as well work them now and get Christmas off, eh?”
Isaac was no longer mugging — he was astonished, as usual, by Heinlein’s total disregard for his feelings. Heinlein hustled him up the gangplank. “Get a move on. Ensign Hopper is waiting to show us around. He’ll introduce us to the officers in charge of the experiment.”
“Where’s Sprague? Can’t he go in my place? It was really his idea — he knows a lot more about this kind of stuff than I do. I’m a chemist, for Pete’s sake. The only military information I have is about dye markers.”
“Sprague’s monitoring the experiment from the base. We need you on the ship.” They’d reached the top of the gangplank. Heinlein looked around. “Where’s that ensign?”
An attractive woman in a WAVE uniform walked up to them. Isaac eyed her appreciatively: trim figure, mass of dark hair, great cheekbones, lovely face. A brunette version, he thought, of Sprague’s wife Catherine, who was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever met. Isaac waggled his eyebrows. “Navy life suddenly looks a lot more attractive, Bob.” He was joking, of course, but he welcomed any distraction from the panic welling up in his chest.
The WAVE nodded to each of them in an official way. Since they were civilians, she didn’t salute. But she conveyed an unmistakable air of Naval authority in the making. “Mr. Heinlein? Mr. Asimov? I’m Ensign Hopper. I’ll be in charge of Project Rainbow.”
For once in his life, Heinlein’s legendary aplomb failed him. “Excuse me, Ensign, but…you’re going to be on board the ship?” It was an unbreakable rule that the Navy did not allow women to serve on ships.
Ensign Hopper’s mouth twisted ironically. “They made me an honorary nurse.” Nurses were the exception to the unbreakable rule.
She turned away.
Isaac could hardly contain his laughter. “Well, Bob,” he said softly, so their new superior couldn’t hear. “I guess we know now what the Navy thinks of our idea. They put an ensign in charge.”
He started whistling again. But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Bob
After just a few hours at sea, Bob Heinlein had come to realize that Ensign Hopper was, for a military woman, a remarkably unknown quantity.
“Mind your head, sir.”
Footsteps echoing, Bob and Asimov clambered down ladders and clattered along passageways and ducked through hatches still gray-gleaming with primer, led by Seaman First Class Kobinski, who looked to Bob all of twelve years old and as fresh as the ship’s paint.
“Summoned below decks by an ensign,” Asimov said.
“Stow it. The Ensign’s in charge of this project. If she says jump, we say ‘how high?’ This is the Navy, Isaac.”
“If I’ve been drafted, it’s news to me.”
Bob was happy to follow orders, even from a woman. Even if it brought his tendency toward seasickness to the fore, as had their interrupted assignment to check the insulation of the Tesla coils at the front of the ship.
Bob, in fact, was actively seeking to put himself entirely under someone’s command, and he wasn’t too particular about whose. He had written more than once to Ernest King, his commander aboard the Lexington, now chief of us naval operations. Admiral King knew Bob’s lungs were scarred from tuberculosis, but King knew grit, too, and intelligence, and leadership potential. It was only a matter of time: Bob would be back in action again.