She looked curiously, hesitantly, at Darmstadter.
In the prescribed British manner, the WRAC sergeant came to stiff attention and stamped her foot.
“Sir,” she said to Canidy.
“Sorry to be late, Sir. There was a dreadful smashup on the way.”
“It’s all right, Agnes, he’s now one of us. Lieutenant Darmstadter, Sergeant Agnes Draper.”
“Hello,” Sgt. Draper said. Her smile was dazzling.
“To answer your unspoken question, Commander Bitter,” Canidy said dryly.
“Yes, Sergeant Draper and I can find time in our busy schedule to take lunch with you. And how lucky for you both that I have just given Darmstadter the ‘no questions allowed’ speech.”
Commander Bitter’s face tightened in anger. Commander Dolan and It.
Kennedy laughed. Sgt. Draper blushed.
“Damn you, Dick,” Sgt. Draper said.
“Military courtesy around here, you may have noticed. Lieutenant Darmstadter, is sometimes a bit lax. In the future. Sergeant Draper, you will make that ‘damn you. Sir.”” “Oh, go to hell,” she said, but she smiled at him.
[FOUR]
Petty Officers’ Club Navy Yard, Washington, D.C.
Radioman 2nd Class Joe Garvey, USN, moved his beer glass in little circles on the bar, spreading the little puddle of condensation in ever-larger circles. Joe Garvey was more than a little drunk. He had been drinking in the petty officers’ club since half past five, when he’d come to the club from the petty officers’ mess. And he was not used to drinking. Sometimes, out at Mare Island, after he’d made radioman third, he had a beer. It was bad enough in boot camp being a skinny little guy with glasses who had never been afloat on anything bigger than a whaleboat, without getting the reputation for being a teetotaler too. Real sailors drank. It was as simple as that.
Joe Garvey hadn’t wanted to be a radioman when he joined the Navy. He had wanted to go to sea as maybe a gunner on a twin-Bofors 20mm, something like that, maybe on a destroyer. Maybe even in a submarine. If he had known more about the Navy, he would have kept his mouth shut about having a ham license. But he’d been a boot, and when they’d asked him, he’d told about being a ham. So they gave him a code test, at twenty words per minute, and he’d flown through that; he’d been copying forty words a minute since he was fifteen.
So he’d gone right from Great Lakes Naval Training Station to Mare Island as a radioman striker–a USN enlisted man working to qualify for a rating–instead of going to sea. And they’d made him seaman first and given him the exam for radioman third, and he’d passed that with a 98.5. And then he’d been on the next promotion list. And six months after that, he’d made 97.4 on the exam for radioman second.
And when he’d asked his chief about maybe getting sea duty, his chief told him the Navy needed him right where he was; there weren’t all that many guys around who could handle a key the way he could; and it made more sense to have the best operators in an important commo center, rather than afloat, where they might average maybe fifteen minutes a day on the air.
The first interesting thing that had happened to him since he’d been in the Navy was the Chief coming to him and telling him to pack his gear, that he’d been placed on TDY to Washington, and that they were holding the courier plane for him.
A couple of times at Mare Island, when he couldn’t think of a way to get out of it, he’d sometimes had two beers, or even three, but he was not used to just sitting at a bar and drinking one beer after another.
They had been treating him real well at the Navy Yard. Instead of what he expected–a bunk and a wall locker in one of the big bays reserved for in transit white hats–he had a private room, with a desk and even a telephone.
“These are chief’s quarters,” the master-at-arms had told him.
“If anybody asks what you’re doing in them, you tell them to see me.”
“What am I doing in them?” Garvey had asked.