under his charge. Grady said, 'Do you recall that matter we were discussing the day the limeys gave up the fight?'
For a moment, Carsten didn't. Then he nodded. 'About aeroplanes, you mean, sir?'
'That's right.' Grady nodded, too. 'Were you serious about what you meant about getting in on the ground floor there?'
'Yes, sir. I sure was, sir,' Sam answered. Aeroplanes were the coming thing. Anyone with an eye in his head could see that. Anyone with an eye in his head could also see the Navy wouldn't stay as big as it had been during the war. Since Sam wanted to make sure he didn't end up on the beach, getting involved with aeroplanes looked like a good insurance policy.
Commander Grady said, 'All right, then. I have some orders cut for you. If you'd said no, you'd have stayed here. There wouldn't have been any trouble about that. As things are, though, we both catch the train for Boston tomorrow morning. You'll see why when we get there.' His smile made him look years younger.
'You're leaving the Dakotal' Vic Crosetti demanded. When Sam nodded, Crosetti clapped a hand to his forehead. 'Jesus Christ, who'm I gonna rag on now?'
'I figure you'll find somebody,' Carsten said, his voice dry. Crosetti gave him a dirty look that melted into a chuckle, then slapped him on the back. Sam had a gift for getting in digs without making people angry at him.
'Only problem with this is the train ride,' Commander Grady said. 'This Spanish influenza that's going around is supposed to be pretty nasty. We might be better staying aboard the Dakota?
'Sir, if the limeys couldn't sink us and the Japs couldn't sink us and whoever was flying that damn bombing aeroplane out from Argentina couldn't sink us, I don't figure we need to be afraid of any germs,' Sam said.
Grady laughed. 'That's the spirit! All right, Carsten. Pick up your new orders, get your paperwork taken care of, and we'll go ashore tomorrow morning-if you can stand an officer for company, that is.'
'I'm a tough guy, sir,' Carsten answered. 'I expect I'll put up with it.' Grady laughed and mimed throwing a punch at him, then went on his way.
'What's this about aeroplanes?' Crosetti asked.
'Don't even know, exactly,' Sam said. 'I joined the Navy five years before the war started, and here I am, buying a pig in a poke. Maybe I need my head examined, but maybe I'm smart, too. Smart, I mean, besides getting away from you. I hope I am, anyway.'
'Good luck. I think you're crazy, but good luck.' Crosetti shook Sam's hand, then walked off shaking his own head.
Getting orders was the easy part of getting off the Dakota. Carsten filled out endless separation forms. Only after the last of them was signed would the paymaster grudgingly give him greenbacks. With money in his billfold and a duffel bag on his shoulder, he walked down the gangplank from the Dakota to the pier with Commander Grady.
Even at the edge of the harbor, New York boiled with life. When Grady flagged a cab for the ride to the New York Central Railroad Depot, three different automobiles almost ran him and Sam down in the zeal for a fare. The drivers hopped out and screamed abuse at one another in both English and a language that seemed entirely compounded of gutturals.
Grady knew his way through the crowded old depot, which was fortunate, because Sam didn't. He had to step smartly to keep from being separated from the officer; the only place where he'd felt more crowded was the triple-decked bunkroom of the Dakota. Everyone here was moving, intent on his own business. About every third man, woman, and child was sneezing or sniffling or coughing. Some of them were likely to have influenza. Carsten tried not to inhale. That didn't work very well.
He and Grady got a couple of seats in a second-class car; the Navy saved money on train fares that way. They were the only Navy men there, though soldiers in green-gray occupied a fair number of seats. The civilians ranged from drummers in cheap, flashy suits to little old ladies who might still have been in Russia.
Once Grady and Carsten pulled into Boston, the officer paid for another cab ride, this one over the Charlestown Bridge to the Navy Yard on the north side of the Charles River. Seeing the battleships and cruisers and submersibles and tenders tied up there made Sam's heart swell with pride. A few ships from the Western Squadron of Germany's High Seas Fleet stood out from their American allies because of their less familiar lines and light gray paint jobs.
Sam followed Commander Grady, each of them with duffel bag bouncing on his back. Then, all at once, Sam stopped in his tracks and stared and stared. Grady walked on for a couple of steps before he noticed he didn't have company any more. He turned and looked back, a grin on his rabbity features. 'What's the matter, Carsten?' he asked, sounding like a man trying hard not to laugh out loud.
'Sir,' Sam said plaintively, 'I've seen every type of ship in the U.S. Navy, and I reckon damn near every type of ship in the High Seas Fleet, too.' He pointed ahead. 'In all my born days, though, I've never seen anything that looked like that, and I hope to God I never do again. What the hell is it supposed to be?'
Now Grady did laugh out loud. 'That's the Remembrance, Carsten. That's what you signed up for.'
'Jesus,' Sam said. 'I must have been out of my goddamn mind.'
The Remembrance looked as if somebody had decided to build a battleship and then, about a third of the way through the job, got sick of it and decided to flatten out most of the deck to hurry things along. An aeroplane sat on the deck aft of the bridge: not a seaplane that would land in the water and be picked up by the ship's crane but a Wright two-decker fighting scout-a U.S. copy of a German Albatros-with utterly ordinary landing gear and not a trace of a float anywhere. Sam shook his head in disbelief.
Laughing still, Commander Grady clapped him on the back. 'Cheer up. It won't be so bad. You'll still mess forward and bunk aft. And a five-inch gun is a five-inch gun.' He pointed to the sponson under that unbelievably long, unbelievably level deck. 'You'll do your job, and the flyboys will do theirs, and everybody will be happy except the poor enemy bastards who bump into us.'
'Yes, sir,' Sam said dubiously. 'What the devil did she start out to be, anyway? And why didn't she turn out to be whatever that was?'
'They started to build her as a fast, light-armored battle cruiser, to slide in close to the Confederate coast, blast hell out of it, and then scoot before the Rebs could do anything about it-a monitor with legs, you might say,' Grady answered. 'But that idea never went anywhere. Some bright boy got to thinking how handy it would be to take aeroplanes along wherever you needed them, and… there's the Remembrancer
'I thought of that myself, after the Dakota got bombed off Argentina,' Carsten said, 'but I never imagined- this.' He wondered if he'd get into fights because sailors on ordinary, respectable vessels would call the Remembrance the ugliest ship in the Navy. Dammit, she was the ugliest ship in the Navy.
'Come on, let's go aboard,' Grady said. 'She won't look anywhere near so strange from the inside.'
Even that didn't turn out to be true. The hangars that held nearly three dozen fighting scouts and the supply and maintenance areas that went with them took up an ungodly amount of space, leaving the bunkrooms cramped and feeling like afterthoughts. As a petty officer, Carsten did get a bottom bunk, but the middle one in the three-tier metal structure was only a few inches above him. He could stand it, but he didn't love it.
The only place in which he did feel at home was the sponson. The five-inch gun was the same model he'd served on the Dakota^ and the sponson itself might have been transferred bodily from the battleship. The chief gunner's mate in charge of the crew, a burly veteran named Willie Moore, wore a splendid gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He wasn't half brother to his counterpart from the Dakota^ Hiram Kidde, but Sam couldn't have proved it by the way he acted.
He turned out to know Kidde, which surprised Sam not at all. 'If you served with the 'Cap'n,' reckon you'll do for me,' he rumbled when Carsten mentioned the name of his former gun commander a couple of days after coming aboard.
'Thanks, Chief. Hope so,' Sam said, and punctuated that with a sneeze. 'Damn. I'm coming down with a cold.'
He was off his feed at supper that evening, which surprised him: the Remembrance, however ugly she was, boasted a first-class galley. Everything was fresh, too-an advantage of sitting in port. But Sam didn't realize how sick he was till the next morning, when he almost fell out of his bunk. He stood, swaying, in front of it.
'You all right?' asked George Moerlein, who slept just above him. Sam didn't answer; he had trouble figuring out what the words meant. Moerlein peered at him, touched his forehead, and then jerked back his hand as if he'd tried picking up a live coal. 'We better get this guy to sick bay,' he said. 'I think he's got the influenza.' Sam didn't
