'I know, but I was looking at them, and they looked so cute-and they turn into stupid, boring old hens so fast. I wanted to have some fun with them while I could. They act so silly.' Mary seized on the explanation with both hands. She didn't like to lie to her mother, but preferred that to telling the truth here.
'Can't afford to get sentimental about 'em,' her mother said. 'They'll go into the pot when they stop giving enough eggs to be worth their keep. Nothing like a good chicken stew on a cold winter night.'
'I know that, too, Ma.' Mary didn't want to say anything to stir her mother up or make her start asking questions. Agreeing with everything Maude McGregor said was also liable to make her mother wonder, but not in any dangerous way.
Or so Mary thought, till her mother asked, 'Are you all right, dear?'
Mary thought that over. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. 'I'm swell, Ma. I'm the best I've been for a long time, matter of fact.' Her mother gave her a quizzical look, but not of the sort to make her worry. No, she didn't worry at all. Everything was going to be fine now. She could feel it.
T he Remembrance sailed west through the Straits of Florida, out of Nassau in the Bahamas-the formerly British Bahamas, surrendered to the USA after the Great War-bound for Puerto Limon on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The sun stood tropically high in the sky. The day was hot and bright and perfect… perfect, that is, for almost everybody aboard the aeroplane carrier except Sam Carsten.
No matter how hot and muggy it got, Sam had to keep his cap on and to jam it down as far down over his eyes as he could. A lot of officers went around in their shirtsleeves. He didn't; he left on his white summer jacket, to protect his arms as well as he could.
His ears, his nose (especially his nose), and the backs of his hands were snowy white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even so, every square inch of flesh he exposed to the sun was red and peeling or blistered. He hated weather like this, hated it where most men reveled in it.
Like most men, Commander Martin van der Waal tanned readily. Oh, he'd burn if he did something stupid, but even that would only last till he stayed out enough to get his hide acclimated to the sun. The torpedo-defense specialist looked at Sam with wry sympathy. 'You'd sooner be patrolling somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, wouldn't you?' he said.
'Now that you mention it, sir-yes,' Carsten answered.
'Sorry about that,' van der Waal said. 'They've got somebody else keeping an eye on the Royal Navy up there. We get to show the flag in what used to be a Confederate lake.'
'Not quite enough little specks of land in the Florida Straits to let the CSA claim this as territorial water and make us go the long way round,' Sam said.
'We would have had to before the war,' his superior said. 'The Confederates thought they were little tin gods then. Now… Now I don't care if they build themselves a bridge from Key West to Habana. We'll sail right under it, by God, and thumb our noses as we go by.'
'Yeah.' Carsten smiled and nodded, liking the picture.
Down at the Remembrance 's stern, a sailor spun an aeroplane's prop. The engine roared to noisy life. With a push from the steam catapult, the machine taxied along the carrier's flight deck, descended for a split second as it went off the end, and then gained altitude and buzzed away. Another followed, and another, and another.
Sam said, 'Of course it'll be unofficial when they look over what the Confederates are up to in south Florida and Cuba.' He winked. 'Of course it will.'
Commander van der Waal chuckled. 'Yeah, and rain makes applesauce.'
But two could play at that game. Before long, a biplane came down from Florida and began flying lazy circles above the Remembrance. Not caring for the company, the aeroplane carrier's commander ordered a couple of fighting scouts aloft to look over the newcomer and, if need be, to warn him off. Sam happened to be going by the wireless shack when one of the U.S. pilots said, 'The Confederate says he's just a civilian. His machine's got Confederate Citrus Company painted on the side. He's out for a stroll, you might say.'
What the officer inside the wireless center said meant, Yeah, and rain makes applesauce, but was a good deal more pungently phrased. The officer went on, 'Tell the son of a bitch he can goddamn well go strolling somewhere else, or maybe he'll go swimming instead.'
'Yes, sir,' the pilot answered. Carsten lingered in the corridor to hear what happened next. After half a minute or so, the pilot came back on the air: 'Sir, he says if we want an international incident from shooting down an unarmed civilian pilot in international waters, we can have one.'
The officer in the wireless center expended more bad language. At last, he said, 'I'd better talk to the old man about that one.' He might have wanted to order the Confederate aeroplane knocked out of the sky, but he didn't have the nerve to do it without approval from on high. Carsten wouldn't have, either.
Maybe the skipper of the Remembrance used some blue language of his own. Whether he did or not, that CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY aeroplane flew above the carrier for the next hour and a half. Nobody fired a shot at it. The pilot finally ran low on fuel or got bored or found some other reason to fly back off toward the north.
In the officers' galley at supper that evening, Sam said, 'I bet they're developing that bastard's photographs right now.'
'Probably,' a lieutenant, junior grade, agreed. 'Fat lot of good they can do with 'em, though. Maybe they've built a few submersibles without our noticing, and maybe than can keep 'em hidden from us, too-'
'Especially since the Socialists aren't spending the money on inspections that the Democrats did,' a lieutenant commander put in.
'Yes, sir,' the j.g. said. 'But there's no way in hell they could build themselves an aeroplane carrier on the sly. That's too big a secret to keep. Besides, they haven't got the aeroplanes to put aboard it.'
'We hope they don't,' Sam said. 'For all we know, they're all labeled Confederate Citrus Company right now.'
That produced a few laughs and a few curses. The lieutenant commander said, 'That machine had no guns. The pilots checked, first thing.'
'Yes, sir,' Sam said. 'But how long would they need to convert the type to something they could use in combat?'
Nobody had anything resembling an answer for him. The lieutenant commander said, 'That's something we ought to find out about. Maybe more of these fruit-company bastards will come look us over before too long. If they do, we'll look them over, too.' He sighed. 'I don't know how much good that will do us, not the way things are in Philadelphia these days, but we do have to make the effort.'
By the next morning, though, they'd left the Straits and even Cuba behind. No more aeroplanes came out from the CSA to inspect them. Carsten was sure that didn't mean nobody was keeping an eye on them. Lots of little fishing boats, some Confederate, others Mexican, bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico. How many of them had wireless sets? How many of those sets were sending reports to, say, the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, or to New Orleans? He didn't know, but he had his suspicions.
He also had suspicions of another sort. Whenever he came up onto the flight deck, he kept staring out into the blue, blue waters of the Gulf. 'What are you doing?' Commander van der Waal asked. 'Looking for periscopes?'
'Yes, sir,' Sam answered, altogether seriously.
Van der Waal stared. 'Do you really think the Confederates would try to sink us?'
'No, sir,' Sam said. 'I think they'd have to be crazy to try that. But if they've got any submersibles, what better way to train their crews than by stalking a real, live aeroplane carrier?'
His superior pondered that, then nodded. 'Good point, Carsten. Let's see what we can do about it. Maybe we ought to get some training in, too.'
Before long, the Remembrance shut down her engines and drifted to a stop. Sam knew what that meant: she was giving her hydrophone operators the best chance she could to pick up the sounds of submarines moving on their electric engines somewhere under the sea.
What will we do if we hear one? Carsten wondered. The carrier couldn't start lobbing depth charges into the Gulf of Mexico. That would be an act of war, no less than if one of the hypothetical subs launched a torpedo at her. We could report it to Philadelphia. How much good would that do? Sam didn't know. But the Confederate States couldn't claim they had no submersibles if the Remembrance found one.
Or could they? Maybe they'd claim the boat belonged to the Empire of Mexico. Sam doubted the Mexicans
