eat every crumb?
He heard a rapping and turned. The sliding glass door was opening.
“Hi, Harlan. Come on in.”
“Saw your light. Couldn’t sleep. The air conditioning crapped out today and that place is too stuffy to sleep in.”
“It’d be better if there was a breeze.”
“What a climate!”
Canseco took the first pitch. Strike one. “Want some milk?”
“Yeah. That’d be good. Got any cookies?”
“I’m looking.” Up there, behind the flour. Half a package of Fig Newtons. He carried them over to the counter where Albright sat and took one from the package and bit into it. “Little stale, but edible.”
The radio audience sighed. Foul tip up toward the press box. Strike two. Harlan Albright helped himself to a cookie while Ca- macho poured him a glass of milk.
Another foul tip. The sound of the bat on the ball was plainly audible.
Both men nibbled a cookie and sipped milk as they listened. The announcer was hyping the moment for all it was worth. Men on first and second, one out. Two strikes on Jose Canseco.
Another foul tip.
“Guy ought to quit fouling the ball,” Albright said. “Sometimes you want them to either hit it or strike out, it doesn’t matter, as long as the game goes on.”
“Yeah,” Camacho mumbled with his mouth full. He swallowed. “But the guy keeps swinging to stay alive.”
The Baltimore pitcher swung around and threw to second. Too late.
“Now the pitcher’s doing it.” Albright helped himself to another Fig Newton.
Camacho finished his milk and set the glass in the sink.
“Here’s the pitch.” the radio blared. The crack of the bat started the crowd roaring. “Through the hole. looks like it’s going to the wall. Man rounding third is trotting home. And that’s it, folks. The A’s win it in the eleventh inning on an RBI double by Jose Can- seco.” Camacho nipped the radio off.
“A good player,” Albright told him.
“Good kid,” Luis agreed.
“Gonna be a superstar.”
“If he lasts.”
“Yeah. They all gotta last. Everyone has high expectations, then for some reason, sometimes the kid sorta fizzles. Know what I mean?”
Camacho nodded and put Albright’s glass in the sink.
“We had high hopes for you—“
“Why don’t you go home and swelter at your house, Harlan. It’s two-thirty in the morning and I have to work tomorrow.”
“I don’t. Got the air conditioner guys coming in the morning. I’ll call in sick. Tomorrow night my place is going to be like Mos- cow in winter.”
“Terrific.”
Albright heaved himself off the stool and reached for the sliding glass door. As his hand closed on it, he paused and looked at Camacho. “Anything new?”
“Yeah. One or two little things, since you mentioned it. The Soviet ambassador got a letter several weeks ago. For some reason there was a stain on it, a jelly stain. We analyzed it. Looks like a French brand of blueberry. Imported. We have a dozen agents on it.”
“Amazing.” Albright shook his head like a great bear. He brightened. “That might lead to something, eh?”
“It might. You never know.”
“Amazing. All those letters, over three and a half years! The Minotaur has never made a mistake, not even one tiny slip. And now he sends a letter with a jelly stain on it? It’s too good to be real.”
“You take your breaks where you find them. If it is a break. We’ll find out if I can keep enough people working on it. Another development just cropped up.”
“Like what? Peanut butter on the envelope?”
“Nothing to do with X.”
“What?” Albright was no longer amused.
“Crash of the navy’s ATA prototype. Augered in yesterday out in Nevada.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Day before yesterday, actually. Seems somebody has been peddling erroneous informa- tion to a defense contractor. AeroTech. So the smelly stuff has hit the fan, so to speak.”
“Keep your people on X.” His tone was flat.
“What am I supposed to do now? Salute?”
Albright slid the door open. “I’m not kidding, Luis. We need some progress.” He stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind him. Then he disappeared into the darkness.
A minute or so later, Luis Camacho locked the door and pulled the drapes.
After Jake Grafton and the rest of the staff left for Washington, the atmosphere at the base at Tonopah took on the ethereal silence of a graveyard, or so it seemed to Toad Tarkington. He divided his time between the hangar, where a TRX crew was mocking up the rem- nants of the airplane he and Rita had abandoned, and the hospital, where Rita remained in a coma.
Toad drove the two miles back and forth between the two loca- tions in an air force sedan that one of the commanders had as- sumed he would return to the motor pool. He would, eventually, but he was in no hurry. After all, the commander had signed for the car and hadn’t really ordered him to return it.
The lounge in the VOQ was empty. The other guests apparently were too busy to hang around the pool table and bet dimes and swap lies while the TV hummed in the background, as the naval aviators had. The camaraderie was an essential part of naval avia- tion. Those who flew the planes gave and demanded this friendship of each other.
That first evening alone Toad tossed the cue ball down the table and watched it carom off the rails. He looked at the empty seats and the blank TV screen and the racks of cue sticks, and trudged off to his room to call Rita’s parents yet again. He was talking to them twice a day now.
He was also calling his own folks out in Santa Barbara once a day, keeping them updated on Rita and talking just to hear their voices. Likely as not his parents were slightly baffled and secretly pleased by this attention from the son who usually phoned once a month and never wrote because he had said everything in the phone call.
It’s funny, he mused, that now, now. with Rita in such bad shape, the sound of his mother’s voice was so comforting. After the second day alone, it finally occurred to him that the problem was that he had almost nothing to do. He was standing in the hangar watching, listening, but he had no people to supervise or reports to write or memos due, so he merely observed with his mind in neutral. At the hospital he sat beside Rita, who was moved to a private room, and did a monologue for her or stared at the wall. And thought. He pondered and thought and mused some more.
That evening on the way to the hospital he stopped by the ex- change and bought a spiral notebook. In Rita’s room he began to write. “Dear Rita,” he began, then sucked on the pen and looked out the window. He dated the page. “Dear, dear Rita: Someday you will wake, and when you do, I will give you this letter.”
He wrote, sometimes for several hours at a sitting. He started out writing about Toad Tarkington: growing up in southern Cali- fornia with the beach and surf just down the road, baseball and football in the endless summer, the hard-bodied bimbettes chased and wooed and sometimes conquered. He described how he felt about his first true love, and his second and third and fourth. He devoted page after page to college and grades and all-night parties.
Finally he decided he had squeezed the sponge pretty dry on his youth, so he turned to the navy. Without his even realizing it, his style changed. Instead of the light, witty, listen-to-this style he had adopted for tales of his youth, he wrote seriously now, with no attempt at humor. Facts, impressions, opinions, ambitions, they came pouring from his pen.
In four days the TRX crew finished their work and mysteriously vanished. Several days later a group of
