Rita went over to check it. "This one's wrong… and so is this one."

"They can't be! I did 'em right." Carl stared at the paper as if his answers had mysteriously changed while he wasn't looking.

"Well, you can darn well do 'em over," Rita told him. "And you'd better not get the same answers this time, or you'll be in real trouble."

"I'll try." Carl might have been sentenced to ten years at San Quentin. He erased what he'd done and tried again. When he was done, he pushed the paper across the table to his mother. "There."

She inspected the revised problems. "That's more like it," she said. Carl brightened. But she wasn't going to let him off the hook so soon. "If these answers are right, that means the ones you got before were wrong, doesn't it?"

"Uh-huh," Carl said unwillingly.

"How come you didn't get 'em right the first time?"

"I don't know. I thought I did."

" 'Cause you were goofing around, that's why. Are you going to goof around when your teacher gives you a test?" Rita asked. He shook his head. He knew that question had only one safe answer. His mother continued, "You'd better not. I'm going to be looking for that test paper when you come home with it. If you only get a C, I'll make you sorry. And don't think you can hide it from me if you do bad, either, 'cause that won't work. I'll call up Mrs. Reilly and find out what you got. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Mommy," Carl said in a very small voice. Telephoning the teacher was a parent's ultimate weapon. Kids had no defense against it this side of running away from home.

"All right, then." Rita seemed satisfied that she'd bombed him into submission. "Do you have any more homework?" He shook his head again. She ruffled his hair. "Then go take a bath and get into your pajamas, why don't you?"

A spark of resistance flared. "Do I hafta?"

She ruthlessly squashed it. "Yes, you have to. Go on. Scoot." Routed, Carl retreated to his bedroom. He came out in pajamas: the garments of surrender.

"Honestly," Rita said after she and Chester had played with him and read to him and finally kissed him good night. "Getting him to do anything is like pulling teeth." She scowled at Chester. "Why are men always like that?"

"Because women would walk all over us if we weren't," he answered, and tickled her. There was probably something in the Geneva Convention about that, especially since he wasn't ticklish himself, which meant she couldn't retaliate in kind.

They did have a more enjoyable way of unknotting such problems than the earnest diplomats at Geneva had imagined. Afterwards, they both smoked cigarettes. Then Chester turned out the lamp on his nightstand. Rita stayed up a while with a mystery. As he rolled himself into a cocoon of blankets-one more Geneva violation-she said, "You do remember Sue and Otis and Pete are coming over for dinner tomorrow night?"

"I do now," he said, and fell asleep.

He was glad to see his sister and brother-in-law and nephew. Sue had a beaky face much like his. Where he was going gray, her hair remained a time-defying sandy brown. He suspected a bottle helped her defy time, but he'd never asked. Otis Blake had a wide, perfect part along the top of his head-the scar from a bullet crease. An inch lower and Sue never would have had the chance to meet him. Their son was several years older than Carl.

"I'm working with glass again," Otis said. "When they found out I had plate-glass experience, they put me on cockpits." Till the war boom started, he'd been in and out of work since coming to California. He'd spent years in a plate-glass plant in Toledo before the business collapse got him along with so many others.

"Good for you, Otis." Chester meant it. He'd helped out when he could. Otis had done the same for him back in Ohio when Chester lost his steel-mill job there while his brother-in-law still had work.

"You ought to get a war-plant job," Otis said. "I'm making more money than I ever did before."

"I'm doing all right where I am," Chester said. "I like building better than steel, too."

"You're losing money," his brother-in-law declared.

"Not much," Chester answered. "We're getting raises. The contractors know they've got to give 'em to us, or else we darn well will quit and start making airplanes or shells or whatever else the war needs."

"Before too long, I'll be able to start paying back some of what I owe you," Otis said. "Haven't wanted to show my face around here till I could tell you that."

Chester shrugged. "Hey, I never worried about it. It's not like you didn't carry me for a while. If you can do it without hurting yourself, great. If you can't-then you can't, that's all."

"You're all right, Chester," Sue said softly.

Framed on the wall of the front room was a note from Teddy Roosevelt hoping Chester would recover from his war wound. They'd met on one of TR's tours of the Great War trenches. From that day to this, Chester had never found any words that mattered so much to him. Now maybe he had.

The USS Remembrance lay at anchor off the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui. The airplane carrier hadn't come back to Pearl Harbor after her cruise up to Midway. Somebody with a lot of braid on his sleeves had decided that putting an extra ninety miles or so between the Remembrance and a Japanese attack from the west would help keep her safe. Sam Carsten wasn't completely convinced, but nobody except the sailors in the damage-control party cared about his opinion.

His boss wasn't thrilled, either. "If they bomb us in Pearl Harbor, we sink in shallow water and we're easy to refloat," Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger grumbled at a general-quarters drill. "If they bomb us here, down we go, and they never see us again. There's a hell of a lot of water underneath us."

"If we can figure that out, how come the brass can't?" Szczerbiakowicz asked.

"Beats me, Eyechart," Sam said. "You want stuff to make sense all the time, why the hell'd you join the Navy?"

"You got me there, Lieutenant," the Pole said. "Why the hell did you join the Navy?"

"Me?" Sam hadn't thought about it for a while. "Mostly because I didn't want to walk behind a horse's ass the rest of my life, I guess. My folks had a farm, and I knew that was hard work. I figured this would be better. And it is-most of the time."

"Yeah, most of the time," Szczerbiakowicz agreed dryly. Everybody laughed, not that it was really funny. You weren't likely to run into dive bombers and battleships and submarines on a farm.

When the all-clear sounded, Sam went up to the flight deck. Destroyers and cruisers flanked the Remembrance to the west; their antiaircraft guns would help defend the vital ship if the Japs figured out she wasn't at Pearl Harbor. To the east lay Maui. Lahaina had been the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii till 1845. It had been a boomtown in whaling days. Now it seemed to have forgotten its lively past, and slumbered the days away-until Navy ships anchored offshore, when it perked up amazingly. Sam had seen the enormous banyan tree in the town square, which had to shade an area a couple of hundred feet across. Any town whose main attraction was a tree wasn't the most exciting place God ever made.

Fighters buzzed high overhead. The Remembrance's Y-ranging antenna swung round and round, round and round. Nobody's going to catch us with our pants down, Sam thought approvingly. But how many carriers did the Japanese have? It was possible-hell, it was easy-to be ready for battle in a tactical sense but to get overwhelmed strategically.

That thought came back to haunt him at supper. He was halfway through a good steak-he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a better one-when the intercom suddenly announced, "Midway reports itself under attack by Japanese aircraft. The island has launched aircraft along the vector given by the enemy machines. We are proceeding to lend our assistance."