"She's no trouble at all," Brigid Coneval assured Sylvia. "Good as gold, she is… most o' the time. But if I've coped with my own hellions so long, she'll have to go some to put me out of kilter." She cocked her head to one side. "And how does it feel to be after having your husband's picture in the papers and all?"

"It feels wonderful. We have a copy of the Globe framed in the kitchen," Sylvia answered, and then, "I wish they'd never done it."

Confusion spread across Mrs. Coneval's long, pale face. "Begging your pardon, but I don't follow that."

"Now that the papers have blabbed what that fishing boat did and how it did it, it'll be harder and more dangerous for them to do it again," Sylvia explained. "I wish the Rebs didn't have any idea what sort of trick they used."

"Ah, now I see," Mrs. Coneval breathed. "God bless you, Mrs. Enos, and may He keep your man safe." She crossed herself.

"Thank you," Sylvia said from the bottom of her heart. She did a lot of praying, too. It had brought George safe from the sea to North Carolina, and from North Carolina back to Boston.

Whatever God chose to do about that, He wouldn't let her stand around flapping her gums with Brigid Coneval. She hurried downstairs. The air was cooler and fresher outdoors than in the apartment building, but that wasn't saying much. It was going to be hot and sticky. It was usually hot and sticky in Boston in July, but she hadn't known what that meant, not really, till she'd put in a few shifts under a corrugated tin roof at the fish-canning plant.

She got onto the trolley. A man who looked like a factory worker stood up and gave her his seat. She sat down with a murmur of thanks. Men were more inclined to be gentlemanly in the morning, she'd found, than in the eve ning after a full day's work, when they were tired and wanted to get a load off their feet. Then it was everyone for himself. She'd heard women complain and shame men to their feet, but she never did that herself. She knew all about be ing tired.

Riding the streetcar gave her a few minutes to herself, even in a crowd of strangers. She spent half the time thinking of the pork chops she'd fry up for supper when she got home that night, the other half, inevitably, worrying about George. The Spray was out on patrol again. What she hoped most of all was that the boat would come back from the Banks with a hold full of hake and halibut, having seen no Confederate, Canadian, or British warships of any description. That had happened on one cruise already, and was probably the only thing the Navy was doing during the war to turn a profit.

Next best would be to sink an enemy submersible. George would have disagreed with those priorities, but what did he know? Going face to face with the Rebs and Canucks put him in even more danger than simply going out to sea, and so many men never came home in time of peace.

And, of course, the tables could turn. That was even more likely now, thanks to the enterprising reporters who'd published their stories about fishing boats that were so much more than they seemed. Making the foe wary might tempt him to shoot at long range or make him more watchful for the towed submarine or any number of other unpleasant possibilities.

On that cheerful note, she got off the trolley and walked to the factory. A couple of cats stared at her with green, green eyes. The smell of the fish-canning plant -and the scraps outside-drew them like a magnet. She wondered if they were jealous, watching her go into the dingy building. If they were, it was only because they didn't know what she did in there.

Her children's best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, she got to work on time. "Has the machine been behaving itself?" she asked Elena Gomes, who worked the night shift.

"It did not jam much-not too much," the other woman answered. "Some nights, I think it has the Devil in it, but tonight it was not bad." She patted her lustrous black hair. Instead of cutting it short, as most of the women at the factory did, she wore it under a hairnet to keep it from getting caught in the machinery.

"That's something, anyway," Sylvia said, though what the label-gluing machine did on one shift was no guarantee of what it would do on the next. For the moment, as shifts changed all through the canning plant, the produc tion line was quiet.

"Your husband, he is well?" Elena asked.

"As far as I know, yes," Sylvia said. "But his boat put to sea again three nights ago, so I won't know for certain till they come back from the trip." And if something did go wrong, she wouldn't know till days, maybe weeks, passed. Dead? Captured? She'd been through the agony of wondering once; she didn't know if she could stand to go through it again.

The Portuguese woman made the sign of the cross. "I pray for him, as I do for my own husband."

"Thank you," Sylvia said, as she had to Brigid Coneval. "How's your Pedro?" Elena Gomes' husband was in the Army, somewhere out in the South west. "Have you heard from him lately?"

"I got a letter yesterday, thank God," Elena said. "They are moving farther into Texas, to a town called -" She frowned. "Lummox? Is that right?"

" Lubbock, I think." Sylvia remembered seeing the name in the newspaper. "I'm glad he's all right."

"Oh, so am I," the other woman replied. "He says they are thinking of making him a corporal. He talks it down: he says it is only because -again, thank God-he has stayed alive. But I can tell he is proud of it. Still, it is noth ing like what your George has done. To be one of the crew that sank a submarine-" Her eyes glowed.

What George had had to say about that was that the Spray had gone to sea with a big sink me! sign painted on the cabin, and that the Confederate submarine had thought it was part of the free-lunch spread at a saloon. He didn't think being a decoy was worth getting as excited over as the papers had gone and done.

Before Sylvia found a way to put any of that into words, the conveyor belt gave a couple of jerks. She knew what that meant -it would start up in earnest in a minute or two. Elena Gomes understood that, too. "I am going to go home and try to get some sleep," she said with a wan smile, "so I can come back tonight and do the same thing all over again. Such is life." She hurried away.

Such is life, Sylvia thought: drudgery, exhaustion, never enough money, never the time to lift up your head and look around. Wasn't it last week she'd had George, Jr., the day before yesterday she'd given birth to Mary Jane? If it wasn't, where had the time gone? How had it slipped past her? She hadn't even been working then-if, that is, you didn't call raising children work. People who didn't have to do it didn't think it was, which, as far as she was concerned, only showed how little they knew. Or maybe they thought it wasn't work because women didn't get paid for it. That was nothing but more foolishness.

With a clatter, the conveyor belt got rolling in earnest. Sylvia thought, The trouble with this job is that I don't get paid… enough. If she'd been a man, she would have made more money. Then again, if she'd been a man, she probably would have been in the armed forces by now. Soldiers and sailors didn't get paid much, either, and the things they did…

She remembered George talking about the torpedo that had slammed into the Confederate submersible. "It was there," he'd said, "and then it was in two pieces, sinking. Nobody had a chance to get out." He'd known some pride in being part of the ambush that sank it, but also a sailor's horror of watching any vessel go to the bottom.

She pulled the levers on her machine. As Elena had said, it was behaving pretty well. When the paste reservoir ran low, she poured more into it from a big bucket that sat by her feet. She had to keep an eye on the labels, too, to make sure the machine didn't run out of them. She'd let the feeder go empty once, and had the foreman screaming at her because unlabeled cans were go ing down the line. She never wanted that to happen again.