"Done!" Stone shouted at last, and Moss gave the Wright all the juice it had to get out of the antiaircraft fire and head for home.
The aeroplane rolled to a stop on the landing strip. Moss killed the engine. For a moment, silence seemed louder than the roar had. He needed a distinct effort of will not to shout as he said, "That wasn't so bad." After a reflective pause, he added, "Any run where they don't send their aeroplanes up after you is a pretty good one, as a matter of fact."
"Oh, I don't know," Percy Stone said. "I was sort of looking forward to the chance of shooting the tail right off my own bus." His grin was so disarming, it almost let Moss forget that that was one of the things that could happen when an observer got overeager.
Moss climbed out of the cockpit and jumped down to solid ground. Stone followed more slowly and more carefully; he had to remove the camera and the precious exposed plates from their mounting. Moss liked the precise way he did things. "This may work out pretty well," he said.
Percy Stone's grin got wider and more wicked. "Oh, darling," he breathed, "I didn't know you cared." Laughing, the two men headed off toward the photographic laboratory together.
Sylvia Enos stared at the new form the Coal Board clerk handed her. "Fill this out and bring it to Window C, over there, when you've finished it," the clerk droned, almost as mechanically as a gramophone record. Sylvia wondered how many times a day he said the exact same thing.
She wished Brigid Coneval weren't down with the grippe. But Mrs. Coneval was, which meant Sylvia had had to bring George, Jr., and Mary Jane with her to the Coal Board office of a Saturday afternoon. She was just glad the office stayed open on Saturday afternoons; if it hadn't, she would have had to try to get time off from work to fill out this new and hideous form.
She sat down in one of the hard chairs that filled the open area in front of the Coal Board office windows. George, Jr., sat down next to her. She plopped Mary Jane into the chair on the other side. "Be good, both of you, while I answer these questions," she said.
Every time she had to fill anything out, it was a race against the clock. The children would get into mischief; it was only a question of when. To delay the inevitable, she gave her son a lollipop and her daughter a bottle, then took out a fountain pen and bent over the sheet full of tiny type to find out what sort of information they wanted from her now.
COAL RATION ALLOTMENT
REASSESSMENT EVALUATION
SURVEY REPORT,
The form said at the top. Sylvia sighed. It seemed to be a law- or perhaps a Coal Board policy-that every form had to be more complicated than the one it replaced. This one certainly lived up to the requirement.
She had no trouble filling out her own name or the address of the flat in which she and the children lived. Then the form asked for the names of all individuals residing at that address. That was all fine. But next it asked for the present status of each individual, and gave check-off boxes for MILITARY, CIVILIAN GAINFULLY EMPLOYED, CIVILIAN UNEMPLOYED OTHER THAN STUDENT, STUDENT, AND CHILD BELOW AGE.
None of those boxes fit her husband, and there was no OTHER line on which to explain. Painful experience had taught her nothing caused more trouble than filling out a Coal Board form the wrong way. She glanced at her children. They both seemed occupied. "Wait here," she told them. "I have to go ask that man a question."
When she got to the front of the line again, the clerk who'd given her the form looked as delighted to see her as she was to see the landlord on the first of every month. "What seems to be your trouble?" he asked in a voice that said he knew she was bothering him on purpose.
She pointed to the check-off boxes. "What do I do about my husband here?" she asked. "He's a Confederate prisoner at-"
"Prisoners of war go under the Military heading," the clerk said, more exasperated than ever.
"But he's not a prisoner of war; he's a detainee," Sylvia said. "A commerce raider captured him when he was out on Georges Bank."
"Then he's a Civilian Gainfully-" The Coal Board clerk stopped. You couldn't say George Enos was gainfully employed, not when he was at a camp or wherever the Rebs kept their detainees down in North Carolina. But he wasn't unemployed, either. The clerk looked as if he hated Sylvia. He probably did, for breaking up the smooth monotony of his day. He turned and called, "Mr. Colfax, can you please come here for a moment?" Being his superior, Mr. Colfax rated politeness. Sylvia barely rated the time of day.
She turned to look back at her children. George, Jr., was teasing Mary Jane with the lollipop. She could have told him that was a mistake. Mary Jane grabbed the lollipop and stuffed it into her own mouth. George, Jr., started to scream.
"Excuse me," Sylvia said hastily. She took the lollipop away from Mary Jane, returned it to its rightful owner, swatted every available backside, and warned of measures yet more dire if the two of them didn't behave themselves. That done, she went back to the clerk. The next woman in line had come up to the window in the meanwhile, giving him an excuse to pretend she didn't exist. He seized on the excuse with alacrity.
But then Mr. Colfax, who wore not only pince-nez but a red vest to show he was someone above the common run of clerk, came out of whatever office he'd been given to prove he was above the common run of clerk. The window clerk proved willing to ignore the other woman at the window instead of Sylvia: as long as he was ignoring someone, he was happy.
Upon hearing of the ambiguity, Mr. Colfax chewed on his lower lip, which was red and meaty and made for such mastications. At last, he said, "Properly speaking, this man should not be included in the calculations, for no coal need be expended on cooking and heating water for him."
"It's not his fault he's not here," Sylvia protested. "He's a prisoner-"
"No, he is a detainee, as you yourself specified," the window clerk said, relishing his moment of petty triumph. "Fill out the form accordingly and take it to Window C. Thank you, Mr. Coifax." Mr. Colfax nodded and disappeared. Sylvia wished he were gone for good.
When she looked to her children again, Mary Jane was toddling over to take a good look at the brass cuspidor in one corner of the room. Its polished, gleaming surface was stained here and there-as was the floor around it-by the tobacco-brown spittle of men whose intentions were better than their aim. Sylvia let out a small shriek and, skirts flapping around her, managed to intercept Mary Jane just before her daughter got feet and hands in the disgusting stuff.
Gripping Mary Jane in one hand and the precious if annoying form in the other, she returned to the seat where George, Jr., waited placidly. "Why didn't you keep your sister from wandering off and getting into mischief?" she said. "You have to be my big boy till Papa gets home, you know."
"I'm sorry, Mama," he said, his face serious, his eyes big, looking so much like his father, Sylvia thought her heart would break. "I didn't see her go, I really didn't. I was looking at this bug I caught." He opened his hand. He was holding a cockroach. It jumped down and started to scurry across the floor toward any shelter it could find.
Sylvia lashed out with a foot. The cockroach crunched under the sole of her shoe. George, Jr., started to cry, but then discovered the remains of the cockroach were about as interesting as it had been alive. "Look at its guts sticking out!" he exclaimed, loudly and enthusiastically.
Heads turned, all through the Coal Board office. Sylvia felt herself flushing, and wished she could sink through the floor. "Don't play with them any more, do you hear me?" she told George, Jr. "They're dirty and nasty."
At last, she got the chance to finish filling out the form. It asked for things she didn't know, like the quality of the insulation in her flat, and for things she had a devil of a time figuring out, like the number of cubic feet the flat contained. Her education had stopped in the middle of the seventh grade, when it became obvious she needed a job more than schooling. She hadn't had to figure out the volume of anything since then, and hadn't expected to need to do it now.