But he had been efficient about the cabin. And so, on a mid-September afternoon, she had unpacked. The first thing she took out of the large suitcase was Bob’s picture. The favorite one. No uniform. A sport shirt open at the throat. The steady gray eyes and the smile. She could imagine him saying, “Baby, how do you know there aren’t any bears in those woods? Fine life for a city gal.”
“I’ll get along, Bob,” she told him. “I promise you I’ll get along.”
It was all part of that next-to-the-last letter, the one that had come a day before the telegram:
“Kindly excuse writing, baby. Blame a pencil stub and frequent stops to warm hands under parka. Look, I don’t want to hex us. Our luck is good. It will stay good. I’ve learned a new trade. They ought to have a course in it at the Point. Ducking IV. But suppose I zig when I ought to zag? Write me something. Write me that, no matter what, you’ll get along. With your head up, and all saucy like I know you. Write me that.”
But there hadn’t been time, of course, to write him that.
And with his picture watching her, she unpacked, and cooked, and ate, and went to bed in the deep bunk, surrounded by the pine smell, the leaf rustle, the lap of water against the small dock.
The work had been very hard at first, mostly because of the technical terms used in the reports, and also because of the backlog of data that had piled up since the illness of the previous girl. During the worst of it Clint found ways to make her smile. He helped her in her purchase of the ten-year-old car. The names and faces straightened out quickly, with Clint’s help. Gray, chubby young Dr. Jonas McKay, with razor-sharp mind. Tom Blajoviak, with Slavic slanting merry eyes, heavy-handed joshing, big shoulders. Dr. Sherra, lost in a private fog of mental mathematics and conjecture.
Francie had pictured laboratories as being gleaming, spotless places, full of stainless steel, sparkling glass, white smocks. Unit 30 was a chaotic jumble of dust and bits of wire and tubing and old technical journals stacked on the floor. Each team captain had a littered plywood office. Most of the men dressed like lumberjacks. For a time Francie thought that the complete disorder was an adequate measuring stick for Clint Reese’s abilities as Administrative Assistant. And one day, during a brief respite, she tried to house-clean a corner of the biggest lab room. The howls of anguish brought Clint to her rescue.
He explained, “Francie, when these men were small boys they kept their rooms full of bugs on pins, pet snakes, stamp collections, chemistry sets, and stuffed birds. They grew up in confusion, and they don’t feel at home unless the conditions are duplicated. So we humor them. When one of them gets completely walled in with junk, he usually fights his way clear, and starts over again.”
She soon caught the hang of their verbal shorthand, learned to put in the reports the complete terms to which they referred. McKay was orderly about summoning her. Tom Blajoviak found so much pleasure in dictating that he kept calling for her when he had nothing at all to report. Dr. Sherra had to be trapped before he would dictate to her. He considered progress reports to be a lot of nonsense.
With increasing knowledge of the personalities of the three team leaders came a new awareness of the strain under which they worked. The strain made them irritable, sometimes childish. Dr. Cudahy supervised and co-ordinated the technical aspects of the lines of research, treading very gently so as not to offend. And it was Clint’s task to take the burden of all other routine matters off Cudahy’s shoulders so that he could function at maximum efficiency at the technical supervision in which he excelled.
It had been a very full month, with little time for relaxation. Francie sat on the porch of the cabin on the October Sunday afternoon, realizing how closely she had identified herself with the work of Unit 30 during the past month. Bob had fought in one way. She was fighting in another. It was a matter of deadly seriousness. The only person who seemed untouched by the critical nature of the work being done was Clint Reese. He did his job, but seemed completely unimpressed by the seriousness of the total effort.
With the Adirondack tourist season over, most of the private camps were empty. There were only a few fishermen about. She heard the shrill keening of the reel long before the boat, following the shore line, came into view through the remaining lurid leaves of autumn. A young girl, her hair pale and blond, rowed the boat very slowly. She wore a heavy cardigan and a wool skirt. A man stood in the boat, casting a black-and-white plug toward the shallows, reeling it in with hopeful twitches of the rod tip. The sun was low, the lake still, the air sharp with the threat of coming winter. It made a very pretty picture. Francie wondered if they’d had any luck.
The boat moved slowly by, passing just ten feet or so from the end of Francie’s dock, not more than thirty feet from the small porch. The girl glanced up and smiled, and Francie instinctively waved. She remembered seeing them in Vanders, in the store.
“Any luck?” Francie called.
“One decent bass,” the man said. He had a pleasant, weather-burned face.
As he made the next cast Francie saw him slip. As the girl cried out he reached wildly at nothingness, and fell full length into the lake, inadvertently pushing the boat away from him. He came up quickly, looked toward the boat, then paddled toward the end of Francie’s dock. Francie ran down just as he climbed up onto the dock.
“That must have been graceful to watch,” the man said ruefully, his teeth chattering.
The girl bumped the end of the dock with the boat. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked nervously.
“Oh, I’m just dandy!” the man said, flapping his arms. “Row me home quick.”
The blond girl looked appealingly at Francie. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I could row home and bring dry clothes here and...”
“Of course!” Francie said. “I was going to suggest that.”
“I don’t want to put you out,” the man said. “Darn’ fool stunt, falling in the lake.”
“Come on in before you freeze solid,” Francie said. The girl rowed quickly down the lake shore. The man followed her in. The fire was all laid. Francie touched a match to the exposed corner of paper, handed him a folded blanket from the foot of the bunk.
She said, “That fireplace works fast. Get those clothes off and wrap yourself up in the blanket. I’ll be on the porch. You holler when you’re ready.”
She sat on the porch and waited. When the man called she went in. She put three fingers of whisky in the bottom of a water tumbler and handed it to him. “Drink your medicine.”
“I ought to fall in the lake oftener... Hey, don’t bother with those clothes!”
“I’ll hang them out.”
She put his shoes on the porch, hung the clothes on the line she had rigged from the porch comer to a small birch. Just as she finished she saw the girl coming, rowing strongly. Francie went down and tied the bow line, took the pile of clothes from the girl so she could get out of the boat more easily.
“How is he?” the girl asked in a worried tone.
“Warm on the inside and the outside, too.”
“He wouldn’t want me to tell you this. He likes to pretend it isn’t so. But he isn’t very well. That’s why I was so worried. You’re being more than kind.”
“When I fall out of a boat near your place I’ll expect the same service.”
“You’ll get it,” the girl said. Francie saw that she was older than she had looked from a distance. There were fine wrinkles near her eyes, a bit of gray in the blond temples. Late twenties, possibly.