Sex and the High Command Read Free Page B

interests you.”
    She looked over her raised coffee cup and shook her head. “Amapola, if you keep talking about boys, you’ll sound like a pederast. More toast?”
    “No, thanks, J.P.” He glanced at his watch and got up. “Liberty expires at 0800, and the captain can’t be late.”
    “Oh, gee!”
    Arms akimbo, chin resting on palms, she was such a picture of dejection that he went around the table and patted her shoulder. “Don’t fret, honey. We’ll see each other again, at lunch.”
    “But you’re leaving me with all the dirty dishes.”
    “Maybe you’ll meet some future admiral, aboard, who’ll wash your dishes.”
    She brightened. “I’ll walk you to the car, Papa, because I want to make a deal.”
    For Hansen, it was sheer joy to walk down the hallway with this lithe and handsome girl who held his hand and swung his arm back and forth in a wide arc. “I want to go to college and study marine architecture, and if you’ll buy me a GE dishwasher you can keep the admiral dishwashers. Then, when I make enough money building ships to buy a copra boat, I’ll make you captain, because the scuttlebutt among the Navy juniors is that you’re the best ship handler in the Navy.”
    “What’ll we do with your mother?”
    “Stick her on the fantail and give her a book.”
    She walked him to the jeep and turned to point up at her antenna. “Papa, it’ll get Baltimore on a quiet day. Must I take it down?”
    He put his arm around her waist, considered her request with mock gravity, and grinned, “Child, for one-third interest in your copra boat, you can stick a weathercock up there.”
    “Heavens no, Papa! With a rooster above the house, Dr. Carey would blackball mother.”
    “Who’s Dr. Carey?”
    “She’s a woman doctor, the president of the FEM’s, and she doesn’t care for men or roosters. She says automation and science has made them both unnecessary.”
    “Is she crazy?”
    “She’s a peace nut, but I wouldn’t call her crazy. She can prove what she says.” Suddenly, Joan Paula’s face brightened. “She teaches what she calls the New Logic, and I’m going to use New Logic on Mother. I’m going to leave your dirty dishes for her. She married you, and you’re her responsibility.”
    She stepped back, saluted smartly, and said, “Carry on. Skipper.”
    “Aye, aye, ma’am.”
    As he returned her salute and backed the jeep out of the driveway, Captain Hansen smiled. He’d take Helga aside when the two came aboard for lunch and plan a purchase to be kept secret from Joan Paula. He had been absent for over eighteen months, but he could still recognize a shrewd family campaign to get Papa to buy a dishwasher for the kitchen.

CHAPTER 2
    When Hansen saluted aft and stepped aboard the Chattahoochee , he returned to a world he understood. Near the quarterdeck, the first division was mustering. Forward, the third repeater was fluttering down from the yardarm. As he climbed the ladder to the captain’s quarters, some instinct told him that this world was also wobbling slightly. Returning the salute of his orderly, he entered his cabin and smelled the aroma of coffee—his steward was aboard. His shore phone was connected, the Norfolk paper with the ship’s paper was on his desk, and his yeoman had brought in a fortnight’s accumulation of Navy bulletins. As the bosun’s “Turn to” was piped over the intercom, he settled at his desk, and Marcos brought in his morning coffee.
    Hansen reached first for the Bureau of Personnel’s all-Navy bulletins to see if any of his classmates had been appointed admiral—an eventuality he did not expect for another five years—but he did not start to read immediately. Tapping his fingers on his desk top, he gazed idly out of the porthole at a honey barge moving across the Roads. Everything was shipshape, too shipshape.
    On the morning of the first liberty in Norfolk, a shore-patrol paddy wagon should have been on the dock, MP’s with brassards and